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Simon Black
SovereignMan 2013-10-08 16:35:00
It's clear to everyone by now that the government of the largest country in the world is careening towards default in just over 200 hours. Yet curiously, even though the US government's completely ridiculous, untenable fiscal situation is a front page embarrassment for the entire world to see, markets have barely budged. A few very short-term rates have shot up, but for the most part, stocks are very close to where they were before the shutdown. The US 10-year yield has actually dropped over the last month, from 2.95% in mid-September to 2.64% today... pretty much where it was a week ago before the shutdown began. (Bear in mind that the 10-year yield in Italy, Spain, etc. were all over 7% at the most recent peaks of their respective crises...) Meanwhile, other rates like the 30-year Treasury and 30-year fixed mortgage rates are even a hair lower than they were a week ago. Where's the calamity? Where's the panic? There's been almost none. | |
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David Edwards
The Raw Story 2013-10-08 16:35:00
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggested on Tuesday that the Navy SEALs from Seal Team 6 were wrong to abort a mission on an Al-Shabaab camp in Somalia over the weekend just because they thought children would die. According to NBC News, the plan to capture an Al-Shabaab warlord named Ikrima went awry when an enemy fighter spotted Seal Team 6 members and started a firefight. The SEALs soon recognized that children who were in the compound would die if the raid went forward so they aborted the mission. "I think a lot of people thought that was - and it is - an incredible act of just honor for life, especially the little ones," Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck noted on Tuesday. But Kilmeade saw things another way. | |
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Abby Ohlheiser
The Atlantic Wire 2013-10-07 16:28:00
The NSA's huge Utah data center is supposed to help U.S. intelligence collect billions of bytes of data when it opens this fall. But the agency hit a snag or two in trying to take the complex live: a mysterious, repeated electrical failure keeps melting the facility's equipment. The center, located in Utah in part because of a need to access the massive amounts of cheap electricity available there, has suffered 10 meltdowns over 13 months, starting in August 2012. Each incident created about $100,000 dollars in damage. And according to the Wall Street Journal report on the facility, those problems could have a lot to do with the contractors (a running theme) tasked with building it. The Journal, using documents and interviews, outlines the delays and problems encountered by the agency in its completion of the mostly classified complex. Speaking to an official, the paper notes that the electrical problems plaguing the facility are like "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box." And those flashes, they continue, "create fiery explosions, melt metal and cause circuits to fail." So, why is it happening? | |
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Sibel Edmonds
BoilingFrogsPost 2013-10-08 15:53:00
Isn't it amazing? The government puts on all these shows. Their media tentacles help with the shows by hyping them royally and pumping up scare tactic headlines hourly. Take this new shenanigan called the war over the debt ceiling. Now, that was not the amazing part I was referring to. What I meant by amazing was the public's response to all this nonsense baloney. The government is telling us to 'be afraid! Our food stamp program will no longer feed you, your Medicaid will no longer get you medicine, our airports will no longer remain operational, our homeland security guys won't be able to protect you against those boogey men terrorists who are hiding behind your sheds ... you are going to starve, suffer and most likely drop dead. So be afraid! We ain't got no money, and if we don't raise this debt ceiling and print more money, you all are gonna die!' And our people, amazingly, buy into all this. They don't even look at the most obvious facts. Now isn't that amazing?! I just finished reading news headlines geared to calm nerves in one particular area: Thou shalt not be afraid. Our military and foreign aid will continue pouring into our usual recipient nations. Hooray. Hooray. We'll continue to send them dollars and guns... in the billions. Hooray, hooray! Who were they attempting to comfort and calm? I have no idea. Probably some nervous recipient(s) in some miserable country (s) out there. But most importantly, where the heck is the response to this here in our nation? Nowhere to be heard or seen. And what's up with that?! Come on, they are saying we are right now at this default line, with our current debt level in the trillions of dollars, with our unaccountable loony expenditures totally out of control, with our miserable unemployment reflecting the more miserable overall economy crashing down, yet we are going to send billions and billions of dollars to some nations out there. Yet not a peep from our zombie-turned majority. | |
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Arnie Gunderson
Each week Fairewinds receives many questions about the ongoing tragedy unfolding in Japan as a result of the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.Global Research TV 2013-10-08 14:02:00 Join us as Fairewinds' Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen highlights the many problems facing Japan as he takes you on a tour of the Fukushima Daiichi site by combining satellite video, animated graphics and photos to create a comprehensive and easy to follow video tour.
Video Transcript | |
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RT
2013-10-08 13:31:00
President Vladimir Putin called on the Netherlands to apologize for the alleged assault and detention of a Russian diplomat in The Hague. He slammed the incident as a "blatant violation" of the Vienna Convention and demanded those responsible be punished. Speaking at the APEC summit in Indonesia, Putin said Russia was waiting for an "official apology" after a formal complaint was lodged with the government of the Netherlands. "We are awaiting an explanation, an apology and also punishment of those responsible," Putin said at a news conference after an Asia-Pacific summit in Indonesia. He added that Russia would react depending on the course of action the Dutch side takes. "The Dutch government is obliged to send a full explanation by 6pm today (14:00 GMT) Moscow time," said the Russian Foreign Ministry in an official statement. Minister-counselor Dmitry Borodin said he was badly beaten by unidentified men in camouflage uniform who forced their way into his flat in The Hague on Saturday evening. He was then taken to a police station and held for a number of hours without any explanation. Borodin went on to say that the men did not produce any official documents showing they were policemen. Moreover, the men ignored Borodin when he said he was a diplomat. | |
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Patrick Cockburn
The timing of the latest shot in a covert war invites questions about the role of proxiesThe Independent 2013-10-06 00:00:00
What to make of the latest alleged assassination in Iran of a senior officer in the Revolutionary Guards just as Iran and the US move towards negotiations? Is it a last-minute attempt by Israel or the Iranian dissident group the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) to sabotage talks - or at least to show that they are still players in the decades-long struggle between the government in Tehran and its many antagonists? The first account on an Iranian website stated that Mojtaba Ahmadi, the head of Iranian cyber warfare, had been found shot in the head outside Tehran. The Revolutionary Guards issued a statement denying that he had been assassinated, but admitted there had been a "horrific incident" which it was investigating. The killing appeared to be the latest in a string of killings, since 2007, in which five Iranians associated with the country's nuclear programme have been murdered in professional attacks. Men on motorcycles operating on the basis of good intelligence have stuck magnetically attachable bombs to their victims' cars. The timing of Ahmadi's assassination looks suspicious, coming a few days after the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations and later spoke to President Barack Obama by telephone. Not everybody on either side is happy: the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammed Ali Jafari, even stated openly that, while he agreed with Rouhani's UN speech, "he should have turned down a telephone conversation until after the American government had shown its sincerity towards Iran". | |
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Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online 2013-10-08 10:14:00
