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| Puppet Masters |
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Juliet Eilperin and William Branigin
Video: In a press conference Monday,
President Obama addressed the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of
groups critical of government, and said, "I've got no patience with it. I
will not tolerate it."Washington Post 2013-05-13 16:42:00
President Obama on Monday described the reported targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service as "outrageous" and intolerable, and he called for those responsible to be held "fully accountable." Speaking to reporters at a joint news conference with visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama said he first learned about the issue Friday from news reports. He said the IRS must be perceived to operate with "absolute integrity" to give the public confidence that it is applying the law "in a nonpartisan way." "If, in fact, IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous, and there's no place for it," Obama said. "And they have to be held fully accountable." Obama addressed the issue amid a growing furor on Capitol Hill over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service used ostensibly political criteria in scrutinizing groups applying for tax-exempt status. At various points over the past two years, IRS officials singled out for scrutiny not only groups with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names but also nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency's inspector general. |
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Stop The War Coalition
Bill Maher is taken apart by Glenn Greenwald for trying to absolve the
US from any responsibility for the mass slaughter and destruction in
Muslim countries, blaming it on Islamic fundamentalism, as if the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars never happened, as if the US wasn't pushing
for more war in Iran, as if it isn't intervening in Somalia and Yemen.YouTube 2013-05-13 14:24:00
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Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research 2013-05-12 14:06:00
Recent reports from the ground suggest that America and its allies are losing their covert war in support of the Al Nusra front. In recent weeks, the US sponsored Al Qaeda affiliated rebels have been decimated by the Syrian Armed Forces. A nationwide offensive has been launched with the support of Russia and Iran. The weapons supply routes of the rebels have been disrupted: "the [Syrian] army has concentrated on starving, and cutting off "rebel" supply routes and arms corridors, which predominantly run through Northern Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan" (See Buying Time in Syria by Phil Greaves, Global Research, May 11, 2013) Al Nusra is largely made up of mercenaries recruited in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Covert (Western) special forces and military advisers have also integrated their ranks. The Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists directly funded by Washington constitute the foot-soldiers of the Western military alliance |
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RIA Novosti
2013-05-12 14:50:00
Russia's Mediterranean task force will comprise 5-6 warships and may be enlarged to include nuclear submarines, Navy Commander Adm. Viktor Chirkov said on Sunday. "Overall, already from this year, we plan to have 5-6 warships and support vessels [in the Mediterranean Sea], which will be replaced on a rotating basis from each of the fleets - the Black Sea, Baltic, Northern and, in some cases, even the Pacific Fleet. Depending on the scope of assignments and their complexity, the number of warships in the task force may be increased," Chirkov told RIA Novosti. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu earlier said a decision to deploy a permanent task force in the Mediterranean to defend Russia's interests in the area had been made. The Russian navy commander also said nuclear submarines could be deployed in the Mediterranean, if necessary. |
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Fars News Agency
2013-05-12 06:18:00
The Lebanese Resistance Movement Hezbollah has all parts of Israel within the reach of its long-range missiles and it can surprise Tel Aviv with its high capabilities, the Israeli media said. The Tel Aviv-based newspaper 'Israel Hayom' in an article titled 'Hezbollah 2013' stressed Hezbollah's high combat preparedness against Israel, saying that Hezbollah has 300 long-range missiles which bring all the occupied territories within the reach of its missiles. It claimed that Hezbollah has an arsenal of 60,000 missiles posing direct and real threat to Israel. The paper wrote that Hezbollah has 5,000 missiles with the range of 250 km. | |
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Comment: The article in the newspaper Israel Hayom may be true, but it also may be a ploy to scare Israelis to be more fearful and thus hateful of their neighbors.
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Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog 2013-05-12 21:39:00
Would you take out a loan that has an annual percentage rate of 391 percent? Yes, I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but millions of Americans do it every single year. The typical payday loan requires borrowers to pay about 15 dollars for every $100 that they borrow for two weeks. That comes out to a yearly rate of about 391 percent. And the payday loan companies know exactly who to target. They have set up thousands of shops in the poorest communities all over the nation over the last several decades. Each year, approximately 12 million Americans take out payday loans and they pay approximately 7.4 billion dollars in interest and fees on those loans. Sadly, once you get hooked on payday loans they are very hard to stop. In fact, one study found that only 13 percent of payday borrowers get two loans or less per year. All other borrowers take out more loans than that. In fact, more than a third of all payday borrowers take out between 11 and 19 loans during the course of a single year. And as was mentioned earlier, the interest rates on these loans are beyond exorbitant. Payday loans are estimated to be about 20 times more expensive than bank loans, with annual interest rates that are sometimes as high as 500 percent. The payday loan companies circle the poor like vultures, because they know that the poor are the only ones desperate enough to agree to such terms. This is why we need to shut them down. The payday loan companies are making billions preying on the misery of the poor and it needs to be stopped. |
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WCBD News
2013-05-12 14:35:00
Charleston - Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft and one of the richest people in the world, is spending time in the Lowcountry. WCBD confirmed the American business magnate is at the Sanctuary on Kiawah Island. Suspicion was raised when nearly 20 very expensive jets were seen lined up at the Charleston International Airport on Johns Island. Officials with the Beach Company confirmed to WCBD that other big names such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, TV host Oprah Winfrey and billionaire Warren Buffet flew into the Charleston Executive airport on Johns Island Wednesday night. Other prominent people said to also be staying there this weekend are Jeb Bush and Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. |
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RT.com
2013-05-11 09:14:00
The UK and US are removing some diplomatic staff from Libya amid political unrest throughout the country. Professor Mark Almond told RT that the spike in violence is mostly due to Libya's state of disorder - which has worsened since Gaddafi's overthrow. The US State Department said that it has "approved the ordered departure of non-emergency personnel from Libya." It said that the US embassy in Tripoli would continue to remain "open and functioning." A spokesman for the Foreign Office said that Britain's embassy is temporarily withdrawing a small number of staff - most of which "work in support of government ministries which have been affected by recent developments." Those "recent developments" refer to an increase in violence which was sparked after two ex-rebels besieged two ministries last month over a law that would ban officials who served under former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Since then, gunmen have surrounded the Libyan foreign embassy and Benghazi has been the target of bomb attacks which left a police station damaged. Mark Almond, an international relations professor at Turkey's Bilkent University, says the violence is largely to do with the country's chaotic state, as well as a power struggle regarding who should control the country's oil and gas industry. |
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YouTube
Watch this video to see the shifting explanations given by our
government following the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
2013-05-08 15:51:00 |
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Fred Lucas
cnsnews.com 2013-02-20 15:35:00
