Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday 27 September 2012


Thursday, 27 September 2012

SOTT Focus
No new articles.
--- Best of the Web
UK Independent
2012-09-27 10:19:00

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Report claims just one in fifty victims of 'surgical' US strikes in Pakistan are known militants. Jerome Taylor reports on a deadly new strategy

Late in the evening on 6 June this year an unmanned drone was flying high above the Pakistani village of Datta Khel in north Waziristan.

The buzz emitted by America's fleet of Predators and Reapers are a familiar sound for the inhabitants of the dusty hamlet, which lies next to a riverbed close to Pakistan's border with Afghanistan and is a stronghold for the Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur.

As the drone circled it let off the first of its Hellfire missiles, slamming into a small house and reducing it to rubble. When residents rushed to the scene of the attack to see if they could help they were struck again.

According to reports at the time, three local rescuers were killed by a second missile whilst a further strike killed another three people five minutes later. In all, somewhere between 17 and 24 people are thought to have been killed in the attack.

The Datta Khel assault was just one of the more than 345 strikes that have hit Pakistan's tribal areas in the past eight years but it reveals an increasingly common tactic now being used in America's covert drone wars - the "double-tap" strike.

More and more, while the overall frequency of strikes has fallen since a Nato attack in 2011 killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and strained US-Pakistan relations, initial strikes are now followed up by further missiles in a tactic which lawyers and campaigners say is killing an even greater number of civilians.
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Tom Philpott
Mother Jones
2012-09-14 05:00:00

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Today, Monsanto looms over the global ag landscape like a colossus. It is the globe's largest seed purveyor - and its dominant vendor of genetically modified traits. How dominant? Here's NPR on the company's mastery over the US GMO market: "More than 9 out of 10 soybean seeds carry [Monsanto's] Roundup Ready trait. It's about the same for cotton and just a little lower for corn." It also sells nearly $1 billion worth of herbicides every three months.

But for all its clout, Monsanto is a relatively new player in the Big Ag game. While fellow ag giants like ADM, Cargill, Bunge, and BASF have been in the game for a century or more, as recently as the late 1970s Monsanto was known mostly as a chemical company; herbicides were a relatively small sideline, and genetically modified seeds were just the gleam in the eye of a few scientists in the R&D department. And its flagship chemical business had plunged into crisis. In 1976, Congress banned the highly toxic industrial coolant PCB - the US production of which Monsanto had enjoyed what the Washington Post called a "lucrative four-decade monopoly." According to the Post, Monsanto had been actively covering up the dangers of PCB exposure for years before the ban, opening the company to a thicket of lawsuits. To make matters worse, the company had also been heavily invested in the toxic pesticide DDT (banned in 1972) and the infamous Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange - both of which carried their own legal and public-relations liabilities.

How did Monsanto pivot from teetering, scandal-ridden chemical giant to mighty high-tech (though still quite controversial) agribiz firm? As the veteran investigative reporter (and Mother Jones contributor) Wayne Barrett shows in a new Nation article, a young consultant called Mitt Romney helped push the firm on its highly lucrative new path.
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Puppet Masters
Jeffrey Heller
Reuters
2012-09-27 16:04:00

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew his "red line" for Iran's nuclear program on Thursday - the point at which Iran has amassed nearly enough highly enriched uranium for a single atomic bomb - and voiced confidence that the United States shares his view.

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly, Netanyahu appeared to pull back from any threat of an imminent Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, saying the Islamic Republic would be on the brink of producing an atomic weapon only next summer.
Comment: Netanyahu's laughable cartoon presentation makes Colin Powell's grainy pictures to support the case for war on Iraq years ago seem 'serious' in comparison - and Powell's UN performance was as ridiculous as it could get.

Is Bibi as idiotic as he is coming across or does he think the public is stupid and needs to be addressed in such terms? Either way it is very worrying that such a man - who has already proven to have no conscience - is in control of the red button of the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.
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Newsvandal
Newsvandal Blog
2012-09-25 15:19:00

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Headlines are designed to grab the reader's attention and pull 'em in.

Today, Reuters rolled out a serious eye-grabber: In New York, defiant Ahmadinejad says Israel will be "eliminated"

Just sounds like par for the course when it comes to Iran's dangerous doom-dealer, right?

