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Gregory James
Sott.net 2012-09-30 11:10:00
With the advent of the internet came the Information Age, where it has become possible to spread and find information about almost anything with unparalleled ease and convenience - information that, as little as a couple decades ago, would have been extremely difficult if not impossible for most people to obtain. More data than any one of us could ever assimilate is now at our fingertips, and news of most global events is available practically instantaneously. Where information is suppressed, it finds its way to the surface, sooner rather than later. We carry the internet around with us in super-powerful laptop computers and handheld devices, and culturally, in our everyday lives, we now spend more time online than not, whether for work or leisure. Everything is plugged in! In a relatively short time-frame, our global society has become a vast network of information movers, like a giant brain network, processing and sharing data with our counterparts within this greater body of humanity. It's no wonder our collective paradigm is shifting and it's no wonder the deepest patterns of our subconscious/archetypal makeup - understood as ancient mystery teachings and prophecies, tales of power and spiritual allegories, epic adventure stories and legends of old - have emerged in the forefront of our consciousness, becoming compelling topics of interest. |
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Fidockave213
Youtube 2012-09-28 07:17:00
Note: this video does not imply the world is going to end in 2012. Extreme weather and global unrest in September 2012. Earthquakes, sinkholes, volcanic eruptions, steam plumes, riots, floods, UFOs, meteors, fireballs... major Earth changes are underway.
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Justin Raimondo
AntiWar.com 2012-09-28 00:00:00
It's no wonder the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially held back from releasing a transcript of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the UN General Assembly: Bibi's wackiness doesn't bear close scrutiny. Perhaps "wacky" isn't quite the right word for his 40-minute peroration, during which he pulled out a bomb "diagram" and a red marker to illustrate where he would draw a "red line" defining the outer limits of Iran's nuclear program. Cartoonish is more like it. The cartoonish quality of the bomb drawing underscored the content and tone of the speech, which was the jeremiad of a radical ideologue rather than anything one would expect from a statesman: "Today a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval. Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the right of all our citizens, men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, all are equal before the law."Israel, which privileges its priestly caste, has a state religion, and bases its national mythology on a "promise" from G-d, is as medieval as any of its neighbors. Aside from being a lie, however, this statement is interesting because it evokes the very same supremacist spirit that animates the controversial pro-Israel public relations campaign launched by the Jewish state's extremist American supporters. Posters in the public transport system, from New York to San Francisco, proclaim: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad."No wonder the Israeli consulates in New York and San Francisco won't disavow those vile subway posters: Pamela Geller is the new public face of Israel. Yes, Israel protects the rights of all citizens - unless they're Palestinians who happen to own property coveted by the "settlers," in which case it doesn't. And the key word here is citizens: of course, the Palestinians in the occupied territories are not citizens, but helots, with no rights, and no protection from fanatical Jewish fundamentalists who have launched hundreds of attacks on their homes, and sought to displace them at every opportunity, with the active complicity of the Israeli government. |
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Michael Goodspeed
thunderbolts.info 2011-06-29 00:00:00
For thousands of years, the appearance of a comet in the terrestrial skies has provoked deep anxiety and even collective hysteria in humans the world over. The reasons for this response are not entirely clear. Working with historical testimony, David Talbott and his colleagues have concluded that comet fears originated in a global experience of catastrophe and terror. Behind all of the regional traditions and stories is the memory of the "Great Comet," the mother of all comets. The memory traces to the origins of world mythology, according to Talbott, and is particularly vivid in the story of a cosmic serpent or dragon threatening to destroy the world. The most common ancient ideas attached to a comet were the death of kings, the fall of kingdoms, cosmic upheaval, and the end of the world. It is well worth asking why this collective anxiety can be provoked with the first appearance of a mere wisp of gas in the heavens. The question is especially appropriate today because of the approach of the Comet Elenin, which is predicted to pass within about 0.233 AU of the Earth in October of this year. Speculations about Elenin range from a theoretical NASA coverup of an "extinction level event," to theories that the comet is actually the ever-elusive planet "Nibiru" of author Zecharia Sitchin's lore. (For a thoughtful meditation on the credibility of some of these theories, see the Subversify.com piece, "Is Google Censoring Nibiru?"). It should be noted here that the leading proponent of the electric universe, Wal Thornhill, has refrained from predicting specific behaviors of Elenin due to the number of unknowns. These unknowns (discussed below) include the Sun's activity, and the constituent material of the comet itself. |
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John Aziz
Azizonomics 2012-10-01 16:57:00
According to a recent FPI poll, 60% of Americans want go to war with Iran to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. This in spite of the fact that the US intelligence community is fairy unanimous that Iran is not even currently pursuing nuclear weapons. According to Micah Zenko: So 60% of Americans believe Iran should be attacked to prevent nuclear proliferation. Simultaneously 71% of Americans - in total contradiction to the evidence recognised by both the CIA and Mossad that Iran is not currently even developing a nuclear weapon - believe that Iran currently has nuclear weapons. There is almost certainly a high degree of overlap - and that's some severe cognitive dissonance. Where are such ideas coming from? There are some voices in the wilderness that are expressing the view that Iran already has a nuclear weapon to anyone who will listen. |
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KTAR.com
A traveler at Sky Harbor has uploaded a video of TSA employees
performing an "all-stop drill." Passengers had already passed the
security checkpoint when agents told them to stop moving. The video
uploader, who captured the final 24 seconds of the drill, posted in
comments it was unclear what was happening, writing:
2012-10-01 16:23:00
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Kevin Barrett
Press TV 2012-10-01 14:15:00
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been vilified in the Western media for daring to imagine "a world without Israel." But according to news reports, Henry Kissinger and sixteen American intelligence agencies agree that in the near future, Israel will no longer exist. The New York Post quotes Kissinger "word for word": In 10 years, there will be no more Israel. Kissinger's statement is flat and unqualified. He is not saying that Israel is in danger, but could be saved if we just gave it additional trillions of dollars and smashed enough of its enemies with our military. He is not saying that if we elect Netanyahu's old friend Mitt Romney, Israel could somehow be salvaged. He is not saying that if we bomb Iran, Israel might survive. He is not offering a way out. He is simply stating a fact: In 2022, Israel will no longer exist. The US Intelligence Community agrees, though perhaps not on the precise 2022 expiration date. Sixteen US intelligence agencies with a combined budget over USD70 billion have issued an 82-page analysis titled "Preparing for a Post-Israel Middle East." |
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Fars News Agency
2012-10-01 09:00:00
Director of one of the branches of the Doha Bank disclosed financial documents substantiating the Qatari government's support for terrorist and rebel groups in Syria. Lebanese Addiyar daily reported on Monday that it had received an e-mail from the Director of one of the Doha Bank branches owned by one of the royal family members, which unveiled the details of how Qatar financed terrorists in Syria. According to the e-mail, the director suspected the transactions of the two Syrian bank customers Moataz al-Khayyat and Mohammed Moataz al-Khayyat. The two men owned a small contracting company in Doha, named UCC. "After they had usual small accounts of deposit, transactions, remittances, and credits, they recently started bringing a large amount of weekly money remittances from various sources," the director informed the Lebanese daily. |
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Kevin Rawlinson
Political activists must watch what they say on the likes of Facebook
and Twitter, sites which will become the "next big thing in law
enforcement", a leading human rights lawyer has warned.Independent.co.uk 2012-10-01 09:13:00 John Cooper QC said that police are monitoring key activists online and that officers and the courts are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to social media. But, speaking to The Independent, he added that he also expected that to drive an increase in the number of criminals being brought to justice in the coming months. "People involved in public protest should use social media to their strengths, like getting their message across. But they should not use them for things like discussing tactics. They might as well be having a tactical meeting with their opponents sitting in and listening. "For example, if antifascist organisers were discussing their plans on social media, they can assume that a fascist organisation will be watching. Social media sites are the last place you want to post something like that," he said. Mr Cooper QC's warning comes after a New York court ordered Twitter to hand over messages posted on the site by a demonstrator belonging to the Occupy Wall Street movement in America. Malcolm Harris, 23, is accused of disorderly conduct after he was arrested on Brooklyn Bridge during a protest last October. |
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Fars News Agency
2012-09-30 13:42:00
Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said the United States violated the international norms by removing the name of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO, also known as the MEK, NCR and PMOI) from the list of terrorist groups. "The United States suddenly prepares a ground to strike the Monafeqin (Hypocrites, as they are called in Iran) grouplet from their terror list, and they, in fact, disrespected international norms and human criteria by such actions," Larijani told FNA on Sunday. He said Washington's claims about war on terrorism as well as promotion of democracy and human rights are no more than empty words which meet no action. "As a matter of fact, they (Americans) are looking for servants to obey their orders and if then their actions fall in the domain of terrorism, they won't care." "Americans took similar measures in Afghanistan and they continue doing so now," Larijani went on saying. He said the US delisting of the MKO revealed once again to the Iranian nation that "Americans are an accomplice of those who assassinated Iran's leaders and our scholars". | |
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Esam Al-Amin
Counterpunch 2012-09-28 22:49:00
On Sept. 25, Professor-turned President Barack Obama lectured the Muslim World and world leaders during his annual address before the United Nations. The beautifully crafted speech of the Nobel peace laureate would have been believed - and better received - had it simply been genuine. The president's appeal for rejecting violence, spreading peace among nations, while emphasizing the vital use of diplomacy in international relations, as well as his call for respecting the rule of law, due process, and cultural understanding were remarkable. But unfortunately, they were simply not credible. In his speech, the president admonished the Muslim World by underscoring the important belief that people must "resolve their differences peacefully" and that "diplomacy" should take "the place of war." Laudable words, but only if America practiced what it preaches. In his seminal work A Century of U.S. Interventions, based on the Congressional Records and the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Services, Zoltan Grossman chronicled 133 U.S. military interventions by the most active military in the history of the world, between 1890 and 2001. Similarly, William Blum's study A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, covered 67 interventions between 1945 and 2000 that, according to him, resulted in the deaths of 13-17 million people. In his book The Fall of the U.S. Empire - And Then What?, European intellectual Johan Galtung listed 161 incidents of American overt political violence between 1945 and 2001, including 67 military interventions, 25 bombings, 35 political assassinations (or attempted ones), 11 foreign countries that were assisted with torture, and 23 interferences with elections or the political process abroad. And all that was before the 9/11 attacks. |
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Emily Anne Epstein
DailyMail 2012-09-29 11:21:00
The United States Military conducted top secret experiments on the citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, for years, exposing them to radioactive compounds, a researcher has claimed. While it was known that the government sprayed 'harmless' zinc cadmium silfide particles over the general population in St Louis, Professor Lisa Martino-Taylor, a sociologist at St. Louis Community College, claims that a radioactive additive was also mixed with the compound. She has accrued detailed descriptions as well as photographs of the spraying which exposed the unwitting public, predominantly in low-income and minority communities, to radioactive particles. |
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Natalie O'Brien
The Sydney Morning Herald 2012-09-16 00:00:00
Guantanamo Bay detainees, including David Hicks, were forced to take high dosages of anti-malaria drug mefloquine despite showing no signs of the disease, a practice likened to ''pharmacological waterboarding'' by a US military doctor. Questions have been raised about whether the mass administration of the drug to detainees was a secret, illegal experiment after a medical journal article last month by an army doctor, Major Remington Nevin, highlighted the ''inappropriate use'' of the drug and asked if its use had been motivated by the drug's psychotic side effects. The US Centres for Disease Control issued a warning against the use of mefloquine on anyone suffering psychiatric disturbances or having a previous history of depression. Dr Nevin also warned high doses of the drug could cause brain injuries. Mr Hicks has long claimed he was drugged against his will. Evidence including previously secret reports and witnesses including a Guantanamo guard and New York lawyer Josh Dratel support Mr Hicks' claims. |
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Natalie O'Brien
The Sydney Morning Herald 2012-09-30 00:00:00
New evidence has emerged that all Guantanamo Bay detainees, including David Hicks, were drugged involuntarily with a substance that has a long history as a truth serum. Recently declassified US documents revealing medical procedures have shown that scopolamine was administered to all detainees taken to the Cuban detention centre. The documents, which were standard operating procedures for nursing staff, were obtained by the independent US news outlet Truthout, and reveal that the rationale for the drug's use on all detainees was to prevent motion sickness. However, US military experts have said that scopolamine is not recommended for motion sickness because of its severe side effects. |
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John Aziz
Azizonomics 2012-09-29 14:00:00
Here's some context behind the claims that Iran will imminently possess a nuclear weapon. It started a long time ago (but not, unfortunately, in a galaxy far, far away): Seven years away? And did they have a bomb in 1991? So was there a bomb by the late 1990s? So now we're looking at a nuclear-armed Iran by 2007. Scary stuff, right? And Iran still doesn't have a bomb today - all of those reports, all of that scaremongering and warmongering was wrong. Both the CIA and Mossad agree that there is no specific evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons today. And many experts believe that even if Iran were working on a bomb it could take up to ten to fifteen years. |
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Nation
2012-09-28 11:01:00
Paris/Hamburg - Iran's state grains agency GTC has discreetly snapped up around 1 million tonnes of milling wheat in the past 2 weeks mostly from the European Union, traders said on Thursday, showing increased ability to import food despite financial sanctions. Iran has in the past exported wheat but Western sanctions aimed at its disputed nuclear programme coincided with a bad harvest, forcing the country to quietly enter global markets and make substantial wheat purchases to feed its large population. While sanctions don't target food shipments, they make it difficult for importers to obtain letters of credit or conduct international transfers of funds through banks. "They are buying bigger volumes than what was expected, they have big needs...," one trader said, adding European origin was currently the most attractive. |
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Gordon Duff
Press TV 2012-09-30 09:50:00
The aftermath of the last world altering months may mean life or death, war or peace for millions, perhaps the entire world. Real conflict in Syria, the attempts by others to expand regional conflicts, tribal feuds and ethnic rivalries into war of aggression is becoming openly recognized, perhaps for the first time in history. Since the days of Machiavelli, war through deception has been the rule but the information age has made deception a more powerful tool than ever imagined. Perhaps it is time the tables were turned and the "deceivers" were to receive some of the recognition they have, for so long, been denied. Today's story will involve Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Israel, and the Mossad. Along with Netanyahu, Assange has tried to insert his way into the American election on the side of a losing candidate whose platform is simply war with Iran. Some explanation is needed. His recent statement, theoretically to the United Nations, one attacking President Obama, always sparing any mention of Israel or the rights of the Palestinian people, are cheap showmanship, utter lies and a form of "holocaust flag waving" he learned from Netanyahu. |
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Press TV
2012-09-28 09:41:00
An American military analyst says the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, organized the attack on the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi, Press TV reports. Israeli forces produced the anti-Islam film, released it and led the attacks against the US consulate in Benghazi, Gordon Duff said in an interview with Press TV on Friday. US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed on September 11, when rocket-propelled grenades were fired on the US consulate in the eastern Libyan city. The incident took place while a group of people held a demonstration against an anti-Islam movie produced in the United States. Referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Duff argued that "it is unusual hearing someone as radical and extremist as Netanyahu talk about others." |
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Kuwait News Agency
2012-09-23 07:38:00
The Iraqi government reiterated here Sunday its insistence on the deportation of Iran's opposition Mujahedeen-e-Khalq group from Iraqi territories in spite of a US plan to remove it from the list of terror groups. The Iraqi Prime Minister's office said in a release that Iraq's position towards the Iranian group remained unchanged, shrugging off a recent US plan to stop listing Mujahedeen-e-Khalq as a terrorist group. "The Iraqi government's position on this organization, which is involved in terrorist acts against Iraqis, remains unchanged," it said. "Therefore, its illegitimate presence on Iraqi soil marks a breach of Iraq's constitutional obligations and peaceful policies in the world," the release added. It called on the UN and all world countries to fulfil their commitments related to fighting terrorist groups. Iraq had agreed with the UN to transfer the Iranian opposition group's members from the border area with Iran to camp in west Baghdad as a prelude to deporting them. | |
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Comment: For the full background on the MEK and its role in US-Israeli plans for the Middle East, see Target Iran: America and Israel to Officially Unleash MEK Terrorist Cult
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Associated Press
2012-10-01 16:15:00