What a photo - yet another instance of Bali working its magic. Chinese President Xi Jinping leads a "Happy Birthday" for Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Indonesian President Susilo Yudhoyono on acoustic guitar. You know who is not in the picture - he's in shutdown containment mode. US Think Tankland protestations notwithstanding, there could not be a more graphic reminder of the emerging multipolar order. And right on cue, the Creditor, somewhat alarmed, pointedly reminded the massive Debtor, via Chinese vice-finance minister Zhu Guangyao: Translation; just as Asia-Pacific gathered to discuss the messier points of economic cooperation at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bali, what everybody was worried about is the scary possibility of the US government defaulting on its colossal debts next week. All this interfered with by a sideshow - the Return of the Extraordinary Rendition in Libya and Navy SEALS getting their butts kicked by a bunch of al-Shabaab jihadis in Somalia, more than enough to bury any coverage of the APEC summit by US corporate media. | |
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Adam Kingsmith
The Huffington Post 2013-04-29 08:13:00
Less than a generation ago, Canada was a world leader when it came to the fundamental democratic freedoms of assembly, speech and information. In 1982, Canada adopted the Access to Information Act -- making it one of the first countries to pass legislation recognizing the right of citizens to access information held by government, and as recently as 2002, Canada ranked among the top 5 most open and transparent countries when it came to respect for freedom of the press. Fast-forward a decade, and we've become a true north suppressed and disparate -- where unregistered civic demonstrations are inhibited and repressed, rebellious Internet activities are scrutinised and supervised, government scientists are hushed and muzzled, and public information is stalled and mired by bureaucratic firewalls. In the 2013 World Press Freedom Index -- an evaluation done by Reporters Without Borders on the autonomy of a country's media environment, Canada came in at a paltry 20th, putting us behind liberal-democratic powerhouses such as Namibia, Costa Rica, and the Western Hemisphere's new champion of free media -- Jamaica. So what the devil is going on? | |
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Michael Parenti
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that on August 21 the Assad government slaughtered 1,429 people, including 426 children, in a sarin chemical attack in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb. (Doctors Without Borders put the total at about 300.) Secretary Kerry insisted that now the United States had no choice but to launch U.S. bombing attacks against President Bashar al-Assad, devolving into another of America's "humanitarian wars."Michael Parenti Blogspot 2013-09-30 01:08:00 The Sarin Mysteries Following Kerry, President Obama announced that the situation in Syria had changed irredeemably since August 21. The United States would have to attack. But, on second thought, Obama decided to leave the decision up to (a seemingly reluctant) Congress. A few weeks later, Turkish prosecutors issued a lengthy court indictment charging the Syrian rebels with seeking to use chemical weapons. The indictment suggested that sarin gas and other "weapons for a terrorist organization" were utilized by the opposition and not by the Assad government. The "Syrian freedom fighters" include men who are not even Syrian, much like the many mujahedeen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan but who were not Afghani. As reported in the Wall Street Journal (September 19, 2013), the ISIS, an Iraqi al Qaeda outfit operating in Syria, "has become a magnet for foreign jihadists" who view the war in Syria not primarily as a means to overthrow Assad "but rather as a historic battleground for a larger Sunni holy war. According to centuries-old Islamic prophecy they espouse, they must establish an Islamic state in Syria as a step to achieving a global one." |
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Thank you for all the pledges so far! Your contributions so far have been overwhelmingly generous. Given the great enthusiasm we have received so far, we have raised our ambitions to making a feature length documentary for global cinema release in order to reach the widest audience possible and to making this the best and most thorough documentary it can be. Therefore we need to keep raising funds. Please keep circulating the link and keep telling your friends and family to continue to donate. Tony Blair knows we are after him, let's let him know we mean business! | |
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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy 2013-10-02 22:51:00
The inability of the media and politicians to focus on the real issues never ceases to amaze. The real crisis is not the "debt ceiling crisis." The government shutdown is merely a result of the Republicans using the debt limit ceiling to attempt to block the implementation of Obamacare. If the shutdown persists and becomes a problem, Obama has enough power under the various "war on terror" rulings to declare a national emergency and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. An executive branch that has the power to inter citizens indefinitely and to murder them without due process of law, can certainly set aside a ceiling on debt that jeopardizes the government. The real crisis is that jobs offshoring by US corporations has permanently lowered US tax revenues by shifting what would have been consumer income, US GDP, and tax base to China, India, and other countries where wages and the cost of living are relatively low. On the spending side, twelve years of wars have inflated annual expenditures. The consequence is a wide deficit gap between revenues and expenditures. Under the present circumstances, the deficit is too large to be closed. The Federal Reserve covers the deficit by printing $1,000 billion annually with which to purchase Treasury debt and mortgage-backed financial instruments. The use of the printing press on such a large scale undermines the US dollar's role as reserve currency, the basis for US power. Raising the debt limit simply allows the real crisis to continue. More money will be printed with which to purchase more new debt issues needed to close the gap between revenues and expenditures. The supply of dollars or dollar denominated assets in foreign hands is vast. (The Social Security system's large surplus accumulated over a quarter century was borrowed by the Treasury and spent. In its place are non-marketable Treasury IOUs. Consequently, Social Security is one of the largest creditors to the US government.) | |
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Annie Machon
RT 2013-10-05 21:53:00
The disparity in response to Edward Snowden's disclosures within the USA and the UK is astonishing. The disparity in response to Edward Snowden's disclosures within the USA and the UK is astonishing. In the face of righteous public wrath, the US administration is contorting itself to ensure that it does not lose its treasured data-mining capabilities: congressional hearings are held, the media is on the warpath, and senior securocrats are being forced to admit that they have lied about the efficacy of endemic surveillance in preventing terrorism. Just this week General Alexander, the head of the NSA with a long track record of misleading lying to government, was forced to admit that the endemic surveillance programmes have only helped to foil a couple of terrorist plots. This is a big difference from the previous number of 54 that he was touting around. Cue calls for the surveillance to be reined in, at least against Americans. In future such surveillance should be restricted to targeted individuals who are being actively investigated. Which is all well and good, but would still leave the rest of the global population living their lives under the baleful stare of the US panopticon. And if the capability continues to exist to watch the rest of the world, how can Americans be sure that the NSA et al won't stealthily go back to watching them once the scandal has died down - or just ask their best buddies in GCHQ to do their dirty work for them? | |
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PressTV
2013-10-05 21:43:00
US President Barack Obama appears to have "lost his ability to govern" as the fight is going on between Congressional Democrats and Republicans over budget, says Bill Jones from Executive Intelligence Review. The US government was partially closed down as of Monday midnight after the two houses of Congress failed to agree on the spending bill. Jones told Press TV that if the Republican majority in the House of Representatives holds together opposing the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, anything that the Democrats would put forward will not pass the chamber. | |
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Shaun Waterman