Well, there is a bit of a problem.

You see, the headline doesn't quite match the actual quote in the story. Rather than delivering on their big tease with a blustering rant about destroying Israel with a hail of newly-minted nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad's quote in paragraph eleven of the story comes across a bit differently:
"We don't even count them as any part of any equation for Iran. During a historical phase, they (the Israelis) represent minimal disturbances that come into the picture and are then eliminated."
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Marie-Monique Robin
ajw.asahi.com
2012-09-23 13:35:00

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A giant, multinational agribusiness is using its market share and patent system to spread genetically modified crops throughout the world. A movie documenting this problem generated quite a stir. By piecing together facts and presenting it in a powerful, visual way, she can carve out a vision for the future of agriculture.

I have been working as a journalist for the past 25 years or so, focusing mainly on human rights and the environment.

What struck me was the number of people I encountered who kept uttering a single name: Monsanto, the giant U.S.-based multinational biotechnology company.

I grew up on a farm in France, hence my keen interest in agricultural issues.

I decided to find out more about Monsanto's global reach.
Comment: The World According to Monsanto: The History of Agent Orange

This is a clip from the French documentary The World According to Monsanto. It summarizes the history of Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide produced by Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and other companies.


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YouTube
2012-09-26 00:00:00
This video is banned for broadcast on News Networks in USA, Israel and Europe. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel and US does not want you to see. Jewish leaders and prominent businessmen Greet Ahmadinejad with "Inshallah" and Bless him for long life. Jews have lived in Iran for thousands of years. Over 50,000 Jews live in Teheran. Israeli Jews Love Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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Michael Allen
Opposing Views
2012-09-26 00:00:00

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Longtime liberal activist Ralph Nader is often blamed for costing Al Gore the 2000 election, but that hasn't swayed him from attacking President Obama and calling him a "war criminal" (video below).

Nader told Politico.com that President Obama is worse than President george W. Bush, who invaded two countries during his term.

Nader said: "He's gone beyond George W. Bush in drones, for example. He thinks the world is his plate, that national sovereignties mean nothing, drones can go anywhere. They can kill anybody that he suspects and every Tuesday he makes the call on who lives and who dies, supposed suspects in places like Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is a war crime and he ought to be held to account."
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Louis Charbonneau and Arshad Mohammed
Yahoo! News Canada
2012-09-26 00:00:00

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Iran's president said on Wednesday his country was under constant threat of military action from "uncivilized Zionists" and called for a new world order not dominated by Western powers in the service of "the devil."

In his eighth address to the U.N. General Assembly's annual gathering of world leaders, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad painted a gloomy picture of a world driven by greed rather than moral values.

"The current abysmal situation of the world and the bitter incidents of history are due mainly to the wrong management of the world and the self-proclaimed centers of power who have entrusted themselves to the devil," Ahmadinejad said, in what is expected to be his last address to the world body.

There was no reiteration of his comments to journalists in New York on Monday that Israel has no roots in the Middle East and would be "eliminated."

However, in a clear reference to Israel, he told the assembly: "Continued threat by the uncivilized Zionists to resort to military action against our great nation is a clear example of this bitter reality."
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Society's Child
The Gulf Today
2012-09-28 16:27:00

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The number of refugees fleeing Syria could reach 700,000 by the end of the year, the UN refugee agency said on Thursday, almost four times its previous forecast. Most faced what was likely to be a bitterly cold winter living in tents with little prospect of returning to their homeland, it said.

About 294,000 refugees fleeing 18 months of conflict in Syria have crossed into four neighbouring countries - Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey - or await registration there, it said.

"This is a significant outflow taking place, 100,000 people in August, 60,000 in September and at the moment 2,000 or 3,000 per day or night," Panos Moumtzis, regional refugee co-ordinator for the UN refugee agency UNHCR, told a news briefing.

About 5,000-6,000 Syrians have reached other parts of north Africa, mainly Egypt, while other refugees are turning up in southern Europe, including Cyprus and Greece, he said.

