The US Army has seen record suicide rates (Fort Hood alone saw ten this year), record levels of criminal behaviour in soldiers at home and abroad: numerous veterans are returning from the wars and picking up where they left off "because they can't turn it off". Morale is woeful as soldiers question the purpose of America's wars abroad. Consider that in August,
A Fort Hood soldier was sentenced Wednesday to a month in jail for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan over his beliefs that the war violates international law.
Spc. Victor Agosto, 24, of Miami, pleaded guilty to disobeying lawful orders and was sentenced at the central Texas Army post.
"I really had no Army way of being consistent with my conscience," Agosto said. "The courts haven't recognized soldiers' rights to refuse an order they believe to be illegal.... I believe future courts will find that the Afghanistan war is illegal because it violates international law."
Fort Hood US Army base in the heart of Texas is home to some 50,000 US soldiers, their families and civilian support staff. The complex is next door to the town of Killeen where in 1991 another infamous shooting took place: a man rammed his truck into a cafe and shot dead 23 people, yelling beforehand, "This is what Central Texas did to me!"
Boy diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, but CDC says no clear link
A 14-year-old Virginia boy is weak and struggling to walk after coming down with a reported case of Guillain-Barre syndrome within hours after receiving the H1N1 vaccine for swine flu.
Jordan McFarland, a high school athlete from Alexandria, Va., left Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children Tuesday night in a wheelchair nearly a week after developing severe headaches, muscle spasms and weakness in his legs following a swine flu shot. He will likely need the assistance of a walker for four to six weeks, plus extensive physical therapy.
"The doctor said I'll recover fully, but it's going to take some time," the teenager said.
Jordan is among the first people in the nation to report developing the potentially life-threatening muscle disorder after receiving the H1N1 vaccine this fall. His alarming reaction was submitted via msnbc.com's reader reporting tool, First Person, by his stepmother, Arlene Connin.
Increased cases of GBS were found in patients who received a 1976 swine flu vaccine, but government health officials say they've seen no rise in the condition associated with the current outbreak.
Wars come home in strange, unnerving ways -- as Americans have just discovered at Fort Hood. Even before Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on his killing spree, that base, a major military embarkation point for our war zones, was already experiencing the after-effects of eight years of war and repeated tours of duty. The suicide rate at Fort Hood was soaring (with 10 on the base in 2009 alone). Divorce rates were on the rise, as were mental health problems, drug and alcohol use, domestic abuse (up 75% since 2001), and murders among war-zone returnees. Even violent crime in Killeen, the town that houses the base, was up 22% (though it was down, according to the New York Times, "in towns of similar size in other parts of the country"). In an era in which our last president urged Americans to support his Global War on Terror by shopping and visiting Disney World, it often seemed that, except for soldiers and their families, our wars abroad affected little in this country.
And yet for an imperial power past its prime, foreign wars, even ones fought thousands of miles from home, have a way of coming back to haunt. Alfred W. McCoy tends to be ahead of the curve in his writing. In the Vietnam era, he had to fight the CIA to get his book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, published; in the Bush years, he was perhaps the first person to recognize that the photos from Abu Ghraib represented no anomaly but the product of a long history of CIA torture research -- and published a powerful book, A Question of Torture, on the subject.
His latest book, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, meets counterinsurgency, another topic direct from today's headlines, head on. It ends on these lines: "...a state, like the United States, that rules a foreign territory through political repression and pervasive policing soon finds many of those same coercive methods moving homeward to degrade its own democracy. Such are the costs of empire." In his latest TomDispatch post, McCoy lays out just how that impulse for repression and policing, so vividly and violently expressed abroad in these last years, is now quietly taking aim at us.
Armistice Day reminds us that when wars end, the winners and losers are supposed to make peace. For the first time, in 2009, leaders of World War II enemies, Germany and France, commemorated the date together as a sign of new mutual respect. But this week also marked the ten-year anniversary of a different kind of war -- a war on Americans' assets and the poor. Ten years later, while the winners and losers are obvious, there's no armistice in sight.
On November 12, 1999, after decades of banking deregulation, congress repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which up until that point had kept Main Street banks and commercial financial speculation apart. Glass-Steagall's repeal unleashed a wave of derivative marketing that rewarded shameless loan sharks for selling the most vulnerable Americans into a bubble of debt.
