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Joe Quinn
Sott.net 2014-10-27 21:35:00
As Russia continues to assert itself and lay claim to its rightful place as a leading global power, Western governments and their media whores, in a desperate attempt to preserve their faltering hegemony, are resorting to increasingly outrageous anti-Russian stunts and manipulations that surpass even the worst propaganda of the Cold War era. The most recent episode in the ongoing absurd anti-Russian theater occurred 10 days ago when the Swedish Svenska Dagbladet paper declared that the Swedish military had "intercepted a distress call in Russian on a radio frequency reportedly used by Russia for emergency calls" off the Swedish coast. Citing unnamed "sources" the newspaper claimed that the call was "encrypted radio traffic between a location outside of Stockholm and Russia's Baltic enclave, Kaliningrad" and that it "indicated a damaged Russian submarine." | |
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Joe Quinn
Sott.net 2014-10-25 22:53:00
At what point do we start getting suspicious? Three weeks ago, on October 3rd, Canadian PM Stephen Harper's Conservative party narrowly passed a motion to "launch combat missions" in Iraq alongside other Western warmongering nations and their clients in the Middle East. The motion was passed (157 for to134 against) despite stiff opposition from the NDP and Liberal opposition parties and a Canadian public traditionally averse to any kind of foreign military campaigns. On the day of the vote, an online poll showed almost 60% of respondents were against Canada joining the 'coalition'. NDP opposition leader Tom Mulcair said that the Harper government was "plunging Canada into a prolonged war without a credible plan" and that bombing ISIS "will only create more recruits for ISIS and can, in fact, prove to be disastrously counterproductive". On Monday, former prime minister Jean Chretien again criticized Canada's military involvement in Iraq saying that it was "just the latest in a long history of interventions by western countries that have left "scars" on the Middle East" and that "Canada should be putting its emphasis on humanitarian assistance for the refugees in the region." The pusillanimous PM Harper responded by reading a gospel from the Neocon book of public scaremongering: In urging all parliament members to support the motion, Harper admitted that involving Canada in another war was not only unpopular but politically risky in the run up to next year's general election. Then again, given the widespread allegations of vote fraud leveled against Harper's Conservative party during the last general election, Harper may not have much to worry about.
Two days ago, having finally emerged from the broom closet into which he bolted during the gunfirein the Parliament building, Harper responded to the two "terror attacks" saying that the events were "a grim reminder that Canada is not immune to the types of terrorist attacks we have seen elsewhere around the world, and that the attack(s) would only strengthen Canada's response to terrorist organizations". Harper also pledged to speed up a plan already under way to bolster Canadian laws and police powers in the areas of "surveillance, detention and arrest. We will not be intimidated. Canada will never be intimidated." But of course, as a result of two very well timed 'terror attacks', Canada, or rather Canada's public, its military and its political class, have been intimidated (or rather manipulated) into backing down in the face of Harper's warmongering and becoming accomplices in more corporate war-for-profit and the destruction of their civil liberties. | ||
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RT
2014-10-26 22:58:00
Vladimir Putin criticized the West for "sawing at branches" with sanctions against Russia and releasing a "genie in a bottle" with color revolutions. RT looks at the Russian President's best quotes from his speech in Sochi.
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The President of CRIF, France's largest Jewish Lobby that specializes in harassing and terrorizing the French political elite was indicted on Monday for defamation. Roger Cukierman was cited for remarks he made in an interview on Europe 1 in which he called Dieudonne Mbla Mbla, - France's No 1 comedian, a "professional anti-Semite." On Monday, the elder Zionist announced the indictment himself on CRIF's website. "So I am being indicted for having stated on Europe 1 that Dieudonne is a professional anti-Semite. Isn't that funny? For once, Dieudonne is actually comical." It seems as if the people who imposed 'correctness' on the rest of us, may have to start policing their own language. This may be a positive development. Watch Gilad on Dieudonne and the quenelle:
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David Stockman
Contra Corner 2014-10-24 19:56:00
The following is an introduction to the Polish edition of The Great Deformation:The Corruption Of Capitalism In America. By Fijorr Publishing, 2014. "From Adam Smith to David Stockman" By Jerzy Strzelecki There is no doubt that The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David Stockman, the Polish translation of which has been made available to the Polish reader by Fijorr Publishing, is a real chef's d'oeuvre, a magnum opus. There should also be no doubt that its importance, with more and more people having an opportunity to read it, will grow in time, similar to the quality of wine resting in oak barrels. Although Paul Krugman, the foremost representative of Keynesian doctrines in the United States, in his review of Stockman's book in the New York Times called it "an old man's rant" - immediately contributing to a big leap of the book on the NYT bestsellers list - most of other reviews of The Great Deformation have been much more positive, if not laudatory. Michael Levin, for example, on the pages of Huff Post Books called The Great Deformation "the most important book about the American economy and the world economy published in the last 50 years", adding that it should become "required reading" and "a requirement for voting." The Washington Post, although critical, and calling Stockman America's "serial apostate", does not question, however, that what he wrote, in his diagnosis of the state of the nation, is an excellent description of "the burdens imposed on 'our children and grandchildren' we were warned about by our parents and grandparents." Lew Rockwell, spiritus movens of the American chapter of the Austrian School, called Stockman's book "the book we have been waiting for and we owe David Stockman a great debt." The most laudatory review of The Great Deformation, however, may be found on the Mergers & Inquisitions web portal which in the very title of an analysis of the book authored by the former head of Reagan's Office of Management and Budget called it "the most important book on economics since The Wealth of Nations." | |
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Kurt Nimmo
Global Research 2014-10-21 21:49:00
Investigative journalist and former NSA contractor Wayne Madsen told Press TV on Monday the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa may be a resurfacing of an earlier infection linked to the CIA. "We see a year [1976] when the US was violating a Senate law that forbid the US from engaging in the Angolan Civil War and we saw Zaire being used as a bait for the CIA and then we saw the outbreak of Ebola in Zaire. The same year that George H. W. Bush was the director of the CIA," Madsen said. "In 1980 we saw the outbreak of HIV in Zaire and Angola where the CIA was operating," he said. "I think what we need to see is an investigation of how intense the CIA biological warfare program was in Zaire and Angola between 1976 and 1980, and what has hit in Sierra Leon and other countries is the Zaire strain of Ebola." Madsen said the militarization of the U.S. Ebola effort in West Africa is suspicious. "It's very peculiar that the US is sending the military in when obviously health workers, doctors, and other health care professionals are needed," he said. CIA and U.S. military involvement in the use of biological pathogens as weapons is well documented. In the 1970s, evidence was revealed by the Church Committee. | |
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Roy Eidelson and Trudy Bond
Counterpunch 2014-10-14 12:29:00
New information may soon be revealed by the Senate Intelligence Committee's yet-to-be-releasedreport on the CIA's post-9/11 abusive and torturous detention and interrogation operations. But what already has been clear for a long time - through reports from journalists, independent task forces, congressional investigations, and otherdocuments - is that psychologists and other health professionals were directly involved in brutalizing "war on terror" prisoners in U.S. custody. Of particular note, contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen have been identified as the architects of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques," which included waterboarding, stress positions, exposure to extreme cold, sensory and sleep deprivation, and isolation. | |
Comment: Torture occurs with increasing scope in a pathocracy. From the article,"Ex-CIA officer: Torture great way to get false confessions
Torture goes hand in hand with terror - they are the same weapons that are used to push through pathological policies that benefit only the bloated and greedy minorities in power:
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RT
The Israeli government has approved plans to build over 1,000 new settler homes in East Jerusalem. It will expand two existing Israeli settlements on part of the territories seized in 1967.2014-10-27 21:34:00 An official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office declined to comment on the possible political and diplomatic impact. He said on Monday that "The government has decided to advance the planning of more than 1,000 units in Jerusalem - roughly 400 in Har Homa and about 600 in Ramat Shlomo," as cited by Reuters. He also said that plans would be "advanced for infrastructure projects in the West Bank that will include roads for the Palestinians." It is a sidestep by Netanyahu's office, as the ultranationalist Jewish Home party and its leader Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, has been pressing the Prime Minister to call for 2,000 new building tenders.
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Comment: The new houses are planned as an expansion of already existing settlements in "territories seized". Lets look at the definition of the word seize:
In other words, they are planning an expansion in a piece of land that was stolen by force.
Then again, with the exception of a few properties that were purchased and others that already belonged to the local Jews, almost all of what is now called Israel was at some point or another taken by force from the Palestinians, so this does not come as a surprise. | |
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Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report 2014-10-22 15:09:00
The two United Nations Special Rapporteurs have seen human rights violations around the world, but Detroit's massive water shut-offs are uniquely upsetting. "We were deeply disturbed to observe the indignity people have faced and continue to live with in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and in a city that was a symbol of America's prosperity," said Catarina de Albuquerque and Leilani Farha, in a joint statement. An "unprecedented" 27,000 households have been disconnected from the pipes that sustain life and dignity - most of them Black and poor, according to the rapporteurs' observations, although the city doesn't bother to maintain records on the race and income of those it casts into purgatory. The water department is deliberately blind to the shut-offs' "disproportionate impact on low-income African Americans." Detroit, an 82 percent Black city, run for four decades by Black mayors and Black city councils, and presided over for the past year and a half by a Black state-appointed emergency financial manager, may well be in violation of the United Nations Convention on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, "which explicitly prohibits and calls for the elimination of racial discrimination in relation to several human rights directly affected by water disconnections, including the right to housing and the right to public health," wrote Albuquerque and Farha. The poor are not asking for a free ride, said Albuquerque. "In the three days we were here, nobody asked us for free water. People want to pay their bills within their possibilities...they want affordable and fair bills." However, the water department is determined to solve its financial problems - and change the city's demographics - by ejecting the poor from the grid. Albuquerque was compelled to remind Detroit that the city's bankruptcy drama "doesn't exempt it from human rights obligations." | |
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William Engdahl
Boiling Frogs Post 2014-10-24 00:00:00
The Kerry-Abdullah Secret Deal & An Oil-Gas Pipeline War The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called IS. It involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabia flooding the world market with cheap oil. Details were concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Saudi King. The unintended consequence will be to push Russia even faster to turn east to China and Eurasia. One of the weirdest anomalies of the recent NATO bombing campaign, allegedly against the ISIS or IS or ISIL or Daash, depending on your preference, is the fact that with major war raging in the world's richest oil region, the price of crude oil has been dropping, dramatically so. Since June when ISIS suddenly captured the oil-rich region of Iraq around Mosul and Kirkuk, the benchmark Brent price of crude oil dropped some 20% from $112 to about $88. World daily demand for oil has not dropped by 20% however. Chinese oil demand has not fallen 20%, nor has US domestic shale oil stock risen by 21%. What has happened is that the long-time US ally inside OPEC, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been flooding the market with deeply discounted oil, triggering a price war within OPEC, with Iran following suit and panic-selling short in oil futures markets. The Saudis are targeting sales to Asia for the discounts and in particular, its major Asian customer, China, where it is reportedly offering its crude for a mere $50 to $60 a barrel rather than the earlier price of around $100.1 That Saudi financial discounting operation in turn is by all appearance being coordinated with a US Treasury financial warfare operation, via its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in cooperation with a handful of inside players on Wall Street who control oil derivatives trading. The result is a market panic that is gaining momentum daily. China is quite happy to buy the cheap oil, but her close allies, Russia and Iran, are being hit severely. | |
Comment: On a related point, isn't it incredible that for all of Israel's bluster about Islamic extremism and terrorism that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has done nothing whatsoever in the way of speaking out about ISIS, or employing its world-renowned air force in the service of eradicating it? Nor, for that matter, has it once spoken out against the horrific rise of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine. It's as if Israel stands to benefit from these pathologically contrived ' war theaters'.