Washington Times 2013-10-02 21:36:00
The Obama administration's credibility on intelligence suffered another blow Wednesday as the chief of the National Security Agency admitted that officials put out numbers that vastly overstated the counterterrorism successes of the government's warrantless bulk collection of all Americans' phone records. Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA's huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two - far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration. Gen. Alexander and other intelligence chiefs have pleaded with lawmakers not to shut down the bulk collection of U.S. phone records despite growing unease about government overreach in the program, which was revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and committee chairman, told Gen. Alexander of the 54 cases that administration officials - including the general himself - have cited as the fruit of the NSA's domestic snooping. "These weren't all plots and they weren't all foiled," he said. | |
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| Society's Child |
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RIA Novosti
2013-10-08 16:45:00
The stand-off between Russian and the Netherlands escalated Tuesday as Moscow angrily demanded a full account of how one its diplomats came to be arrested by the Dutch police over the weekend. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russia Today channel that the state of relations between the two countries will depend on how Netherlands chooses to handle the matter. "We need to know what disciplinary measures would be taken in regard to these police officers," Lavrov said in an English-language interview. "When we get a reaction on this demand, then we will see how we will handle the relations further." | |
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Toby Sterling and Laura Mills
abc News 2013-10-08 16:39:00
Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded Tuesday that the Netherlands apologize for arresting a Russian diplomat, further straining relations between the countries after Moscow decided to put some Greenpeace activists on trial. The tensions come during a year meant to celebrate the countries' historic ties. The diplomat, Dmitry Borodin, was arrested by Dutch police in The Hague late Saturday, and he has accused the police of even pulling his one-year-old daughter's hair as they took him and both his children to the station. Borodin, whose title is minister-counselor, gave his version of events on his Twitter account. He said the arrest came even though he identified himself and said he had diplomatic immunity. | |
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NewsOne
2013-10-08 16:24:00
Jack Lamar Roberson, 43, was gunned down by Waycross, Georgia police on October 4 after his family called 911 for an ambulance due to issues with his diabetes, First Coast News reports. Waycross police officers claim they responded to a report of attempted suicide and were told that Roberson was combative. Upon arrival, Roberson allegedly "lunged" at the officers with two "weapons" and refused to drop them. That's when they fired, claims Police Chief Tony Tanner. Roberson's family tells a different story. | |
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Alessandra Prentice
Reuters 2013-10-05 14:30:00
Russia shrugged off Dutch legal action over its detention and prosecution of Greenpeace activists for piracy on Saturday as protesters took to the streets internationally to call for the 30 detainees to be freed. The Netherlands launched legal proceedings against Russia on Friday, saying it had unlawfully detained activists and others on the Dutch-registered ship last month as it protested against drilling in the Arctic. Two Dutch citizens were among 30 people on board the Arctic Sunrise, which was seized by Russian authorities near the Prirazlomnaya offshore oil platform. Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov told state-run news agency RIA Novosti that Russia had repeatedly asked the Netherlands to halt what Russia said was "illegal activity" by the ship. "Unfortunately, this was not done. Therefore, we have far more questions for the Dutch side than they can have for us," RIA quoted Meshkov as saying. | |
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Fox News
2013-10-07 00:01:00
An Ohio school district has agreed to keep a portrait of Jesus Christ off school property and pay a $95,000 fine in the face of legal pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union. The Jackson City School District, located in Jackson, reached a deal on Friday after the ACLU, along with the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, sued the district in February, citing "unconstitutional" actions and charging that students and visitors to the school "will continue to suffer permanent, severe and irreparable harm and injury," according to the lawsuit. The picture had been hanging in Jackson's high school since 1947 as part of a "Hall of Honor" display meant to highlight famous historical figures. | |
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Kate Hilpern
Those who cut themselves - many as young as 10 - are often dismissed as attention-seekers. But their distress is real, and their numbers are increasing, reports Kate HilpernThe Independent 2013-10-08 00:00:00
Chloe was just 12 when she started self-harming. "I was very quiet and an easy target for bullies. My brother was unwell, so I didn't want to bother my parents, and I had very few friends. One day in class, I dug my nails into my arm to stop me crying, and I was surprised by how much the physical pain distracted me from the emotional pain. Before long, I was regularly scratching myself, deeper each time." The following year, on another particularly bad day, Chloe came home to find a knife on the kitchen side. "It felt almost instinctive to cut myself and afterwards, I felt so much better. By the time I was 15, I was using scissors or blades several times a day and never left home without something sharp." Chloe hid her scars, but one day a friend saw her diary. This led to Chloe's mum, Jo, finding out. "It was a big shock," says Jo. "Chloe, who is now 17, has always been a very sensible, studious young lady. I didn't even know she was unhappy. Making matters worse was the fact that I got such bad advice. I was told not to discuss anything with Chloe, just to march her into treatment. It didn't work." Last week, official statistics revealed an alarming rise in children who self-harm. These figures show that in the past year, NHS hospitals treated more than 18,000 girls and 4,600 boys between 10 and 19 after they had deliberately harmed themselves - a rise of 11 per cent. During the same period, cases involving children between 10 and 14 rose from 4,008 to 5,192 - a rise of 30 per cent. According to Sarah Brennan, chief executive of YoungMinds, "An equally striking finding, which reflects Jo's experience, was the lack of confidence among parents and professionals about how to deal with it." So what's going on? Why are so many young people - children, for goodness sake - self-harming? And where did the phenomenon, one that many people hadn't even heard of until recently, come from anyway? Rachel Welch, project manager at selfharm.co.uk, isn't convinced self-harming is on the rise. It's just we are more aware of it, says the 35-year-old. Indeed, even the Bible includes stories about self-harming and the World Health Organisation has long recognised it as a problem, not just in the West but in developing countries. | |
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Michael Shank and Elizabeth Beavers
A Defense Department program transfers military-grade weapons and vehicles to local law enforcement. It's the last thing we needthe guardian 2013-10-07 00:00:00
America's streets are looking more and more like a war zone. Last week, in a small county in upstate New York with a population of roughly 120,000 people, county legislators approved the receipt of a 20-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle, donated by the US Defense Department to the county sheriff. Between the Armored Personnel Carriers locking down main streets in major American cities - mimicking our MRAPs in Afghanistan - or Special Weapons and Tactics (Swat) and Special Forces units canvassing our country, if we're not careful, this militarization of our domestic policing will make-over America, and fast. Here's how it all happened. A little-known Pentagon program has been quietly militarizing American police forces for years. A total of $4.2bn worth of equipment has been distributed by the Defense Department to municipal law enforcement agencies, with a record $546m in 2012 alone. In the fine print of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1997, the "1033 program" was born. It allows the Defense Department to donate surplus military equipmentto local police forces. Though the program's existed since the 1990s, it has expanded greatly in recent years, due, in part, to post-9/11 fears and sequestration budget cuts. The expanse, however, seems unnecessary given that the Department of Homeland Security has already handed out $34bn in "terrorism grants" to local polices forces - without oversight mind you - to fund counter-terrorism efforts. Additional militarization, then, deserves congressional attention as the program is harmful and must be scaled back for a number of reasons. First, the program is transforming our police into a military. The results of such over-militarized law enforcement are apparent from the dispersion of Occupy protesters in Oakland to the city-wide lockdown in Boston. As retired police chief Norm Stamper stated to the Associated Press: We make a serious mistake, I'm convinced, in equipping domestic law enforcement, particularly in smaller, rural communities, with this much military equipment. | |