The bubble having burst, now the stock market is up. Companies are reporting strong earnings and Wall Street's clearly at peace. The top three banks announced this week that they'll be giving out their biggest bonuses yet. But this week's news also brought US double-digit unemployment and regardless of those good earnings, the layoffs just don't stop; Sprint says it's cutting another 2,500 jobs; Pfizer, 2,000 jobs; even supposedly new and growing parts of the economy aren't growing -- software developer Adobe's cutting 6 percent of its workforce, game-maker Electronic Arts is cutting 1,500 jobs. And that's just this week.
Winners and losers? You betcha. And the winners have won some serious loot.
Having suppressed wages for decades, now employers are suppressing jobs. Workers are not only making do with less -- they're working harder than ever, and there are no new hires, because fewer people seem to get the job done just fine. In fact, productivity's up, and the personal costs are off the books.
Jason Ryan, Pierre Thomas and Martha Raddatz ABC News 2009-11-10 19:50:00
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspect in last weeks Fort Hood, Texas shooting spree that killed 13 people, came under scrutiny by officials beginning last year for communicating with Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been a scholar at a mosque Hasan attended when he lived in Virginia. The Virginia mosque where al-Awlaki taught had also been visited by 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour.
Officials determined that the communications were benign and contained no threat. Given the results of the review, the FBI did not have enough information to open a full-field investigation, according to investigative officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Officials briefed on the case said that an individual overseas was being monitored when authorities recognized that Hasan had contacted the scholar. The FBI notified two of the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force offices, which pursued the leads on Hasan.
Stu Schutzman The World Newser 2009-11-10 19:41:00
Sarah Palin's crusade for God and country "kicked up another notch" last week after she uncovered a government plot to marginalize God. Ms. Palin delivered a speech to a Wisconsin Right-to-Life group Friday night, at which she banned all media coverage including personal cameras, cell phones or other recording devices. The better to speak her mind?
But lo and behold, a group of enterprising reporters including Jonathan Martin from Politico.com found a way in anyway, by forking over the $30 entrance fee and covering the speech the old-fashioned way -- with pad and pen. There was a lot to write about.
James C. McKinley Jr. The New York Times 2009-11-11 20:00:00
Killeen, Texas - Sgt. Kimberly D. Munley has been applauded as a hero across the nation for shooting down Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan during the bloody rampage at Fort Hood last week. The account of heroism, given by the authorities, attracted the attention of newspapers, the networks and television talk shows.
But the story of how the petite police officer and the accused gunman went down in an exchange of gunfire does not agree with the account of an eyewitness who had gone to the base's processing center, where the shooting occurred, to conduct business before being deployed.
The witness, who asked not to be identified, said Major Hasan wheeled on Sergeant Munley as she rounded the corner of a building and shot her, putting her on the ground. Then Major Hasan turned his back on her and started putting another magazine into his semiautomatic pistol.
The men behind the Omagh bomb could have been arrested before the atrocity, the man who investigated the murders said tonight.
Norman Baxter said had intelligence services shared information with the police, the lives of the 29 killed could have been saved.
Mr Baxter gave evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of MPs and said there had been a string of earlier threats involving the same republican gang.
The former head of the West German Military Intelligence has issued a book revealing secret details of a 1949 US-German treaty, alleging America and its allies have been deliberately suppressing the nation's sovereignty.
Andrew Sparrow The Daily Telegraph 2009-11-11 14:35:00
Exclusive: Business secretary could hold weekly televised news conferences to explain government business
Lord Mandelson is being tipped as a possible "minister for information" under a shake-up of the way Downing Street holds its media briefings announced today.
Officials planning the overhaul believe that one option would be for the business secretary to hold weekly news conferences to explain government policy.
The prime minister's spokesman announced the setting up of a working group to review the way Downing Street conducts media briefings in "an increasingly fast-moving and online media world".
One option being considered would involve Mandelson giving a televised briefing to reporters every Monday about government business, according to a Westminster insider.
A soldier facing charges of desertion for refusing to return to Afghanistan has been arrested and charged with five further offences after joining an anti-war demonstration.
Lance Corporal Joe Glenton led a protest in London last month against the continued presence of British troops in Afghanistan.