Hmmm.... | |
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RT
2014-10-27 17:34:00
Will the White House soon host another President Bush? According to family members, Jeb Bush - a son of former president George H.W. Bush and the brother of the current president's predecessor, George W. Bush - is eying the oval office. With the 2016 presidential election now nearly just two years away, potential candidates are becoming increasingly pressured to announce once and for all if they're willing to throw their hat into the race. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush has long been rumored to be considering a run in 2016 under the Republican Party ticket which, if successful, would make him the third Bush to win a presidential election in 30 years. Now, two of his sons are lending credence to those rumors by telling the media that the odds are better than ever that Jeb Bush will run in 2016. "I think it's more than likely that he's giving this serious thought in moving forward ... that he'll run," son George P. Bush told ABC's This Week on Sunday. "No question," Jeb Bush Jr., another son of the former governor, added to the New York Times, "people are getting fired up about it - donors and people who have been around the political process for a while, people he's known in Tallahassee when he was governor. The family, we're geared up either way." Additionally, Jeb Jr. added to the Times for an article published on Sunday that his mother, Columba Bush, has given Jeb Sr. her go ahead to pursue the White House. And according to one "family insider" quoted anonymous by the Times' Peter Baker, George W. Bush - or "Bush 43," as he's often called to differentiate himself from his father, George H.W. Bush, or "Bush "41" - wants his brother Jeb to enter the race. "The one person who is really, really trying to get Jeb to run is George W.," the source told Baker. "He's talking it up all the time." "The family will be behind him 100 percent," George P. Bush, Jeb Bush's eldest son, added during the ABC News interview over the weekend. | |
Comment: It won't matter who is in the White House, the drums of war against "terrorism" and the middle class will keep on beating.
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Ron Holland
The Daily Bell 2014-10-24 16:49:00
I recently was in Vietnam and spent some time in prosperous, capitalist Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and toured the American War Museum. I believe there are a number of parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq War and that history could repeat itself now in Baghdad. Who can forget the former Vietnamese supporters of America being left behind as the last helicopter left the roof of the US embassy? Today, America still has the strongest military in the world but our manufacturing capacity and financial situation shows the US is on a downhill slide like earlier over-extended and bankrupt empires throughout world history. We've already watched the frightening incompetence of the Obama Administration and the CDC in dealing with the Ebola virus. One would have to be blind not to see the petrodollar deathwatch as Russia, China and the BRIC countries build new trading alternatives to avoid using the dollar world reserve currency when trading energy and other financial dealings. | |
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PressTV
2014-10-27 16:42:00
The ISIL Takfiri militants operating in Iraq have reportedly carried out a chemical attack on a residential area in the western part of the violence-stricken country. According to local media reports, the commander of the rapid intervention forces in Iraq's Anbar province, Shaaban Obaidi, said Sunday that the ISIL terrorists "fired seven shells filled with chlorine on the residential district" there. He added that no casualties have been reported as a result of the gas attack, as residents had left the buildings and some shells did not go off. Last week, Iraqi officials said the ISIL terror group used bombs with chlorine-filled cylinders during clashes in the town of Dhuluiya, located about 96 kilometers (60 miles) north of the capital, Baghdad, on September 15. They noted that some 40 Iraqi soldiers and Shia fighters were made ill and showed symptoms of chlorine poisoning such as coughing and vomiting. They were all treated in hospital and quickly recovered. The use of chlorine gas has raised grave concerns about future militant attacks in Iraq. There are also fears that Iraq's old chemical weapons stores could have fallen into ISIL's hands. | |
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Greg Hunter
USAWatchdog 2014-10-27 00:00:00
Financial analyst Andy Hoffman says the real global economy is in deep trouble, which is much to the chagrin of the Fed. Hoffman explains, "Recall last April, they started smashing gold and started with the 'taper' talk. The Fed figured by about this time, they'd be ready to start hiking rates. The fact is the global economy has collapsed. Our real economy has collapsed. Forget the fake PMI numbers or their ridiculous employment numbers. The economy of the world is getting worse and worse and worse. No matter how hard they try to say yes, there is a recovery and we are tapering. Interest rates keep falling and falling. There are plunging rates despite all their talk of recovery and tapering." Hoffman, who also has deep Wall Street experience, points to the recent sell-off in the stock market and the Fed's reaction. Hoffman contends, "The Dow Jones propaganda average fell a whopping 9% from its all-time highs. The Fed absolutely freaked out. Within minutes, they had the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) running it back up, and no less than six Fed Governors in the space of three days came out and called for extension of QE and extension of zero-percent-interest-rates (ZERP). That's how terrified they are, and remember, next week is when QE is supposed to end." | |
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RIA Novosti
2014-10-26 09:29:00
A team of RIA Novosti correspondents was barred Sunday from entering a polling station in Ukraine's embassy in Madrid, Spain over allegedly "biased reporting on the situation in Ukraine by Russian media." Two RIA Novosti journalists - a Russian and a Spanish citizens - were stopped from entering the station despite having all necessary documents. Local electoral committee's head Ivan Vovk said this decision had been made due to the Russian media's biased angle on the events in Ukraine, which is going through a devastating crisis. Comment: The junta in Kiev has been lying and distorting the truth from the start, and yet they have the nerve to talk about Russian media's biases. A military confrontation in Ukraine's two eastern provinces began in mid-April, after the Ukrainian government sent troops to the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk to suppress pro-independence uprisings against Kiev. Since then, media freedom watchdogs have been reporting numerous instances of abuse and violence against Russian and Western journalists at the hands of Ukrainian government forces, who accused the media of distorting the facts and destabilizing the situation in eastern Ukraine. | |
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PressTV
2014-04-11 14:55:00
The pro-Israel Canadian government is modifying the country's criminal code to ban any criticism of the Zionist regime for atrocities against Palestinians, an analyst says. In a column for Press TV website, Brandon Martinez has analyzed the proposed cyber-bullying law (Bill C-13) by the administration of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "The Zionist ruling clique of Canada, through their front-man Stephen Harper, is seeking to beef up the already-existing Orwellian 'hate propaganda' law, which has been primarily used to curtail criticism of Zionists and Israel," wrote Martinez.He said Canada's criminal code is to ban criticism or promotion of "hatred" against people distinguished by "national origin." "This means, say, if you condemn Israelis for their inhumane treatment of Palestinians, you could find yourself in court facing down the self-appointed thought police and commissars of political correctness," wrote Martinez.He singled out the case of German-Canadian publisher, Ernst Zundel, who has been facing court and jail due to his criticism of Zionists who are "the self-appointed architects of public discourse, the self-declared arbiters of truth and morality." The analyst said the Canadian police have refused to provide any protection to Zundel, whose Toronto home has been "torched by Zionist terrorists." | |
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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research 2014-10-25 02:45:00
Prime Minister Steven Harper and the Canadian federal government are using the shooting rampage on Parliament Hill as a justification for imposing surveillance and detainment measures that they were already implementing and going forward with. On October 22, 2014 a solitary gunman named Michael Zehaf-Bibeau (originally Michael Joseph Hall) from the city of Laval, Quebec went on a shooting spree in downtown Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Firstly, it was reported that there were shootings in the Rideau Centre which from the northern side of the Mackenzie King Bridge faces National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ), the nerve of Canada's Department of National Defence (DND). This proved to be false or wrong. The gunman had killed a reservist guard in front of the National War Memorial and then made his way northward to Parliament Hill. Secondly, it was reported that there were multiple gunmen. As a result all government employees were not allowed to enter or leave their respective buildings throughout the interprovincial National Capital Region, which includes the city of Gatineau. Although the police did the right thing in taking precautions to make sure that there were no other gunmen and declined to give explanations, the public was led to believe that there were multiple shooters. This justified the lockdown and suspension of mobility that took place for hours. | |
Comment: To learn more read Joe Quinn's article:
Ottawa 'Terror Attacks' Lucky Break for Harper and the Warmongers | |
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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research 2014-10-26 00:00:00
Is it a coincidence that the vulture funds are putting increasing pressure on Argentina as it prepares to develop the world's second largest shale gas reserves? Are the vultures instruments of foreign policy? Paranoia or insightfulness in Buenos Aires? Hours after the US Embassy in Buenos Aires issued a security warning to US citizens either already inside or traveling to the South American country, Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner accused the US of plotting to overthrow or kill her. Speaking during a television broadcast from the Casa de Gobierno on September 30, she explained that "if something happens to me, don't look to the Mideast, look north" to Washington, DC. She told the Argentine people not to believe anything that the US government was saying, even going as far as dismissing the ISIL/ISIS threat as a US bogeyman. More or less, at the United Nations she was already cautiously dismissive of the ISIL threats against her when she spoke on September 24. Now, however, President Kirchner connected the dots between the diplomatic situation with Washington and the ISIL threat towards her by stating that "when you see what has been coming out of diplomatic offices, they had better not come in here and try to sell some tall tale about ISIS trying to track me down so they can kill me." Instead of asking what led Fernandez de Kirchner to make such accusations against the US government, the question should be what has led to the deterioration of relations and diplomatic ties between Buenos Aires and Washington. | |
Comment: The US fully supports vulture capitalism and uses it as a means of economic blackmail to force countries to support the empire. The following books describe it well: Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins and The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
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David Edwards
The Raw Story 2014-10-27 21:39:00
Researchers said that over a dozen infant deaths in one Utah basin over the last year may be related to a recent increase in oil drilling. In a Sunday report, the Denver Post talked to scientists about the possibilities that the dead babies were "victims of air pollution fed by the nearly 12,000 oil and gas wells in one of the most energy-rich areas in the country." "I suspect it is real - that there is a relationship," University of Missouri School of Medicine researcher Susan Nagel, Ph.D, told the Post. "Scads of medical studies have concluded that air pollution can harm embryos. Drilling is a documented contributor to that pollution. It is a given that some of the harmful chemicals released in drilling, like benzene, toluene and xylenes, can cross the placental barrier and cause heart, brain and spinal defects," the paper points out | |
Comment: It has been well documented that fracking chemicals and air pollution from oil drilling have negative consequences on the health of populations and is disastrous for the environment, yet the vast sums of money generated by the industry enables it to buy off politicians and the EPA.
What fracking can do to your health The Perils of Fracking: Environmental and Health Risks Greater Than Claimed by Gas Industry Environmental impact of the petroleum industry | |
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Jewish Business News
2014-10-25 21:12:00
Thierry Leyne, the French-Israeli entrepreneur who last year started an investment firm with disgraced former International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, committed suicide on Thursday by jumping out of his Tel Aviv apartment, Le Figaro reported. He was 49. Last year, Leyne and Strauss-Kahn started the Paris-traded firm Leyne, Strauss-Kahn & Partners, after Kahn had bought a 20 percent stake to help develop the investment-banking franchise of Leyne's company, Luxembourg-based Anatevka SA. Leyne had taken Anatevka public in March 2013 before partnering with Strauss-Kahn. The new partnership was part of Strauss-Kahn's efforts to revive his career after he was charged in 2011 of criminal sex, attempted rape, sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment and the forcible touching of a chambermaid in a Manhattan hotel. Strauss-Kahn denied the charges, which were later dropped. He settled the maid's lawsuit in 2012. | |
Comment: Sure, nothing suspicious about this death, which happened just several hours beforeanother banker's suicide. And nothing strange about the fact, that Thierry Leyne was Strauss-Kahn's partner.