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Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was "closed" due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown. The Park Service will also have rangers on duty to police the ban... of access to an ocean. The government will probably use more personnel and spend more resources to attempt to close the ocean, than it would in its normal course of business. This is governing by temper-tantrum. It is on par with the government's ham-fisted attempts to close the DC WWII Memorial, an open-air public monument that is normally accessible 24 hours a day. By accessible I mean, you walk up to it. When you have finished reflecting, you then walk away from it. | |
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Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
Former US West CEO Joseph Nacchio was released from prison last week after completing a four year insider trading sentence. He still claims the NSA framed him on the insider trading charges - after he refused to participate in their illegal phone surveillance program in 2001. US West was the only major telecommunication program that refused to spy on its customers. According to the Wall Street Journal, Nacchio feels vindicated by Edward Snowden's recent revelations about NSA spying on Americans' phone and email communications.Veterans ToDay 2013-10-07 00:00:00
Nacchio was convicted of selling US West stock based on inside information about the company's deteriorating financial health. He denies this, claiming he believed US West's lucrative contracts with the federal government would continue. Instead his refusal to cooperate with the NSA resulted in the wholesale cancellation of government contracts. Nacchio had evidence supporting this claim. However the judge ruled it was classified and prevented his defense team from presenting it. The redacted NSA files were only made public after the former CEO was convicted and sentenced. However Harper's and others have always supported Nacchio's contention that he was prosecuted in retaliation for saying "no" to the NSA. Whether or not Vlaccio is guilty of insider trading (all the legal arguments are summarized at Race to the Bottom), the most illuminating information in the redacted files is that the NSA was pressuring US West to spy on customers in February 2001. This was a good seven months before the 9-11 attacks, the supposed justification for curtailing Americans' civil liberties. | |
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Kuwait Times
Kuwait: Gulf states plan to study a project which will identify homosexuals and transgender individuals through a 'clinical test' which will be added to the list of medical tests one has to undergo to obtain a visa. If individuals are revealed to be homosexual or transgender, they will be denied entry into the country, a local daily reported yesterday, quoting a senior official in Kuwait's Ministry of Health.2013-10-07 21:36:00 "Homosexuals and 'third-sex' individuals can be detected through clinical tests during the routine medical examination for visa", Public Health Department Director Dr Yousuf Mendakar said. 'Third-sex' is a common term used in Gulf states to refer to transsexuals or people with gender identity disorder. The senior official added that an individual who is identified as homosexual will have 'unfit' stamped on his medical report; a term often used for people who fail medical tests which will automatically disqualify their visa application. Dr Mendakar's statements did not specify the test or the people targeted in the new project. It was also unclear whether this excluded cross-dressers or included all homosexuals in general. He also did not explain how medical examiners intend to determine a visitor's sexual orientation. "Expatriates undergo medical tests at local clinics, but the new procedure includes stricter measures to find out homosexuals and transgenders so that they are banned from entering Kuwait or any GCC state", he added. |
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| Secret History |
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Brian Handwerk
One of history's great disaster mysteries may be solved - the case of the largest volcanic eruption in the last 3,700 years. Nearly 800 years ago, the blast that was recorded, and then forgotten, may also have created a "Pompeii of the Far East," researchers suggest, which might lie buried and waiting for discovery on an Indonesian island.National Geographic 2013-10-01 13:46:00 The source of an eruption that scattered ash from pole to pole has been pinpointed as Samalas volcano on Indonesia's Lombok Island. The research team, led by geographer Franck Lavigne of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, has now dated the event to between May and October of 1257. The findings were published today in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's been a long time that some people have been looking," said Lavigne. After glaciologists turned up evidence for the blast three decades ago, volcano experts had looked for the origin of the eruption everywhere from New Zealand's Okataina volcano to Mexico's El Chichón. The previously unattributed eruption was an estimated eight times as large as the famed Krakatau explosion (1883) and twice as large as Tambora in 1815, the researchers estimate. (Related: "Tambora: The Greatest Explosion in History.") "Until now we thought that Tambora was the largest eruption for 3,700 years," Lavigne said, but the study reveals that the 1257 event was even larger. |
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Tia Ghose
LiveScience 2013-10-08 10:00:00
The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, who come most recently from Europe, has largely been shrouded in mystery. But a new study suggests that at least their maternal lineage may derive largely from Europe. Though the finding may seem intuitive, it contradicts the notion that European Jews mostly descend from people who left Israel and the Middle East around 2,000 years ago. Instead, a substantial proportion of the population originates from local Europeans who converted to Judaism, said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England. | |
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Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience 2013-10-07 13:36:00
A carved stone found marking a Bronze Age grave in the Ukraine is the oldest sundial of its kind ever found, a new study reveals. The sundial may have marked the final resting place of a young man sacrificed or otherwise marked as a messenger to the gods or ancestors, said study researcher Larisa Vodolazhskaya of the Archaeoastronomical Research Center at Southern Federal University in Russia. Vodolazhskaya analyzed the geometry of the tire-size stone and its carvings, confirming the stone would have marked the time using a system of parallel lines and an elliptical pattern of circular depressions. The elliptical pattern makes the carving an analemmatic sundial. A traditional sundial marks the time using a gnomon, a fixed vertical that casts a shadow. An analemmatic sundial has a gnomon that must move every day of the year to adjust to the changing position of the sun in the sky. [See Images of the Ancient Sundial] | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Joshua Foust
National Journal 2013-10-08 16:49:00
Scientists, engineers and policymakers are all figuring out ways drones can be used better and more smartly, more precise and less damaging to civilians, with longer range and better staying power. One method under development is by increasing autonomy on the drone itself. Eventually, drones may have the technical ability to make even lethal decisions autonomously: to respond to a programmed set of inputs, select a target and fire their weapons without a human reviewing or checking the result. Yet the idea of the U.S. military deploying a lethal autonomous robot, or LAR, is sparking controversy. Though autonomy might address some of the current downsides of how drones are used, they introduce new downsides policymakers are only just learning to grapple with. | |