Mexico City - As the clock winds down to Dec. 21, experts on the Mayan calendar have been racing to convince people that the Mayas didn't predict an apocalypse for the end of this year. Some experts are now saying the Mayas may indeed have made prophecies, just not about the end of the world. Archaeologists, anthropologists and other experts met Friday in the southern Mexico city of Merida to discuss the implications of the Mayan Long Count calendar, which is made up of 394-year periods called baktuns. Experts estimate the system starts counting at 3114 B.C., and will have run through 13 baktuns, or 5,125 years, around Dec. 21. Experts say 13 was a significant number for the Mayans, and the end of that cycle would be a milestone - but not an end. Fears that the calendar does point to the end have circulated in recent years. People in that camp believe the Maya may have been privy to impending astronomical disasters that would coincide with 2012, ranging from explosive storms on the surface of the sun that could knock out power grids to a galactic alignment that could trigger a reversal in Earth's magnetic field. Mexican government archaeologist Alfredo Barrera said Friday that the Mayas did prophesize, but perhaps about more humdrum events like droughts or disease outbreaks. | |
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Michael Isikoff
First Read on NBC News 2012-09-27 00:00:00
Election officials in six Florida counties are investigating what appears to be "hundreds" of cases of suspected voter fraud by a GOP consulting firm that has been paid nearly $3 million by the Republican National Committee to register Republican voters in five key battleground states, state officials tell NBC. But the veteran GOP consultant, Nathan Sproul, who runs the firm, strongly defended his company's conduct, saying it has rigorous "quality controls" and blamed the alleged fraud on the actions of a few "bad apples," workers who were hired to register Republican voters for $12 an hour and then tried to "cheat the system." The allegations of suspected voter fraud committed by Strategic Allied Consulting of Tempe, Arizona spread Thursday to counties throughout Florida. At the same time, the Republican National Committee said it had severed its ties to the firm altogether. |
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Daily Mail, UK
2012-09-29 00:00:00
The explosive sex grooming allegations are made in a documentary to be aired on national TV on Wednesday night. The women, now in their fifties, claim Sir Jimmy was at the peak of his fame when he is said to have molested them in his Rolls-Royce, at a hospital, a school and the BBC Television centre
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Anita Singh
The BBC shelved a Newsnight investigation into allegations
that Sir Jimmy Savile sexually abused a teenage girl in his dressing
room at Television Centre, it has emerged. The Telegraph, UK 2012-02-10 00:00:00
The woman claimed that the presenter molested her when she was 14 or 15 after inviting her to recordings of Clunk Click, his 1970s BBC family show. Newsnight tracked down several other women who claimed that Savile used his role on the programme to groom and abuse teenage girls. Reporters on the current affairs programme were also told of claims that two other celebrities, both still alive, sexually abused girls at Television Centre in the 1970s. The BBC had hoped to broadcast the Newsnight report in December, two months after Savile's death, but bosses ordered that the investigation be dropped. Instead, the corporation screened two tribute programmes celebrating Savile's lengthy BBC career as presenter of Jim'll Fix It and Top of the Pops, and also as a Radio 1 DJ. |
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James Eng
Updated at 12:34 p.m. ET: California has become the first state in the nation to ban therapy that tries to turn gay teens straight.USNews.msnbcnews.com 2012-09-30 14:24:00
Gov. Jerry Brown announced Sunday that he has signed Senate Bill 1172, which prohibits children under age 18 from undergoing "sexual orientation change efforts." The law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, prohibits state-licensed therapists from engaging in these practices with minors. "Governor Brown today reaffirmed what medical and mental health organizations have made clear: Efforts to change minors' sexual orientation are not therapy, they are the relics of prejudice and abuse that have inflicted untold harm on young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Californians," Clarissa Filgioun, board president of Equality California, said in a press release. Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, added: "Governor Brown has sent a powerful message of affirmation and support to LGBT youth and their families. This law will ensure that state-licensed therapists can no longer abuse their power to harm LGBT youth and propagate the dangerous and deadly lie that sexual orientation is an illness or disorder that can be 'cured.'" |
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Suzanne Daley
New York Times 2012-09-24 11:21:00
Madrid - On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night. At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day's trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby. "When you don't have enough money," she said, declining to give her name, "this is what there is." The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting "a little of everything" from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet. Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution. A report this year by a Catholic charity, Caritas, said that it had fed nearly one million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than twice as many as in 2007. That number rose again in 2011 by 65,000. As Spain tries desperately to meet its budget targets, it has been forced to embark on the same path as Greece, introducing one austerity measure after another, cutting jobs, salaries, pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink. Most recently, the government raised the value-added tax three percentage points, to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items, making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in sight as the country's regional governments, facing their own budget crisis, are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families. |
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The Voice of Russia
2012-09-30 11:16:00
The general strike was organized by Italy's two biggest unions. The protesters demanded that the government give up its reform programme slashing government spending, including expenditures on social programmes. The austerity measures also provide for tax increases and job cuts. |
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Sylvie Coyaud
Il Sole 2012-08-26 12:55:00
On May 13, in "Piezopoli, Italian thriller", we announced the discovery of a new form of energy extracted by fragmentation of stones and the transmutation of nuclear waste. To design and build a reactor capable of exploiting this energy, only one billion euros of public or private funds was needed. Today we are pleased to announce that the reactor is on sale thanks to the generosity of Francesco Fucilla, an industrialist head of a conglomerate, on which, as in the case of the Empire of Charles V, the sun never sets. This is because you can, by and large, find this particular empire only on the Internet. The activities of the philanthropist - something of a Pico della Mirandola, i.e. 'shy and reserved' - include publications, awards, medals and degrees to honor scientists, partners and relatives whose creativity is a source of revolutionary innovations. With the participation of celebrated Italian researchers, or those who soon hope to be , Fucilla's group develops products that solve the problems of mankind. Based on resolutely 'alternative' scientific theories, these products include those that guarantee food security, multiply energy resources and treat almost every disease, known and unknown. The following is a brief world-view of the multinational Fucilla & Co., beginning with his 'man Friday', who is perhaps already familiar to some readers. | |
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Comment: SOTT has also written an expose on Francesco Fucilla and the Telesio-Galilei Academy of Science, read it here:
Corruption in Science: Francesco Fucilla and the Telesio-Galilei Academy of Science |
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Daily Mail, UK
2012-09-29 00:00:00
Three months after pledging to turn her life around and get a job, a lottery winner convicted of fraud has died from a suspected overdose. In June Amanda Clayton pleaded no contest to fraud, having continued to collect state welfare handouts despite pocketing her $1 million prize. She accepted her punishment and was said by her lawyer to be trying to move on. But on Saturday morning she was found dead at her Michigan home. Ecorse police Sgt. Cornelius Herring confirmed that the 25-year-old's was discovered at about 9 am, thought to be the result of a drug overdose. No further details were given and Clayton's relatives did not immediately return a phone message for comment. Clayton won the Michigan Lottery in September 2011, continuing to collect $5,475 in food handouts over the subsequent months. |
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Michael J. Mishak and Patrick McGreevy
Brown signs open-carry ban on rifles and shotguns in cities, plus college, carpool bills. Los Angeles Times 2012-09-29 00:00:00
Sacramento, California - Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Friday outlawing the open carrying of rifles and shotguns in cities across California. The measure was among dozens of bills the governor approved that take effect Jan. 1, including proposals intended to help curb student fee hikes at the state's public universities and exempt hybrid drivers from toll charges in carpool lanes. Brown also signed a measure banning state agencies from regulating Internet phone service - a priority for the tech industry - and took steps to establish a state-run retirement plan for low-wage, private-sector workers. Brown vetoed bills that would have increased fines for Californians who use a cellphone while driving and required motorists to provide at least three feet of space between their vehicle and bicyclists they pass. He has until the end of Sunday to act on proposals sent to him by the Legislature in the session that ended last month. Nearly 200 bills remain on his desk. The gun measure sprang from the actions of gun rights advocates who toted long guns to coffee shops and other public places to declare their right to bear arms. It took on new urgency after the mass shootings at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater and a Milwaukee Sikh temple. |
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John Christoffersen
New Fairfield, Connecticut - Tyler Giuliano had no trouble with the law.
The teenager loved flying small planes as a Civil Air Patrol cadet and
seemed happy as he played an online game with friends Wednesday night.
