Extended StayAmerica

Extended StayAmerica is an American hotel company. It was founded in 1995 in South Carolina as an extended-stay hotel, catering to businesspeople.

The first Extended StayAmerica hotels opened in 1995 by a number of founders including management from Blockbuster Video and AutoNation. In 1996, Extended Stay America acquired StudioPLUS, further continuing its growth. During this time, the company also acquired Crossland Economy Studios. The company also added various brands offering different levels of service, like Extended Stay Deluxe and StudioPLUS. By August 2001, the company was added to S&P 400.

Blackstone took Extended Stay America private in May 2004 to form a new company,Extended Stay Hotels. It paid close to $2 billion in cash as well as over $1 billion in debt. At the time, Extended Stay America had 425 hotels, but Blackstone added about 255 properties from other acquisitions including Homestead Village, which it agreed to buy for $600 million two months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.^[1]

In 2007 Extended Stay Hotels was sold to the Lightstone Group for $8 billion. The sale was one of the biggest non casino hotel deals in history.

On June 16, 2009, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing $7.1 billion in assets and $7.6 billion in liabilities. The company intends to keep operating all its properties through bankruptcy by using its substantial cash flow rather than debtor-in-possession financing.

Jeff Overton's consistent year has him climbing the US Ryder Cup chart

AKRON, Ohio — Even avid golf fans might be surprised to see who is No. 4 in the U.S. Ryder Cup team rankings this week.

Tiger Woods? Nope. He's ninth. Stewart Cink? He's at No. 13.

Try Jeff Overton, hardly the name that comes to mind when you consider the best American players in 2010.

"It's not like I'm Tiger Woods," he said. "Maybe if we could ever win instead of finish second, maybe we'd have a little better chance of (being known)."

Overton is listed so high among U.S. golfers for the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor because he's played consistently well all year. He's had three seconds and two thirds, barely missing out on his first career win several times.

On Sunday at the Greenbrier Classic, it took Stewart Appleby's stirring 59 in the final round to beat him. The 27-year-old Indiana University graduate also was runner-up at the Zurich Classic and the Byron Nelson.

"This year I've been able to get inside the top three a lot, but I haven't been able to get that win," he said Wednesday, the day before the start of the Bridgestone Invitational. "Hopefully, I'll be able to keep plugging along.

"Like (former British Open champion) Ian Baker-Finch said, 'You keep knocking on the door enough times, eventually something is going to happen.' "

Overton's scoring average is 69.81, third-best on the PGA Tour. He is 12th on the money list with more than US$2.4 million. He's up to No. 47 in the world rankings after starting the year at No. 186.

A native of Indiana, he is the son of a former baseball player and quarterback at Indiana State. He said he gets his competitive fire from his dad.

He also dates an opera singer.

Asked where they met, he laughed and said, "Bloomington, Ind., the No. 1 opera school in America."

Overton said he knows about as much about opera as his girlfriend knows about golf.

For instance, his girlfriend's mother came out to see him play once. He made a bogey and she said, "What did he do? He made a bogus?"

So far this year, he's been anything but bogus when climbing those Ryder Cup charts.

"(Making the team) would be half the goal, and then the next half of the goal would be to figure out a way to go win the USA some points," he said.

That was perhaps the case for Justin Rose for his first decade as a professional. In six full years (and parts of four or five others), he never won on American soil. Second-place finishes at the Texas Open in '06, Bridgestone in '07 and Memorial in '08 not only whetted his appetite for winning, but also increased questions about why he wasn't winning.

Rose turned 30 last week but he's been celebrating all year in the U.S.

Wins at the Memorial and AT&T National have pushed him up the charts in the world rankings. He was 70th to start the year but is now 19th. After years of promise mixed with disappointment, he is considered a threat to win every tournament.

"I said before I started winning that my game was in great shape," he said Wednesday. "I didn't need to do anything different; I didn't need to work on anything.

"I guess it was the patience factor of just letting it happen."

Overton window

Overview

At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office. Overton arranged the spectrum on a vertical axis of “more free” and “less free” in regards to government intervention. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:

• Unthinkable Radical Acceptable Sensible Popular Policy

The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public so that the window either “moves” or expands to encompass them. Opponents of current policies, or similar ones currently within the window, likewise seek to convince people that these should be considered unacceptable.

Other formulations of the process created after Overton's death add the concept of moving the window, such as deliberately promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas, with the intention of making the current fringe ideas acceptable by comparison (This might be a form of the “Door-in-the-face technique" of persuasion.)