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Lee Rannals
RedOrbit 2013-10-08 15:21:00
Comet ISON is getting closer to making its close pass by the sun, but what would happen if it had a brush with our planet instead? New evidence shows it would be devastating. International scientists have discovered the first ever evidence of a comet entering Earth's atmosphere and exploding. This celestial object rained down fire across the Earth, obliterating every life form in its path. The team's discovery provides the first definitive proof of a comet striking Earth millions of years ago. It also helps to give scientists a peak into how comets help shape the solar system. "Comets always visit our skies - they're these dirty snowballs of ice mixed with dust - but never before in history has material from a comet ever been found on Earth," Professor David Block, of Wits University, said in a statement. | |
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Tanya Lewis
LiveScience 2013-10-08 11:29:00
New York - The oodles of microbes living in the gut may affect brain function, recent studies suggest. The human body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria - that means there are about 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells in your body. Increasing evidence shows these microbes - collectively known as the microbiome - play a role in health, including mental health. Studies in mice suggest that microbes living in the digestive tract are linked to depression and anxiety. "There's a strong relationship between gastroenterology and psychiatric conditions," said gastroenterologist Dr. Stephen Collins of McMaster University in Canada, at a symposium here at the New York Academy of Sciences. Many people with inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS) have depression or anxiety, Collins said. His research team has found several lines of evidence that intestinal microbes influence the brain. | |
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Mark Reynolds
A man's best friend really does share his master's feelings. The Express, UK 2013-10-08 13:23:00
For the first time scientists have established that dogs have the ability to experience positive emotions, such as love and attachment. The findings mean we may have to rethink the idea of pets as "property". Dogs could have a level of emotional response comparable to that of a child, the results suggest. Professor Gregory Berns, who revealed his findings in a New York Times article, carried out scans on his own dog's brain to achieve the results. The professor, from Emory University, Atlanta, had to give his pet terrier Callie the scans without anaesthetic to keep her still. So with the help of his friend, dog trainer Mark Spivak, he taught her to go into an MRI scanner he built in his living room, place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest then hold still for up to 30 seconds.After months of trial and error, he built up a series of MRI scans. | |
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Erika Check Hayden
Nature 2013-10-02 11:12:00
Businesses and academic researchers among those affected by ongoing US government shutdown. Tuesday 1 October should have been an exciting day for David Johnson. The biotech chief executive planned to withdraw some of the cash from a US$1.2-million small business grant that his firm, GigaGen in San Francisco, California, had been awarded just days before by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). But Johnson was not able to access the money, nor may he be able to until the deeply divided US Congress agrees on a plan to fund government operations for the fiscal year that began on 1 October. In the meantime, the US government has shut down - a dramatic development that is beginning to hamper and halt the work of academic and private-sector researchers, as well as scientists employed by federal agencies. "The knock-on effects - undermining confidence in public funding of research and ceding scientific priority to other nations - are hugely deleterious," says Ian Holmes, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. | |
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William Raillant-Clark
The unique genomic signature could serve as a research model for founding events.University of Montreal 2013-10-08 10:29:00 This news release is available in French. Researchers at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center and University of Montreal have discovered that the genomic signature inherited by today's 6 million French Canadians from the first 8,500 French settlers who colonized New France some 400 years ago has gone through an unparalleled change in human history, in a remarkably short timescale. This unique signature could serve as an ideal model to study the effect of demographic processes on human genetic diversity, including the identification of possibly damaging mutations associated with population-specific diseases. Until now, changes in the relative proportion of rare mutations, that could be both detrimental and adaptive, had only been shown over relatively long timescales, by comparing African and European populations. According to Dr. Alan Hodgkinson, the co-first author of an article published online in PLOS Genetics recently and a postdoctoral fellow, "through this first in-depth genomic analysis of more than a hundred French Canadians, we have been surprised to find that in less than 20 generations, the distribution and relative proportion of rare, potentially damaging variants have changed more than we anticipated." |
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Rebecca Taylor
LifeNews 2013-10-07 17:00:00
In the last year there has been a push in both the United Kingdom and the United States for permission to create children with three genetic parents. This technique, often called mitochondrial replacement (MR), is presented as a simple switching out the mitochondria in the eggs of women with mitochondrial disease. We inherit all of our mitochondria from our mother, so a woman with mitochondrial disease cannot help but pass that onto her offspring. In reality, the technique is far from simple. The nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of the woman with mitochrondrial disease. This creates a genetically-engineered egg where the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the cytoplasm of the egg is from the donor and the nuclear DNA, the chromosomes we all learned about in biology, is from the woman with the mitochondrial disease. The embryos created with IVF using these genetically-engineered eggs have the nuclear DNA of a woman and a man, like all other embryos, but would also have the mitochondrial DNA of the woman who donated the egg. These children would have the genetic material from three individuals. In addition, these genetically-engineered children, well at least the girls, could not help but pass this engineering onto their offspring. This is a modification that would affect generations. | |
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| Earth Changes |
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Chet Brokaw
Associated Press 2013-10-07 19:00:00
Pierre - A record-breaking storm that dumped 4 feet of snow in parts of western South Dakota left ranchers dealing with heavy losses, in some cases perhaps up to half their herds, as they assess how many of their cattle died during the unseasonably early blizzard. Meanwhile, utility companies were working to restore power to tens of thousands of people still without electricity Monday after the weekend storm that was part of a powerful weather system that also buried parts of Wyoming and Colorado with snow and produced destructive tornadoes in Nebraska and Iowa. At least four deaths were attributed to the weather, including a South Dakota man who collapsed while cleaning snow off his roof. Gary Cammack, who ranches on the prairie near Union Center about 40 miles northeast of the Black Hills, said he lost about 70 cows and some calves, about 15 percent of his herd. A calf would normally sell for $1,000, while a mature cow would bring $1,500 or more, he said. "It's bad. It's really bad. I'm the eternal optimist and this is really bad," Cammack said. "The livestock loss is just catastrophic. ... It's pretty unbelievable." Cammack said cattle were soaked by 12 hours of rain early in the storm, so many were unable to survive an additional 48 hours of snow and winds up to 60 mph. "It's the worst early season snowstorm I've seen in my lifetime," said Cammack, 60. | |
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WorldNetDaily
2013-10-06 21:54:00