But hours later, authorities say, Tyler was outside wearing a black ski
mask and wielding a knife when he was shot by his father, who thought he
was a prowler.ABC News 2012-09-29 00:00:00
No immediate charges were brought against Jeffrey Giuliano, a popular fifth-grade teacher, in the slaying of 15-year-old Tyler, who was gunned down in his aunt's driveway next door to his own home in New Fairfield around 1 a.m. Thursday. "It's something out of a Hollywood script," said John Hodge, the first selectman, or top elected official, in the town of nearly 14,000 people about 50 miles from New York City. He said he couldn't recall another killing in his eight years on the job. State police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said the boy had never been in trouble with the law, and some of those who knew him described him as a good kid with an easygoing personality. Investigators and acquaintances said they were at a loss to explain what he was doing outside dressed all in black and carrying a weapon. "Certainly, that is the major question we are trying to answer at this point," Vance said. |
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Daily Mail, UK
2012-09-29 00:00:00
The agent fired after being driven several hundred yards on the hood of Valeria Alvarado's car. Her husband, Gilbert Alvarado, is furious about what happened and believes the agent who shot her overreacted. 'My wife got killed for no reason,' Gilbert told NBC 7. Show me that my wife had a gun or something that threatened the guy's life where he had to use lethal force against her.' The shooting occurred about five miles north of the Mexican border as plainclothes agents were looking to serve a felony warrant in the area to someone other than Alvarado, Border Patrol Deputy Chief Rodney Scott told U-T San Diego. 'Fearing for his life, he discharged his weapon to get the vehicle to stop,' Scott said. No other agents fired. |
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Michael Allen
Opposing Views 2012-09-28 21:11:00
Catarina Migliorini, a 20-year-old Brazilian student, is offering her virginity to the highest bidder to raise money to build homes for poor people in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Migliorini insists that she is not a prostitute. So far the bids are up to $155,000. The physical education student will be filmed, before and after her first sexual encounter, by a film crew for a documentary called 'Virgins Wanted,' reports the Daily Mail. Migliorini told the Folha newspaper: "I saw this as a business. I have the opportunity to travel, to be part of a movie and get a bonus with it. If you only do it once in your life then you are not a prostitute, just like if you take one amazing photograph it does not automatically make you a photographer. The auction is just business, I'm a romantic girl at heart and believe in love. But this will make a big difference to my area." |
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Michael Allen
Opposing Views 2012-09-27 20:58:00
An unidentified man, who plead guilty to statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl in 2009 and got her pregnant, is now filing for visitation rights to see the toddler produced by the rape. The man was sentenced to 16 years probation in 2011, reports the Daily Mail. Part of the probation required that he pay child support, however, that also entitles him to seek visitation rights. The man met the 14-year-old girl at church and, later, had sex with her and got the teen pregnant. However, she was too young to legally consent to sex, reports Fox 25. |
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Michael Allen
Opposing Views 2012-09-28 00:00:00
Texas Rep. Debbie Riddle (R) was apparently infuriated by the unclassified Red Team report which detailed the abusive behavior of American soldiers against their Afghan military allies [ANSF] and Afghan citizens. The Red Team report said that ANSF members found many U.S. soldiers to be "extremely arrogant, bullying, unwilling to listen to their advice, and were often seen as lacking concern for civilian and ANSF safety during combat." The Red Team report described vulgar and crude acts the American soldiers engaged in, such as urinating in public, cussing, disrespecting women and bullying people during night raids. Rep. Riddle was not offended by the actions of American soldiers, but rather by the conclusion of the Red Team report which recommended sensitivity training for American soldiers in Afghanistan. According to the thedailydolt.com, Rep. Riddle wrote on her Facebook: "Our soldiers do NOT need to be taught how to be sensitive to radical Muslims. They do not need to be worried about blowing their nose wrong or using their left hand and offending someone. . . . They should not be bothered with being sensitive to people who want us all dead! We need a true leader in the White House - a vote for Obama is a vote to destroy our country." |
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| Secret History |
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Brett Smith
RedOrbit 2012-09-28 13:51:00
Spanish archeologists have announced the discovery of continental Europe's biggest Bronze Age settlement that dates back 4,200 years and represents the pinnacle of architecture and engineering for that time. The site, known as La Bastida, was protected by 20-foot high walls and towers designed to keep its upper class residents protected and in power. The design of these structures suggests that those who built it were from Asia Minor and the Middle East. One of the key clues to uncovering the story of La Bastida is the ogival arched postern gate, or secondary door, near the main entrance. The arch is the first one to be found in Europe from this time period, and its roots can be traced to Troy, in modern day Turkey, and urban locations in Palestine, Israel and Jordan. The construction techniques found at La Bastida would not show up in Europe until 400 to 800 years later when Mycenaeans, or city-states residents in Southern Europe, incorporated them into their military architecture. The structure shows people from the Middle East had a hand in the construction of the fortification. The Spanish archeologists theorized the people who lived in La Bastida moved there after a mysterious crisis devastated the region 4,300 years ago. The archeological record shows the people living in Jordan and Israel at the time abandoned the safety and security of settlements for pastoral life. |
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| Science & Technology |
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Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
ScienceInsider 2012-10-01 15:00:00
Scientific misconduct, and not honest mistakes, account for more than two-thirds of retractions, a paper published today online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests. The authors, microbiologists and journal editors Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, set out to classify the errors that prompt researchers to yank published work - and came up with what they say is a surprising result. Casadevall and Fang, who are fascinated by scientific integrity in publication, wanted to follow up on work published last year. Medical writer R. Grant Steen had reported in the Journal of Medical Ethics that 73.5% of 742 papers retracted between 2000 and 2010 were pulled because of errors. "What I was interested in was to see if we could understand the sources of error," says Casadevall, who runs a lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and is editor-in-chief of mBio. That way, he and Fang thought, "we may find a way to improve science" by giving researchers a heads up about where the most common pitfalls lie. They asked Steen to join them, and together searched PubMed for all retractions, coming up with a total of 2047 dating back to 1977. (PubMed primarily covers biomedical research.) Rather than rely just on retraction notices from journals -- which in some cases they couldn't access without paying a fee, Casadevall says - they cross-referenced as many retractions as they could with other sources, including reports from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which investigates scientific misconduct. |
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Michael Harper
RedOrbit 2012-10-01 16:42:00
Robotic scientists, it seems, are hell bent on creating autonomous, animalistic robots. These machines, should the scientists have their way, would be capable of running faster than any human being, scaling all manner of rough terrain, and now, taking flight on their own, thinking like a bee in order to find certain sights and smells. The robot take over is nigh. A new report from the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex explains how scientists are looking at the way a bee's brain works in order to not only improve Artificial Intelligence, but to also create the world's first flying robot capable of acting on its own rather than waiting on the instructions of its human creators. If doctors James Marshall and Thomas Nowotny are able to create such a bee-inspired brain, it will be the first time a robotic brain has been built to perform complex tasks similar to those carried out by actual animals and insects. According to the report, these brains could then be used in search and rescue missions or even performing the jobs of bees (namely pollination) in case the great bee shortage continues. Dr. Marshall explained why his team chose the brain of a bee instead of another creature in recent statement: "The development of an artificial brain is one of the greatest challenges in Artificial Intelligence. So far, researchers have typically studied brains such as those of rats, monkeys, and humans, but actually 'simpler' organisms such as social insects have surprisingly advanced cognitive abilities." |
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Jennifer Ouellette
Discovery News 2012-10-01 13:15:00
Remember when we said that Doctor Who fans eager to build their own TARDIS would first need to obtain an odd little item called a trachoid time crystal? The exotic item was first mentioned in a 1976 episode called "The Hand of Fear" as being key to the machine's ability to travel through space and time. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek (MIT) suggested such a thing might be mathematically possible, giving hope to aspiring Time Lords everywhere. Wilczek was teaching a class on 3D crystals: think salt, snowflakes, ice and similar sustances where the atoms or molecules are tightly bound in a very precise lattice-type structure. He started wondering whether you could have a crystal-like structure in the fourth dimension of time -- i.e., a spacetime crystal. He concluded that you could. Theoretically, at least.