The previous forecast of 185,000 refugees was surpassed in August.
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Nikki Tucker
Medical Daily
2012-09-26 15:23:00
Tattoos, body piercings and implants have become the norm in today's society. However the newest trend in body alteration is "bagel head," which refers to a saline injection to an individual's forehead that is molded to resemble a bagel.

The new trend is created by injecting 400 cc of saline into the forehead until it swells up and then pressing the center of the swollen area in with a thumb. The results would reflect the appearance of bagel-like shaped bread stuck to an individual's head.



The process may take up to two hours to administer the saline injections. When the forehead is fully saturated with saline, the practitioner administering the saline then uses his or her thumb to form the shape of a bagel. This particular modification can last anywhere from 16 to 24 hours, when the saline is absorbed by the body, before an individual's forehead returns to normal.
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Angela K. Brown
Associated Press
2012-09-26 05:43:00

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Springtown - Like many schools in Texas, "spare the rod and spoil the child" might be considered the motto at Springtown High School.

But when two teenage girls there reportedly suffered bruises after being paddled by male assistant principals, some parents complained. They weren't upset about the punishment itself, but instead that the school violated the policy requiring an educator of the same sex as the student to dole out the paddling.

So the school district has changed its policy - to expand, not abolish, corporal punishment. Board members voted Monday night to let administrators paddle students of the opposite sex, after Superintendent Michael Kelley cited a lack of women administrators to carry out spankings.

The new policy says a same-gender school official must witness the paddling, which is just one "swat," and that parents also can request one spanking per semester. In all cases, a parent must give written permission and request it in lieu of another punishment, such as suspension or detention.
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Jason Ryan
Yahoo! News
2012-09-26 00:00:00

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The founder of charity group USA Harvest, which has ties to celebrities Scarlett Johansson, Hillary Duff, the Goo Goo Dolls and Green Day has been charged by the Justice Department with stealing more than $553,000 from the organization.

Hugh "Stan" Curtis, the founder of USA Harvest, has been charged by the US Attorney's Office in Kentucky with mail fraud, money laundering and filing false income tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service.

Curtis allegedly stole over $180,000 between September 2005 and September 2007 of donations that he solicited on behalf of the organization-a tax-exempt charity. The theft included some large donations meant for the USA Harvest. According to the criminal charges Curtis allegedly deposited checks into his bank account for the charity that included a $20,000 and a $25,000 check from donors.

The charity provides food and meals for individuals in need by partnering with restaurants, hospitals to get leftover food to soup kitchens and food banks. According to the USA Harvest website, which highlights their ties with celebrities such as Johansson, the charity works with 5,400 agencies to provide food and notes that they have provided over 437 billion pounds of food to organizations since their founding in 1989.
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Yahoo! News
2012-09-26 00:00:00

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The University of California regents will pay about $1 million to 21 UC Davis current and former students who were pepper-sprayed during a peaceful campus protest last November.

A video of the incident that went viral shows an officer casually walking up to and aiming a thick stream of the spray directly into the faces of seated students at close range during an Occupy rally. The incident triggered outrage and an investigation by the university.

In the settlement, each student who filed suit will each receive $30,000 and a handwritten apology from UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi.

Student Ian Lee was a freshman when he was pepper sprayed.

"The reason we were protesting was that the university has proposed unfair and unreasonable tuition hikes," Lee said.

In addition, the university system has agreed to $250,000 for the students' legal fees.

Lee said he plans to use all of the money to pay future tuition.

"I know that's what a lot of my friends are doing. Some others are donating it, and some others are using the money to get a good start post-college in this difficult economic time," he said.
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Fox Van Allen
Yahoo! News - Y! Tech
2012-09-26 00:00:00

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US, Texas - Facebook is a great way to connect with long-lost friends, and an even better way to connect with new ones. But not everyone who uses the world's most popular social network has good intentions: Police in Texas today are warning that girls are being lured into prostitution by gang members trolling their social media profiles.

According to San Antonio Police Detective George Segura, gangs look for girls on Facebook who are showing off a bit too much skin, and are possibly seeking attention. Gang members then approach the girls on Facebook, befriend them, and convince them to meet up in person. No one is too young to be exploited - police say girls as young as 12 are being recruited.