President Barack Obama called Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at approximately 10 p.m. on the night of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told CNSNews.com. That was more than six hours after the attacks started, more than an hour before Tryone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed--and about the time that Clinton first released a statement linking the attacks to "inflammatory material posted on the Internet," a reference to an anti-Muslim video on YouTube. "Like every president before him, he has a national security adviser and deputy national security adviser," Carney told CNSNews.com on Tuesday. "He was in regular communication with his national security team directly, through them, and spoke with the secretary of state at approximately 10 p.m. He called her to get an update on the situation." Carney was responding to questions from CNSNews.com about who Obama communicated with on the evening of Sept. 11, 2012. Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee they first notified the president of the attack during a Sept. 11, 2012 meeting that began at 5 p.m. and ran for about 30 minutes. They also told the committee they did not talk to Obama or anyone else at the White House after that meeting. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, State Department Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who worked for CIA, were killed in the Benghazi attacks. |
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Tom Kertscher
PolitiFact 2013-05-07 15:28:00
If the buildup doesn't disappoint, you can expect plenty of news out of the U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing on May 8, 2013. The panel, which includes freshman U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, will review how President Barack Obama's administration -- including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- handled the Sept. 11, 2012 bombing at the U.S. consulate in Benghzai, Libya. The attack killed four Americans -- and set off administration critics such as U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. A few days before the hearing, it was disclosed that a top U.S. diplomat had said "everyone" at the consulate thought "from the beginning" that the attack was an act of terror. And even before that, Johnson had reminded citizens at least twice of what Clinton told him about the attack during a Senate committee hearing in January 2013. "Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they'd go kill some Americans," Clinton said. "What difference - at this point, what difference does it make?" |
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Harriet Sherwood and Matthew Kalman
Guardian 2013-05-08 15:22:00
Physicist pulls out of conference hosted by president Shimon Peres in protest at treatment of Palestinians Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday. Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as "his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there". Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions. In April the Teachers' Union of Ireland became the first lecturers' association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so. |
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RT
2013-05-11 14:21:00
Officials at an Alabama university have divulged a new plan to use unmanned aerial devices to help police monitor, and supposedly protect, students on campus. Law enforcement officials unveiled the plan Wednesday at a press conference at the University of Alabama Huntsville, telling the Huntsville Times the aircraft would provide an "eye in the sky" that could help stop a mass shooting on campus. Gary Maddux, the lead research director of Systems Management and Productions Center, said that because the remote-controlled surveillance devices fly at a lower altitude than drones, they are totally unlike the controversial military aircraft. "We just want to be able to make a difference and we want to make a difference quickly and come up with something to help law enforcement," he said. "That's what it's all about - improving our response times so maybe we could mitigate the next tragedy that could occur." Maddux did not specify how the surveillance technology will prevent criminal activity or improve campus police response time. He did add, however, that the drones will "be incredibly useful and offer a wide range of possible applications." |
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AlterNet
2013-05-10 13:54:00
Baltimore - Makia Smith sued the Baltimore Police Department, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts and police Officers Nathan Church, William Pilkerton, Jr., Nathan Ulmer and Kenneth Campbell in Federal Court. Smith claims she was stuck in stand-still rush hour traffic in northern Baltimore when she saw the defendant officers beating up and arresting a young man. She says pulled out her camera, stood on her car's door sill and filmed the beating. "Officer Church saw plaintiff filming the beating and ran at her," the complaint states. "He scared her and she sat back in her vehicle. As he ran at her, he yelled, 'You want to film something bitch? Film this!' |
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Dissident Voice
2013-05-04 12:01:00
The decision of the European Union to lift the embargo on Syrian government's energy exports by importing oil from the 'armed opposition' is another flagrant violation of international law. It violates the UN General Assembly declaration of 1962 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources and is yet another violation of the 1981 UN declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States. But it is much more than a technical violation of the law. It marks the decent of civilization into barbarism. London and Paris, have more than Washington, been at the forefront of aggression against Syria. In spite of the fact that it has now been confirmed by most media sources that the Syrian 'opposition' is Al-Qaeda, London and Paris persist in their insane drive to arm the terrorists, using the spurious argument that if they don't arm the 'moderates' the 'extremists' will take over the country. However, in the words of the New York Times, 'nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of'. The fact that the Syrian 'rebels' are, in fact, Al-Qaeda has even been admitted by the war-mongering French daily Le Monde. So, Paris and London are pushing for further arming of Al-Qaeda and the legalization of oil trading with the jihadi terrorists. In plain language this means that the loose, terrorist network known to the world as Al-Qaeda will soon become one of the EU's partners in the oil business. A new absurd chapter in the Era of Terror is about to be enacted. |
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| Society's Child |
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WBALTV.com
2013-05-10 16:04:00
A Baltimore woman is suing some city police officers after she claimed they illegally thwarted her efforts to record police activity. |
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Daniel June
JDJournal 2013-05-13 17:13:00
The peacock is an emblem of pride, arrogance, vanity, and flaunted fashion. These sentiments apply a little less to poor old Phyl, a pet peacock whose owner sexually abused him. The bizarre incident, which ended with Phyl's body being discovered in the garage of 63-year-old David Beckman, is merely one of many charges the strange man is facing. Beckman is also facing three charges of harassment by telephone, unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, two counts of possessing marijuana, and even an attempted indecent solicitation of a child between the ages of 13 and 17, on top of his charge of cruelty to animals - not to mention two counts of battery, as NBC Chicago reported. A real winner, this one. |
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Brady Dennis
Video: A Philadelphia doctor accused
of performing illegal, late-term abortions in a filthy clinic has been
found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies born
alive but acquitted in the death of a fourth baby.The Washington Post 2013-05-13 16:58:00
Gosnell also was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 death of 41-year-old Virginia woman Karnamaya Mongar, who died from an overdose of drugs while undergoing an abortion at the clinic. Prosecutors described the clinic as a "house of horrors" because of the unsanitary conditions and unsafe practices that defined it. |
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Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
The New York Times 2013-04-26 15:58:00
One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. The two had known each other since the early '90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam; now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the university's School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenberg's door, Stapel wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend. Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. "What's up?" Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. "They suspect you have been committing research fraud." |
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David Masciotra
IndyStar 2013-05-10 15:42:00
There is no shortage of petty hall monitors, arrogant bureaucrats and paternalistic politicians who know what is good for us, will threaten us into compliance with their lifestyle choices, and discipline us into shutting up if we feel differently. Ball State University is the latest institution to participate in the finger wagging of the nanny state elite. The trustees recently announced that students and employees of the college will no longer have the right to consume legal tobacco products on campus grounds. Smoking is permitted only in automobiles with all windows rolled up. Any adult who breaks the seal and allows the slightest streak of smoke to waft into the open air will face a $50 fine. |