Now a team of physicists led by mechanical engineer Xiang Zhang and Tongcang Li think they have come up with an experimental design that would make Wilczek's spacetime crystals a viable reality. Wilczek's paper and the follow-up analysis by Zhang et al. will both be published in Physical Review Letters. |
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Giovanni Sostero, Nick Howes and Ernesto Guido
Our team performed follow-up observations of comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) on 2012, Sept. 28.6, remotely through the 2m, f/10 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD of Faulkes Telescope North
(Haleakala) under good seeing conditions, and a scale of 0.3"/px. After
stacking 13 R-filtered exposures, 120-seconds each, comet ISON appears
as a pale blob of light, slightly elongated toward the south-west (this
is particularly obvious looking at the azimuthal median subtraction
rendition). Click on the image below to see a bigger version.Remanzacco Observatory 2012-10-01 13:02:00
The Afrho (proxy of dust abundance within the coma) calculation we performed on this dataset, using a few Tycho reference stars having colour indexes close to that of the Sun, provided rather puzzling results: in short, we found a significant variation of the Afrho amount, according to the dimension of the measurement window (something pretty different from the steady state coma model). |
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Space Safety Magazine
A large but relatively slow moving coronal mass ejection (CME) that
erupted from the Sun on September 27 hit Earth September 30 causing a
low level radio blackout and moderate geomagnetic storms. Although the blackout has passed, storm warnings continue through October 1.2012-10-01 09:35:00 In a couple weeks, the GOES-15 satellite which is the primary X-ray solar sensor used to monitor solar weather, will undergo a maintenance phase as its view of the sun is eclipsed by Earth. During that time GOES-14 is brought online to provide continuous coverage of solar activity. GOES-15 is expected to be operational again around October 30.
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Wolfgang Gruener
TomsHardware 2012-09-30 12:00:00
Researchers at Berkeley Lab of the U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory have come forward with the idea to build the first space time crystal. This device could deliver groundbreaking insight into physics and will be able to keep the correct time until after the universe dies. The projected crystal will be a 4D construct that is characterized by a periodic structure in time as well as space. If built, scientists hope they will be able to study the properties and behaviors during interactions of large numbers of particles, which is commonly known as the many-body problem in physics. There is also the vision that a space time crystal would be useful to dive deeper into quantum physics, including particle entanglement over close and far distances. Xiang Zhang, a faculty scientistwith Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division who led the space time crystal research, explained that "the electric field of an ion trap holds charged particles in place and Coulomb repulsion causes them to spontaneously form a spatial ring crystal". He added: "Under the application of a weak static magnetic field, this ring-shaped ion crystal will begin a rotation that will never stop. The persistent rotation of trapped ions produces temporal order, leading to the formation of a space-time crystal at the lowest quantum energy state." Since this crystal is already at its lowest quantum energy state, its time keeping will persist for eternity even until the universe reaches its "heat-death", the scientists said. Despite its continued motion, the scientists said that the crystal would not represent a perpetuum mobile as the structures does not deliver energy. According to Zhang, the "main challenge" in creating the crystal "will be to cool an ion ring to its ground state." He believes that this will be possible "in the near future with the development of ion trap technologies." |
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Wolfgang Gruener
TomsHardware 2012-09-30 18:00:00
Bioengineers at Stanford University have created a communication network to send commands to and from cells within a biological body. Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, an assistant professor of bioengineering said they succeeded in using the M13 bacteriophage as a carrier of genetic messages to build what they call a "biological Internet". M13, a non-lethal virus which has the ability to "broadcast" DNA, can be used to pick up arbitrary DNA strands and transport them to certain cells over a distance of up to 7 cm, which is about 79,500 times its own length (880 nm). The researchers said that M13 transports messages in the form of commands, but does not care what the content of the message is. At its destination, M13 releases the command. "Effectively, we've separated the message from the channel. We can now send any DNA message we want to specific cells within a complex microbial community," said Ortiz, the first author of the study. According to the research, M13 can be used to create much more complex communication between cells and "include any sort of genetic instruction: start growing, stop growing, come closer, swim away, produce insulin and so forth." The vision is the creation of "biosynthetic factories in which huge masses of microbes collaborate to make more complicated fuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful chemicals." Even the regeneration of tissue and organs may be possible. |
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Khaleej Times
2012-09-30 07:34:00
A British astronaut will be part of a team to fly to space to investigate a cosmic rock, and if the asteroid is found to be on collision course for Earth, he would be the one to deflect it. Major Tim Peake is part of a NASA team due to fly by the mid-2020s, The Sun reported. He and three colleagues from the Extreme Environment Missions Operations could be flown to deflect the asteroid. "Earth has close calls all the time. The work we are doing is without a doubt going to help prevent a catastrophic collision with one of them," Peake, a 40-year-old former Army Air Corps officer, was quoted as saying. In February, a 45-metre-wide rock got closer than the artificial satellites around the earth, and in November 2011, a 360-metre-wide one came between earth and the moon. Comment: ...and on a daily basis now fireballs are seen from the ground... The team has spent 12 days simulating weightless conditions in a deep sea research station off Florida, US. The team's main aim is to travel to an asteroid in a shuttle, spend up to 30 days on a smaller spacecraft so that they can take samples from it and place sensors. | |
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Comment: This notion of saving Earth from incoming
asteroids/meteors/comets has already been thoroughly debunked, but it
doesn't seem to stop them putting these stories about there to calm
people:
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Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed 2012-09-21 00:37:00
Study after study finds that many women feel unwelcome in laboratories and science departments, even after considerable progress in encouraging women to study science and technology fields. As these studies come out, there are almost always skeptics who say that whatever gender imbalance exists could well reflect different choices made, on average, by men and women, or who say that individual men are rising on their merits, not sexism. But a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers evidence of bias among scientists -- male and female scientists alike -- against female students. The study was based on evaluations by scientists of hypothetical student applications for a lab manager position, with the application materials identical in every way, except that half of the pool received applications with a male name and the other half received applications with a female name. The faculty members surveyed -- 127 professors in biology, chemistry or physics -- were told that their analyses of the applications would be used to help the students. And they were asked to evaluate the students' competence and "hireability" and to consider how large a salary they would recommend and how much mentoring they would offer the student if hired. The scientists evaluating these applications (which were identical in every way except the gender of the "submitter") rated the male student more competent, more likely to be hired, deserving of a better salary, and worth spending more time mentoring. The gaps were significant. |
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| Earth Changes |
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AlfieAesthetics
YouTube 2012-10-01 14:07:00
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US Geological Survey
2012-09-30 13:31:00
Event Time: 2012-09-30 16:31:35 UTC 2012-09-30 11:31:35 UTC-05:00 at epicenter 2012-09-30 09:31:35 UTC-07:00 system time Location: 1.972°N 76.329°W depth=162.1km (100.7mi) Nearby Cities: 10km (6mi) WNW of Isnos, Colombia 34km (21mi) WNW of Pitalito, Colombia 60km (37mi) SSE of Popayan, Colombia 67km (42mi) SW of La Plata, Colombia 344km (214mi) NE of Quito, Ecuador |
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Wally Kennedy
When he was asked whether he wanted to help tow some of the thousands of
vehicles that were destroyed in the May 22, 2011, tornado in Joplin,
Mike Forest jumped at the chance.The Joplin Globe 2012-09-29 10:07:00 "The day after the tornado, he was there,'' said his wife, Dina, of Olathe, Kan. "It was the third week he was there that it happened.'' Forest awoke one morning to a blood-stained pillow from a nosebleed he did not know had happened. His shins were covered with blisters up to his knees. He had an excruciating headache. He is now in the Shawnee Mission Medical Center in the Kansas City area, where doctors are trying to find out why he became ill and why he is still ill. His most recent tests include a spinal tap to determine whether he was exposed to something toxic. "He's very sick. He describes it as someone taking a spoon and raking his bones. He has a headache that just disables him,'' said his wife in a recent telephone interview. "No one has a clue. If we don't get some answers here, we're going to the Mayo Clinic next. He can't go on like this.'' |
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Charles Choi
Space.com 2012-09-28 05:50:00
To combat global warming, scientists in Scotland now suggest an out-of-this-world solution - a giant dust cloud in space, blasted off an asteroid, which would act like a sunshade for Earth. The world is warming and the climate is changing. Although many want to prevent these shifts by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat from the sun, some controversially suggest deliberating manipulating the planet's climate with large-scale engineering projects, commonly called geoengineering. Instead of altering the climate by targeting either the oceans or the atmosphere, some researchers have suggested geoengineering projects that would affect the entire planet from space. For instance, projects that reduced the amount of solar radiation Earth receives by 1.7 percent could offset the effects of a global increase in temperature of 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C). The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has noted climate models suggest average global temperatures will likely rise by 2 to 11.5 degrees F (1.1 to 6.4 degrees C) by the end of this century. "A 1.7 percent reduction is very small and will hardly be noticeable on Earth," said researcher Russell Bewick, a space scientist at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. "People sometimes get the idea of giant screens blocking the entire sun. This is not the case ... as [the device] is constantly between the sun and the Earth, it acts merely as a very light shade or filter." | |
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Comment: Well now, this is a very interesting
development. With the recent admission from NASA that noctilucent clouds
are the result of 'meteor smoke' - and that they are showing up in our skies with greater frequency and at further latitudes from the poles, along with the increased fireball flux that their rocket/missile cover-stories
are failing to hide - they are clearly 'psyching' people with these
fanciful crackpot schemes so that there is a reference point for such
time that these effects (lower temperatures and decreased sunlight,
among other things), which are already being caused by increased cosmic debris in the solar system, take ahold and people en masse begin to take notice.