Wow, somebody sure has it in for DSK, first trumped-up rape charges, now this. "Honey Traps" and the Strauss-Kahn Affair: A Stealthy Coup d'état at the IMF? | |
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Richard Walker
American Free Press 2014-10-26 16:12:00
A growing exodus of young Israelis to Berlin has not only shocked Israel's far right leadership but has highlighted the growing disillusionment with Zionism among Israel's younger generation. As Israeli commentators noted, the trend would encourage the late Israeli leader, Yitzhak Rabin to turn in his grave. He once described those who fled Israel as a "cascade of wimps" and a "fallout of cowards." Ravit Hecht, a columnist with Israel's oldest daily newspaper, Ha'aretz, has blamed ultranationalists for the exodus, and there may well be substance to her claim. "Berlin is a lovely city, but it is sucking away all the forces that we desperately need here, especially now," she wrote. Of course, it's not Berlin that's doing the sucking, but Israel, in a different sense of the word. | |
Comment: They are right to see no future in an extremely ponerized society. Good on them for getting out while they still can. See also:
Israel: A cornered rat Israel's Jewish Exodus BBC Poll: Israel's global image plummets | |
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Police State USA
2014-10-27 19:59:00
Summerville - Fans were startled by the heavy presence of police officers, drone surveillance, and warrantless checkpoints upon entry at the local high school football game. The prison-like security at Summerville High School was called "the reality of the world we live in today." As students and fans filed into the homecoming football game on Friday, October 24th, 2014, they were forced to place their belongings in a bin for police examination, then walk through a metal detector. Stadium-goers were restricted from bringing certain items into the stands. "It is very scary to come here tonight," said Summerville resident said Ann Almers to WCIV. "It's such a change, I've been coming to the stadium for so many years. Now we have armed guards. I couldn't carry my purse, I forgot my phone. I'm a little out of sorts." Fans also were quick to notice the conspicuous presence of police officers mixed among the crowd and perched on the rooftops, surveillance drones whirring overhead, and even SWAT team members ready for action. | |
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Alanna Vagianos
The Huffington Post 2014-10-26 19:59:00
The number of American troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2012 was 6,488. The number of American women who were murdered by current or ex male partners during that time was 11,766. That's nearly double the amount of casualties lost during war. Women are much more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence with 85 percent of domestic abuse victims being women and 15 percent men. Too many women have been held captive by domestic violence -- whether through physical abuse, financial abuse, emotional abuse or a combination of all three. We are inundated with news stories about domestic violence, from athletes beating their significant others in public elevators or in their own homes to celebrities publicly abusing their girlfriends. This problem is not one that will go away quickly or quietly. As Domestic Violence Awareness Month comes to an end, discussions about intimate partner abuse and its horrible repercussions should not. In an attempt to illustrate the gravity of abuse all genders (but largely women) face in the U.S., we rounded up 30 statistics on domestic violence. Domestic violence is not a singular incident, it's an insidious problem deeply rooted in our culture -- and these numbers prove that. 3: The number of women murdered every day by a current or former male partner in the U.S. 38,028,000: The number of women who have experienced physical intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. | |
Comment: If you need help read How to Spot A Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved andWomen Who Love Psychopaths by Sandra Brown, M.A.
Also see our discussion on the Forum here. You can also listen to the SOTT editors' interview with Sandra Brown here. | |
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PressTV
2014-10-25 16:21:00
Jobless rate in France has hit an all-time high for September, with official statistics showing nearly 3.5 million people have claimed unemployment benefits, Press TV reports. According to figures released by the French Labor Ministry on Friday, unemployment has witnessed a 0.6-percent rise since last month, hitting a new record high of 3.43 million. The new figures came after a modest 0.3 rise in the European country's jobless rate in August. "Let's be honest, we are failing," French Labor Minister Francois Rebsamen told Le Parisien newspaper. France, Europe's second-biggest economy, is grappling with political and economic crises, which are seen as the worst since French President Francois Hollande took power in May 2012. | |
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Danielle Haynes
United Press International 2014-10-26 16:35:00
Larry McHale charged with animal cruelty for allegedly throwing a Chihuahua against a Starbucks window, breaking its leg. A Houston man was charged with animal cruelty after he allegedly threw a 4-pound Chihuahua at a Starbucks window. Witnesses said the man, Larry McHale, was causing a commotion around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday outside the Starbucks coffee shop, from which he had been banned the last three months. One witness said McHale yelled and smashed a bottle on the ground. "He harasses customers every time. He comes in and starts chaos," Starbucks manager Jasmine Hyder told KHOU-TV, Houston. He then allegedly picked up a Chihuahua and threw it against the restaurant's window. | |
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Danielle Haynes
United Press International 2014-10-26 17:25:00
Charges were pending for a man accused of shooting to death his 13-year-old neighbor in Gary, Indiana. A Gary, Ind., man allegedly shot his 13-year-old neighbor nine times because the boy laughed at him. Kobe Jones, 13, died Friday after he was shot multiple times while standing on his front porch, police said. A neighbor, whose name wasn't released, had gone door-to-door trying to find out information about a burglary at his home while he was away. Kobe allegedly laughed at the man's misfortune when the man came to his house. "I was told that my son was laughing and the guy shot him dead," Kobe's father, Kaunda Jones, said. The suspect and his girlfriend were observed leaving the scene after the shooting and they were both arrested. Charges were still pending for the couple, who remain in police custody. | |
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Julie Bindel
The Guardian 2014-10-25 04:38:00
Matthew Shepard's horrific death at the hands of redneck homophobes shocked America and changed its laws. Now a different truth is emerging, but does it matter? The horrific killing of Matthew Shepard in 1998 is widely seen as one of the worst anti-gay hate crimes in American history. Matthew was beaten by two assailants, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They pistol whipped him with a gun then tied him to a fence in freezing conditions and set fire to him before leaving him to die. The attack became a cause célèbre: it precipitated a national backlash against hyper-macho culture and tacit tolerance of homophobia. As a result of Matthew's death, many good things have happened for the gay community. The play The Laramie Project has toured the US and many other countries, telling Matthew's story and encouraging campaigns against bigotry. Politicians and celebrities pledged support and funding to combat anti-gay hate crime. The Shepard family have become campaigners for gay rights. Judy and Dennis Shepard run the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which funds educational programmes and an online community for teens to discuss sexual orientation and gender issues. There have been numerous documentaries, dramas, books and events based on the story. The men responsible for his death were convicted of first-degree murder and given two life sentences. They were not charged with a hate crime, as that wasn't possible under Wyoming's criminal law. But after lengthy wrangling in congress, President Obama finally signed the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009, a law which defined certain attacks motivated by victim identity as hate crimes. But the Matthew Shepard story is not yet finished. A new twist came last year with the publication of another book, this one by investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez, who has spent 13 years interviewing more than 100 people with a connection to the case. His conclusion, outlined in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, is that the grotesque murder was not a hate crime, but could instead be blamed on crystal meth, a drug that was flooding Denver and the surrounding area at the time of Matthew's death. This new theory has, understandably, caused a lot of anger. | |
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RT
2014-10-27 02:07:00
Amid wide concerns over US police brutality, militarization and indiscriminate use of force against suspects, a new technology has emerged that will enable law enforcement to track down when a bullet was fired from a police gun. The latest technological marvel developed and currently being tested by a Silicon Valley startup, Yardarm Technologies, is designed to keep track in real time and send a signal to the dispatchers when a gun is drawn from its holster and when it's fired. It can also track the trajectory of the shot as well as the location of the weapon.
"These events are transmitted in real-time to CAD or RTCC dashboards, allowing command to use this information to support officers in the field," the company says. Comment: Translation: They have the power to amend, delete any information to their benefit. The new technology is advertised and hailed as a life saver in situations when a police officer is in urgent need of backup but can't call for it, a situation dubbed the "worst nightmare" by those involved in testing of the scientific breakthrough. "That's the worst nightmare for any police officer in the field," Santa Cruz County Sheriff Phil Wowak told AP. Comment: The real nightmare is the police state we are living in and the murder of innocent people:
The technology relies on the Internet and requires an officer to carry a small device that the company says would fit in the handle of most police guns. A small sensor equivalent in weight to a bullet connects to the officer's smartphone using Bluetooth. | ||
Comment: Feel safe, yet? Another tactic that will be used against the real enemy in a Police State: the people.
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The Raw Story
2014-10-25 23:02:00
An American nurse published a scathing account of her treatment after being put in isolation in the United States following a stint caring for Ebola patients in West Africa, saying she was made to feel like "a criminal." Kaci Hickox was the first person to enter mandatory 21-day quarantine for medical staff returning to parts of the United States who may have had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa, the epicenter of the outbreak that has killed nearly 5,000 people. The new rules took effect in New York and New Jersey on Friday, the same day Hickox returned. "This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me," Hickox wrote in The Dallas Morning News, saying she was showing no symptoms when she arrived back in the United States. "I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy ofdisorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine." Hickox, who landed at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport after working with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Sierra Leone, will be monitored at a hospital for 21 days, the known incubation period of Ebola. Her account recalled the ordeal that began with her "grueling" two-day journey from Sierra Leone back to the United States. | |
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RT
2014-10-26 18:46:00
While many Americans fight for the government to increase the minimum wage across the country, one Silicon Valley company has now been penalized for paying some foreign employees dramatically lower wages. The fine was handed down by the US Department of Labor after it discovered that Electronics for Imaging (EFI) flew eight employees in from its office in Bangalore, India, and paid them the equivalent of $1.21 an hour, the San Jose Mercury News reported this week. The foreign employees were called in to help install computers for the Fremont, California-based company, which paid them in Indian rupees. Additionally, these employees worked extensive hours - up to 122 hours a week in some cases. They were employed inside of the United States last year from September 8 until December 21. "We are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior from employers," said Susana Blanco, district director of the US Labor Department, according to the Mercury News. | |
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Christopher Bodeen
AP 2014-10-25 04:43:00
A coal mine shaft collapsed in northwestern China, killing 16 miners, an official said Saturday, highlighting the persistence of safety problems in the industry despite a leveling off of demand. Another 11 miners were injured in the disaster, which struck just before midnight Friday in Tiechanggou township outside the Xinjiang regional capital of Urumqi. Thirty-three miners were in the shaft when the accident occurred, six of whom were brought out by rescuers, said an official with the State Administration of Work Safety. The official, speaking on routine condition of anonymity, said that all of the injured were in stable condition and that the cause of the cave-in was under investigation. State broadcaster CCTV showed footage of injured miners sitting up in their hospital beds and describing their experiences to a reporter. A man who answered the phone at the mine's offices said he could not comment, and calls to the Xinjiang regional safety administration rang unanswered. | |
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Rosamund Unwin
The Independent, UK 2014-10-26 19:35:00
Every year, one in eight greyhounds "disappears" at the end of its racing career, with some dogs being sold for research and dissection, a leading animal welfare charity claims. The League Against Cruel Sports (LACS) estimates that around 1,000 of the approximately 8,000 greyhounds retiring from racing annually are not rehomed and are unaccounted for. Although the industry's governing body, the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB), requires owners to register retirements and provide information on the fate of each dog, they are not obliged to provide any supporting evidence that a new home has been found. Some unwanted dogs are known to be returned to Ireland, where the majority were originally bred. A report to be published this week reveals that some unwanted greyhounds were sold to a university which slaughtered them and used them to teach anatomy to veterinary students. University College Dublin admitted buying 33 dogs last year, the report by the LACS and GREY2K USA, an American greyhound protection organisation. | |
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RT
2014-10-24 00:00:00
A California Highway Patrol officer has been accused of stealing nude photographs of a woman he pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence, and investigators recommend filing criminal charges against him. Court documents obtained by the Contra Costa Times show that investigators have learned Sean Harrington, a 35-year-old CHP officer and five-year veteran of the force, illegally forwarded various nude photographs to himself after gaining access to the young woman's phone. The investigator for the Contra Costa District Attorney is recommending that they bring felony computer theft charges against Harrington. The incident began earlier this year on August 29, when Harrington pulled over a 23-year-old woman - who remains unidentified - for performing an illegal lane change. She ended up failing a sobriety test and registered a .29 percent blood-alcohol level, far higher than the legal limit of .08 percent. | |
Comment: Another example of how US police became dangerous to the people they are supposed to serve.