The sex trade is big business for gangs. According to a Bexar County probation officer, gang members "can easily make hundred of thousands of dollars per girl, per year."

While this news is admittedly alarmist, it provides a strong reminder to revisit your child's Facebook privacy settings. You should also discuss ways for your son or daughter to be smart, safe digital citizens, so they'll be better equipped to avoid such dangers. And, of course, it's important to know when your child is too young to handle tech on their own. "Not every child needs access and such freedom to chat with strangers that could do them harm," says Segura.

Source: Tecca
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Yahoo! News Canada
2012-09-26 00:00:00

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Canada, Nova Scotia - A manhunt is underway in rural Nova Scotia for two men charged by RCMP with unlawful confinement involving a 16-year-old boy.

David James Leblanc, 47, and Wayne Alan Cunningham, 31, are facing forcible confinement and sexual assault charges.

"The nature of the charges speaks for themselves. They are serious charges, indeed," said RCMP Sgt. Alain LeBlanc.

Investigators said they believe the accused men could be in Lunenburg County southwest of Halifax or in Halifax County .

Alice Arnold, 79, said she heard panicked knocking at her back door Monday night.

"I went to the door," she said."I didn't open the storm door. There was a young man, probably about 14, I'd say, standing there saying, 'I want to come in, I want to come in. I've got to come in.' His appearance was unusual; he had chains on his wrists and chains on his feet."

She said the chains were double-wrapped around his wrists and ankles.

Arnold then called 911, but didn't let the teen into her home.
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Secret History
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Science & Technology
ScienceDaily
2012-09-27 13:28:00

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Between April 30 and May 1 of the year 1006, the brightest stellar event ever recorded in history occurred: a supernova, or stellar explosion, that was widely observed by various civilizations from different places on Earth. More than a thousand years later a team led by researchers from the University of Barcelona, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the CSIC has found that the supernova of 1006 (SN 1006) probably occurred as a result of the merger of two white dwarfs.

The finding has been published in the journal Nature.

Different communities of astronomers all over the world observed the supernova of the year 1006. Some of them, including Chinese astronomers, highlighted the fact that the astronomical event was visible for three years. The most explicit record, made by the Egyptian doctor and astronomer Ali ibn Ridwan (988-1061), notes that the phenomenon was about three times brighter than Venus, and that it emitted light of a quantity equivalent to almost a quarter of the Moon's brightness.

As co-director of the work, Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente, a researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) and the Instituto of Fundamental Physics(IFF-CSIC), explains, "In this work the existing stars in the area have been studied, regarding distance and possible contamination by elements of the supernova, and the results show that there is no star that could be considered the progenitor of this explosion."
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Earth Changes
Jesse Ferrell
AccuWeather
2012-09-26 14:46:00

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The MetSul blog this week (translated) tells a harrowing tale of extreme heat in Brazil, followed by severe storms with hail and flooding as a powerful Spring storm system (one of the most intense ever) moved through between September 15 and 17. The temperature at Antonina, Parana, Brazil spiked to 108° F (42.1 C) before the storm hit, breaking not only winter, but summer heat records for Southern Brazil.

Metsul goes on to say that lightning strikes numbered over 300,000 in four days in Rio Grande do Sul (the southernmost state in Brazil), which reported two million without power. Near the city of Camaquã, nearly a foot (300 mm) of rain was estimated, collapsing a bridge.

Huge hailstones punched holes in roofs, high winds (estimated near 100 mph) knocked down brick walls and radio antennas. Thousands of homes were damaged in southern Brazil as well as neighboring Argentina and Paraguay (where five people were killed). On the Uruguay coast, streets filled with sand and sea foam as winds gusted to 107 mph (172 km/hr).

Incredibly, less than 10 days later, a low pressure system has pulled up extreme cold from Antarctica and "Santa Catarina*" became a trending topic on Twitter this morning, as reports and photos of snow and temperatures below freezing (with wind chills as low as -30 C!) started pouring in.

An article from Estadao.com says (translation) says:
"Also there was record snow between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, in Bom Jardim da Serra and Urubici. According to Epagri / Ciram, responsible for monitoring weather conditions in Santa Catarina, the last time there was record snowfall in spring in the state was in 2000."
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Sheila Eldred
Discovery News
2012-09-27 13:48:00

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In the past month, four runners have been attacked by owls in separate incidents, Runner's World magazine notes.