As much as they have tried, so-called 'geo-engineering' doesn't work as it's supposed to. They can affect local weather fronts or set off earthquakes at targeted locations, but altering the climate in any particular direction is impossible because it is too non-linear - there are too many unknowns. It takes extraordinary hubris to believe that you possess the technological capabilities of regulating how much sun reaches the planet's surface - hubris which at root is due to science having been taken over by psychopaths. But also, and much more importantly, getting these stories out there is important to the Powers That Be because people are sitting up and noticing that something is going on. Whether or not such schemes actually work is besides the point. Just hyping them up reassures people that someone's doing something to take care of the situation, that Big Brother/Big Government remains in control. He doesn't; the Emperor has no clothes! There is nothing they can do to stop a cometary swarm, much less redirect or harness asteroids for combating so-called global warming. |
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Diverse
2012-09-29 12:21:00
A tornado struck a fairground in Gandia, Spain, knocking down a Ferris wheel, damaging several rides and causing a power outage at the site. The twister left 35 people injured. The fair was closed to the public when the tornado touched down, and all of those injured were fair workers, local media reported. Fifteen people were seriously hurt and treated on site, the website for Gandia's town hall said. The tornado ripped roofs off buildings, uprooted trees and overturned a truck which landed on cars. Further North on the Valencia coast, two large cargo ships ran aground as a result of the high winds and seas. In the provinces of Murica, Almeria and Malaga, 10 people were killed when the inclement weather caused flash floods that swept away cars and bridges and flooded many villages.
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BBC News
2012-09-29 12:08:00
At least eight people have died after heavy rains triggered flash floods in southern Spain, officials have said. The strength of the floods overturned cars, closed roads, damaged homes and forced hundreds to leave their properties. The hardest hit areas were the provinces of Malaga and Almeria, and the Murcia region. Further north in the town of Gandia, a tornado struck a temporary fairground, injuring 35 people, 15 seriously. 'Hit hard' At least 600 people had to be evacuated from their homes in the Andalucia region, which contains Malaga and Almeria, officials said. Map |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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Junior Bester
ioL News 2012-09-30 14:29:00
Cape Town had its own "it's a bird! It's a plane!" moment when multiple reports that a helicopter had crashed off the coast of Blouberg on Friday night saw rescuers across the spectrum mobilised, only to turn up... nothing. Reports included suggestions of "something flying through the air that looked like a shooting star or rocket", complete with green light and in one case, a flash of flame, which suddenly disappeared. By yesterday morning not a scrap of wreckage had turned up, however. And NSRI spokesman Craig Lambinon reported that what the witnesses were likely to have seen was in fact "meteorite fall". He said it had come to light that an Airlink pilot reported seeing "what he believed to be a meteorite fall across the western part of the Western Cape, at the same time as the crash sightings". "The pilot had just reached cruising altitude in an Airlink passenger plane after taking off from Durban's airport, heading towards Cape Town." Lambinon added that more witnesses at the Cape Town International Airport also reported seeing what was believed to be a meteorite fly across the West Coast skyline. |
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Tariq Malik
National Column 2012-09-28 06:50:00
NASA officials announced Thursday that plans to alter the orbit of the International Space Station (IIS) would not move forward. In a statement released to reporters, NASA officials noted that the space station's path will not put the massive orbiting module in the path of two large chunks of space debris. "Additional tracking Wednesday night of both the Cosmos satellite debris and the Indian rocket body debris resulted in a high degree of confidence that neither object would pose any possibility of a conjunction with the International Space Station and a debris avoidance maneuver scheduled for Thursday morning was cancelled by the flight control team at Mission Control," NASA officials said in an update Thursday. Mission Control says there is a high degree of confidence neither object will come too close to the space station. The worrisome debris contained fragments of an Indian rocket. NASA issued an alert late Thursday, warning that the space debris could pose a risk to the ISS. Three astronauts - NASA's Sunita Williams, Russia's Yuri Malenchenko and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide - are currently working aboard the space station. | |
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Comment: 'Space debris' is, of course, cover for
increased fireball flux due to Earth passing through higher
concentrations of cometary debris. Like man-made global warming,
chemtrails and HAARP, 'space debris' is the ready-(man-)made answer to
something which man has absolutely no technological control over.
Reading between the lines of the above story, it appears that they were tracking two or more incoming meteors or cometary fragments (MoCFs), anticipated that a possible dodge would be required for the ISS, then canceled the operation once the MoCFs passed by. The ISS wasn't so lucky in June when it was hit by a smaller object: International Space Station damaged by meteor |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Lisa Garber
Activist Post 2012-10-01 17:19:00
Soda and sugary beverages make up 15 to 25 percent of the daily recommended caloric intake for children aged 2 to 19. That's almost 300 calories a day and 7 trillion calories a year of sugar, one of cancer's favorite substances. Keeping Soda from Kids Dr. Steven Gortmaker, Director of the Harvard School of Public Health Prevention Research Center, recently presented these statistics at the Obesity Society's Annual Scientific Meeting in San Antonio. Amidst protests from consumer rights die-hards and the beverage lobby, Gortmaker is urging the government to keep away sodas and sugary drinks from children, in the vein of Boston's 2004 ban of selling sodas at public schools. According to Gortmaker, the kids' calorie consumption has gone down by 45 calories, "just the level you need to start flattening out the obesity epidemic, if not to start turning it all around." |
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Sayer Ji
GreenMedInfo.com 2012-09-27 16:07:00
A new study published in the journal Atherosclerosis found that statin use is associated with a 52% increased prevalence and extent of coronary artery plaques possessing calcium.[i] This study, published on August 24th, was preceded only three weeks earlier by one in the journal Diabetes Care, which found that coronary artery calcification "was significantly higher in more frequent statin users than in less frequent users," among patients with type 2 diabetes and advanced atherosclerosis. Coronary artery disease is one of the primary risk factors for heart attack and cardiac mortality, and calcification marks the end-stage of atherosclerosis, the gradual plaque-driven narrowing of the arteries, as the lumen (opening of the artery) can no longer compensate for the obstructive build-up of plaque by expanding, once the calcification process has taken place. Statins are increasingly recognized to have profound cardiotoxic properties, despite their widespread use in the prevention and treatment of heart disease. | |
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Comment: Read more about the serious side effects of Statin Drugs:
How Statins Really Work Explains Why They Don't Really Work Health Groups: Statins Linked to 300+ Negative Effects Big Pharma Lies About Statin Drugs Finally Exposed in British Medical Journal Statins may do more harm than good in stroke victims Why Taking Statins Might be Pointless - And Even Bad for You Why Women Should Stop Their Cholesterol Lowering Medication Statins Cause Serious Structural Muscle Damage Taking statins may increase cancer risk Statin Drugs Found To Accelerate Arterial Calcification Learn the truth about Glycation, Cholesterol, Statins and Dietary Fiber from Dr. Ellis |
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ScienceDaily
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children's
Hospital Medical Center have found a new genetic mutation responsible
for deafness and hearing loss associated with Usher syndrome type 1.2012-10-01 15:31:00 These findings, published in the Sept. 30 advance online edition of the journal Nature Genetics, could help researchers develop new therapeutic targets for those at risk for this syndrome. Partners in the study included the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Kentucky. Usher syndrome is a genetic defect that causes deafness, night-blindness and a loss of peripheral vision through the progressive degeneration of the retina. |
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ScienceDaily
Just six months of exercise can improve memory, language,
thinking and judgment problems by almost 50 per cent, says a study
presented October 1 at the Canadian Stroke Congress.2012-10-01 14:37:00 Toronto researchers found that the proportion of stroke patients with at least mild cognitive impairment dropped from 66 per cent to 37 per cent during a research study on the impact of exercise on the brain. "People who have cognitive deficits after stroke have a threefold risk of mortality, and they're more likely to be institutionalized," says lead researcher Susan Marzolini of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. "If we can improve cognition through exercise, which also has many physical benefits, then this should become a standard of care for people following stroke." Forty-one patients, of whom 70 per cent had mild to moderate walking problems requiring a cane or walker, followed an adapted aerobic and strength/resistance training program five days a week. Exercises designed to imitate daily life included walking, lifting weights and doing squats. |
