SPEAK ENGLISH IN MADRID

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's Bankia SA is set to ask the state for a more than 15 billion euros ($19 billion) bailout on Friday, marking another rise in the cost of a drawn-out rescue of the country's fourth-biggest bank. The capital shortfall at Bankia is key to a wider funding gap in Spain's banking system, which some investors believe could drive the euro zone's fourth-largest economy to seek international aid - a move that would create fresh uncertainty around the whole currency union.

Spain is nationalizing Bankia, which holds some 10 percent of the country's bank deposits, after it was unable to handle heavy losses from a 2008 property crash. The government insists the bank is a one-off case. One London-based analyst said the government's handling of Bankia had undermined confidence in whether the figure announced would be enough. "Whatever they say, people are going to think it's not enough. The process has been going on for so long already."

Earlier this week Economy Minister Luis de Guindos told a congressional committee that the state would have to put at least 9 billion euros into Bankia to cover losses on sour loans and repossessed housing. The government has already spent 4.5 billion euros to prop up Bankia and the entire rescue is now seen totaling some 20 billion euros. De Guindos had pledged in the past that no public money would be put into the banks.

Bankia's new management team is analyzing the financial position of the banks before approving a recapitalization plan at a board meeting to be held on Friday afternoon. The extra cash relates to accounting glitches and writedowns on future losses across the balance sheet, a financial sector source said. Spain will have to go to the markets to raise debt to put into Bankia at a time when its borrowing costs are high.

Spain's country risk, as measured by the spread between benchmark German and Spanish bond yields, jumped as high as 500 basis points in recent weeks. On Friday it had moderated to 462 basis points as investors moved out of German debt to hunt for higher returns.

ADDITIONAL SPENDING

While struggling to put a precise number on a banking sector clean-up, Spain has also revised up its 2011 deficit figure several times as additional spending from regional and local governments has come to light. A Treasury source told Reuters on Thursday that adjustments to 2011 town hall accounts could mean another change, up or down, to the overall public deficit last year, which stands at 8.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), almost 3 percentage points higher than the target.

The conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy plans more than 45 billion euros in savings this year to try to bring the deficit down to 5.3 percent of GDP, a mission many say is impossible. Spain has gone through four different stages of rescues of its banks, none of which has completely convinced investors that the clean-up has been deep enough.

Now it may end up creating one nationalized bank out of its failed lenders, including Bankia, if the state cannot find buyers for state-rescued banks like mid-sized Catalunya Caixa.

Under pressure from the European Union, the government has hired independent auditors to produce a report on the financial system. International institutions such as the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund will scrutinize the audit to give it credibility.

Ratings agency S&P could cut the credit rating of some Spanish banks on Friday, Banesto said in a research note. The agency said in April that by the end of May it would conclude a review of Spanish banks on creditwatch.

Bankia shares have fallen 34 percent since its former Chairman Rodrigo Rato stepped down on May 7, in a prelude to the state intervention in the bank. The shares were suspended pending the announcement later on Friday.

resident Barack Obama on Thursday invited Americans to a Twitter press conference of sorts, taking seven questions on topics like how he aims to curb oil imports, boost job growth or help homeowners struggling with their mortgages. Leaving little to chance, the White House advertised the "#WHchat" hashtag for the online event several times throughout the day but only revealed that the president himself would answer the questions shortly before he got online.

As a result, most of the queries were made hours before Obama took to a laptop, his shirtsleeves rolled up, after a speech in the battleground state of Iowa."This is barack — let's get this started —bo," Obama said, using his initials to show that he, not a White House staffer, was at the keyboard controlling the www.twitter.com/whitehouse account.

The first question came from @asturtz, who had asked, "What are we doing to curb, better yet avoid, dependency on oil?"

".@asturtz all of the above energy strategy; increase dom. oil & gas. increase energy efficiency. 2x clean energy. 2x car fuel eff. -bo" was the president's reply.

Not all of the questions he chose to answer were friendly. @jwarner180 asked: "Fossil fuels are much much much cheaper and our economy is based on cheap energy. Why push Algae?"Obama wasunfazed: ".@jwarner180 bio fuels, wind , solar all getting cheaper each year & oil getting more expensive. Why we need all-of-the-above strategy. -bo."

As is frequently the case, conservatives jumped into the public conversation.

Conservative writer Ben Domenech asked, "Do you believe in miracles? Other than you finding a way to win reelection?" If Obama saw the query among the flood of questions, he ignored it. (Domenech also had a play on the classic "boxers or briefs" question asked of President Bill Clinton during a 1994 "town hall" chat on MTV.) And the Republican National Committee hit the president on the swelling national debt.Then, as quickly as it begin, the exchange was over, with Obama heading to Des Moines for a campaign rally where he was expected to assail his presumptive Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

"off to des moines. thx for questions - keep em coming. remember we're not D's or R's but americans first! -bo" the president said.

Researchers on Thursday challenged a tenet of modern medicine that higher levels of "good" cholesterol automatically boost cardiovascular health.

In a study published in The Lancet, investigators said they found no evidence to back the belief that higher levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol routinely reduce the risk of a heart attack.

High concentrations of HDL are one of the big markers for blood tests.