Two of the attacks occurred near Washington, D.C., one in England, and one in Vancouver. Two happened at dusk, and two in early morning, by different species of owls. No one was seriously injured, but the 17-year-old British boy was knocked off his feet.

Four attacks doesn't make a trend, or even a trendlet, but it puzzles Rob Bierregaard of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he studies suburban barred owls, nonetheless -- especially because such behavior would usually be associated with spring, when owls are nesting.

"Barred owls are so used to humans that they've pretty much lost all fear of them. But I can't stretch that to explain why an owl would pop a jogger on the back of the head," he told The Washington Post. "The only thing I can come up with is these are playful young."

If a runner accidentally disrupted a nest or came too close to a young owl, the attack would make more sense, said Bierregaard, who wears safety glasses and a lacrosse helmet when he works with owls.
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Charles Q. Choi
OurAmazingPlanet
2012-09-27 08:36:00

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A very hazardous volcano at the border of China and North Korea is growing more active, and might erupt in the next few decades, researchers studying the area say.

About 1,100 years ago, the Changbaishan volcano in northeastern China erupted, shooting superheated flows of ash and gas up to 30 miles (50 kilometers) away and blasting a 3-mile-wide (5 km) chunk off the tip of the volcano. The explosion, known as the Millennium eruption because it occurred close to the turn of the first millennium, was one of the largest volcanic events in the last 2,000 years.

Since the Millennium eruption, Changbaishan has seen three smaller eruptions, the most recent of which took place in 1903. Starting in 1999, driven by signs of resumed activity, scientists established the Changbaishan Volcano Observatory.

Now, data collected over the past 12 years suggest that changes in seismic activity, ground deformation and gas emissions all spiked during a brief period of heightened activity from 2002 to 2006. This suggests the magma chamber beneath Changbaishan has awakened, researchers studying the volcano say.

The researchers saw the number of earthquakes increase dramatically during this burst of activity. From 1999 to 2002, and from 2006 to 2011, researchers detected seven earthquakes per month. However, from 2002 to 2006, this rate increased to 72 earthquakes per month, peaking in November 2003, which saw 243 events. Most of these quakes are tied to a region 3 miles beneath the volcanic crater that has risen slowly over the years, which suggests magma is creeping upward.
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Skynews.com.au
2012-09-27 09:14:00
A volcano has erupted on Indonesia's Sumatra island, spewing thick grey smoke up to 1.5 kilometres into the sky.

Monitoring official Suparno says Mount Marapi's eruption on Wednesday is its strongest since August last year, when its status was raised to level three out of four.
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Yahoo! News
2012-09-26 00:00:00

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On April 11, a massive magnitude 8.6 earthquake shook the floor of the Indian Ocean off Sumatra. It wasn't just unusual because of its size - the 10th largest quake in the last century - it also set off a series of quakes around the world for up to six days afterward, according to a study published today (Sept. 26) in the journal Nature.

"Until now, we seismologists have always said, 'Don't worry about distant earthquakes triggering local quakes,'" said Roland Burgmann, an earth and planetary scientist at UC Berkeley, in a statement. "This study now says that, while it is very rare - it may only happen every few decades - it is a real possibility if the right kind of earthquake happens."

The study found that some quakes were triggered within a few hours, while in other places the seismic waves from the Sumatran quake primed temblors to happen for up to six days later.

The findings should remind those living in seismically active areas that the risk from a large earthquake could persist, even on the opposite side of the globe, for more than a few hours, the study scientists said.

Another study also published today suggests that the quake marks the birth of a new tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean.
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US Geological Survey
2012-09-26 19:23:00

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Event Time:

2012-09-26 23:39:58 UTC
2012-09-26 14:39:58 UTC-09:00 at epicenter
2012-09-26 16:39:58 UTC-07:00 system time

Location:

51.583°N 178.200°W depth=40.5km (25.2mi)

Nearby Cities:

33km (21mi) S of Tanaga Volcano, Alaska
1487km (924mi) SSE of Anadyr', Russia
1580km (982mi) E of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia
1597km (992mi) E of Yelizovo, Russia
2806km (1744mi) W of Whitehorse, Canada
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Fire in the Sky
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Health & Wellness
Sharon Begley
Medical Daily
2012-09-27 08:14:00

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When Dr. Marty Makary was a medical student, staffers at the Boston hospital where he was training had a nickname for one of its most popular surgeons: Dr. Hodad.