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ScienceDaily
A new Yale School of Medicine study shows that cases of serious physical
abuse in children, such as head injuries, burns, and fractures,
increased slightly by about 5% in the last 12 years. This is in sharp
contrast to data from child protective services agencies, which show a
55% decrease in physical abuse cases from 1997 to 2009.2012-10-01 14:31:00 Published in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics (online October 1), the Yale study is the first to track the occurrence of serious injuries due to physical abuse in hospitalized children. The study raises concerns that results from the U.S. child protective services agencies may be due to changes in reporting of cases to agencies, rather than a true lessening in child abuse cases. One possible reason for the divergent results is that studies by the child protective services agencies included all cases of physical abuse regardless of age or severity. The Yale study focused only on serious physical abuse. "These results highlight the challenges of helping parents do better by their children and the importance of effective prevention programs to reduce serious abusive injuries in young children," said Dr. John M. Leventhal, professor of pediatrics and nursing at Yale, and director of the Child Abuse Programs at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital. |
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ScienceDaily
Adolescents who sleep poorly may be at risk of cardiovascular disease in later life, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).2012-10-01 14:13:00 "We found an association between sleep disturbance and cardiovascular risk in adolescents, as determined by high cholesterol levels, increased BMI [body mass index] and hypertension," writes lead author Dr. Indra Narang, respirologist and director of sleep medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Toronto, Ontario, with coauthors. "These findings are important, given that sleep disturbance is highly prevalent in adolescence and that cardiovascular disease risk factors track from childhood into adulthood." Approximately 20% of adolescents have significant sleep problems, such as sleep disturbances or sleep deprivation. Sleep disturbances include frequent waking up during the night, early wakening, inability to fall asleep within 30 minutes, restlessness and bad dreams. |
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Anthony Gucciardi
NaturalSociety 2012-09-30 14:15:00
Glorified as a heart warming 'preventative' trend by the mainstream media, doctors are now recommending that patients who are found to be 'more susceptible' to certain cancers based on genetic testing actually surgically remove body parts that could be affected. It sounds insane and beyond barbaric (as it is), but apparently the mainstream medical community thinks it is quite the heroic feat to perform bodily mutilation in the name of phony cancer prevention. In a recent CNN article entitled "My preventive mastectomy: Staying alive for my kids," a mother removes both her breasts and ovaries despite not testing positive for cancer. Stating that the did so at the urging of her gynecologist, Allison Gilbert surgically removed her ovaries in 2007 and her breasts earlier this year. Gilbert explains how she decided to remove her breasts and ovaries after her doctor highly recommended doing so despite the fact that nutrition and lifestyle actually can alter your gene expression dramatically: Nutrition is Known to Dramatically Affect Gene Expression This new trend signifies a complete and utter failure to recognize legitimate science regarding the effective prevention of cancer through nutrition and lifestyle. In fact, research has repeatedly shown that what you eat directly affects your genes. As information from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology shows, nutrition can create or alleviate inflammation levels through altering gene expression. Inflammation, of course, has been linked to a long list of diseases - including cancer. As a lead researcher from the study explained:
Beyond this information, we know that countless natural substances are highly effective in the prevention of cancer across the board. Super nutrients like vitamin D, spices like ginger and turmeric, and antioxidant-rich superfoods have all been shown in peer-reviewed research to fight cancer at a genetic level. As researchers at Jefferson's Kimmel Cancer Center found, antioxidants help to both prevent and fight cancer:
Apparently Gilbert's gynecologist was completely unaware of this research, or perhaps the other several thousand pieces of information that exist on the subject. But sadly it is not just Gilbert's doctor who is recommending patients chop off their breasts, ovaries, and other areas of the body that present a 'genetic risk' of cancer. Sadly, this trend is not only far-reaching but being touted in the media through laughable sources like CNN as a heart warming and touching display of affection for friends and family. |
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Lynn Celmer
Extending sleep duration may help to reduce diabetes risk in youth.American Academy of Sleep Medicine 2012-09-29 09:26:00 A new study suggests that increasing the amount of sleep that teenagers get could improve their insulin resistance and prevent the future onset of diabetes. "High levels of insulin resistance can lead to the development of diabetes," said lead author Karen Matthews, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry. "We found that if teens that normally get six hours of sleep per night get one extra hour of sleep, they would improve insulin resistance by 9 percent." The study, appearing in the October issue of the journal SLEEP, tracked the sleep duration and insulin resistance levels of 245 healthy high school students. Participants provided a fasting blood draw, and they kept a sleep log and wore a wrist actigraph for one week during the school year. Sleep duration based on actigraphy averaged 6.4 hours over the week, with school days significantly lower than weekends. |
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Sayer Ji
GreenMedInfo.com 2012-09-27 13:10:00
The "diseases of affluence," as they are known, include diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis and cancer, and are sometimes referred to as the "Western disease" paradigm. They emerge largely in response to the type of over-nourishment that occurs in relatively wealthy societies, and particularly the excessive consumption of certain evolutionarily incompatible foods that nonetheless have become the nutritional centerpiece of agrarian, grain-based cultures. (Consider that we have only been consuming the seeds of cereal grasses, i.e. grains, en masse for 10-20,000 years, which while ancient in cultural time, is but a nanosecond in biological time!) While we have already spent considerable time indicting the credibility of wheat as a so-called health food, whose secular and religious glorification are unparalleled within the cereal grains, we have not delved deeply enough into the link between grain consumption, particularly wheat, and cardiovascular disease, the #1 cause of death in the Western world. This link, of course, strikes literally to the heart of the seemingly indestructible myth that eating wheat, and more exactly whole wheat (which has more lectin than white, processed wheat flour), is a good thing for human health. Beyond the well over 200 adverse health effects linked to wheat consumption that now exist in the peer-reviewed biomedical literature, we hope to point out in the following article how cardiovascular health is better served by eliminating this uniquely problematic grain from the diet. | |
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Comment: Sayer Ji has written several excellent articles about the 'dark side of wheat':
The Dark Side of Wheat - New Perspectives on Celiac Disease and Wheat Intolerance Opening Pandora's Bread Box: The Critical Role of Wheat Lectin in Human Disease Beyond Gluten-Free: The Critical Role of Chitin-Binding Lectins in Human Disease Can Wheat Drive More Than Your Digestive System Crazy? |
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Dr. Mercola
Mercola.com 2012-04-07 19:43:00
Ashwagandha is a small evergreen perennial herb that grows up to nearly 5 feet tall. Common names used for ashwagandha include: Winter Cherry, Withania somnifera (Latin botanical name), and Indian Ginseng to name a few. Regardless of the name you use to describe this adaptogenic herb, ashwaganda has been a part of India's Ayurvedic medical system for thousands of years. There it's regarded as a wonder herb. While often regarded as an herb for stress reduction and improved energy and vitality, there is a robust body of scientific research confiming ashwaganda's potential therapeutic value in several dozen health conditions.i Now, new research has revealed this herb may also fight off the devastating effects of Alzheimer's disease. |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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ScienceDaily
2012-10-01 16:03:00
Trying to keep an image we've just seen in memory can leave us blind to things we are 'looking' at, according to the results of a new study supported by the Wellcome Trust. It's been known for some time that when our brains are focused on a task, we can fail to see other things that are in plain sight. This phenomenon, known as 'inattentional blindness', is exemplified by the famous 'invisible gorilla' experiment in which people watching a video of players passing around a basketball and counting the number of passes fail to observe a man in a gorilla suit walking across the centre of the screen. The new results reveal that our visual field does not need to be cluttered with other objects to cause this 'blindness' and that focusing on remembering something we have just seen is enough to make us unaware of things that happen around us. Professor Nilli Lavie from UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who led the study, explains: "An example of where this is relevant in the real world is when people are following directions on a sat nav while driving. |
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Lack of discipline or character: 'We have focused way too much on intelligence and cognitive skills'
Barbara McMahon
Why do some children succeed while others fail? A new book, How Children Succeed,