He was already facing a court martial but according to the Stop the War Coalition the new charges carry a maximum of 10 years imprisonment.
The group's convener Lindsey German said last night : 'This is not about breach of military regulations. In the last few days a range of military personnel have been speaking in the media in defence of this appalling war. I doubt if any of them have been arrested.
Taliban have allegedly been found in possession of American-manufactured mines, amid reports of the Afghan militants stepping up their bombing campaigns.
On Tuesday, the Qatar-based news channel Al-Jazeera aired footages showing the Taliban sorting and transporting purported 'US military ammunition' including mines engraved with US markings.
The channel claimed the explosives had been taken during an October militant rampage through two distant US bases in the eastern province of Nuristan.
The militants are, meanwhile, reported to conduct explosions throughout the war-wrecked country on a daily basis.
Israel is sending a foreign ministry official to the Solomon Islands next week to seek an explanation as to why it was the only country in Oceania to vote at the UN for the Goldstone report condemning Israel's assault on Gaza.
Solomon Islands' Foreign Minister William Haomae a year ago flew to Iran, following a meeting at the UN in New York with counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki, to explore the prospect of formalising diplomatic relations, and of benefiting from Iranian aid.
Prime Minister Derek Sikua also held talks with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when both were attending the UN General Assembly in September last year.
Mr Haomae said at the time that Iran's assistance might be helpful in dam construction, training for the oil and gas industries -- for which the Solomons hopes to attract exploration -- and trade in general.
The government assured the National Assembly on Tuesday it would execute any court warrants against ex-president Pervez Musharraf as the former military dictator came under fire from both sides of the house, though the treasury benches ignored an opposition call to reply to his latest criticism of President Asif Ali Zardari.
Opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was cheered by desk-thumping from both opposition and treasury benches as he lambasted Mr Musharraf for 'using such (insulting) words against the elected president of Pakistan' and, while demanding a government response to it, repeated his Pakistan Muslim League-N's demand for a high treason trial of the former army chief for his violations of the Constitution.
George Hunter & Doug Guthrie Detroit News 2009-11-12 15:13:00
Money raised by Metro Detroit, Michigan agencies increases 50% in five years
Local law enforcement agencies are raising millions of dollars by seizing private property suspected in crimes, but often without charges being filed -- and sometimes even when authorities admit no offense was committed.
The money raised by confiscating goods in Metro Detroit soared more than 50 percent to at least $20.62 million from 2003 to 2007, according to a Detroit News analysis of records from 58 law enforcement agencies. In some communities, amounts raised went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands -- and, in one case, into the millions.
"It's like legalized stealing," said Jacque Sutton, a 21-year-old college student from Mount Clemens whose 1989 Mustang was seized by Detroit police raiding a party. Charges against him and more than 100 others were dropped, but he still paid more than $1,000 to get the car back.
'Freedoms and liberties which we enjoy under the U.S. Constitution are under siege'
A Colorado sheriff who made headlines for his deliberate non-compliance with the politically correct attitude of his county toward Christmas, today honored the U.S. Marine Corps on its 234th birthday, along with veterans and members of other military branches.
And he implored them to be vigilant now as ever, since their service is not over.
The comments come from Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden, who occasionally releases a personal column called the BullsEye.
Human Rights Watch says people seeking redress in Beijing for local injustices have been abducted, detained and abused
Large numbers of Chinese citizens - including children - have been held for days or months in unofficial "black jails" that appear to have emerged when a controversial detention system was abolished, according to a report published today by a human rights group.
Dozens of citizens who had travelled or tried to travel to Beijing to seek redress for local injustices told Human Rights Watch they were instead abducted, detained and in many cases abused in the illicit prisons.
The prison issue received unusual coverage in the domestic media this year when a guard was accused of raping a young detainee - although the carefully worded articles, which did not include the term "black jails", were soon deleted from Chinese websites. The English-language newspaper China Daily reported last week that the guard had pleaded guilty and a verdict was expected within the month.
Google has updated its Latitude service, which tracks you and your friends' locations, to include a history of the places you have visited and alerts to let your mates know you are nearby.
The Google Location History will store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. Once this information has been accrued, you will be able to see a visual plot on Google Maps of the places you have been.