Cop Who Stole Nude Photos From Woman's Cellphone, Says It's A "Game" Among Police | |
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| Secret History |
The divers descended 410 feet (125 meters) into dark Mediterranean waters off Italy, their lights revealing the skeleton of a ship that sank thousands of years ago when Rome was a world power. A sea-crusted anchor rested on a rock. The ship's cargo lay scattered amid piles of terra cotta jars, called amphora. Highly trained technical divers with a Florida-based group called Global Underwater Explorers - GUE for short - are helping Italian researchers to unlock an ancient shipwreck thought to date to the second Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. Able to descend hundreds of feet (meters) further than most divers, they aide the archaeologists by swimming about the wreck fetching artifacts - as no robotic submersible can. On this dive, they swam past the large amphora used to carry wine, olive oil and other cargo on Mediterranean trade routes centuries ago - feeling as if they were transported to another time. "It felt very much like a ghost ship awaiting the boarding of ancient mariners," said Jarrod Jablonski, one of the divers with the Florida exploration group. Many of these divers honed their deep-water diving abilities in Florida's labyrinths of underwater caves. Now GUE provides the technical divers needed access to cargo and other artifacts from a ship thought to have sailed around 218-210 B.C. - when Rome and Carthage were fighting for naval superiority in the Mediterranean.
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Joseph Castro
LiveScience 2014-10-27 11:26:00
A 2,600-year-old two-handled wine cup currently on display at the Lamia Archaeological Museum in Greece has long been thought to depict a random assortment of animals. But the piece of ancient pottery, called a skyphos,may actually contain one of the earliest Greek depictions of the constellations, a new analysis shows. The study researchers suggested that other ancient artistic representations of animals may also portray constellations, and hold clues to what the early Greeks knew about astronomy, said study researcher John Barnes, a classical archaeology doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri. "If we go back and re-evaluate other animal scenes that might have been originally categorized as hunting scenes or animal friezes, then maybe we can find more [depictions of constellations] and get a greater understanding of how the ancient Greeks viewed the night sky," Barnes told Live Science. | |
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Elizabeth Palermo
Live Science 2014-10-24 10:36:00
Few names have cast more terror into the human heart than Dracula. The legendary vampire, created by author Bram Stoker for his 1897 novel of the same name, has inspired countless horror movies, television shows and other bloodcurdling tales of vampires. Though Dracula may seem like a singular creation, Stoker in fact drew inspiration from a real-life man with an even more grotesque taste for blood: Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia or - as he is better known - Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepes), a name he earned for his favorite way of dispensing with his enemies. Vlad III was born in 1431 in Transylvania, a mountainous region in modern-day Romania. His father was Vlad II Dracul, ruler of Wallachia, a principality located to the south of Transylvania. Vlad II was granted the surname Dracul ("dragon") after his induction into the Order of the Dragon, a Christian military order supported by the Holy Roman Emperor. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries] Situated between Christian Europe and the Muslim lands of the Ottoman Empire, Transylvania and Wallachia were frequently the scene of bloody battles as Ottoman forces pushed westward into Europe, and Christian Crusaders repulsed the invaders or marched eastward toward the Holy Land. When Vlad II was called to a diplomatic meeting in 1442 with Sultan Murad II, he brought his young sons Vlad III and Radu along. But the meeting was actually a trap: All three were arrested and held hostage. The elder Vlad was released under the condition that he leave his sons behind.
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Sean O'Riordan
Irish Examiner 2014-10-24 19:00:00
Archaeologists working on a church in Cork have discovered three burial vaults dating back to the 1600s, pottery, and coins from that period and a 300-year-old underground central heating system copied from the Romans. The discoveries have been made at the 1250-built St Mary's Collegiate Church in Youghal - the longest, constantly used church in the country. Archaeologist Caroline Desmond said they moved onto the site after subsidence was noticed in the aisle. Discoveries show that in the 17th century, Youghal was a far more prosperous town than Cork and had more trade in its port. Excavations began six weeks ago and they discovered vaults underneath the aisle. One vault, dated February 1661, contains the remains of John Luther, an alderman of the town and his wife, Elizabeth. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Greta McClain
Digital Journal 2014-10-27 04:59:00
If you are a Transformer fan who dreams of someday owning your own transforming robot, Project J-deite will soon make your dream a reality. The project, which is a collaborative effort between Japan's Brave Robotics, Asratec and Takara Tommy, is the brain child of Kenji Ishida, founder of Brave Robotics. Ishida's passion for robotics began at the age of 14 and by the time he was 21, he had built his first bi-pedal walking robot. Now, he and his team have developed the J-deite Quarter, a humanoid bi-pedal robot made out of 3D-printed parts. Introduced last week at the Digital Content Expo in Tokyo, attendees and the media got a glimpse of what J-deite Quarter can do. The transforming robot stands 1.3 meters (4.3 feet) tall and can walk at a rate of 1 kilometer per hour (0.62 mph). Geek.com reports it takes J-deite Quarter approximately 30 seconds to transform from a walking robot to car mode. Once in car mode, it can travel up to ten kilometers per hour (6.2 mph). | |
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The International Space Station has to sidestep a piece of junk on the same day that a Virginia company is sending fresh supplies. NASA says debris from an old, wrecked Russian satellite was due to come dangerously close to the orbiting lab Monday afternoon - a gap of just two-tenths of a mile. To keep the station and its six inhabitants safe, the station was going to maneuver well out of harm's way. Mission Control says the move won't affect Monday evening's planned launch of a commercial supply ship. Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Cygnus capsule holds 5,000 pounds of cargo, including mini research satellites. Liftoff is scheduled for 6:45 p.m. (2245 GMT) from Wallops Island, Virginia. The launch, coming a half-hour after sunset, should be visible along much of the Eastern Seaboard. |
Comment: If this really is "debris from an old, wrecked Russian satellite", perhaps we ought to ask the following question. Why have more satellites been crashing to Earth since 2011?
Could it be because they're being knocked out of orbit by incoming meteors and comet fragments? See: Satellite debris or UFO Unidentified metal sphere falls from the sky in Brazil and Space station dodges space junk again |
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Simon Redfern
Phys.org 2014-10-27 12:17:00
How is it that Earth developed an atmosphere that made the development of life possible? A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience links the origins of Earth's nitrogen-rich atmosphere to the same tectonic forces that drive mountain-building and volcanism on our planet. It goes some way to explaining why, compared to our nearest neighbours, Venus and Mars, Earth's air is richer in nitrogen. The chemistry of the air we breathe is, at least partly, the result of billions of years of photosynthesis. Plant life has transformed our world from one cloaked in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere - as seen on Mars or Venus - to one with significant oxygen. About a fifth of the air is made up of oxygen, and almost all the rest is nitrogen. But the origins of the relatively high nitrogen content of Earth's air have been something of a mystery. Geoscientists Sami Mikhail and Dimitri Sverjensky of the Carnegie Institution of Washington have calculated what nitrogen is expected to do when it is cycled through the rocks of the deep Earth by the churning cycle of plate tectonics. Active volcanoes not only shower volcanic rock and superheated ash as they erupt molten rock into the air, they also vent huge amounts of gas from Earth's depths. The latest eruptions in Iceland, for example, have been noted for the amounts of sulphurous fumes that they have emitted. Alongside sulphur, steam and carbon dioxide, volcanoes next to active tectonic plate boundaries pump massive quantities of nitrogen into the air. Mikhail and Sverjensky explain this through the chemistry of what goes on beneath those volcanic roots. | |
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Melissa Davey
Researchers reveal the nova was about 14,800 light years from the sun, meaning the explosion witnessed in August last year happened 15,000 years agoThe Guardian, UK 2014-10-27 06:16:00
A team of astronomers have captured the first images of a thermonuclear fireball from a nova star, allowing them to track the explosion as it expanded. The nova was detected last year in the constellation Delphinus by the Chara Array infrared telescope in the US. Researchers from 17 institutions around the world, including the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, analysed the resulting data. It revealed with "unprecedented clarity" how the fireball evolves as the gas fuelling it expands and cools, Professor Peter Tuthill, a co-author on the study, said. "We haven't had the ability to witness such exquisite magnification or high resolution of images until very recently, when we started building these powerful Array telescopes," Tuthill, from the University of Sydney's Institute for Astronomy, said. | |
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Shawna Williams
Two new studies shed light on how cells sense and respond to chemical trailsEurekAlert! 2014-10-27 11:00:00
Amoebas aren't the only cells that crawl: Movement is crucial to development, wound healing and immune response in animals, not to mention cancer metastasis. In two new studies from Johns Hopkins, researchers answer long-standing questions about how complex cells sense the chemical trails that show them where to go - and the role of cells' internal "skeleton" in responding to those cues. In following these chemical trails, cells steer based on minute differences in concentrations of chemicals between one end of the cell and the other. "Cells can detect differences in concentration as low as 2 percent," says Peter Devreotes, Ph.D., director of the Department of Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "They're also versatile, detecting small differences whether the background concentration is very high, very low or somewhere in between." Working with Pablo Iglesias, Ph.D., a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins, Devreotes' research group members Chuan-Hsiang Huang, Ph.D., a research associate, and postdoctoral fellow Ming Tang, Ph.D., devised a system for watching the response of a cellular control center that directs movement. They then subjected amoebas and human white blood cells to various gradients and analyzed what happened. "Detecting gradients turns out to be a two-step process," says Huang. "First, the cell tunes out the background noise, and the side of the cell that is getting less of the chemical signal just stops responding to it. Then, the control center inside the cell ramps up its response to the message it's getting from the other side of the cell and starts the cell moving toward that signal." The results appear on the Nature Communications website on Oct. 27. | |
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phys.org
2014-10-26 09:56:00
Proteins are the machinery that accomplishes almost every task in every cell in every living organism. The instructions for how to build each protein are written into a cell's DNA. But once the proteins are constructed, they must be shipped off to the proper place to perform their jobs. New work from a team of scientists led by Carnegie's Munevver Aksoy and Arthur Grossman, describes a potentially new pathway for targeting newly manufactured proteins to the correct location. Their work is published in The Plant Cell journal. The team's discovery concerns a cellular organelle that has been called an acidocalcisome. It is a compartment that isolates potential harmful or disruptive compounds from the rest of the celland is also involved in the turnover of cellular components (similar to the so-called lysosome in animals). They are rich in phosphate-containing molecules and the team noted that they build up to high levels when cells of the single-celled, green alga Chlamydomonas are deprived of sulfur. They discovered that acidocalcisomes are also, surprisingly, involved in targeting proteins out into the cell space between the cell's membrane and the cell wall. Working with Chlamydomonas, the team, which also included Carnegie's Wirulda Pootakham, was examining the organism's responses to nutrient deficiency. They found that mutant cells lacking the ability to form these acidocalcisomes also lacked the ability to cope with sulfur and nitrogen deprivation adequately. What appears to happen with these mutants is that the proteins that specialize in helping the cell survive a deficiency of sulfur or nitrogen don't get shipped out to the space between the membrane and cell wall where they are needed. Because of this, feedback is sent to stop construction of the proteins (and the messenger RNA that encodes those proteins) and the entire response to nutrient deficiency is derailed. | |
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Fox News
2014-10-26 02:10:00
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, said Friday that artificial intelligence is probably the biggest threat to humans. Musk, who addressed MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department's Centennial Symposium for about an hour, mulled international oversight to "make sure we don't do something very foolish," The Washington Post reported. He was not specific about any particular threat, but appeared to theorize out loud.