Far from being the final word on climate change, last week's United Nations report suggesting near certainty that human activity is causing a rise in Earth's temperatures is actually further proof that the conventional wisdom is dead wrong and the Earth is cooling right on schedule, according to one of the leading scientists who is skeptical of the climate-change premise. Last week, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reported it was 95 percent certain that climate change was the result of human activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels that emit "greenhouse gases." "That's the result that they get when you premeditate your science," said Dr. Tim Ball, former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. "When you set out to establish a certain scientific outcome and you program your computers to do that, you shouldn't be surprised if that's the result you get. The problem is what they're getting out of their computers is not fitting with what's actually happening. Of course, that's been the problem with the IPCC all along." Ball told WND the deception of the IPCC and its allies can be seen in how the reports are released, with the policy statement drawing headlines while the scientific information comes later and is largely ignored. "(The summary for policymakers) is a document written to scare to public and scare the politicians into providing more funding for their own research and their own political agenda," he said. "The actual science report, which it supposedly is based on isn't going to be released right away. They've always done it his way because the summary for policymakers completely disagrees with what the science report is saying. They know that the media and the public are not going to read the science report. And they also know that if any of them get into it, they won't understand it anyway." | |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Associated Press
2013-10-08 16:55:00
It's long been known that America's school kids haven't measured well compared with international peers. Now, there's a new twist: Adults don't either. In math, reading and problem-solving using technology - all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength - American adults scored below the international average on a global test, according to results released Tuesday. Adults in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland and multiple other countries scored significantly higher than the United States in all three areas on the test. Beyond basic reading and math, respondents were tested on activities such as calculating mileage reimbursement due to a salesman, sorting email and comparing food expiration dates on grocery store tags. | |
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Sarah Zhang
Treatment halts recurrence of Clostridium difficile bacteria, but a commercial pill is still far off.Nature 2013-10-07 11:19:00
Patients with a stubborn, debilitating bacterial infection may soon be treated with pills full of microbes derived from human faeces. Clostridium difficile is a bacterial infection that causes diarrhoea and fever in around half a million people in the United States each year, and is linked to the death of some 14,000 US citizens annually. Some physicians now treat recurrent C. difficile infections with faecal transplants, delivering donor faeces filled with healthy microbes via enemas, colonoscopies or nasal tubes that run directly to the gut. But capsules containing the same donor bacteria are also effective at giving these 'gut microbiome transplants', according to results presented on 3 October at a meeting in San Francisco, California. Thomas Louie, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, treated 31 patients with the bacterial pills, curing all but one. Because the pills are less invasive than other techniques for treating the disease, they could make gut microbiome transplants available to more patients - including those who, for medical reasons, cannot tolerate an enema or tube from the nose to the small intestine. Louie had initially created the capsules when treating such a patient. | |
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N.L. Swanson
The endocrine disrupting properties of glyphosate can lead to neurological disorders(learning disabilities (LD), attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), autism, dementia,Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder). Those most susceptible are children and the elderly.Farm Wars 2013-10-08 10:01:00
Glyphosate was first marketed in 1976 and its use has exploded since the advent of glyphosateresistant, genetically engineered (GE) crops in 1995. The herbicide-resistant GE crops absorb glyphosate through direct application and from the soil and it cannot be washed off. It is in the food. Glyphosate has also been found in rivers, streams, air and rain. The thyroid is an endocrine organ that secretes the thyroid hormone. Thyroid dysfunction has been identified with mood disorders. Depression is frequently associated with low levels of thyroid hormone (hypothyroidism), while mood elevation is often associated with high levels of thyroid hormone (hyperthyroidism). An endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC) can cause erratic behavior. Recent studies have shown links between food additives andneurotoxicity in cells and hyperactive behavior in children. Incidents have been reported of laboratory rats and farm animals exhibiting uncharacteristic aggressive and anti-social behavior on being fed a diet consisting of GMO soy or corn. Many scientific studies have shown links between thyroid disruption and neurological diseases. "Thyroid hormones are critical for development of the fetal and neonatal brain, as well as for many other aspects of pregnancy and fetal growth. Hypothyroidism in either the mother or fetus frequently results in fetal disease; in humans, this includes a high incidence of mental retardation. ... numerous studies with rats, sheep and humans have reinforced this concept..." According to de Cock et al, "Perinatal exposure to EDCs appears to be associated with the occurrence of ASD [autism spectrum disorder] as well as ADHD. Disruption of thyroid hormone function ... may offer an explanation for the observed relations...." MacSweeney et al. report, "that the mothers of 104 schizophrenic patients had: (1) a significantly higher incidence of thyroid disease than a carefully matched control group; (2) significantly more abortions, still-births and greater infant mortality. The findings and possible relevance of thyroid disease to schizophrenia are discussed." Strong correlation was shown between cancer of the thyroid and glyphosate use on corn and soy crops and that thyroid cancer affects women more than men. It seems that women are more sensitive to thyroid disruption. | |
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Bill Moyers
Moyers & Company 2013-10-04 00:00:00
Wendell Berry, a quiet and humble man, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. He urges immediate action as he mourns how America has turned its back on the land and rejected Jeffersonian principles of respect for the environment and sustainable agriculture. Berry warns, "People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us." In a rare television interview, this visionary, author, and farmer discusses a sensible, but no-compromise plan to save the Earth. | |
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Michelle Castillo
CBS News 2013-10-07 22:11:00
Scientists took a close look at the chicken nugget and discovered what some may have suspected: it's not full of what we might think of as meat. A study published online in September in the American Journal of Medicine -- cleverly titled "The Autopsy of Chicken Nuggets Reads 'Chicken Little'" - revealed that two nuggets from fast food chains in Jackson, Miss. contained only about half of what we would consider chicken meat. "We all know white chicken meat to be one of the best sources of lean protein available and encourage our patients to eat it," lead author Dr. Richard D. deShazo of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, said to Reuters. "What has happened is that some companies have chosen to use an artificial mixture of chicken parts rather than low-fat chicken white meat, batter it up and fry it and still call it chicken." For the research, nuggets were preserved, dissected and stained before they were examined under a microscope. Nugget number one was about 50 percent muscle tissue such as from the breast or thigh, which is what most people think of when they think of chicken meat. The rest of it was made from fat, blood vessels and nerves, specifically the cells that line the skin and internal organs of the chicken. | |
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| Science of the Spirit |
In the 1970s, Michael Crichton wrote a book called The Terminal Man, about a man with a chip in his brain who becomes addicted to rage and violence. A few experiments done in the 1990s suggest that we actually can get addicted to anger, and to venting that anger in violent ways. In 1972, Michael Crichton published The Terminal Man. In it, a man with a particular form of epilepsy is finally getting treatment. Whenever he is about to have a seizure, electrodes in his brain will stimulate his pleasure centers and, hopefully, ease him out of the seizure behavior. The "seizure behavior" is extreme violence executed with extraordinary strength. The chip is implanted. It works. And all the people around this man quickly learn that giving someone a mind-cookie every time they are about to have a violent attack is not a good idea. The pleasure at the onset of every violent episode causes the man to commit more and more acts of violence. | |