The privacy of our electronic footprints should be a defining political issue of the internet age
Perhaps good old-fashioned, face-to-face conversation will make a comeback, now the government is pressing ahead with its plan to oblige communications providers to retain details of all our electronic interactions.
While most people can understand the argument that mining such data helps law enforcement and security services, it is nonetheless a proposal that sticks in the throat for many.
During Labour's tenure, the concept of the surveillance state has been introduced with almost as much stealth as the snooping itself. The Tories, recognising public unease, promise to "roll back the surveillance state" and stop the trend for big government databases. If they win power, it will be interesting to see whether or not such intentions are watered down in the harsh reality of tackling the UK's national security challenges.
The UK's new cyberwarfare unit will be ready for action on 10 March, according to the government.
The Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), located at GCHQ in Cheltenham, will have an initial staff of 19, said Baroness Crawley.
CSOC will monitor the internet for threats to UK infrastructure and counter-attack when necessary.
The staffing figure, released in response to a Parliamentary question, puts paid to recent hyperbole suggesting the intelligence agencies were recruiting a 50-strong "army" of teenage hackers.
US defense contractors are funding insurgents in Afghanistan, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, according to a report in The Nation published Thursday.
The report, by veteran investigative correspondent Aram Roston, asserts that US military contractors charged with assisting US forces in Afghanistan are actually funding the groups killing American soldiers. Roston describes a protection racket similar to that of the mafia, in which contractors pay the Taliban "protection money" not to attack them.
David Edwards and Daniel Tencer rawstory.com 2009-11-11 10:51:00
Despite news reports that the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater has seen its contracts dry up and its influence wane, the company continues to do brisk business in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and the Obama administration may be too afraid of the firm to do anything about it, says investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill.
"You know who's guarding Hillary Clinton in Afghanistan right now? Blackwater," Scahill told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Tuesday night. "You know who guards members of Congress? Blackwater. They have half a billion dollars in contracts in Afghanistan right now. CIA, State Department, Defense Department. Why is President Obama keeping these guys on the payroll? There has never been a company in recent history that made the case that corporations are corrupt, evil organizations [better] than Blackwater."
Scahill was on The Rachel Maddow Show discussing the New York Times'revelation that senior Blackwater executives allegedly arranged for bribes of up to $1 million for Iraqi politicians in a bid to retain its contracts and silence criticism of the company in the wake of the Nissour Square massacre in 2007, in which 17 Iraqi civilians died after Blackwater guards opened fire.
Though the Times report stated that it's unknown if the approved bribes ever reached their targets -- Iraqi politicians -- Scahill drew a connection between the alleged bribes and the fact that, after the Nissour Sqaure massacre, the Iraqi government first decided to bar Blackwater from operating in the country, and then reversed its position.
"You had the Iraqi government saying Blackwater was banned from that country, then suddenly doing an about face, and Blackwater remains in Iraq to this day," Scahill said.
The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as "nondeployable for medical reasons" have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.
The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma, coupled with ongoing harassment about his being a Muslim. This, along with other factors, contributed towards Hasan falling into a desperation so deep he was willing to slaughter fellow soldiers, and is indicative of fissures running deep into the crumbling edifice upon which the US military stands.
Comment: Fact-twisting in the mainstream media is becoming more blatant every day. The article below is a prime example of how a story is morphed to implement the PTB's sinister goals. While the meaningless yet deadly wars the American empire is currently waging are losing support from within and without, the PTB will go the extra mile - paved of lies and propaganda - to make the populace believe that "the enemy is out there to get us".
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is the proverbial canary in the mine. Gunning down 12 soldiers and one civilian, and wounding 30 was not a random act of violence by an Army psychiatrist who was slated to deploy to Afghanistan, an evil war in his mind, where American infidels are killing good Muslims.
As the Virginia-born major told a female neighbor in his apartment complex, "I'm going to do good work for God." Hasan wanted, in his mind, to die a martyr, killing American soldiers who had been killing Muslim soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, or would soon be doing so.
Comment: How can anyone presume to know what was in Hasan's mind? Several of the earliest, raw stories talk of two or three shooters. There are many unexplained aspects to the Ft. Hood mystery here.