"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon," he said. "In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out." | ||
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David Hughes
The Independent, UK 2014-10-26 19:43:00
A 20-foot python from a zoo in America has given birth without the help of a mate. Thelma, an 11-year-old reticulated python - the longest species of snake in the world - laid 61 eggs in the summer of 2012. This is despite having had no contact with a male in her four years at Louisville Zoo in Kentucky, USA. After six months of extensive tests on the shed skins of the mother and her daughters, a study published in July this year in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society confirmed that Thelma was the sole parent, in the first recorded example of virgin birth in the species. Bill McMahan, Curator of Ectotherms at Louisville Zoo, told National Geographic: "We didn't know what we were seeing. We had attributed it to stored sperm. I guess sometimes truth is stranger than fiction." | |
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ScienceDaily
Dietary cocoa flavanols -- naturally occurring bioactives found in cocoa -- reversed age-related memory decline in healthy older adults, according to a study led by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists.2014-10-26 15:00:00
The study, published today in the advance online issue of Nature Neuroscience, provides the first direct evidence that one component of age-related memory decline in humans is caused by changes in a specific region of the brain and that this form of memory decline can be improved by a dietary intervention. As people age, they typically show some decline in cognitive abilities, including learning and remembering such things as the names of new acquaintances or where one parked the car or placed one's keys. This normal age-related memory decline starts in early adulthood but usually does not have any noticeable impact on quality of life until people reach their fifties or sixties. Age-related memory decline is different from the often-devastating memory impairment that occurs with Alzheimer's, in which a disease process damages and destroys neurons in various parts of the brain, including the memory circuits. Previous work, including by the laboratory of senior author Scott A. Small, MD, had shown that changes in a specific part of the brain -- the dentate gyrus -- are associated with age-related memory decline. Until now, however, the evidence in humans showed only a correlational link, not a causal one. To see if the dentate gyrus is the source of age-related memory decline in humans, Dr. Small and his colleagues tested whether compounds called cocoa flavanols can improve the function of this brain region and improve memory. Flavanols extracted from cocoa beans had previously been found to improve neuronal connections in the dentate gyrus of mice. | |
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Space Weather
Flares have been predicted, sunspot AR2192 has complied. In the past 24 hours, the giant active region has produced two X-class solar flares: X3 (Oct. 24 @ 2140 UT) and X1 (Oct 25 @ 1709 UT). Using a backyard solar telescope, Sergio Castillo of Corona, California, was monitoring the sunspot on Oct. 24th when it exploded, and he snapped this picture:2014-10-26 02:31:00
"This flare was so intense that it almost shorted out my computer! Well ... not really," says Castillo, "but I knew right away that it was an X-class eruption." Both X-flares produced brief but strong HF radio blackouts over the dayside of Earth. Communications were disturbed over a wide area for appeoximately one hour after the peak of each explosion. Such blackouts may be noticed by amateur radio operators, aviators, and mariners. | |
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Tariq Malik
Space 2014-10-26 06:37:00
The biggest sunspot on the face of the sun in more than two decades unleashed a major flare on Friday (Oct. 24), the fourth intense solar storm from the active star in less than a week. The solar flare occurred Friday afternoon, reaching its peak at 5:41 p.m. EDT (2141 GMT), and triggered a strong radio blackout at the time, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center. NASA's sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory captured stunning video of the huge solar flare. The flare erupted from a giant active sunspot known as AR 12192 and was classified as an X3.1-class solar storm - one of the most powerful types of solar storms on the sun - but it is not the first time the sunspot has made its presence known. "This is the fourth substantial flare from this active region since Oct. 19," NASA spokesperson Karen Fox wrote in a status update. | |
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Arielle Duhaime-Ross
The Verge 2014-10-24 12:20:00
Two months ago, doctors in Australia transplanted a "dead heart" - a heart that had stopped beating inside a donor's chest - into a 57-year-old woman, reports the BBC. The operation, which has been deemed success, was unlike any other, because for the first time, it didn't involve a brain-dead donor who's heart was still beating. Normally, heart transplants call for the removal of a still-beating heart that's put on ice for a few hours until it can be placed in a recipient. But two months ago, that didn't happen. Doctors removed a heart that had stopped beating, and placed in a machine called a "heart-in-a-box." That machine then revived the heart by pumping warm blood into it. "We removed blood from the donor to prime the machine," cardiologist Peter MacDonald told WebMD. "We then take the heart out, connect it to the machine, warm it up, and when we warm it up, the heart starts to beat." Once the recipient was ready, the doctors disconnected the warm heart from the machine, and placed it in the patient. | |
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The Siberian Times
2014-10-10 14:47:00
Same phenomenon of discharge of gas hydrates 'led to crater formation in Russia and disappearance of ships in Atlantic'. The craters - two in Yamal and one on the Taymyr peninsula - were revealed during the summer, leading to urgent analysis by scientists as well as a wave of speculation suggesting the cause was aliens from outer space, meteorites, or stray missiles. Now respected Science in Siberia journal has come up with a coherent explanation for the northern craters and - sensationally - links it to the notorious Bermuda Triangle phenomenon, where ships and aircraft have disappeared under strange circumstances between Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico. Heating from above the surface due to unusually warm climatic conditions, and from below, due to geological fault lines, led to a huge release of gas hydrates, say the scientists from the Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum-Gas Geology and Geophysics in Novosibirsk. They subjected one of the two known craters in Yamal - a peninsula known to locals as 'the end of the world' - to detailed scrutiny. 'The main element - and this is our working theory to explain the Yamal crater - was a release of gas hydrates. It turned out that there are gas hydrates both in the deep layer which on peninsula is several hundred meters down, and on the layer close to the surface,' said scientist Vladimir Potapov. Gas - notably methane - is trapped in the frozen hydrates under the permafrost and beneath some oceans. 'There might be another factor, or factors, that could have provoked the air clap. Each of the factors added up and gas exploded, leading to appearance of the crater. 'The crater is located on the intersection of two tectonic faults. Yamal peninsula is seismically quiet, yet the area of the crater we looked into has quite an active tectonic life', Potapov said. Crucially, the surface ice and upper layers of permafrost were exposed to 'a much warmer summer than usual', as Tyumen scientist Marina Leibman earlier noted. Igor Yeltsov, the Trofimuk Institute's deputy head, stressed: 'There is a theory that the Bermuda Triangle is caused by gas hydrates.' He explained: 'They start to actively decompose with methane ice turning into gas. It happens in an avalanche-like way, like a nuclear reaction, producing huge amounts of gas. That makes the ocean heat up, and ships sink in waters which are infused with huge amounts of gas. This leads to the air becoming supersaturated with methane, creating an extremely turbulent atmosphere, leading to aircraft crashes'. | |
Comment:
Irrespective of any possible role in the 'Bermuda Triangle' phenomena, increasing releases of methane gas are already having a devastating effect on our planet - as 'Earth opens up': See: Creatures from the deep signal major Earth Changes: Is anyone paying attention? Hundreds of methane plumes erupting along U.S. Atlantic coast Casualties of seafloor methane gas release? Hundreds of thousands more fish found dead in Plymouth tidal pool, UK See also: Earth is opening up: Mysterious Siberian crater attributed to methane For an explosion you need two things: an igniter and combustible material. The Arctic, as with many other places on Earth is outgassing methane at never-before-seen rates. Lightning discharge events are also increasing in intensity and frequency because the solar wind is being grounded while comet dust loading of the atmosphere increases nucleation and resistance, leading to greater precipitation and greater charge-rebalancing respectively. Then, consider the following excerpt from Superluminal Communications dated 26 of July, 2014: These 'crater- holes' are not an indication of global warming. They're another indication of the planet opening up. See Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection: The Secret History of the World - Book 3where this is explained in greater detail. | |
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Elizabeth Howell
Standing on the ground, we're used to seeing the bolts and flashes of lightning during epic thunderstorms. But how would it look like from space? These three Vine videos from orbiting NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman provide a glimpse.Universe Today 2014-10-24 23:00:00 As you can see in these videos he uploaded to his Twitter account a few days ago, flashes and pools of light appear in this lightning storm over Kansas that he spotted from the International Space Station. Check out more below the jump. |
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Ian O'Neill
Discovery News 2014-10-23 05:02:00
Just as the US prepares to watch the partial solar eclipse today, nearly 100 million miles away on the sun a possible solar storm is brewing. Amateur astronomers have been wowed by a vast sunspot that has rotated to face Earth, the largest since this solar cycle began in 2008, and solar observatories (on the ground and orbiting Earth) are closely monitoring the region. The sunspot, a dark patch in the sun's photosphere, represents intense solar magnetism bursting from the sun's interior known as an active region. This particular active region, designated AR2192, has been rumbling with intense flare activity, recently exploding with 2 X-class flares, causing some short-lived high-frequency (HF) radio black outs around the globe. Such blackouts are triggered by the intense extreme ultraviolet and X-ray radiation that solar flares can generate, causing ionization effects in the Earth's upper atmosphere - a region known as the ionosphere. HF radio can be strongly hindered by this activity, triggering blackouts that can effect air traffic and amateur radio operators. Currently, the sunspot located at the base of AR2192 has swelled to over 80,000 miles across - Jupiter could almost fit inside the sunspot's mottled diameter. | |
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| Earth Changes |
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The Extinction Protocol
2014-10-27 12:14:00
At 17:09 UT (12:09 p.m. EDT) today (Saturday), active region (AR) 2192 erupted with another X-class flare directed at Earth. This is the second powerful eruption in less than 24 hours to be triggered from the large sunspot that occupies the region. Today's flare registered at X1 on the solar flare Richter Scale, the most powerful class of flare, but weaker than Friday's X3-class flare. Further radio black-outs have been recorded on the daytime side of the Earth, but, once again, today's flare did not generate a significant coronal mass ejection (CME). There was already a high probability that active region (AR) 2192 was going to erupt with a powerful solar flare, so it came as little surprise when, yesterday, the huge sunspot fired a powerful X-class flare right at Earth. And we sure did feel its impact. | |
Comment: The fire in the skies is highly active:
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The Weather Channel
2014-10-27 20:15:00
Tropical Storm Hanna, the eighth named storm of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season, formed quickly Monday morning and has now moved inland after making landfall along the Caribbean coast near the Nicaragua - Honduras border. A tropical storm warning was issued by the governments of Nicaragua and Honduras for a small part of each country's Caribbean coast. | |
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weatherwatch.co.nz
2014-10-26 21:05:00
Vineyards in the south of Western Australia could see yield losses of up to 30 per cent after they were hit by damaging hail storms this week. Severe thunderstorms struck the South West and Great Southern regions on Wednesday evening. Wineries in Frankland and Pemberton were hardest hit, with reports of hail completely stripping vines of new season growth. Ferngrove Wine Group was one of the wineries that fell victim to the hail. Ferngrove senior winemaker Kim Horton said that the storm completely damaged some vines, but some were left unscathed. | |
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Mark Piggott
International Business Times 2014-09-29 20:02:00
Six members of one family - including three-year-old twins - died instantly when a vast sinkhole opened up in the motorway and swallowed their car in Crimea. Two other children aged 12 and 12 months survived. It is believed the car was driving between the Crimean capital Simferopol and a village called Nikolaevka in the disputed region, which recently voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Suddenly a massive hole opened up in the ground, ripping away power-lines and reportedly casting the road into darkness. The car's driver, Ibrail Eskandarov, 34, frantically applied his brakes but had no time to avoid the 26-feet wide hole, rescuers said. The car fell 20 metres and smashed into the bottom.