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Tia Ghose
LiveScience 2013-10-08 11:00:00
What makes people fall in love with one person and not another? Philosophers, social scientists and poets have tried to answer that question since time immemorial. The answer may have a lot to do with brain chemistry, said Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, on Sept. 28 at the Being Human conference, a daylong event focused on the science and mystery of the human experience. Several brain chemicals, including dopamine and testosterone, play a role in a person's drive toward romance, sex and other rewards, Fisher said. The specific balance of these chemicals in people's brains could shape their personalities and, in turn, the types of people they are drawn to, Fisher said. Sometimes, that means birds of a feather flock together, whereas for others, opposites attract. Love addiction In past research, Fisher found that the brains of the madly in love look markedly different from the brains of those who are not in love. "Romantic love is akin to an addiction," Fisher said. For instance, two areas of the brain - the ventral tegmental area, a "dopamine factory" associated with craving and obsession, and the nucleus accumbens, which is strongly associated with addiction - are overactive in those who are love struck, she said. | |
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Jim Barlow
University of Oregon 2013-10-08 10:40:00
Research led by University of Oregon professor unveils a potential neurobiological trigger. Parents who physically abuse their children appear to have a physiological response that subsequently triggers more harsh parenting when they attempt parenting in warm, positive ways, according to new research. Reporting in the quarterly journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, a five-member team, led by Elizabeth A. Skowron, a professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology and Human Services in the University of Oregon College of Education, documented connections between the nervous system's ability to calm heart rate -- via electrocardiogram (ECG) measures of parasympathetic activation -- and the type of parenting mothers displayed during a laboratory interaction with their preschool child. Studies of child maltreatment have consistently found that parents who physically abuse their children tend to parent in more hostile, critical and controlling ways. Skowron's team appears to have found evidence of a physiological basis for patterns of aversive parenting -- the use of hostile actions such as grabbing an arm or hand or using negative verbal cues in guiding a child's behavior -- in a sample of families involved with Child Protective Services. For the experiment, mothers and children were monitored to record changes in heart rate while playing together in the lab. Parenting behavior was scored to capture positive parenting and strict, hostile control using a standard coding system. | |
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Daniel Goleman
The New York Times 2013-10-08 10:29:00
Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them. These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less - a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States. A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker. Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy. Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status - and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down. | |
Comment: But no amount of social contact will help certain people in power regain their empathy and compassion. For more information see:
Moral Endo-skeletons and Exo-skeletons: A Perspective on America's Cultural Divide and Current Crisis Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes | |
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Anna Mikulak
Brain training games, apps, and websites are popular and it's not hard to see why - who wouldn't want to give their mental abilities a boost? New research suggests that brain training programs might strengthen your ability to hold information in mind, but they won't bring any benefits to the kind of intelligence that helps you reason and solve problems.Association for Psychological Science 2013-10-08 10:21:00 The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "It is hard to spend any time on the web and not see an ad for a website that promises to train your brain, fix your attention, and increase your IQ," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Randall Engle of Georgia Institute of Technology. "These claims are particularly attractive to parents of children who are struggling in school." According to Engle, the claims are based on evidence that shows a strong correlation between working memory capacity (WMC) and general fluid intelligence. Working memory capacity refers to our ability to keep information either in mind or quickly retrievable, particularly in the presence of distraction. General fluid intelligence is the ability to infer relationships, do complex reasoning, and solve novel problems. The correlation between WMC and fluid intelligence has led some to surmise that increasing WMC should lead to an increase in both fluid intelligence, but "this assumes that the two constructs are the same thing, or that WMC is the basis for fluid intelligence," Engle notes. |
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The University of California
Watch Clayton Critcher talk about his research.2013-10-08 09:46:00 Most know that hiding something from others can cause internal angst. New research suggests the consequences can go far beyond emotional strife and that being forced to keep information concealed, such as one's sexual orientation, disrupts the concealer's basic skills and abilities, including intellectual acuity, physical strength, and interpersonal grace - skills critical to workplace success. "With no federal protection for gays and lesbians in the work place, our work suggests that the wisdom of non-discrimination laws should be debated not merely through a moral lens, but with an appreciation for the loss of economic productivity that such vulnerabilities produce," says Clayton R. Critcher, assistant professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Critcher, a member of the Haas Marketing Group, conducts research on consumer behavior and social psychology, including questions of self and identity. Critcher's paper, "The Cost of Keeping it Hidden: Decomposing Concealment Reveals What Makes it Depleting," forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Generaland co-authored with Melissa J. Ferguson of Cornell University, details multiple negative consequences of concealment. The findings, says Critcher, stem from the difficulty of having to constantly monitor one's speech for secret-revealing content that needs to be edited out. |
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Daniel Goleman
Time Ideas 2013-10-07 09:55:00
By now, we've all heard about the famous marshmallow test in which 4-year-olds are toldthey can either have the juicy one in front of them now, or two later. The 40-year-old experiment, which has been replicated using a variety of enticements, purports to prove that children who can delay gratification will meet with the most success in life. But fighting off impulses is just a one part of a much broader and more predictive mental skill, one that scientists call "cognitive control," or the ability to manage your attention. Cognitive control plays a central role in mental skills ranging from plain concentration and focus (on your homework, not that text from your BFF) to calming down after you get upset (say, when you finally read that text). A study published in 2011 tracked 1,000 children in New Zealand after rigorously testing them in elementary school for cognitive control. By their early 30s, their ability to manage attention predicted their financial success and their health better than did their IQ or the wealth of their family of origin. The brain's prefrontal circuitry for managing attention develops from birth onward into the 20s. Some children naturally have more cognitive control than others, and in all kids this essential skill is being compromised by the usual suspects: smartphones, TV, etc. But there are many ways that adults can help kids learn better cognitive control. For toddlers, playing games like Simon Says or musical chairs, where they win by playing close attention, works this mental muscle. Reading a story, or any activity that requires sustained attention, does the same. | |
Comment: Visit Éiriú Eolas for a comprehensive program on breathing exercises and cognitive enhancement.