First is the report the perpetrator was dead and then hours later the revelation that he was still alive. Exactly how long does it take to determine if a person is dead or alive? Could it be no one knew whom the shooter or shooters were and a story had to be concocted for public consumption? What happened to the two other "suspects" that were detained? What did they do to qualify as suspects and more importantly, what information surfaced that led to their release? One of the suspects reportedly stated he "was with the shooter."
Second is the number of victims from a single shooter. Let us not forget this shooting did not occur at the mall, it occurred on a military installation where the victims had been trained in military tactics and some were combat veterans. We are to believe they did nothing to stop a single shooter and he was allowed to reload several times and continue shooting and the only thing that stopped him was the arrival of a police officer after the gunman had gunned down over 40 people?
And how so very convenient for the state, a perpetrator who was both anti-war and a Muslim; just doesn't get any better than that. Could this be an example of following the philosophy of Rahm Emanuel on dealing with a crisis?
Third was the shutting down of communications in and around Ft. Hood for hours. While the Army and the media will explain this in various scenarios, it also provided the Army with a chance to create whatever story it was they wanted to provide the public on the terrible tragedy. Of course we all know the Army would never distort or lie about the facts involving the deaths of innocents. Well, there is that My Lai thing. People on the ground have told me cell phone towers were jammed to prevent unauthorized dissemination of information after the shooting. Again, the Army would not want any information contrary to the company line emerging from this disaster.
When waging war "by way of deception," the motto of the Israeli Mossad, well-timed crises play a critical agenda-setting role by displacing facts with what a target population can be deceived to believe. Thus the force-multiplier effect when staged crises are reinforced with pre-staged intelligence. In combination, the two often prove persuasive.
That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a "consensus" belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those "facts" proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.
Such agent provocateur operations typically include collateral incidents as pre-staging for the intended main event. Ongoing incidents suggest a follow-on operation is underway. Recent history suggests we'll see an orgy of evidence that plausibly indicts a pre-staged Evil Doer. Though Iran is an obvious candidate, Pakistan is also a possibility where outside forces have been destabilizing this nuclear Islamic nation with a series of violent incidents.
Will it be coincidence if the next war - like the last - is consistent with the expansive goals of Jewish nationalists?
James Cogan World Socialist Web Site 2009-11-11 01:00:00
The awarding of development rights over the huge West Qurna oilfield in southern Iraq to Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell last Thursday once again underscores the criminal character of the continuing US-led occupation. As the direct result of the Iraq war, major American and other transnational energy conglomerates are now gaining control over some the largest oilfields in the world.
West Qurna has proven reserves of 8.7 billion barrels of oil. Iraq's total reserves are currently put at 115 billion barrels, though dozens of potential fields have not been explored adequately. Before the US invasion in 2003, rights over West Qurna had been awarded by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein to the Russian oil firm, Lukoil. The pro-US puppet regime in Baghdad has torn up all pre-war contracts.
U.S. foreclosure filings surpassed 300,000 for an eighth straight month as unemployment made it tougher for homeowners to pay their bills, RealtyTrac Inc. said.
A total of 332,292 properties received a default or auction notice or were seized by banks in October, up 19 percent from a year earlier, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac said today. One in every 385 households received a filing. The tally fell 3 percent from September, the third consecutive monthly decline.
American Small Business League 2009-11-12 15:16:00
Petaluma, California - On October 21, President Barack Obama announced he would convene a small business conference to address increasing access to capital for small businesses. Yet less than a week before the conference is set to convene on Wednesday, November 18, the Administration has refused to release any information regarding the event's location, time, agenda or attendees.
The American Small Business League (ASBL) is concerned that the administration is withholding details on the conference as a means of preventing legitimate small business concerns, small business advocates and the media from attending.
"This is a clear indication that President Obama has no intention of adopting any policies that will actually benefit legitimate small businesses. My guess is that this is going to be a love-fest for his venture capitalist buddies and the Fortune 500 firms he is giving small business contracts to every day," ASBL President Lloyd Chapman said.
Hedge Fund Perps Walk Free From Financial Crisis Criminal Trial
I had come from a heated financial journalism conference in a far more orderly Brussels where I had been thundering against Wall Street crime. The first news I saw from "the homeland" was that the only two big shots busted for crimes against their investors when they ran Hedge Funds, now imploded, at Bear Stears were acquitted in a New York courtroom dramatizing the difficulties prosecutors face in achieving the "jail-out" I have been calling for.