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Metro (UK)
2014-10-24 19:47:00
There are times to regret the amount of dash cams on the road recording our every mistake but this truck driver must be chuffed the car behind had their camera working. Explaining to the boss that your cement truck fell into a large sink-hole works a lot better knowing there is video evidence. Sinkholes are depressions or craters caused after the collapse of the surface layer and can vary in diameter from one to 600m. The cause of such rare incidents can vary from the collapse of a disused mine shaft to to ruptured sewage pipes. Needless to say, this truck driver will never look at a road the same ever again.
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Comment: Sinkhole heat map for the past year -
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After the storm surge in northern Europe, then flooding and storms in Slovenia, Czech Republic and parts of the Balkans, the severe weather thought to be caused by the remnants of Hurricane Gonzalez, moved to parts of southern Europe on Friday 24 October 2014. Athens, Greece Athens in Greece was left knee-deep in water after torrential rain caused flooding in central and western parts of the city. Local media say as much as 14 cm of rain fell in just 90 minutes on Friday. Emergency services received over 600 calls as hundreds of homes and businesses were inundated. The worst affected areas were Peristeri, Ilion, Perama, Menidi, Aegaleo, Aghioi Anargoiroi, Nikaia, Piraeus and Kamatero.
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rcinet.ca
2014-03-24 14:28:00
A young woman was left shaken after being chased by a pack of wild boar in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. Stocholm county police write on their website that the woman was out walking in the evening when she met more than a dozen wild boars. When the surprised woman turned tail and fled the boars gave chase. She luckily met a group of young people who were able to scare away the pack of pursuing porkers. | |
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The Statesman (India)
2014-10-26 14:10:00
In the latest incident of man-wildlife conflict in villages lying in close proximity of Bhitarkanika wildlife sanctuary, at least six persons including two women and an infant were injured today following attack by hordes of wild boars in Jamboo village under Mahakalpada police station jurisdiction. As the news of animal attack spread, people rose in protest and demonstrated in front of the local forest office. The agitating people were demanding the launch of foolproof measures to curb the intrusion of animals like wild boar, crocodiles and spotted deer into places of human habitation. Three persons including a 15-year-old girl, a 55-year-old woman were injured while three others sustained injuries following the stampede that ensued as the wild boars chased the people. All of them, who were hospitalised, are out of danger. | |
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Cliff Weathers
AlterNet 2014-10-26 20:17:00
A poor, rural community in Calfornia's agricultural belt has run out of water. At least one California town has gone dry, and many are expected to follow soon. East Porterville, in Tulare County is now without water, as the wells that feed it have dried up. Residents, according to Yahoo! News, now have to drive to the local fire station to get water to drink, bathe, and flush the toilet. And ironically, the town is near what was once the largest freshwater lake in California. Tulare County, which relies heavily on the agricultural industry, is parched. The some 500 wells that feed its residents and farmers have gone dry. And the county says that it may be years and cost $20 million before a new groundwater management program, which includes a hookup between East Porterville and Porterville's water systems, goes into effect. The county is named for Tulare Lake, which was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes. It was drained for regional agricultural purposes, begining in the early 20th Century. The lake basin is now some of the most fertile soil in the Central Valley, the most productive agricultural region of the United States. Although dry for the most part, the lake occasionally reappears after unusually high levels of rainfall or snow melt, the last time being 1997. Earlier this month, a 5,000-gallon-water tank, donated by the county's Sheriff's Association was delivered to East Porterville, and that is primary source of water for this low-income community. Residents now drive to the fire department with empty water jugs and pump water from the tanks to take home. The county has also been supplying free bottled water, paid for by the state, to residents for drinking and cooking. However, there are worries within the community that the county might use the bottled-water handout to identify undocumented residents or condemn homes that are in disrepair. Non-profit groups and churches have also been trying to help supply water to East Porterville residents. "It's a disaster," says Andrew Lockman, manager of the Tulare County Office of Emergency Services. "It's not a tornado, it's not a hurricane, it's a quiet disaster." | |
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AL.com
2014-10-25 13:05:00
The remnants of Tropical Depression Nine, which washed ashore in Mexico earlier this week, have made it into the northwest Caribbean, where there is a chance -- a very small chance -- that they could develop. The low pressure area was interacting with a cold front and had disorganized storms associated with it, the National Hurricane Center said Saturday morning. The hurricane center gave it only a 20 percent chance of development over the next five days -- that is, if it develops at all. Meanwhile, in the central Pacific, Hurricane Ana was still hanging in there. | |
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A 59-year-old man was injured by an elk at the Wolf Lake Resort & Campground in a bizarreMonday, Oct. 6 incident. An Egelston Township fire official confirmed the attack happened Monday evening between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the resort located at 5451 Harding Ave. The elk is housed at an adjacent deer and elk farm owned by the same people who own the campground. A woman who spoke with an MLive Muskegon Chronicle reporter by phone from the campground office refused to confirm the incident. She denied it ever happened. But the fire official confirmed the fire department was sent there on a medical call and the man had been injured by the elk severely enough that he required hospital treatment. | |
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abc.net.au
2014-10-26 15:45:00
Dingoes have attacked two women while they were jogging on Fraser Island off south-east Queensland. Paramedics were called to Yidney Rocks on the island about 7:00am on Sunday. A woman was treated for leg injuries and taken to Hervey Bay hospital. Doreen Cash from the Yidney Rocks Beachfront Apartments said the two women were staying at the units. | |
Comment: See also: Three dingoes attack man on Fraser Island beach, Australia
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Kerrie O'Connor
The Sydney Morning Herald 2014-10-26 14:31:00
An eight-metre dead whale has been washed onto rocks at the mouth of the Clyde River in Batemans Bay. Canberra visitor David Haberlah saw the whale on Saturday afternoon, just minutes before waves dumped the mammal in an area known as North Head beach, near Yellow Rock. With his four-year-old daughter, Siwa, the geologist hurried to the scene. "I was sitting at the far end and I saw something white floating," Mr Haberlah said. "I thought 'wow, this looks like a massive balloon'. I had a closer look and saw one of the fins come up and realised it was a whale. "I went running back and Siwa and I went straight to look. It was belly up. It was already dead." | |
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keeptalkinggreece.com
2014-10-24 13:33:00
Winter arrived in Greece with heavy rain, strong winds, early snow in the mountains and sharp temperature drop. Sudden rain storms turned streets into rivers. the island of Zakynthos (Zante) was hit by a mini-tornado that uprooted trees, swept away stables roofs and destroyed balconies.
Snow felt not only in some mountain areas in the north of the country (Samarina, Kastoria) but also in Mount Parnassus in Central Greece. | ||
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Olga Rodriguez
Mexico City - Wild dogs mauled and killed four people whose bodies were found over the past two weeks in a park on the edge of Mexico City, authorities said Monday. In one case, a teenage girl frantically called her sister with her cellphone to plead for help as the attack took place.My Fox DC 2013-01-07 08:37:00 Neighbors of the Cerro de la Estrella, a partly wooded, hilltop park surrounded by the city's poor and populous Iztapalapa district, first found the bodies of a 26-year-old woman and a 1-year-old child in the area on Dec. 29, authorities in Mexico's capital said. The woman, Shunashi Mendoza, was missing her left arm, and prosecutors said that both she and the boy had bled to death and been partially eaten. Then on Friday visitors to the same park found the bodies of a teenage couple who had also bled to death. "Experts have established that due to the gravity of the wounds, at least 10 dogs were involved in each attack," Mexico City prosecutors said in a statement. In the second attack, Alejandra Ruiz, 15, and her boyfriend Samuel Martinez, 16, had gone to the park Friday afternoon. The girl called her sister Diana Ruiz at around 7 p.m. pleading for help. "Several dogs are attacking us, help me!" the girl screamed. The call then stopped. Ruiz told Milenio Television she thought her sister was joking and still doesn't believe her sister was killed by dogs despite the call. |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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Astro Watch
2014-10-26 00:00:00
Get ready for a very close encounter as a house-sized asteroid 2014 UF56 will pass between the Earth and the Moon on Monday. The 15 meter wide space rock will miss our planet at a distance of about 160,000 km (0.4 lunar distances) at 9:12 p.m. UTC. The asteroid was discovered Saturday and despite passing so close to Earth, few if any of us will see the flyby with our eyes in a telescope. At brightest, 2014 UF56 will only reach magnitude +16, as it zips from Scutum constellation through Capricornus. The asteroid, back in 2012 visited Mars at a distance of about 8 mln km. It will again approach the Earth on Feb. 12, 2018. This will be a very distant fly-by, at about 64 lunar distances. | |
Comment: Last week, Comet Siding Spring flew by Mars and we are frequently hearing the news of asteroids and fireballs. Is there anything happening in the solar system that is contributing to this phenomenon?
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| Health & Wellness |
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Dr. Michelle Kmiec
Wake-up-world.com 2013-04-21 22:47:00
We have all been concerned about the implications of Genetically Modified (GM) foods. And one company that has received much controversy is Monsanto; established in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri. Their involvement in countless controversial endeavors is nothing short than an attack on humanity! As a refresher, let's briefly take a look at some of Monsanto's accomplishments.