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Cherrill Hicks
The Daily Telegraph, National Post Wire Services 2013-10-07 17:04:00
In his riveting tale of how psychiatrists "medicalize" human suffering, Gary Greenberg recounts that, in 1850, a physician called Samuel Cartwright reported a new disease in the highly respected New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. Cartwright named it drapetomania, from the ancient Greek drapetes for a runaway slave; in other words, here was a disease that "caused Negroes to run away." It had one primary diagnostic symptom - "absconding from service" - and a few secondary ones, including "sulkiness and dissatisfaction just prior to flight." Drapetomania was, of course, consigned to the dustbin of medical history. It never made it into the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the leading authority on mental health diagnosis and research. But, Greenberg suggests in his scathing critique of the DSM, it might well have done - had the manual existed at the time. After all, he notes, homosexuality was listed as a "sociopathic personality disorder" when the DSM was first published in 1952, and remained so until 1973. "Doctors were paid to treat it, scientists to search for its causes and cures," he writes inThe Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. "Gay people themselves underwent countless therapies including electric shocks, years on the couch, behaviour modification and surrogate sex." Greenberg, 56, is a U.S. psychotherapist of 30 years' experience and a prolific writer on mental illness (including his own depression after the collapse of his first marriage). But the target of his latest book is the DSM itself, the so-called "psychiatrist's bible," which aims to provide a definitive list of all mental health conditions, along with their diagnostic criteria. | |
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Chris Chambers
The Guardian, UK 2013-10-07 21:40:00
About five years ago, not long after I started up my research group at Cardiff University, something rather strange happened. One morning I came down to my lab to find the door wide open and a suited man standing in the middle of the room, peering around and scribbling on a clipboard. He told me he worked for a private defence firm who were interested in applications of my research on human brain stimulation. He also said there was funding available for joint research projects. We spoke for a couple of minutes before I made it clear I wasn't interested in that sort of collaboration. Thinking about it afterward, something about the encounter chilled me. It wasn't the fact that this person had gained access to the lab seemingly unannounced, and it wasn't even the sense of entitlement that seemed to exude from the guy, as though he was standing in his lab not mine. What bothered me was the realisation that the work I do operates anywhere near the line where a military firm might find it useful. My opinion at the time - still unchanged - was that I would sooner quit science than get into bed with the profiteering wing of those whose raison d'être is foreign intervention and invasion. Five years later, brain stimulation research has moved far and fast. A fascinating new issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience includes a timely review on the various ways brain stimulation can enhance thought and behaviour - with special consideration of applications in the security services and military. Different forms of neurostimulation in humans have now been shown to boost our ability to learn and perform motor actions, to pay attention to events in the environment, to recall information in memory, and to exercise self-control. At the same time, evidence is mounting for more complex effects on cognition. For instance, stimulation of the human prefrontal cortex can enhance or inhibit our tendency to lie, improve our ability to lie successfully, and can encourage us to comply with social norms that carry a punishment for disobedience. | |
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Shaunacy Ferro
PopSci 2013-10-07 16:00:00
Why are political extremists so hard to argue with? Because they're just so darn sure that their views are the most winningest of them all. As perhaps evidenced by our current state of government, extremists aren't really into compromise. The underlying reason may be that they believe their beliefs are vastly superior to the views of others, according to a new study in Physiological Science. The study, which implicated extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, analyzed the extent to which being extremely conservative or extremely liberal correlated with feelings of belief superiority. Belief superiority doesn't just mean you think your opinions are correct, it means also believing it's the only valid opinion, and that all other opinions or attitudes are inferior to yours. "They don't just take a side, they actually believe that everyone who disagrees with that view must be wrong," lead author Kaitlyn Toner explained. Toner and her colleagues from Duke University looked at political opinions asserted by 527 Americans recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk system. The participants completed a series of online questionnaires about their views on polemical political issues like health care, illegal immigration, abortion, affirmative action and income taxes. They indicated both their attitude on the subject and how correct they believed their belief was in comparison to everyone else's. | |
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| High Strangeness |
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Nicole Fabian-Weber
The Stir 2013-10-07 23:23:00
When I first read the headline "Physician Claims She's Communicating With Her Son's Spirit," I kind of rolled my eyes. Okay, I didn't kind of, I totally did. I tend to err on the side of skepticism when it comes to postmortem communication. But after watching an interview with Dr. Elisa Medhus, who claims she's in frequent communication with her late son -- and we're not talking doors randomly slamming shut kind of communication here, we're talking serious communication -- I may be a bit of a believer. Not a huge believer, but a believer. According to Medhus, three days after her son Erik took his own life, he appeared before her husband to tell him he was okay. As she tells it, Erik, who was standing near his truck, said to his father, "Papa? This is how I felt before ..." and leaned in, exuding a "horrible sadness." He then backed away and said, "This is how I feel now ..." and, again, leaned in, but this time, radiated "a euphoria." Since then, Erik has communicated with his parents many times, as well as Elisa's father, who's "an atheist." | |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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