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Alex Constantine
High Times 2011-02-04 13:08:00
The following article originally appeared in the February 2002 issue of HIGH TIMES Magazine Marley knew the drill - in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press downsizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death squad rule and, as Grenada's Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA's "pernicious attempts [to] wreck the economy." "Destabilization," Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, "is the name given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence." |
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Source
2013-05-13 12:47:00
Russian investigators confirmed on Monday a man beaten to death last week in Volgograd, south Russia, was the victim of a homophobic gang. The naked body of the 23-year-old man with various injuries, including to his genitalia, was found in the courtyard of an apartment building on May 10, the day after Russia celebrated Victory Day marking the end of World War II. The victim's skull was smashed with a 20-kilogram (44 pound) rock and he appeared to have been raped with beer bottles, regional media said. The report said the suspects also tried to burn the body but failed to do so. "The motive for the crime was the [victim's] non-traditional sexual orientation," senior regional investigator Andrei Gapchenko said, adding two suspected attackers have been arrested and another man is a witness in the case. The suspects are a 22-year-old man, who studied with the victim at school, and his 27-year-old friend, who was previously jailed for theft. The latter has admitted his guilt, investigators said. |
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William M. Welch
USA Today 2013-05-12 18:05:00
Shots fired during an informal Mother's Day afternoon parade in New Orleans injured 17 people, a police spokeswoman said Sunday. One of the injured was a girl, 9 or 10 years old, who was grazed by a bullet to her side, said Remi Braden, director of public affairs for the New Orleans Police Department. She said there were no fatalities and "most of the wounds are not life-threatening.'' The shots were fired around 2 p.m. in the area of North Villere and Frenchmen Streets during what is locally referred to as "a second-line parade,'' Braden said. The Times-Picayune newspaper said there were about 200 people at the event when gunfire erupted. Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas told reporters at the scene that at least 12 people were shot, Associated Press reported. Braden said later that "we believe 17 people were wounded,'' either while participating or observing the parade. Braden said three or four people were in surgery, but he didn't have their conditions. |
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Taylor K. Vecsey
East Hampton Patch 2013-05-07 16:56:00
Do you know anything about this statue head? Granted, this is not the kind of question you normally hear, but the statue head that was left at the East Hampton Library this weekend begs the question. Dennis Fabiszak, the library director, tells Patch that some time between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning a statue of the head of a woman, attached to a piece of slate, was left inside the library construction site on top of an old fountain. The back of the statue has a piece broken out of it, where it appears birds made a nest inside of it at some point. Weighing about 50 pounds, it looks like it was made out of a thick red or orange clay that was then painted black. There's an inscription on the back (see photo below). Where did this statue come from? Who left it at the library? Why was it left at the library? Who is the woman depicted in the statue? |
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ITN/agencies
A man in a bulldozer-like vehicle has gone on a rampage in the US
state of Washington, damaging homes and cutting off electricity to
thousands. 2013-05-11 06:35:00
Barry Alan Swegle, 51, used a bulldozer-like vehicle to damage property and an electricity pole in a dispute with neighbours. Four homes in Washington's Olympic Peninsula were badly damaged and one home was knocked off its foundations. An electricity pole was also pushed down by the International Harvester TD-25 machine, cutting off electricity for thousands in the area. A neighbour in the area told the Peninsula Daily News that the driver "just went nuts". Mr Swegle was arrested and held over malicious mischief. No one was injured in the incident. |
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Michael Day
Student persuaded not to have an abortion by gynaecologist who was paid by childless couple Independent.co.uk 2013-05-09 21:34:00
An Italian gynaecologist persuaded a young woman not to have an abortion so that he could sell her baby and pocket €25,000 (£21,000), according to police in Naples. The doctor, Andrea Cozzolino, 57, was arrested this week on suspicion of corruption and abuse of office, after evidence emerged that two years ago he persuaded a 17-year-old student to carry her child to term, telling her that he would pass the baby on to a childless couple. However, it is alleged that he didn't tell the mother that the couple he had found would pay him €25,000 to deliver the child to them. The young woman, who became pregnant by her student boyfriend, was delayed in seeking a legal abortion (paid for by Italy's health service) because of her age and her refusal to allow her parents to be contacted, according to Alessandro Tocco, Caserta's deputy police chief. |
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Michael Allen
Opposing Views 2013-05-10 00:00:00
During the debate over the Senate background checks bill last month, one consistent pro-gun talking point was that expanded background checks would not have prevented the Newtown massacre. However, the parents of the Newtown victims often said the proposed bill wasn't for their slain children, but rather future children who may be killed by guns. Since the Newtown mass shooting in December 2012, at least 71 children (age 12 or under) have been killed in the U.S. by guns, reports Mother Jones. That rate, for just five months, actually exceeds some countries' yearly rates of total gun murder deaths. Japan had only seven in 2011, per the Associated Press. |
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RT.com
2013-05-10 10:16:00
Two 7-year-old Virginia boys were suspended from elementary school for playing a game of make-believe in which they pointed pencils at each other, pretending that they were machine guns. Christopher Marshall, a second grader at Driver Elementary School in Suffolk, Virginia, was sent home and suspended for two days for making machine gun noises while pointing a pencil at his classmate, who was also suspended. A teacher noticed the two boys making the noises, and proceeded to pull them out of the classroom and take them to the principal's office on May 3. "I got a call from Christopher's school at 12:30 on Friday," one boy's mother, 34-year-old Wendy Marshall, told Yahoo! Shine. "His teacher told me that Christopher and his friend were playing with pencils, making machine gun and 'bang bang' noises. I asked if they were pointing the pencils at anyone else, if they were angry or hostile, disrupting class, or refused to stop when asked -- and the teacher said no." Paul Marshall, the boy's father, told Fox 43 that his son was simply pretending to be a Marine, like he was for many years. Both parents believe the school overreacted in suspending their child for two days, and refused to punish him for it. |
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Peter Foster
The Telegraph 2013-05-11 11:14:00
A logging contractor from Seattle took neighbourly score-settling to a new level when he jumped into his bulldozer and demolished two houses, flattened a pickup truck and snapped an electricity pole, causing power-cuts for a 20 mile radius. Neighbours in Port Angeles, a small town of 19,000 people situated on the coast 80 miles northwest of Seattle said that a long-running boundary dispute was behind the rampage. Local police said that Barry Swegle, 51, was being held on suspicion of "malicious mischief in the first degree" after allegedly firing up his luminous-orange International Harvester TD-25 bulldozer with 'skidder' attachment and setting to work. Aerial pictures showed that one property had been ripped clean off its foundations and shunted several hundred feet into a neighbouring plot. Remarkably, police said no one was injured in the wrecking spree. |
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Mehmet Emin Caliskan
Reuters 2013-05-11 18:15:00
Twin car bombs killed 43 people and wounded many more in a Turkish town near the Syrian border on Saturday and the government said it suspected Syrian involvement. The bombing increased fears that Syria's civil war was dragging in neighboring states despite renewed diplomatic moves towards ending two years of fighting in which more than 70,000 people have been killed. The bombs ripped into crowded streets near Reyhanli's shopping district in the early afternoon, scattering concrete blocks and smashing cars in the town in Turkey's southern Hatay province, home to thousands of Syrian refugees. Restaurants and cafes were destroyed and body parts were strewn across the streets. The damage went at least three blocks deep from the site of the blasts. President Bashar al-Assad's government was the "usual suspect", Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said. |