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We've all heard the saying, "listen to your gut." And while that advice often refers to our intuition, it should also speak to our digestion. Your gut guides your overall well-being. Quite literally, your gut is the epicenter of your mental and physical health. Yet it's all too common to experience lots of digestive issues that make a huge impact on our strength and vitality. If you want better immunity, efficient digestion, improved clarity and balance, focus on rebuilding your gut health. I know it may seem like there's always something we could be doing better. And frankly, our quest for getting well can be downright exhausting! Sometimes our health issues can feel so big and daunting. This is especially true when it comes to serious chronic diseases. I remember getting frustrated many times. I thought to myself, for gosh sake, I'm doing everything I can to heal this disease and though I'm grateful it's still stable, why won't the sucker just go away? I give up! Then I decided to take it down a notch and focus on healing areas of my life and my body that I actually could control. My digestion had always been really weak. I got colds every year and had a list of health problems stemming from my gut. That's when the light bulb went off.I decided to forget about cancer and focus my energy on my digestive health instead. Finally, improvements I could see, feel and measure! By supporting this mighty system, you'll see chronic health issues (like fatigue, fogginess, colds, aches and pains) diminish, and you'll feel abundant energy return. I know it sounds too good to be true, but it really isn't. I've experienced these results, and I've seen hundreds of readers do the same. Now it's your turn. Today, we're going to cover the basics of digestive health. You'll learn what your gut does and why it's so important to keep it healthy. Then, we'll discuss how to care for your wonderful gut so that it continues to take care of glorious you. Let's dive in! | |
Comment: Learn more about how diet can effect the intricate balance of gut flora composition:
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High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is an insidious chemical that has crept into our food supply over the past few decades. Today HFCS represents1 more than 40 percent of caloric sweeteners added to foods and beverages. HFCS can contain anywhere from 55 to 90 percent fructose and is derived from corn, a heavily subsidized (read: cheap) crop. Manufacturers love HFCS because, especially when compared to regular sugar, it's cheaper, sweeter and produced in abundance. Not surprisingly, HFCS's ubiquity in the 1980s correlated with the beginning of the obesity epidemic. Other factors, including increased portion sizes, certainly play a role, but the inclusion of HFCS in soft drinks and other sweetened beverages merits serious consideration as an important cause of the obesity epidemic. | |
Comment: The Dirty Truth About High Fructose Corn Syrup...
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ScienceDaily
2014-10-27 18:14:00
A new study published in The Journal of Pain reports that 39 million people in the United States or 19 percent have persistent pain, and the incidence varies according to age and gender. The Journal of Pain is the peer-reviewed publication of the American Pain Society. Researchers at the Washington State University College of Nursing conducted the study. They defined persistent pain as frequent or constant pain lasting longer than three months. The intent of their research was: - Identify groups at higher risk for persistent pain - Identify body sites, chronic conditions and disabilities associated with persistent pain - Assess the relationship between persistent pain and anxiety, depression and fatigue - Describe the individual experience of persistent pain. The study was performed using data from the 2010 Quality of Life Supplement of the National Heath Interview Survey (NHIS) to calculate the prevalence of persistent pain. Results of the analysis showed that approximately 19 percent of U.S. adults reported persistent pain in 2010, and older adults were more likely to experience persistent pain than younger adults. Women also had slightly higher risk than men. | |
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Nick Fortino
Orthomolecular Medicine News 2014-10-27 16:02:00
Schizophrenia is usually treated with prescription antipsychotic drugs, many of which produce severe adverse effects (1-6); are linked to an incentive for monetary profit benefiting pharmaceutical corporations (7-13); lack sufficient evidence for safety and efficacy (9, 14); and have been grossly misused (15-20). Orthomolecular (nutritional) medicine provides another approach to treating schizophrenia, which involves the optimal doses of vitamin B3-also known as niacin, niacinamide, nicotinamide, or nicotinic acid-in conjunction with an individualized protocol of multiple vitamins. The orthomolecular approach involves treating "mental disease by the provision of the optimum molecular environment for the mind, especially the optimum concentrations of substances normally present in the human body" (21). Evidence for the niacin treatment of schizophrenia Vitamin B3 as a treatment for schizophrenia is typically overlooked, which is disconcerting considering that historical evidence suggests it effectively reduces symptoms of schizophrenia, and has the added advantage, in contrast to pharmaceuticals, of mild to no adverse effects (22-35). After successful preliminary trials treating schizophrenia patients with niacin, pilot trials of larger samples commenced in 1952-reported in 1957 by Hoffer, Osmond, Callbeck, and Kahan. Dr. Abram Hoffer began an experiment involving 30 patients who had been diagnosed with acute schizophrenia. Participants were given a series of physiological and psychological tests to measure baseline status and were subsequently assigned randomly to treatment groups. Nine subjects received a placebo, 10 received nicotinic acid, and 11 received nicotinamide (the latter two are forms of vitamin B3). All participants received treatment for 42 days, were in the same hospital, and received psychotherapy from the same group of clinicians. The two experimental groups were administered three grams of vitamin B3 per day. Each of the three treatment groups improved, but the two vitamin B3 groups improved more than the placebo group as compared to baseline measures. At one year follow up, 33% of patients in the placebo group remained well, and 88% of patients in the B3 groups remained well. These results inspired many subsequent trials, and those that replicated the original method produced similarly positive results. | |
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Washington's Blog
2014-10-27 15:25:00
We've noted for some time that Ebola can be spread by aerosols to frontline healthcare workers. The CDC is finally admitting this fact. The CDC put out a new poster stating: Droplet spread happens when germs traveling inside droplets that are coughed or sneezed from a sick person enter the eyes, nose, or mouth of another person.Droplets travel short distances, less than 3 feet (1 meter) from one person to another. | |
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Elizabeth Palermo
Live Science 2014-10-22 12:07:00
In a remote area of Southeast Asia, drones are fighting a battle - not against terrorists or insurgents, but against infectious disease. Researchers on the island of Borneo are using flying robots to map out areas affected by a type of malaria parasite (Plasmodium knowlesi), which most commonly infects macaque monkeys. In recent years, public health officials in the Malaysian state of Sabah have seen a rise in the number of cases of humans infected with this deadly parasite which is spread, via mosquitos, from macaques to people. By mapping the communities where these cases occur, researchers hope to figure out why the parasite is spreading from monkeys to people with greater frequency, said Chris Drakeley, a professor of infection and immunity at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom, and one of the researchers involved in the project.
Drakeley and his colleagues used a small, camera-carrying drone called a senseFly eBee to create maps and digital surface models of the land and vegetation surrounding communities where P.knowlesi has turned up in humans. The drone can fly for up to 50 minutes and carries a 16-megapixel digital camera. "What we're doing is creating a detailed map, which we can then superimpose or overlay with the human and the macaque movement," Drakeley told Live Science. The movement patterns of both monkeys and humans were derived from GPS data. Locals were asked to carry around GPS tracking devices, while certain macaques were fitted with GPS collars. The hope is that this GPS data will help the researchers pinpoint where humans and macaques are most likely to interact, and the drones will show the researchers what these areas look like and help them figure out why both species might be drawn to those areas. | ||
Comment: While the U.S. is breaking international laws using (autonomous?) armed drones to indiscriminately hunt and kill its "enemies" and innocent victims, using reaper drones to gather intelligence or RPA (remotely piloted aircraft) for domestic surveillance, others are using the technology for intelligent and humanitarian purposes: tracking property damage from catastrophes, hunting for survivors, as a tool for research, and as a network for transport (such as medical supplies or lab samples between rural clinics) which aims to help millions of people who do not have year-round ground access or services. A different kind of road, a different kind of bridge.
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Dr. Mercola
Mercola.com 2014-10-23 03:53:00
In the 1940s, opioid-based narcotics like opium and heroin were popular drugs of abuse, which lead to strict controls being put into place to curb their use. Regulations existed to control who could prescribe opioids and at what doses; breaches to the regulations could lead to a loss of your medical license or criminal prosecution. Many physicians feared the repercussions, and thus may have under-prescribed such medications, even in cases where they're called for, such as in late-stage cancer pain.1 Decades later, in the 1990s, successful lobbying by pharmaceutical makers led to changes in the opioid regulations, such that doctors couldn't be penalized for prescribing them. The loosened regulations paved the way for the aggressive treatment of pain, not only in cancer patients and those with terminal diseases, but in virtually anyone with chronic pain. We're now at the opposite end of the spectrum, where opioids are vastly overprescribed and doing far more harm than good. | |
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Erin Elizabeth
Greenmedinfo.com 2014-10-17 03:19:00
Since when did a green magazine promote Ebola vaccines and publish articles by vaccine makers like Paul "Profit" Offit? This might be the most difficult piece I ever write. You see, the minute I hit enter and this article goes live, I can pretty much be assured I'll never write a piece for one of the biggest natural "green" health sites in the world: Mind Body Green aka MBG. Mind Body Green Haven't heard of them? Well they've got over 2.5 million fans on their Facebook page, which is more than any other health site I know in existence. Their Alexa traffic ranking is off the charts and climbing every day. Having monitored web traffic for a living (more exciting than it sounds), I can almost guarantee they'll surpass the top health sites out there fairly soon. Even the ones run by people very close to me and near and dear to my heart. | |
Comment: Interested in learning more about why Dr. Profit is the most hated figure by 'anti-vaxxers'? Read the following articles:
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John Rappoport
Activist Post 2014-10-26 02:50:00
On October 14, Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield sent an official and detailed complaint to the CDC and the US Dept. of Health and Human Services. The devastating and explosive complaint concerns scientific misconduct in a now-infamous 2004 CDC study, which gave the MMR vaccine a free pass and concluded the vaccine had no connection to autism. CDC whistleblower William Thompson was a co-author on that study, and on August 27 he admittedhe and his co-authors committed fraud and covered up the vaccine-autism connection. (The full 34-page complaint can also be accessed via Age of Autism, here) The complaint references a 5/24/14 phone call between whistleblower Thompson and Brian Hooker. The call was recorded. | |
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Daniel Duane,
Business insider 2014-10-22 00:00:00
For more than half a century, the conventional wisdom among nutritionists and public health officials was that fat is dietary enemy number one - the leading cause of obesity and heart disease. It appears the wisdom was off. And not just off. Almost entirely backward. According to a new study from the National Institutes of Health, a diet that reduces carbohydrates in favor of fat - including the saturated fat in meat and butter - improves nearly every health measurement, from reducing our waistlines to keeping our arteries clear, more than the low-fat diets that have been recommended for generations. "The medical establishment got it wrong," says cardiologist Dennis Goodman, director of Integrative Medicine at New York Medical Associates. "The belief system didn't pan out." It's not the conclusion you would expect given the NIH study's parameters. Lead researcher Lydia Bazanno, of the Tulane University School of Public Health, pitted this high-fat, low-carb diet against a fat-restricted regimen prescribed by the National Cholesterol Education Program. | |
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RT
2014-10-25 00:00:00
While harm from cell-phone rays has so far been lacking sufficient scientific proof, a US firm wants men to take no chances with radiation - at least when it comes to the most precious of male body parts. Comment: No scientific Proof?. Mobile phone use poses cancer risk says French study Intensive mobile phone users at higher risk of brain cancers Heavy cell phone use linked to oxidative stress Boxer shorts made with the use of thin silver textile "absorb radiation" will help "protect men's reproductive organs and maintain fertility health," according to their producer, Manhattan-based Belly Armor company. It only launched its male underwear sales this week, but among the company's earlier products are radiation-proof blankets, belly bands and tops for pregnant women and nursing mothers. The company claims the fabric its goods are made of provides the same level of radiation shielding as "a 1/4-inch thick sheet of aluminum." The firm's spokeswoman, Katherine Niefeld, told the New York Post, men were simply unaware of the risks associated with cellphone use. "If you're a guy, how are you going to know that putting your cellphone in your pocket will do things to your sperm," Niefeld said. | |