‘Ill-equipped’ govt hospitals get swine flu medicine

Around 35,000 Tamiflu tablets would be supplied to at least seven large hospitals run by the Sindh and city governments within a couple of days. — File Photo

KARACHI: Senior health officials working amid a swine flu alarm in the city have put their faith in antiviral medicines being provided to them, ignoring their health facilities’ lack of capacity for a fully-fledged treatment of patients reporting with a severe infection of the H1N1 virus. 

nfection of the H1N1 virus. 

Sources added that 35,000 Tamiflu tablets would be supplied to at least seven large hospitals run by the Sindh and city governments within a couple of days. However, the preparation of isolation wards in public sector hospitals for treatment and management of patients complaining of severe respiratory problems and chest infections would not be done anytime soon.

These hospitals would not be able to establish such wards with ventilators required exclusively for swine flu treatment.

The federal health ministry’s Director-General Dr Rasheed A. Jooma told Dawn on Friday that the swine flu death toll in the country had risen to eight. The deaths have been reported from Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi and Faisalabad, according to him. The National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad, he said, had informed him that 37 persons were positive among the 190 tested for swine flu so far.

Pointing out that there had been a rise in swine flu cases being reported in Karachi, he insisted that the virus had been carried by someone coming from abroad.

The focal person on swine flu for Sindh, Dr Shakeel A. Mullick, said that the NIH had so far confirmed five swine flu cases in the province. Four of the patients had already tested positive by the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) laboratory while the other one was deported from Oman and quarantined at the federal health ministry facility near Karachi airport.

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Why is swine flu (H1N1) now infecting humans?

Many researchers now consider that two main series of events can lead to swine flu (and also avian or bird flu) becoming a major cause for influenza illness in humans.

First, the influenza viruses (types A, B, C) are enveloped RNA viruses with a segmented genome; this means the viral RNA genetic code is not a single strand of RNA but exists as eight different RNA segments in the influenza viruses. A human (or bird) influenza virus can infect a pig respiratory cell at the same time as a swine influenza virus; some of the replicating RNA strands from the human virus can get mistakenly enclosed inside the enveloped swine influenza virus. For example, one cell could contain eight swine flu and eight human flu RNA segments. The total number of RNA types in one cell would be 16; four swine and four human flu RNA segments could be incorporated into one particle, making a viable eight RNA segmented flu virus from the 16 available segment types. Various combinations of RNA segments can result in a new subtype of virus (known as antigenic shift) that may have the ability to preferentially infect humans but still show characteristics unique to the swine influenza virus (see Figure 1). It is even possible to include RNA strands from birds, swine, and human influenza viruses into one virus if a cell becomes infected with all three types of influenza (for example, two bird flu, three swine flu, and three human flu RNA segments to produce a viable eight-segment new type of flu viral genome). Formation of a new viral type is considered to be antigenic shift; small changes in an individual RNA segment in flu viruses are termed antigenic drift and result in minor changes in the virus. However, these can accumulate over time to produce enough minor changes that cumulatively change the virus' antigenic makeup over time (usually years).

Virenza Cipla swine flu Medicine | Virenza Swine Flu Drug

Treatment of Influenza
VIRENZA is indicated for treatment of uncomplicated acute illness due to influenza A and B virus in adults and pediatric patients 7 years and older that has been symptomatic for no more than 2 days.

Prophylaxis of Influenza
VIRENZA is indicated in adults and pediatric patients 5 years of age and older for prophylaxis of influenza.

VIRENZA is not recommended for treatment of patients with underlying airways disease (such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)

DOSAGE AND ADMINISTRATION
VIRENZA is for administration to the respiratory tract by oral inhalation using Revolizer device only.

Patients scheduled to use an inhaled bronchodilator at the same time as VIRENZA should use their bronchodilator before taking VIRENZA.

Treatment of Influenza
The recommended dose of VIRENZA for treatment of influenza in adults and pediatric patientsaged 7 years and older is 2 inhalations (one 5-mg capsule per inhalation for a total dose of 10 mg) twice daily (approximately 12 hours apart) for 5 days.

Two doses should be taken on the first day of treatment whenever possible provided there is at least 2 hours between doses. On subsequent days, doses should be about 12 hours apart (e.g., morning and evening) at approximately the same time each day. There are no data on the effectiveness of treatment with Zanamivir when initiated more than 2 days after the onset of signs or symptoms.