says cognitive skill - the kind of intelligence that is measured in IQ
scores and exam results and that includes the ability to read, write and
count numbers - is an important factor, but the qualities children
really need are persistence, curiosity conscientiousness, grit and
optimism - collectively known as character.Sunday Nation 2012-09-28 09:10:00 American author Paul Tough says there is growing evidence parents are worrying too much about their children's academic achievements and not doing enough to help develop character-forming traits. Too many children, he says, lead coddled sub-urban lives, shielded from adversity, and knocked sideways when they have to confront real problems in adulthood. "In the past couple of decades we've focused way too much on cognitive skills and intelligence as the one predictor of success and I think we've ignored this other set of skills," he says. "The scientists and teachers that I am writing about in this book are showing evidence, both in the classroom and in the data, that character skills are at least as important as IQ in terms of a child's ultimate success and are quite likely more important." |
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Stuart Mason Dambrot
MedicalXpress 2012-09-17 17:03:00
Scientists have historically relied on neuroimaging - but not electrophysiological - data when studying the human default mode network (DMN), a group of brain regions with lower activity during externally-directed tasks and higher activity if tasks require internal focus. Recently, however, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine recorded electrical activity directly from a core DMN component known as the posteromedial cortex (PMC) during both internally- and externally-directed waking states - specifically, autobiographical memory and arithmetic calculation, respectively. The data they recorded showed an inverse relationship - namely, the degree activation during memory retrieval predicted the degree of suppression during arithmetic calculation - which they say provides important anatomical and temporal details about DMN function at the neural population level. Drs. Josef Parvizi, Brett L. Foster, and Mohammad Dastjerdi faced a range of challenges when recording intracranially from the human posteromedial cortex. "A key challenge in specifically studying the electrical activity of this region is that unlike much of the brains outer cerebral cortex, the posteromedial cortex is not superficially visible," Foster tells Medical Xpress. Rather, he illustrates, it is part of the cerebral cortex that is hidden from view, which wraps over into the middle space between the left and right brain hemispheres "like the inner walls of a glacier crevasse." This is a two-fold problem, he continues. "Not only does this hidden location make it very difficult to record this regions electrical activity from outside the skull on the scalp - a common technique - but also, even if one gets the opportunity to record more closely from inside the skull, one still needs to access this hidden cortex within the narrow space between the two hemispheres." Importantly, the ability to do so in the human brain only arises out of a unique clinical opportunity, where neurosurgeons have diligently placed electrodes onto the cortical walls of this inter-hemispheric space to monitor epileptic seizure activity as part of surgical planning. "The findings reported in our study are all derived from this unique opportunity, which allowed for direct recordings of electrical neural activity from the posteromedial cortex." |
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Laura Spinney
You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and
then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you? Laura Spinney on our
remembrance of things past.The Guardian 2003-12-04 02:32:00
Alan Alda had nothing against hard-boiled eggs until last spring. Then the actor, better known as Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine. In his new guise as host of a science series on American TV, he was exploring the subject of memory. The researchers showed him round, and afterwards took him for a picnic in the park. By the time he came to leave, he had developed a dislike of hard-boiled eggs based on a memory of having made himself sick on them as a child - something that never happened. Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has been obsessed with the subject of memory and its unreliability since Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Early on in her research, she would invite people into her lab, show them simulated traffic accidents, feed them false information and leading questions, and find that they subsequently recalled details of the scene differently - a finding that has since been replicated hundreds of times. More recently, she has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people's suggestibility because, among other things, real life tends to be more emotionally arousing than simulations of it. So these days she takes her investigations outside the lab. In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust. "We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big." |
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| High Strangeness |
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Daily Mail, UK
Two mysterious and identical UFO's almost 1,000 miles apart have been
observed on Google Maps - raising questions as to what they are and how
they were photographed there in the first place.
2012-09-28 00:00:00
The red orb-like shapes are visible to all users of the application online at Jacksonville in Texas and at the Sky City Casino Hotel on 32 Indian Service Route 30, Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. At both locations the same object appears in the sky hovering over the street and was first pointed out to ABC News affiliate KLTV in East Texas by Andrea Dover who noticed the first UFO while using Google Maps to get directions. To see the Texan UFO you don't even have to enter a street into the search bar, just Jacksonville, Texas and go to street view, pan around there it is. |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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KATU.com
2012-09-30 21:10:00
Vancouver, Wash. - The new Bruce Willis movie Looper opens this weekend, in which Willis' character is sent back in time to kill himself. And while most scientists say time travel isn't possible, a Washington attorney claims he's done it dozens of times as part of a secret Cold War project. "I have physically traveled in time," says Andrew Basiago, an attorney in Vancouver, Wash. "We have - we did over 40 years ago." Now Basiago is on a mission - to reveal what he calls a 40-year government cover-up - of Project Pegasus - where he says he was teleported back and sideways in time, dozens of times. "I have the whole story, I have hundreds of facts," he says. "I can tell you what personnel were at what locations where and which travel device was being used." And his time travel wasn't recent - it's when he was a kid. "I entered the program officially in the fall of 1969 as a third grader, age 7," says Basiago. He says he was one of 140 kids, 60 adults - chrononauts, including his dad, who he says joined him on his first jump. "My dad held my hand, we jumped through the field of energy, and we seem to be moving very rapidly but there was also a paradox and we seemed to be going no where at all," he says. The TV show Fringe aired a similar scene two years ago. A coincidence? |
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Jason Keyser
Associated Press 2012-09-30 13:42:00
Chicago - A joke by the satirical website The Onion appears to have gotten lost in translation. An Iranian news agency picked up - as fact - a story from the paper about a supposed Gallup survey showing an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama. But it was made up, like everything in the just-for-laughs newspaper, which is headquartered in Chicago. The English-language service of Iran's semi-official Fars news agency republished the story Friday, several days after it appeared in The Onion. The Iranian version copied the original word-for-word, even including a made-up quote from a fictional West Virginia resident who says he'd rather go to a baseball game with Ahmadinejad because "he takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does." Homosexual acts are punishable by death in Iran, and Ahmadinejad famously said during a 2007 appearance at Columbia University that "in Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country." |
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Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur
"Hundreds of bystanders swarmed the scene of a high-speed pursuit in
South Los Angeles Wednesday as police tried to apprehend alleged robbers
who were tossing money out of their getaway vehicle. "This isn't
something we see every day," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
spokesman Capt. Mike Parker said. "This definitely had some unique
aspects to it." More than a dozen times during the pursuit, handfuls of
cash were thrown out of the backseat window of a black Volvo SUV that
authorities had pursued from the scene of an alleged armed bank robbery
in the Canyon Country area....".The Young Turks 2012-09-30 07:58:00 Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur break it down on The Young Turks.
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CBC News
2012-09-28 06:36:00
This past spring, an Ottawa family discovered an injured baby bird in the grass near a bike path and took it home to nurse it back to health. Now, Walter the crow is able to fly, but that's about all that's ordinary about him. "He's certainly my best friend in the animal kingdom. He's my best animal friend," said 11-year-old Livia Renaud. "He's like another child in our family," said Livia's little brother, Zachary. Free to come and go, but doesn't go far The Renauds already had two cats and a couple of fish when they found the baby crow, so at first Livia's mother, Elissa Renaud, was hesitant to take him home. But in the end the family decided to take the plunge. The plan was to nurse him back to health and let him back into the wild for good. The research the family did said that's what would probably happen. However, it didn't quite work out that way. Although Walter - who mainly feeds himself - is free to come and go as he pleases, he doesn't go far. |