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| Secret History |
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LiveScience
2013-05-13 11:37:00
Some astronomical sleuthing has revealed the cultic past life of a Roman tomb in Spain. Researchers believe the burial site was once used as a Mithraic temple, positioned to line up with the constellations and guide sun through its window during the equinoxes. The Carmona necropolis in Seville is full of burials from the 1st century B.C. through the 2nd century A.D., including the so-called Elephant's Tomb, named so for an elephant-shaped statue discovered inside the structure. Researchers have debated what this structure was used for and archaeologists from the University of Pablo de Olavide in Seville now propose that it served as a place of worship for devotees of Mithraism, a cult that thrived during the Roman Empire. "In some stages, it was used for burial purposes, but its shape and an archaeoastronomical analysis suggest that it was originally designed and built to contain a Mithraeum [temple to Mithras]," study researcher Inmaculada Carrasco told the Spanish news agency SINC. |
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Kristina Chetcuti
The Times of Malta 2013-05-12 13:26:00
I keep looking at the reconstruction of that 5,600-year-old Maltese woman and can't get enough of her. She's got this allure which is almost intimidating, even though she's slightly cross-eyed. If I squint a lot while looking at her picture, I can see a bit of me in her. But then I'm not the only one, it seems. Everyone was saying how much she looked like his neighbour, his girlfriend, his sister and his nanna. A colleague said she was the split image of his wife and (romantically, I thought) wrote: "It's nice to know I'm married to a woman with such timeless beauty." And a beauty she is this age-old woman. I can't get enough of those perfectly arched eyebrows. My groomed-when-I-remember eyebrows look prehistoric next to hers. And that perfect side-plait looks just on the right side of au naturelle. But, as a girlfriend pointed out, the reconstructed lady from Xagħra Circle in Gozo made her debut at the Malta Fashion Week - hardly the place for excessive facial hair. But it provoked the question: did they have tweezers? Some hoity-toities commenting online were shocked that people were being so frivolous as to ask about tweezers. Well, no it's not silly. It's actually very legitimate. This is what brings history and archaeology close to us and not the reserve of fuddy duddies and academic buffs. |
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April Flowers
RedOrbit 2013-05-11 14:06:00
New light has been shed on the diet and food acquisition strategies of some of the earliest human ancestors in Africa, according to a new study led by Baylor University. Early tool making humans, known as Oldowan hominin, started to exhibit a number of physiological and ecological adaptations beginning around two million years ago. These adaptations, including an increase in brain and body size, heavier investment in their offspring and significant home-range expansion, required greater daily energy expenditures. How these early humans acquired the extra energy to sustain these major shifts has been the subject of much debate among researchers. Joseph Ferraro, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor, led the new study that offers insight into the debate with a wealth of archaeological evidence from the two million-year-old site of Kanjera South (KJS), Kenya. "Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviors - cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behavior, anatomy and physiology," Ferraro said. KJS is located on the shores of Lake Victoria. The settlement contains "three large, well-preserved, stratified" layers of animal remains, on which the research team worked for more than a decade to recover thousands of animal bones and rudimentary stone tools. |
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Rebecca J. Rosen
The Atlantic 2013-05-10 05:31:00
Is it possible they were too perfect? When structural engineer Peter James arrived at the Bent Pyramid, 25 miles south* of Cairo, his task was to secure the structure's remaining "cladding" -- its smooth exterior envelope. But why was it crumbling in the first place? The foundation seemed completely stable. The prevailing theory -- that "the missing cladding was removed by local opportunist thieves" -- didn't inspire confidence: That could explain the destruction at the lower levels, but the damage extended far up the pyramid and "in an apparently random manner, with no signs of indentations from temporary scaffolding or of any symmetrical cutting of the blocks to aid removal," James writes in STRUCTURE, a structural engineering trade publication. The damage just did not look like the result of thieves. Rather, as James puts it, it "appears to be caused by a giant whose hand has swept across the face of the pyramid with enormous energy, sucking out the facing and leaving the ragged empty sockets. " |
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| Science & Technology |
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Kathleen Lees
ScienceWorld Report 2013-05-13 09:46:00
Researchers have been able to identify a common gene found in those with pediatric skeletal disease, which affects 2 percent of school-age children. According to researchers from the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan, the gene contributing to idiopathic scoliosis (also called AIS) seen across Asian and Caucasian populations, can greatly affect the growth and development of the spine during childhood. The cause of scoliosis remains largely unknown, and brace treatment and surgery are the only two treatment options available at this time. However, many clinical and genetic studies have always suggested genetic factors that may contribute to the health issue. |
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Marc Lallanilla
LIveScience 2013-05-13 11:02:00
Energy-saving LED technology has been in the limelight as the best way to reduce the electricity demands of residential and commercial lighting. But how safe are LED lights? A vision researcher from Complutense University in Madrid reports that exposure to LED lights can cause irreparable damage to the retinas of the human eye, UPI reports. The light from LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, comes primarily from the short-wave, high-energy blue and violet end of the visible light spectrum, said Dr. Celia Sánchez-Ramos. And prolonged, continuous exposure to this light - from computer monitors, mobile phones and television screens or indoor and outdoor lights - may be enough to damage retinas, she said. "This problem is going to get worse, because humans are living longer and children are using electronic devices from a young age, particularly for schoolwork," Sánchez-Ramos told ThinkSpain.com. |
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Erik Even
Opposing Views 2013-05-11 00:00:00
An immigration bill under review by the Senate Judiciary Committee would mandate a federal photo database of U.S. adults, sparking concerns that the plan constitutes a national ID system. The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, S.744, instructs the Department of Homeland Security to develop a "photo tool," a national database of headshots that would be used to ensure that only authorized citizens and residents can gain employment in the United States. The existence of the provision in the 800 page bill was first reported by Wired magazine. The DHS database would record each person's name, age, and social security number, in addition to their photograph. Critics are concerned that the database could be used for far more than just confirming immigration status and employment eligibility. The Wired report noted that the social security number system was originally designed for, and legally is still only authorized for use concerning, federal retirement benefits - yet today the number is used for identification in a wide variety of circumstances, including verifying citizenship and employment status. |
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Monica Young
Sky&Telescope 2013-05-10 16:54:00
A mysterious object is hurtling towards the supermassive black hole lurking in our galaxy's center. Known as G2, the object looks like a tiny bit of fuzz in images taken by some of the most powerful infrared telescopes. In fact, it could be anything from a gas cloud with the mass of three Earths to an enshrouded star or even an evaporating protoplanetary disk. Whatever it might be, G2 will whizz past our galaxy's central black hole (often called Sgr A*) in mid-September. It'll pass just 180 times the distance between Earth and the Sun away from the black hole, an event that affords astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to watch the beast devour a snack. What exactly will happen is anyone's guess, but astronomers are at the ready, regularly monitoring the galaxy's central black hole. On April 24th, the Swift telescope witnessed an X-ray flare coming from the galactic center, tantalizing lengthy compared to Sgr A*'s typical flares. And one day later, Swift's Burst Alert Telescope captured a fleeting, 32-millisecond-long burst of higher-energy X-rays Needless to say, the galactic center had astronomers' attention. But did the flare signal G2's imminent demise? The ultra-short flare emitted on April 25th looked more reminiscent of the type of outburst emitted by magnetars, spinning stellar corpses with extreme magnetic fields. |