They are monitored as much as low levels of "bad" cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein, or LDL) as a yardstick of dangerously clogged arteries.

The paper used a method called mendelian randomisation to compare heart-attack risk among people who inherited known genetic variants that gave them higher HDL levels.

According to conventional wisdom, these individuals would have a lower risk of a coronary.

But the study, which looked at nearly 12,500 people with a history of a heart attack and over 41,000 otherwise healthy counterparts, found this was not always the case.

The results are important because of the use of drugs, sometimes inflicting side effects, which are administered to boost HDL cholesterol levels.

"These results show that some ways of raising HDL cholesterol might not reduce risk of myocardial infarction [heart attack] in human beings," said Sekar Kathiresan of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

"Therefore, if an intervention such as a drug raises HDL cholesterol, we cannot automatically assume that risk of myocardial infarction will be reduced."

In contrast, the study said "bad" cholesterol remained an accurate marker of cardiac risk.

Separately, a study, also carried in Thursday's Lancet, confirmed the benefits of LDL-lowering statins for protecting people with no previous history of cardiovascular disease.

Investors are bracing for Facebook's Wall Street debut on Friday after the world's No.1 online social network raised about $16 billion in one of the biggest initial public offerings in U.S. history. Valued at $104 billion, Facebook is larger than Starbucks Corp and Hewlett-Packard combined, sparking intense speculation on how much higher its valuation will rise once shares start trading.

"A 15 to 20 percent pop is in the realm of possibility," said Tim Loughran, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame. "Given they already moved their IPO range up and increased the size, that's bullish to begin with."

Facebook priced its offering at $38 a share on Thursday, but the price could be higher when shares begin trading under the FB symbol on the Nasdaq at around 11 a.m. Eastern Time.

Some expect shares could rise 30 percent or more on Friday, despite ongoing concerns about Facebook's long-term money-making potential. An average of Morningstar analyst estimates puts the closing price for Facebook shares tomorrow at $50.

The IPO, expected to mint more than a thousand paper millionaires at the company, has received wall-to-wall media coverage and sparked hopes of a boom in sales of everything from San Francisco Bay Area real estate to automobiles.

Facebook employees marked the event with an all-night "hackathon" at the company's Menlo Park, California headquarters starting on Thursday evening, a tradition in which programmers work on side projects that sometimes turn into mainstream offerings.

Facebook's 28-year-old founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was expected to ring a bell at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters on Friday morning to kick off trading on the Nasdaq.

Founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, Facebook has grown into the world's dominant social network with 900 million users.

At $38 a share, Facebook would trade at over 100 times historical earnings versus Apple Inc's 14 times and Google Inc's 19 times.

For all the high expectations surrounding Facebook, the company faces challenges maintaining its growth momentum.

Some investors worry the company has not yet figured out a way to make money from the growing number of users who access Facebook on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, revenue growth from Facebook's online advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, has slowed in recent months.

"With mobile usage growth exceeding desktop, monetization in the near term could be reduced given little-to-no ad coverage on mobile, challenged by limited screen sizes," said a report last week from Susquehanna Financial Group.

GM said on Tuesday it would stop placing ads on Facebook, raising questions about whether display ads on the site are as effective as traditional media.

This week we're talking about fungus two ways. One that can survive exclusively on polyurethane and another that can replace Styrofoam.

Both polyurethane and styrofoam are not biodegradable, so without a solution, all the plastic bottles and old toys we throw out every year will be sitting in landfills for centuries.

Yes, you can recycle plastic, but that just means turning it into another product and recycling hasn't sufficiently slowed the production of new plastic.

According to a Yale study, globally we produced 245 million tons of plastic in 2006, compared to only 1.5 million tons in 1950.

One of the fungi we're looking at is called pestalotiopsis microspora. It was discovered by a group of Yale researchers on an expedition in Ecuador and can subsist on polyurethane alone in airless environments, like the bottom of a landfill.

The other comes from a couple of college friends who discovered that the sticky substance on the bottom of mushrooms called mycelium could be turned into a glue and when that glue is combined with corn husks and other food byproducts it takes on a form similar to Styrofoam. Their company, Ecovative wants used Styrofoam to become mulch, not waste.

A future with less plastic and more mulch, all thanks to fungus.

On March 31, 1952, Dick Hauck sent a love letter to his future wife, Arlene. The couple had written back and forth on a nearly daily basis while Dick was serving in the U.S. Army. But this letter, in which Dick formally proposed marriage to Arlene, never reached its final destination until last week.

"I had a box of letters from him," Arlene Hauck tells CNN affiliate, KARE11.

Contract workers found Dick's letter while they were performing renovations in Arlene's childhood home. They gave the letter to the couple, who are both still alive and married to each other, nearly 60 years after Dick first proposed.

And unlike in the 2001 film "Amelie," this decades-old love letter is for real.

"The whole thing brings back memories," Dick told KSDK, while fighting back tears. He was just 21-years-old at the time he wrote the letter, in which he described the wedding ring he had purchased for Arlene. She wears the ring to this day.

"I got your ring today, I sure hope you will like it," the letter reads. "I wish I could have gotten it long ago darling."

A few weeks after the letter was sent, Dick returned from the Army and delivered the engagement ring to Arlene in person. They were married that June.