"Hodad" is an acronym for "hands of death and destruction": Despite his Ivy League credentials and board certification, the surgeon had an unfortunate tendency to botch operations so badly that patients often suffered life-threatening complications.

But he was also one of the surgeons most requested by patients, including celebrities, thanks to his charming bedside manner and their lack of understanding about what caused their post-op problems.

Makary, 42, aims to end the professional code of silence that allows colleagues like Dr. Hodad to thrive. Now a cancer surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Makary has just published the book Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care.

It outlines the extent to which doctors and hospitals suppress objective data about how patients fare in their hands and argues for clear, publicly accessible statistics to help people make the best choices when it comes to treatment. Hospitals and physicians, he argues, should collect "outcomes data" on everything from how many knee-replacement patients walk without a limp to how many prostatectomy patients become incontinent.

Without that, "patients are walking in blind" every time they choose a hospital, Makary said in an interview. With rare exception they have no way of knowing whether they will receive appropriate care or be one of the 100,000 patients killed or 9 million harmed every year in the United States because of medical mistakes.

"There is terrible guilt about keeping quiet, but there are strong social forces against speaking up when you think something doesn't look right: It can get you fired," said Makary. (HealthGrades, a Denver company that develops and markets quality and safety ratings of healthcare providers, rates Makary a "recognized doctor" based on his training and record of no disciplinary actions or malpractice claims.) "You realize as a young doctor that you've walked into an industry with a very dark side."
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The Times of India
2012-09-27 16:06:00
The villagers of Chittor Lotipatti in Perayur taluk of Madurai district are gripped in fear, as a mysterious fever has broke out in the locality.

The villagers claimed that three elderly people have died in the last fortnight and alleged that the cause of the deaths was due to the fever. A battery of health officials is camping in the village, but they said that the cause of the deaths was yet to be ascertained. The deceased were identified as Alagarsamy (70), Budhar (60) and Lakshmi (70).

"They were elderly people. They did not visit the hospital for treatment after falling ill. So, we are left with no medical records to find out the cause of the death," said Latha Freeda Joan, district malaria officer, who is camping in Lottipatti.
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Charles Q. Choi
MyHealthNewsDaily
2012-09-27 11:48:00

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Radiation therapy and chemotherapy aimed at killing cancer cells may have the undesirable effect of helping to create cancer stem cells, which are thought to be particularly adept at generating new tumors and are especially resistant to treatment, researchers say.

The finding might help explain why late-stage cancers are often resistant to both radiation therapy and chemotherapy, and it could point to new strategies to fight tumors.

Past studies hint that cancer stem cells give rise to new tumors. Researchers suggest they are ultimately responsible for the recurrence of cancers and the dangerous spread of a cancer throughout the body. Scientists also have found that cancer stem cells are more likely than other cancer cells to survive chemotherapies and radiation therapies, probably becausetheir "stemness" allows them to self-replenish by repairing their damaged DNA and removing toxins.

The exact origin of cancer stem cells is debated. One possibility is that normal stem cells - which are valued for their ability to give rise to other cell types in the body - mutate to become cancerous. Another is that regular cancer cells somehow acquire stem cell properties.

The new study suggests regular cancer cells can indeed give rise to cancer stem cells, and that the radiation commonly used to treat cancer can trigger their stemness.
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cbsnews.com
2012-09-03 02:12:00


Modern wheat is a "perfect, chronic poison," according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who has published a book all about the world's most popular grain.

Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn't the wheat your grandma had: "It's an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the '60s and '70s," he said on CBS This Morning.
"This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there's a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It's not gluten. I'm not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I'm talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 440 more calories per day, 365 days per year."
Asked if the farming industry could change back to the grain it formerly produced, Davis said it could, but it would not be economically feasible because it yields less per acre. However, Davis said a movement has begun with people turning away from wheat - and dropping substantial weight.
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ScienceDaily
2012-09-27 12:58:00
In what could be a breakthrough in the treatment of deadly brain tumors, a team of researchers from Barrow Neurological Institute and Arizona State University has discovered that the immune system reacts differently to different types of brain tissue, shedding light on why cancerous brain tumors are so difficult to treat.

The large, two-part study, led by Barrow research fellow Sergiy Kushchayev, MD under the guidance of Dr. Mark Preul, Director of Neurosurgery Research, was published in the Sept. 14 issue of Cancer Management and Research. The study explores the effects of immunotherapy on malignant gliomas, cancerous brain tumors that typically have a poor prognosis.

What the researchers discovered was that immune cells of the brain and of the blood exhibit massive rearrangements when interacting with a malignant glioma under treatment. Essentially, the study demonstrates that the complex immune system reacts differently in different brain tissues and different regions of the brain, including tumors.
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The Star Online
2012-09-26 23:04:00
Patients may soon opt for modern, traditional or complementary medicine when seeking treatment in government hospitals.

Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said even though this was not the current standard operating procedure at government hospitals, traditional and complementary medical services could be a possibility in the near future due to its growing popularity among the public.

He said a study made recently showed that 77.9% of medical doctors responded positively about traditional and complementary medicine and would refer or advise their patients to go for massages, therapies or acupuncture.

"This is something that we can look into in the near future. For now, 10 government hospitals are providing traditional and complementary medicine on the side," he said in response to points raised during debate for the Traditional and Complementary Medicine Bill 2012.

The Bill is to better regulate the growing alternative medicine industry and to set up the Traditional and Complementary Medicine Council which will be responsible for establishing eligibility of a practice area, registering individuals providing such services and issuing practising certificates.

Liow said that Islamic medicine practices were now being included in the Bill alongside traditional Malay, Chinese and Indian medicines, homeopathy and complementary therapies, adding that it was not included as part of the Bill earlier as it did not have Jakim's approval.
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Science of the Spirit
Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science
2012-09-27 15:54:00

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You're waiting in the reception area of your doctor's office. The magazines are uninteresting. The pictures on the wall are dull. The second hand on the wall clock moves so excruciatingly slowly that you're sure it must be broken. You feel depleted and irritated about being stuck in this seemingly endless moment. You want to be engaged by something - anything - when a thought, so familiar from childhood, comes to mind: "I'm bored!"

Although boredom is often seen as a trivial and temporary discomfort that can be alleviated by a simple change in circumstances, it can also be a chronic and pervasive stressor that can have significant consequences for health and well-being.

Boredom at work may cause serious accidents when safety depends on continuous vigilance, as in medical monitoring or long-haul truck driving. On a behavioral level, boredom has been linked with problems with impulse control, leading to overeating and binge eating, drug and alcohol abuse, and problem gambling. Boredom has even been associated with mortality, lending grim weight to the popular phrase "bored to death."
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Lauren Woods
New York- Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center/Weill Cornell Medical College
2012-09-27 05:25:00

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New study shows fear is hard to extinguish from the developing teenage brain, which may explain why anxiety and depression spikes during adolescence.

A new study by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers shows that adolescents' reactions to threat remain high even when the danger is no longer present. According to researchers, once a teenager's brain is triggered by a threat, the ability to suppress an emotional response to the threat is diminished which may explain the peak in anxiety and stress-related disorders during this developmental period.

The study, published Sept. 17 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first to decode fear acquisition and fear "extinction learning," down to the synaptic level in the brains of mice, which mirror human neuronal networks. Also, through human and rodent experiments, the study finds that acquired fear can be difficult to extinguish in some adolescents. By contrast, the study shows that adults and children do not have the same trouble learning when a threat is no longer present.

"This is the first study to show, in an experiment, that adolescent humans have diminished fear extinction learning," says the study's lead author, Dr. Siobhan S. Pattwell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell. "Our findings are important because they might explain why epidemiologists have found that anxiety disorders seem to spike during adolescence or just before adolescence. It is estimated that over 75 percent of adults with fear-related disorders can trace the roots of their anxiety to earlier ages."
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