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Jayantha Dhanapala
In Depth News 2013-04-23 11:38:00
In his farewell address on January 17, 1961 - at the height of the Cold War - President Eisenhower, speaking with the combined experience of a US Army General and a two-term elected President of the most powerful country in the world, warned his country of the danger of the military-industrial complex. He said: "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Over 50 years later we continue to live with the problem of more and more lethal weaponry being designed, manufactured and sold under Government financed contracts not only by the military-industrial complex in the USA but in other countries as well. Government contracts power much research in laboratories and many scientists are lured away from Universities to work on weapons manufacture. These weapons are then placed on the market and sold to countries ostensibly for defence purposes despite their heavy burden on economies especially in developing countries. The recent adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty in the UN General Assembly is a modest brake on this $70 billion trade. |
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Chip Smedley
Lancaster Online 2013-05-08 08:11:00
For $1,000, you can adopt a security camera in Lancaster. That's because the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition is embarking on an "Adopt-A-Camera" campaign to raise funds that will help pay for the coalition's 161 surveillance cameras deployed around the city. "It's an idea that came from our volunteers," said LCSC managing director Wes Farmer. Added coalition resource development chairman DJ Risk, "Our all-volunteer committee believes this fundraiser will generate interest among individuals and businesses who wish to support LCSC's efforts in enhancing Lancaster's community safety." Risk said the use of cameras to identify suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings illustrates "how Lancastrians should feel safer. because of LCSC's video evidence project." |
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| Earth Changes |
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Kevin Ambrose
The Washington Post 2013-05-13 17:07:00
For those of you who live in an area affected by Brood II of the periodical 17 year cicadas - see map here - they have started to emerge. During this past weekend, the loud and clumsy bug was observed in counties just to the south of Washington. I had a camp out scheduled with my kids this past weekend in central Prince William County and I knew that my campsite was located in Brood II country. I packed my camera hoping to find and photograph cicadas. |
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Greg Newkirk
WhoForted? 2013-05-13 14:13:00
Something very strange started oozing out of the streets in the Chinese city of Nanjing on Saturday night. Generally, when weird things start erupting from the ground in Asian countries it's in the form of a giant b-movie monster, but this invasion was a whole lot realer, and a whole lot smellier. At around 9PM, pedestrians began to notice the pavement at the Wende Baiyun Lane cross intersection started to crack and split open, and before long, a foamy white substance was spewing from the cracks, brining with it a foul-smelling stench. Within a short time, the foam had spread to a 50 meter radius and stood a foot high. According to the Chinese news outlet Longhoo, firefighters and police rushed to rope off the scene, evacuating civilians and helping redirect the flow of traffic from the flow of ooze. |
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Kevin J. Cook
reporterherald.com 2013-05-08 05:07:00
The phone rang. Again. I didn't want to answer it. The two previous calls were from people who had found dying bluebirds in their yards. They wanted to help, but they needed someone to help them help the birds. Yesterday, the call was from someone who had found a dead bluebird. Three emails about bluebirds also came. One person had found a dozen dead or dying bluebirds in her yard. Another person recognized me at the coffee shop and wanted to relate yet another woeful bluebird tale. The loss of a bluebird counts as nothing more than just one of those life and death things that happen in nature. But so much loss at once is stunning. People everywhere love bluebirds, but Coloradans have special reason to esteem them. The bluebirds are members of the thrush family. Considering we also have some blue warblers, blue buntings and blue jays the reality becomes obvious: all blue birds are not bluebirds. Just three species can claim the name "bluebird" and they are relatives of the robins, solitaires and thrushes. |
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CBC News
2013-05-12 17:06:00
Winnipeg police have blocked a large sinkhole at an intersection in the city's north end Sunday. Officers were called to Airlies Street and Ashbury Bay at about 1 p.m. City crews are currently on scene assessing the crater. The city said the sinkhole will be repaired Monday. Homes in the area will not have water Monday, so crews can test for a possible leak. |
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Cassie Hart
KSTP.com 2013-05-11 14:13:00
Ice outs are still happening on lakes in northern Minnesota because of our cold and snowy spring. Now, homes along the shore of Mille Lacs Lake are getting damaged because the ice is moving like a glacier, and pushing up against the homes. In a video sent to us by KSTP viewer, Darla Johnson, you can see the ice making its charge onto shore. Then in a matter of minutes the wind pushes the ice about 15 feet from the shore to the doors of a home. |
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Bill Walker
Government agency gets license to kill...owlsbedford-nh.patch.com 2013-05-12 15:40:00
Usually we have to prioritize, and keep track of the big issues... which in politics means we don't deal with anything less than a trillion dollars. Bank bailouts, the various new and old undeclared wars, the Federal Reserve printing money to buy our own Treasury bonds; that sort of thing. But today I'm going to look at the US government's approach to a small thing: an owl. Namely, the Barred Owl, which has through hard work, saving and investment (in-nestment?), managed to extend its range even in this recession. The owl is a great neighbor to humankind and a boon to our parks and forests, spending most of its time hunting and destroying rodents that carry bubonic plague fleas. It is a beautiful predator with a haunting, tourist-attracting call. So naturally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (a bureau of the DOI) has started a million-dollar program to... terminate the owls and their owlets without mercy. Yes, your taxes are even now paying for empty-eyed Department of the Interior owlinators to go from nest to nest with 12-gauge shotguns and copies of Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds, with the Barred Owl picture highlighted like Sarah Connor's name in an LA phone book. Night vision scopes, thermal imaging, and Predator drones (well, in this case, anti-predator drones) give the owls little chance. The first stage of the plan is to blast about 9,000 owls and their families into small bloody pieces of fluffy down, but the program is open-ended. Listen, and understand: The Department of the Interior is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until those owls are dead! |
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Tracie Cone
The Associated Press 2013-05-11 06:47:00
Scott and Robin Spivey had a sinking feeling that something was wrong with their home when cracks began snaking across their walls in March. The cracks soon turned into gaping fractures, and within two weeks their 600-square-foot garage broke from the house and the entire property - manicured lawn and all - dropped 10 feet below the street. It wasn't long before the houses on both sides collapsed as the ground gave way in the Spivey's neighborhood in Lake County, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. "We want to know what is going on here," said Scott Spivey, a former city building inspector who lived in his four-bedroom, Tudor-style dream home for 11 years. |
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CBC News
Residents 'devastated' after ice from Dauphin Lake pushed ashore2013-05-10 10:10:00 A local state of emergency has been declared in a western Manitoba municipality after homes in Ochre Beach were destroyed and seriously damaged by a wave of lake ice. Area officials told CBC News the wind pushed built-up ice off Dauphin Lake on Friday evening and caused it to pile up in the community, located on the lake's southern shore. The piles of ice, which were more than nine metres tall in some cases, destroyed at least six homes and cottages, according to the Rural Municipality of Ochre River. Another 14 homes suffered extensive damage, with some structures knocked off their foundations. Clayton Watts, Ochre River's deputy reeve, said it's a miracle no one was hurt.