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Jonathan Allen
Yahoo! News 2014-10-26 00:00:00
Illinois joined New York and New Jersey in imposing mandatory quarantines for people arriving with a risk of having contracted Ebola in West Africa, but the first person isolated under the new rules, a nurse returning from Sierra Leone, called her treatment a "frenzy of disorganization." Kaci Hickox, who arrived at Newark airport in New Jersey on Friday, described hours of questioning by officials in protective gear and what she said was a mis-diagnosis of fever, followed by a transfer to a hospital isolation tent. Not long after Hickox's criticisms were made public, it was announced that the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, is traveling to Guinea on Sunday. She will also visit Liberia and Sierra Leone, making the trip despite calls by some U.S. lawmakers for a travel ban on the three West African countries worst-affected by Ebola. Power, a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, left Washington on Saturday. Obama has resisted Republican calls for a travel ban on advice from health officials who say such a measure would be counter-productive, in part because it would impede people going to help fight the epidemic. Concern over Ebola has become a political issue ahead of Nov. 4 congressional elections. | |
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Caroline Price
The majority of GPs are not complying with NICE advice that they should prescribe statins to more low-risk patients, a Pulse survey has revealed.Pulse 2014-10-22 10:38:00
Two-thirds of GPs said they have not begun prescribing statins to patients who are newly eligible for the drugs since NICE lowered the risk threshold for primary prevention from a 10-year risk of 20% to 10%, in updated lipid guidance released over the summer. The chair of the GPC prescribing committee told Pulse there should be 'no.. slavish devotion' to guidelines, while GPs indicated they have ongoing doubts there is enough evidence that the benefits of statins outweigh the harms in lower-risk people, and concerns around the increased workload and 'medicalisation' of healthy people. NICE pushed through the lower 10% threshold when it published revised lipid modification guidelines in July this year, despite strong objections from the GPC on the grounds it was not evidence-based and could lead to increased consultations and medicalisation of healthy people to the cost of more needy, unwell patients. Pulse's survey of more than 560 GP respondents reveals that so far two-thirds - 66% - said they had not begun prescribing statins at the 10% risk threshold. Dr May Cahill, a GP partner in Hackney, east London, said: 'I am not convinced they will do any good, the side-effects are horrific. Why give something to a patient that you would not take yourself nor recommend a family member or friend to?' | |
Comment: "...our guidance will prevent many lives being destroyed." What!? The nerve of them! Let's stay with the facts:
Vascular surgeons write a damning report about lowering cholesterol drugs Vascular surgeon: Why I've ditched statins for good Statins may do more harm than good in stroke victims Confirmed Once Again: Statins Likely Harm The Heart | |
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phys.org
2014-10-23 09:57:00
When pathogenic bacteria like Salmonella or Staphylococcus invade a host, the host organism should respond by going into a state of high alert, altering its metabolism to defend against the attack. But if the host doesn't reverse course once the battle is won, its efforts will be wasted on defense rather than on repairing the damage done by bacterial invaders. Duke University researchers have uncovered the genes that are normally activated during recovery from bacterial infection. The finding could lead to ways to jumpstart this recovery process and possibly fend off autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammatory disorders that can result from the body staying in attack mode for too long. The study appears Oct. 23, 2014 in PLOS Genetics. "While the steps involved in recognizing microbial pathogens and inducing the immune response have been extensively studied, the pathways involved in host recovery after an infection are not well understood," said Alejandro Aballay, Ph.D., an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine. | |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Kelly Connelly
...but only if the guesses are 'close-but-no-cigar'EurekAlert! 2014-10-27 11:00:00
Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar, according to new research findings from Baycrest Health Sciences. "Making random guesses does not appear to benefit later memory for the right answer , but near-miss guesses act as stepping stones for retrieval of the correct information - and this benefit is seen in younger and older adults," says lead investigator Andrée-Ann Cyr, a graduate student with Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Cyr's paper is posted online today in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (ahead of print publication). The study expands upon a previous paper she published in Psychology and Aging in 2012 that found that learning information the hard way by making mistakes (as opposed to just being told the correct answer) may be the best boot camp for older brains. | |
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RT.com
2014-10-26 12:25:00
Learning new words stimulates the same brain center as such long-proven means of deriving pleasure, as having sex, gambling or eating chocolate, a new study says. A team of Spanish and German researchers at Barcelona's Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute and Otto von Guericke University has found that successful learning of the meanings of new words activates a core reward center in the adult brain. They have recently published their findings in theCurrent Biology journal. The ventral striatum is a part of the brain activated by actions that trigger positive emotions, should it be sugary food, sex or drugs. Traditionally, the process of learning of a new language was associated with a boost in the number of connections between neurons, but it wasn't proven that emotions are also involved. "The purpose of the study was to find out to what extent learning a language could activate these pleasure-and-reward circuits," study author Antoni Rodríguez Fornells told La Vanguardia, Catalan daily newspaper. | |
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Science Daily
2014-10-24 10:38:00
From our very first years, we are intrinsically motivated to learn new words and their meanings. First language acquisition occurs within a permanent emotional interaction between parents and children. However, the exact mechanism behind the human drive to acquire communicative linguistic skills is yet to be established. In a study published in the journal Current Biology, researchers from the University of Barcelona (UB), the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (Germany) have experimentally proved that human adult word learning exhibit activation not only of cortical language regions but also of the ventral striatum, a core region of reward processing. Results confirm that the motivation to learn is preserved throughout the lifespan, helping adults to acquire a second language. Researchers determined that the reward region that is activated is the same that answers to a wide range of stimuli, including food, sex, drugs or game. "The main objective of the study was to know to what extent language learning activates subcortical reward and motivational systems," explains Pablo Ripollés, PhD student at UB-IDIBELL and first author of the article. "Moreover, the fact that language could be favoured by this type of circuitries is an interesting hypothesis from an evolutionary point of view," points out the expert. According to Antoni Rodríguez Fornells, UB lecturer and ICREA researcher at IDIBELL, "the language region has been traditionally located at an apparently encapsulated cortical structure which has never been related to reward circuitries, which are considered much older from an evolutionary perspective." "The study -- he adds -- questions whether language only comes from cortical evolution or structured mechanisms and suggests that emotions may influence language acquisition processes." Subcortical areas are closely related to those that help to store information. Therefore, those facts or pieces of information that awake an emotion are more easily to remember and learn. | |
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Michael Dhar
Live Science 2014-10-25 15:08:00
Two beloved sci-fi franchises returned to the screens this fall burdened with shaky memories. In ABC's superhero spy TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the lead character, Phil Coulson, is still reeling from a case of implanted memories. Meanwhile, the movie adaptation of the young-adult novel The Maze Runner opens on a hero with amnesia who is stranded in a dystopian maze. These characters' memories betray them in seemingly fantastical ways, but the recollections stored between your own ears may hardly be any better. From vivid images of events that never happenedto bad memories artificially engineered in the lab, here are the real-life ways your brain can distort your past. In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., super-spy Coulson carries on with his superhero-monitoring work from theAvengers movies. This season, he must do so with the knowledge that his traumatic death and recovery had been papered over in his own mind by images of a fictional Tahiti vacation. (Killed off in the Avengers movie, Coulson was revived by mysterious techniques in the show.) In one disturbing scene, the real memory returns - and he recalls a spiderlike machine rewriting the information in his brain. | |
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Martyn McLaughlin
The Scotsman 2014-10-27 22:27:00
At a time when sightings of the nation's most elusive inhabitant were treated with gravity by British officialdom, it was a fiendish plan to snatch her from under Scottish noses. Newly discovered documents have revealed how the National History Museum (NHM) in London appealed to so-called bounty hunters to help secure the carcase of the Loch Ness monster, according to a new book. It claims the files, dating back to the 1930s, show staff at the institution were keen to steal a march on museums in Scotland and around the world by exhibiting all - or part - of the beast's remains. Although Nessie now occupies a prized place in Scottish mythology alongside flying haggis and Brigadoon, the correspondence from the museum's archives demonstrate the seriousness with which early rumours of her existence were treated. In 1934, a year after the first sightings of a supposedly mysterious creature lurking in the loch's depths, the book claims, an NHM employee made clear it would be keen to trump institutions such as Edinburgh's Royal Scottish Museum (RSM). | |
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Rob Waugh
A strange disc pouring smoke and hovering over buildings has been found in a Romanian monastery wall painting thought to date from the 16th centuryYahoo News! 2014-10-23 00:00:00
A strange disc pouring smoke and hovering over buildings has been found in a monastery wall painting thought to date from the 16th century - and UFO researchers claim it is just one of many old paintings which seem to show evidence of visitors from another world. The image is painted on the wall on a 14th century church in Sighisoara - thought to the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure on whom the Dracula legend is based. The photograph was taken by a tourist, Catalina Borta, and sent to UFO experts at the Israeli Extraterrestrials and UFOs Research Organization (EURA). The caption on the painting says, 'Israel, put your hope in the Lord,' and the image is thought to date from just after 1523, when the Bible was first translated into German. UFO experts have drawn a comparison with other well-known paintings which seem to depict flying saucers, such as the 1710 painting Baptism of Christ by Aert de Gelder. | |
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RT
2014-10-26 16:35:00
An unidentified metal sphere has plunged from the sky on unsuspecting villagers in northern Brazil, causing an uproar. According to eyewitnesses, the UFO weighs about 50 kilograms and measures roughly one meter in diameter. The sphere fell on Wednesday in a village of Riacho dos Poços in Brazilian Maranhão state. No casualties were reported apart from an unfortunate cashew tree that was severed by the object as it plunged to the ground, according to MR Notícias, a Mata Roma news site. Valdir José Mendes, 46, told police the sphere landed several meters from his house leaving a one-meter-deep hole in the yard.
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Comment: There was a similar incident in China earlier this year:
UFO landed in vegetable garden in China's Heilongjiang Province Assuming this too was a satellite part, we have to ask why more satellites have been crashing to Earth since 2011? Could it be because they're being knocked out of orbit by incoming meteors and comet fragments? | ||
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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Khier Casino,
Opposing Views 2014-10-26 00:00:00
Getting kids to take their medicine can be hard, but when it comes to adorable panda cubs, it can be even more difficult. In a new viral video, a Chinese zookeeper needed to give a dose of medicine to two pandas, but it didn't go according to plan, the Huffington Post reports. The two young cubs mistake the man's presence for playtime as they climb on top of him and even cling to his legs. As Metro notes, just as the zookeeper is close to getting one of them in position to take the medicine, the other panda climbs on his back, sending all three of them tumbling. | |
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RT.com
2014-10-23 04:42:00
Dutch pranksters have fooled food experts and consumers and proved that even foodies can't tell McDonald's from real, organic food when offered some on a plate. The comments from misled 'experts' are hysterical. Lifehunters, as the guys call themselves, posted a video of them visiting one of the most popular annual food expos in Europe, in the city of Houten, to serve their "top of the notch recipes" from their"high-end restaurant" that serves "organic alternatives to fastfood." "The problem here is that we don't actually own a restaurant," one of the pranksters, Sacha, says on the video. So they paid a visit to their "favorite restaurant" McDonald's. Armed with a serving tray of cut up McDonald's sandwiches made into canapé treats they started their hunt for gullible fans of organic food to ask what experts think about their "specialties." | |
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