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Greg Pallone
Melbourne -- The search for answers presses on about why high-profile wildlife are dying in the Indian River Lagoon.CFNews13 2013-05-08 03:08:00 "It's one thing to die a quick death," said Megan Stolen from Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute. "It's another to sort of waste away." That's why there's a sense of urgency for biologists, who are trying to figure out why 30 dead dolphins have turned up since the beginning of the year in the Indian River Lagoon of Brevard County. "We do see a few patterns in that the dolphins that we have found in the lagoon are very skinny, but aside from that, we don't see anything that really connects them," Stolen said. Most of them are decomposed, limiting on what researchers can learn. Many of the dolphins have been found with near-empty stomachs. "We really don't know what they've been eating, that takes a whole new level of scientific inquiry," Stolen said. Meanwhile, researchers are looking for a possible connection to other wildlife turning up dead in the lagoon. Approximately 100 manatees have died since July 2012 due to a common, but unknown cause. |
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Thomas Fuller
The New York Times 2013-05-11 00:00:00
Of the more than 130,000 people forced to flee their homes in rioting between Buddhists and Muslims over the last year in western Myanmar, around half are living in low-lying camps near the sea, the United Nations says. Human rights organizations have issued repeated warnings that the displaced people are at risk of disease and hunger during the rainy season, which begins this month and continues until around September. "We're definitely very concerned," said Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency. "We are working around the clock, trying to get as many people out of low-lying areas and into decent shelters." Projections on Saturday by the United States Navy Marine Meteorology Division estimated that the cyclone would reach land around Wednesday. According to the same calculations, the center of the storm will be just south of Chittagong, a major city in Bangladesh, and rain and strong winds would also hit areas in Rakhine State in Myanmar, where the camps are. Although the storm could change direction or lessen in intensity, aid groups say even heavy rains would create very difficult conditions for the displaced families, who are camped out in muddy fields vulnerable to tidal surges. Myanmar is prone to violent tropical storms. A cyclone in 2008 killed more than 150,000 people in the country's Irrawaddy River delta. Another storm in 2010 in western Myanmar, in roughly the same areas as those under threat now, displaced tens of thousands and killed more than 100. |
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Michael Slezak
New Scientist 2013-05-10 17:45:00
A locust plague of epic size is devastating the island nation of Madagascar, threatening the lives of 13 million people already on the brink of famine. Billions of locusts are destroying crops and grazing lands across half the country. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects the plague to get worse, with two-thirds of the country likely to be affected by September. The FAO says $22 million is needed by the end of this month to control the plague. And with each female locust laying up to 180 eggs, another $19 million will be needed to stop the plague recurring. "We know from experience that this plague will require three years of anti-locust campaigns," says Annie Monard, who coordinates the FAO's locust response. |
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Jack Encarnacao
The Patriot Ledger 2013-05-09 16:57:00
Living so close the ocean, residents at The Moorings at Squantum Gardens are used to the full spectrum of sea scents wafting over to their building. "Maybe occasionally you get bad smells, but it was never this constant, six weeks of this now," said Don Duggan, who's lived in the apartment community for seniors since it opened in 2007. "You can smell it walking the hallway." The mysterious odor - a potent mix of sulfur and rotten eggs - hits the nose at the intersection of Quincy Shore Drive and East Squantum Street. The city has hired chemists from UMass Boston to test water samples for the presence of any bacteria that could contain clues about the smell's origin. "The city immediately took bacteria samples to see if it was sewage; those tests came back negative," city spokesman Christopher Walker said. "But we're still waiting to determine exactly what it is." Walker said preliminary indications are that the smell is linked to a naturally-occurring phenomenon, perhaps red algae. "Unfortunately, it appears to be something at this point that's occurring in nature and doesn't have an immediate remedy, other than waiting for nature to run its course," he said. |
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US Geological Survey
2013-05-11 16:10:00
Event Time 2013-05-11 20:46:56 UTC 2013-05-11 08:46:56 UTC-12:00 at epicenter Location 17.944°S 175.075°W depth=205.4km (127.6mi) Nearby Cities 139km (86mi) NW of Neiafu, Tonga 353km (219mi) N of Nuku'alofa, Tonga 576km (358mi) SW of Apia, Samoa 613km (381mi) ESE of Lambasa, Fiji 613km (381mi) SW of Tafuna, American Samoa Technical Details |
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Jeff Dute
For the second year running, a spring die-off of hundreds of spawning-age red drum has occurred in Mobile Bay.blog.al.com 2013-05-10 15:43:00 Alabama Marine Resources Department personnel, who surveyed the situation on the water Thursday, estimate finding nearly 400 floating in the bay with about 100 dead hardhead catfish mixed in. Red drum are commonly called redfish, with the larger specimens known as bull redfish because of their hard-charging fighting ability when hooked by fishermen. A die-off involving the same size and number of redfish and catfish happened during the last couple of days in April 2012.
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northlandsnewscenter.com
It's a rite of spring, birds flying back to the Northland after a long winter.2013-05-10 10:32:00 But an especially long winter this year has caused big problems for the loon population.
"He needs a much larger area to achieve lift," said Erica LeMoine, Program Coordinator for LoonWatch, of a lone loon in a pond near Ashland. The loons are turning up grounded because many Northland lakes, the bird's springtime landing pads, are still frozen. "This late spring definitely has a detrimental effect. Especially when we have this type of weather," said LeMoine, "They found a loon in a wet, paved parking lot, in farm fields down by Rhinelander." The loons are grounded, unable to move on land due to the mechanics of their body. Raptor Education Group, Inc. has rescued 57 loons so far this spring. |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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Helvy Shaanika
Onesi - Thousands of people have flocked to the Omusati Region out of
curiosity to view a small piece of meteorite that landed in a mahangu field in the village of Oshika, in Onesi Constituency, yesterday morning.AllAfrica.com 2013-05-10 06:39:00 The incident created fear and panic among villagers who suggested the 'strange object' had something to do with the recent commotion over the 12 South African aircraft that were released after days of grounding at Ondangwa Airport. The aircraft of South African origin were grounded for several days and then sent back to South Africa, because they had no permits to use Namibian airspace. People who came from all over the five northern regions, including the Kunene Region, flocking to Oshika, expressed fears that the tourists may have had something to do with the 'strange' object that fell in the mahangu field of Andreas Kamafo Ningilenimo. "Maybe those people who came here with so many aircraft are responsible for this. Maybe that object is poisonous, we are scared, we won't even want to get close to it. If it is not taken away, we will not cultivate near it," said Selma Shikongo. A piece of meteorite, the of a size of a small ball or two human fists put together made such an impact that people within a radius of over 200km were able to hear the explosive impact, feel the resulting tremor and observe the blinding light that followed as it landed. |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Raw Story
2013-05-12 16:18:00
Western drug companies tested pharmaceuticals on more than 50,000 people in the former communist East Germany, often without the knowledge of patients, several of whom died, the Spiegel news weekly reported Sunday. Some 600 clinical trials were carried out in more than 50 hospitals until the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the report said, citing previously unpublished documents of the East German health ministry, pharmaceutical institute and Stasi secret police. Many major drug companies from Germany, Switzerland and the United States took part, offering up to 800,000 West German marks (about 400,000 euros, $520,000 at today's exchange rate) per study, a boost for East Germany's underfunded health care system, Spiegel said. Records showed that two people died in East Berlin during testing of Trental, a drug that improves blood circulation developed by then West German company Hoechst, which has since merged with Sanofi, the report said. |
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Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson
The newyork Times 2013-05-03 00:00:00
Technology has given us many gifts, among them dozens of new ways to grab our attention. It's hard to talk to a friend without your phone buzzing at least once. Odds are high you will check your Twitter feed or Facebook wall while reading this article. Just try to type a memo at work without having an e-mail pop up that ruins your train of thought. But what constitutes distraction? Does the mere possibility that a phone call or e-mail will soon arrive drain your brain power? And does distraction matter - do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Lab. There's a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer. In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is really doing something called "rapid toggling between tasks," and is engaged in constant context switching. As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it's relatively easy to count the added expense of the hassle of change. When your brain is switching tasks, the cost is harder to quantify. |
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Government Accountability Project
2013-05-12 06:08:00
On April 19, 2013, GAP released "Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?" The report details the devastating long-term effects on human health and the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem stemming from BP and the federal government's widespread use of the dispersant Corexit, in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. GAP teamed up with the nonprofit Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) to launch this effort in August 2011 after repeatedly hearing from Gulf residents and cleanup workers that official statements from representatives of BP and the federal government were false and misleading in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Over the next 20 months, GAP collected data and evidence from over two dozen employee and citizen whistleblowers who experienced the cleanup's effects firsthand, and GAP studied data from extensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Taken together, the documents and the witnesses' testimony belie repeated corporate and government rhetoric that Corexit is not dangerous. Worse than this, evidence suggests that the cleanup effort has been more destructive to human health and the environment than the spill itself. Conclusions from the report strongly suggest that the dispersant Corexit was widely applied in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion because it caused the false impression that the oil disappeared. In reality, the oil/Corexit mixture became less visible, yet much more toxic than the oil alone. Nonetheless, indications are that both BP and the government were pleased with what Corexit accomplished. The report is available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three. You can download an Executive Summary of the report here. Additional report exhibits are on file with GAP. | |
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Comment: For more information on this topic and how to detoxify see The Day the Water Died: Detoxing after the Gulf Oil Spill
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Science Codex
2013-05-10 03:42:00
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and physicians continue to document that some patients experience fuzzy thinking and memory loss while taking statins, a class of global top-selling cholesterol-lowering drugs. A University of Arizona research team has made a novel discovery in brain cells being treated with statin drugs: unusual swellings within neurons, which the team has termed the "beads-on-a-string" effect. The team is not entirely sure why the beads form, said UA neuroscientist Linda L. Restifo, who leads the investigation. However, the team believes that further investigation of the beads will help inform why some people experience cognitive declines while taking statins. "What we think we've found is a laboratory demonstration of a problem in the neuron that is a more severe version for what is happening in some peoples' brains when they take statins," said Restifo, a UA professor of neuroscience, neurology and cellular and molecular medicine, and principal investigator on the project. Restifo and her team's co-authored study and findings recently were published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, a peer-reviewed journal. Robert Kraft, a former research associate in the department of neuroscience, is lead author on the article. Restifo and Kraft cite clinical reports noting that statin users often are told by physicians that cognitive disturbances experienced while taking statins were likely due to aging or other effects. However, the UA team's research offers additional evidence that the cause for such declines in cognition is likely due to a negative response to statins. The team also has found that removing statins results in a disappearance of the beads-on-a-string, and also a restoration of normal growth. With research continuing, the UA team intends to investigate how genetics may be involved in the bead formation and, thus, could cause hypersensitivity to the drugs in people. Team members believe that genetic differences could involve neurons directly, or the statin interaction with the blood-brain barrier. | |
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Comment: For more information on the devastation caused by lowering cholesterol drugs see Statin Nation by Justin Smith.
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Hannah Dahlen
Dailyadvertiser.com 2013-04-25 13:18:00
"Women aren't dolphins" is a phrase often bandied about by those who question the idea of water births. Of course, they forget that we're not mountain goats or birds, but that doesn't stop us from rock climbing or hang gliding. As more scientific evidence emerges about the benefits of water immersion in labour and birth, hospitals and birth centres are increasingly adding large baths to their delivery rooms. The New South Wales Department of Health has even given a directive that "all maternity services offer access to water immersion in labour (target 100 per cent by 2015)", in an attempt to stem the rising caesarean section rate. |
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Public Health
Professor Colin Pritchard's latest research published in journal Public Health
has found that the sharp rise of dementia and other neurological deaths
in people under 74 cannot be put down to the fact that we are living
longer. The rise is because a higher proportion of old people are being
affected by such conditions -- and what is really alarming, it is
starting earlier and affecting people under 55 years.2013-05-10 09:48:00
Of the 10 biggest Western countries the USA had the worst increase in all neurological deaths, men up 66% and women 92% between 1979-2010. The UK was 4th highest, men up 32% and women 48%. In terms of numbers of deaths, in the UK, it was 4,500 and now 6,500, in the USA it was 14,500 now more than 28,500 deaths. Professor Pritchard of Bournemouth University says: "These statistics are about real people and families, and we need to recognise that there is an 'epidemic' that clearly is influenced by environmental and societal changes." Tessa Gutteridge, Director YoungDementia UK says that our society needs to learn that dementia is increasingly affecting people from an earlier age: "The lives of an increasing number of families struggling with working-age dementia are made so much more challenging by services which fail to keep pace with their needs and a society which believes dementia to be an illness of old age." Bournemouth University researchers, Professor Colin Pritchard and Dr Andrew Mayers, along with the University of Southampton's Professor David Baldwin show that there are rises in total neurological deaths, including the dementias, which are starting earlier, impacting upon patients, their families and health and social care services, exemplified by an 85% increase in UK Motor Neurone Disease deaths. |
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Ian Sample
The Guardian 2013-05-07 15:30:00
Scientists hail medical breakthrough by which half a million UK sufferers could avoid major surgery and take antibiotics instead Up to 40% of patients with chronic back pain could be cured with a course of antibiotics rather than surgery, in a medical breakthrough that one spinal surgeon says is worthy of a Nobel prize. Surgeons in the UK and elsewhere are reviewing how they treat patients with chronic back pain after scientists discovered that many of the worst cases were due to bacterial infections. The shock finding means that scores of patients with unrelenting lower back pain will no longer face major operations but can instead be cured with courses of antibiotics costing around £114. One of the UK's most eminent spinal surgeons said the discovery was the greatest he had witnessed in his professional life, and that its impact on medicine was worthy of a Nobel prize. "This is vast. We are talking about probably half of all spinal surgery for back pain being replaced by taking antibiotics," said Peter Hamlyn, a consultant neurological and spinal surgeon at University College London hospital. Hamlyn recently operated on rugby player Tom Croft, who was called up for the British and Irish Lions summer tour last month after missing most of the season with a broken neck. Specialists who deal with back pain have long known that infections are sometimes to blame, but these cases were thought to be exceptional. That thinking has been overturned by scientists at the University of Southern Denmark who found that 20% to 40% of chronic lower back pain was caused by bacterial infections. In Britain today, around 4 million people can expect to suffer from chronic lower back pain at some point in their lives. The latest work suggests that more than half a million of them would benefit from antibiotics. |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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ScienceDaily
2013-05-13 17:49:00
Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so. Participants in the study -- native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 -- had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time. Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically (grammatically) correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as "We drank Lisa's brandy by the fire in the lobby," or "We drank Lisa's by brandy the fire in the lobby." A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences. This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. "Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high," she said. "The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn't." |
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Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience 2013-05-13 14:00:00
Disrupted sleep is so commonly a symptom of depression that some of the first things doctors look for in diagnosing depression are insomnia and excessive sleeping. Now, however, scientists have observed for the first time a dysfunctional body clock in the brains of people with depression. People with major depression, also known as clinical depression, show disrupted circadian rhythms across brain regions, according to a new study published today (May 13) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers looked at post-mortem brain samples from mentally healthy donors and compared them with those of people who had major depression at the time of their death. They found that gene activity in the brains of depressed people failed to follow healthy 24-hour cycles. "They seem to have the sleep cycle both shifted and disrupted," said study researcher Jun Li, a professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan. |
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Diana Yates
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2013-05-13 12:55:00
When trouble approaches, what do you do? Run for the hills? Hide? Pretend it isn't there? Or do you focus on the promise of rain in those looming dark clouds? New research suggests that the way you regulate your emotions, in bad times and in good, can influence whether - or how much - you suffer from anxiety. The study appears in the journal Emotion. In a series of questionnaires, researchers asked 179 healthy men and women how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations. The team analyzed the results to see if different emotional strategies were associated with more or less anxiety. The study revealed that those who engage in an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal tended to also have less social anxiety and less anxiety in general than those who avoid expressing their feelings. Reappraisal involves looking at a problem in a new way, said University of Illinois graduate student Nicole Llewellyn, who led the research with psychology professor Florin Dolcos, an affiliate of the Beckman Institute at Illinois. "When something happens, you think about it in a more positive light, a glass half full instead of half empty," Llewellyn said. "You sort of reframe and reappraise what's happened and think what are the positives about this? What are the ways I can look at this and think of it as a stimulating challenge rather than a problem?" Study participants who regularly used this approach reported less severe anxiety than those who tended to suppress their emotions. |
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Tim Adams
The Observer 2013-05-12 04:17:00
In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines. In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. To suggest otherwise, as Raine felt compelled to, having studied under Richard Dawkins and been persuaded of the "all-embracing influence of evolution on behaviour", was to doom yourself to an absence of funding. In America, there seemed more open-mindedness on the question and, as a result, more money to explore it. There was also another good reason why Raine headed initially to California: there were more murderers to study than there were at home. When Raine started doing brain scans of murderers in American prisons, he was among the first researchers to apply the evolving science of brain imaging to violent criminality. His most comprehensive study, in 1994, was still, necessarily, a small sample. He conducted PET [positron emission tomography] scans of 41 convicted killers and paired them with a "normal" control group of 41 people of similar age and profile. However limited the control, the colour images, which showed metabolic activity in different parts of the brain, appeared striking in comparison. In particular, the murderers' brains showed what appeared to be a significant reduction in the development of the prefrontal cortex, "the executive function" of the brain, compared with the control group. | |
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Comment: The root confusion here is the failure to
distinguish between violent criminals and psychopaths. Violent criminals
make up a tiny fraction of psychopaths. Most psychopaths never
physically harm anyone and thus remain 'sub-criminal', i.e. below the
radar.
How full-time researchers still have not grokked this staggers the mind... |
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Jamie Doward
The Observer 2013-05-12 05:37:00
British Psychological Society to launch attack on rival profession, casting doubt on biomedical model of mental illness There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain's clinical psychologists. In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society's division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a "paradigm shift" in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry's predominantly biomedical model of mental distress - the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out "reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems", used by psychiatry. Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP's statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes. | |
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Comment: Ordinary people can be predisposed to
schizophrenia due to their genetics, but yes, we largely side with the
psychotherapists on this one: widespread schizophrenia and schizophrenic
symptoms are the result of normal people breaking down in a society run
by, for and of psychopaths.
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Jeremy Dean
Psyblog 2013-05-09 07:38:00
Why do CEOs who excel at golf get paid more, despite poorer stock market performance? To see how easily the mind jumps to the wrong conclusions, try virtually taking part in a little experiment... ...imagine that you are presented with information about two groups of people about which you know nothing. Let's call them the Azaleans and the Begonians. For each group you are given a list of positive and negative behaviours. A good one might be: an Azalean was seen helping an old lady across the road. A bad one might be: a Begonian urinated in the street. So, you read this list of good and bad behaviours about the Azaleans and Begonians and afterwards you make some judgements about them. How often do they perform good and bad behaviours and what are they? What you notice is that it's the Begonians that seem dodgy. They are the ones more often to be found shoving burgers into mailboxes and ringing doorbells and running away. The Azaleans, in contrast, are a sounder bunch; certainly not blameless, but overall better people. While you're happy with the judgement, you're in for a shock. What's revealed to you afterwards is that actually the ratio of good to bad behaviours listed for both the Azaleans and Begonians was exactly the same. For the Azaleans 18 positive behaviours were listed along with 8 negative. For the Begonians it was 9 positive and 4 negative. In reality you just had less information about the Begonians. What happened was that you built up an illusory connection between more frequent bad behaviours and the Begonians; they weren't more frequent, however, they just seemed that way. |
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| High Strangeness |
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Greg Newkirk
WhoForted? 2013-05-12 00:05:00
Did a woman unwittingly capture the creeping presence of an alien creature lurking outside her vehicle? Or is it something else entirely? This eerie photograph popped online today, inciting some heated debate rational explanations for what certainly looks like a bug-eyed figure peering through a car window. "My friend took a picture in the car... there's nobody outside the car," user cblmnop posted to reddit. Instantly, the comments lit up with possible explanations for the image. Photoshop, pareidolia, and fog were popular choices, with "billboard of a woman wearing sunglasses" ranking pretty highly. Anyone who dared even mention anything paranormal was downvoted into oblivion. |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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Michael Kelley
Business Insider 2013-05-12 18:09:00
The New York Public Library has published an unretouched, un-Photoshopped photo from 1939 that features a guy who looks remarkably like Jay-Z. The library said the image, "Harlem Loiterers" by street photographer Sid Grossman, "created quite a stir" since being posted on NYPL Schomburg centre for Research In Black Culture's Facebook page the other day. "I was immediately struck by the similarity to Jay-Z and actually laughed out loud," Schomburg's Curator of Digital Collections Sylviane A. Diouf, who found the photo, said. "I still hope somebody will tell us who that young man really was." |
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Cinelan/Powered by NewsLook
Where exactly do babies come from? And how are they really made? Mixing
humorous animation and interviews, Oscar winner Jessica Yu poses these
questions to a variety of adults and youngsters who explore their
earliest understanding of sex.2013-05-10 23:04:00
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