Here's how the NY Times covered it:
"It was, prosecutors claimed, a clear case of Wall Street crime - and a chance to bring to account two culprits of the subprime age.
But jurors disagreed, and on Tuesday, two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers were found not guilty of securities fraud in federal court in Brooklyn, in what legal experts called a setback for prosecutors hoping for easy victories in this era of bailouts and foreclosures.
Grant McCool and Michael Erman Reuters 2009-11-11 19:56:00
New York - Two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers were found not guilty of fraud, a decision that could make government prosecutors less likely to bring criminal charges against Wall Street executives for their role in the financial crisis.
The case -- the first major prosecution arising from the meltdown of major U.S. financial institutions -- was seen as a litmus test of whether a jury, presented with evidence from emails between money managers and conference calls with investors, would convict individuals for corporate collapses.
Ralph Cioffi, 53, and Matthew Tannin, 48, were acquitted of all charges on the second day of deliberations by a jury in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York. Cioffi and Tannin left the courthouse with their smiling wives and relatives, some of them crying tears of relief.
Cioffi and Tannin managed two funds, crammed with subprime mortgage-backed securities, that lost institutional and individual investors a total of $1.6 billion when the funds collapsed in mid-2007 at an early phase of the Wall Street market meltdown.
The jury on Tuesday acquitted both men of conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud -- charges brought in a June 2008 indictment. Cioffi was acquitted of an additional charge of insider trading.
Andrew Martin and Lowell Bergman New York Times 2009-11-11 19:49:00
Banks are struggling to make money in the credit card business these days, and consumers are paying the price. Interest rates are going up, credit lines are being cut and a variety of new fees are being imposed on even the best cardholders.
One recipient of new credit card terms is Anita Holaday, a 91-year-old in Florida, who received a letter last month from Citibank announcing that her new interest rate was 29.99 percent, an increase of 10 percentage points.
"I think it's outrageous they pursue such a policy," said Susan Holaday Schumacher, Ms. Holaday's daughter, who pays her mother's bills. "That rate is shocking under any circumstances."
While the average interest rates charged by banks are lower than Ms. Holaday's, her situation is not all that unusual. The higher rates and fees reflect the grim new realities of the credit card industry - the percentage of uncollectible balances has hit a record even as a new law may further limit the cards' profitability.
Jesse Jackson Chicago Sun-Times 2009-11-10 19:24:00
Black Unemployment Tops 40 Percent
Unemployment has soared above 10 percent, but that figure doesn't count those forced to work part-time, those who have given up in despair, young people who were never able to get hired. There are now 25 million people unemployed.
For African Americans, it is worse. African Americans are experiencing a silent depression. Unemployment is more than 18 percent; underemployment even higher. And among black teens, unemployment is more than 40 percent.
This is combined with a staggering loss of wealth among what was the emerging African-American middle class -- a group devastated by the collapse of the housing bubble. African-Americans were prime targets of mortgage companies peddling misleading mortgages, with low entry rates, hidden fees and exploding interest-rate escalation clauses. Having redlined urban areas for decades, mortgage brokers then targeted them for subprime mortgages. Too many families aspiring to own their own homes assumed that their jobs were secure and that they could always remortgage after their low entry rates expired -- and got caught.
The scalding-hot sea that supposedly covered the early Earth may in fact never have existed, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers who analyzed isotope ratios in 3.4 billion-year-old ocean floor rocks. Their findings suggest that the early ocean was much more temperate and that, as a result, life likely diversified and spread across the globe much sooner in Earth's history than has been generally theorized.
It also means that the chemical composition of the ancient ocean was significantly different from today's ocean, which in turn may change interpretations of how the early atmosphere evolved, said Page Chamberlain, professor of environmental earth system science.
When rocks form on the ocean floor, they form in chemical equilibrium with the ocean water, incorporating similar proportions of different isotopes into the rock as are in the water. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus, giving them different masses. However, because the exact proportion of different isotopes that go into the rock is partly temperature dependent, the ratios in the rock provide critical clues into how warm the ocean was when the rock formed.
Just months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.
Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.
Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues.
The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail.
Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. "It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard" in the Arctic, says Patterson, who presented the findings at the BOREAS conference in Rovaniemi, Finland, on 31 October.
Pablo Cermeño balances at the back of the small boat, legs braced, harpoon at the ready. Beneath him in the crystal waters his target is clearly visible: a shimmer of metallic turquoise that tacks left, right, left again as it is hauled inexorably towards the surface. The fisherman grunts and sweats as he does battle with the giant fish, reeling, pulling and reeling again.
Thomas H. Maugh II The Los Angeles Times 2009-11-12 12:00:00
A high-fat, high-sugar diet alters the composition of bacteria in the gut, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it.
A high-fat, high-sugar diet does more than pump calories into your body. It also alters the composition of bacteria in your intestines, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, research in mice suggests. And the changeover can happen in as little as 24 hours, according to a report Wednesday in the new journal Science Translational Medicine.
Many factors play a role in the propensity to gain weight, including genetics, physical activity and the environment, as well as food choices. But a growing body of evidence, much of it accumulated by Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that bacteria in the gut also play a key role.
Lauren Johnson has been sneezing thousands of times a day for weeks
With metronomic regularity, the girl's right arm rises to her face, her hand balled into a fist and partially covered by her sleeve. If Lauren Johnson is talking, she stops when her hand arrives at her nose. Then she sneezes. It's not a big sneeze, but she has to stop to let it out. Then the hand drops and she resumes whatever she was doing. A few seconds later, the action is repeated.
Talk. Sneeze. Play. Sneeze. Sit still. Sneeze. Eat. Sneeze.
As many as 12 times a minute and 12,000 times a day, 12-year-old Lauren sneezes. And there's nothing that six professionals, including doctors, a psychologist and a hypnotist, have been able to do to stop it.
"It gets old after a while," said Lauren. Even that short sentence was bracketed by the sneezes that began on Nov. 1 and haven't stopped since.
Cathleen Genova Medical News Today 2009-11-12 03:00:00
New research reveals that children with developmental dyslexia have a deficit in a brain mechanism involved in the perception of speech in a noisy environment. The study, published by Cell Press in the November 12 issue of the journal Neuron, provides the first direct evidence that the human auditory brainstem exhibits remarkable moment-to-moment plasticity and undergoes a fine tuning that is strongly associated with noise exclusion.
Most people have little trouble carrying on a conversation with a friend in a noisy restaurant thanks to the highly adaptive auditory system which manages to focus in on the predictable, repeating pitch of the friend's voice and effectively tune out the random, fluctuating background noise. Although it may be a routine occurrence, exactly how the nervous system manages to accomplish this feat is still a mystery.
"Understanding the relationship between the adaptive auditory system and perception of speech in noise is clinically relevant because recent studies have demonstrated that the 5% of school-age children who are diagnosed with developmental dyslexia can be particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of background noise," explains senior study author Dr. Nina Kraus, who directs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University.
The long-held theory that our brains use different mechanisms for forming long-term and short-term memories has been challenged by new research from UCL, published in PNAS.
Neuroscientists formed this theory based on observation of patients with amnesia, a condition that severely disrupts the ability to form long-lasting memories. Typically, amnesia is caused by injury to the hippocampi, a pair of brain structures located in the depth of the temporal lobes.
Despite the condition devastating long-term memory, such patients are quite proficient in rehearsing a phone number over short periods of time, as long as their attention is not distracted. This led to a hypothesis that the hippocampus supports long-term but not short-term memory. However, the UCL study shows that this distinction now needs to be reconsidered.
The team studied patients with a specific form of epilepsy called 'temporal lobe epilepsy with bilateral hippocampal sclerosis', which leads to marked dysfunction of the hippocampi. They asked the patients to try and memorise photographic images depicting normal scenes, for example chairs and a table in a living-room. Their memory of the image was tested and brain activity recorded using MEG (magnetoencephalography) after a short interval of just five seconds, or a long interval of 60 minutes.
A teenage Virginia athlete is in a wheel chair now after suffering Guillain-Barre Syndrome within hours after receiving an H1N1 swine flu vaccine shot. 14-year-old Jordan McFarland developed severe headaches, muscle spasms and weakness in his legs after being injected. He will need "extensive physical therapy" to recovery, reports MSNBC. Plus, he'll need the help of a walker for four to six weeks.
Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) is the name given to anyone who exhibits a particular set of neurological symptoms including muscle weakness and muscle spasms. GBS is now increasingly occurring following H1N1 vaccine injections. It was diagnosed in thousands of patients following the 1976 swine flu vaccine scare, and it appears to be recurring here in 2009 as the swine flu vaccine makes it into more widespread distribution.
Health authorities, however, remain adamant that H1N1 vaccines are never the cause of GBS, and that such diagnoses are "pure coincidence." This blatantly unscientific P.R. tactic is designed to dismiss any and all concerns over the neurological side effects of H1N1 vaccines by simply denying they exist. To date, the CDC has received reports of five additional people being diagnosed with GBS following swine flu vaccinations, but it dismisses them all as coincidence. "It's much less than we'd expect," says CDC official Dr. Claudia J. Vellozzi. (Which is sort of interesting all by itself, because it reveals that the CDC expects a lot more people to get GBS following vaccine injections...)
Faced with a growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, hospitals in the United Kingdom are adopting traditional medicinal techniques to fight infection, such as maggots and honey.
Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other drug-resistant infections kill or hasten the death of 8,000 British patients per year, while MRSA now kills more people in the United States annually than AIDS.
At the Royal United Hospital in Bath, England, many wounds are now being disinfected with Manuka honey rather than pharmaceutical antibiotics.
"Honey has been used in healing for centuries, but now new products have overcome the problems associated with using conventional honey and bring it into a modern healthcare setting," said the hospital's Kate Purser.
On 6 December 1957 a hollow aluminium sphere the size of a small melon burst from a blazing fireball, rose a mere metre or so above Florida before landing with a thump. The US was in trouble. A month earlier, the Soviet Union had sent a 500-kilogram capsule bearing a dog called Laika into space. But here was the US unable to even notch up its first foray into orbit.
President Dwight Eisenhower responded by creating a new research agency tasked with ensuring such "technological surprises" like Sputnik would never be sprung on the US again. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), conceived in February 1958 not only still exists, it has consistently made the US military the most advanced on Earth and unleashed life-changing technologies such as the internet, GPS and the computer mouse along the way.
Under the control of the Pentagon, DARPA has always maintained a low profile, but now journalist Michael Belfiore has written the first book about the agency. He spent time with the engineers charged with realising some very far-fetched ideas, which, if past performance is anything to go by, may also create society-changing spin-offs. He also gained unprecedented access to the agency's director, Tony Tether (now retired).
The current projects that Belfiore visits have typically ambitious goals - ones which dedicated New Scientist readers will be familiar with. He talks with two groups working to make prosthetic arms as nimble and light as the real thing, watches driverless cars work their way through real traffic in a bid to win a $2-million prize, and meets the creators of a portable robotic emergency room intended to keep injured soldiers alive long enough to reach hospital. He also learns about efforts to build scramjets able to race around the world in just a few hours.
Here's an apple that landed far from the tree. A dim star just 13 light years from Earth was born in a cluster 17,000 light years away.
Discovered in 1897, Kapteyn's Star is the 25th nearest star system to our sun, but it is no local, says Elizabeth Wylie-de Boer of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra.
The cool star's composition is tricky to study, but astronomers can look at 16 other stars in the same "moving group", all of which orbit the galaxy backwards and are very old. The odd motion marks them as members of the Milky Way's ancient population of halo stars.
Of the stars, 14 had the same abundance of elements - such as sodium, magnesium, zirconium, barium - as Omega Centauri, the galaxy's most luminous globular cluster. The cluster emits a million times more light than the sun.
"It's long been thought that Omega Centauri is the left-over nucleus of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way," says Wylie-de Boer, whose paper will appear in the Astronomical Journal. "During the merger, the outer regions of this dwarf galaxy were stripped."
Anil Ananthaswamy New Scientist 2009-11-12 11:49:00
As damp squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.
Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.
"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."
Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.
It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.
Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work.
The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.
While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment.
Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.
The ancient find is a psalium, an element of harness. Experts state that it is just 200 years younger than the first chariot, invented in that very part of the continent, according to research.
The psalium is made of a bull's hipbone. Amazing is the craftsmanship of the master who made this artifact, as well as the ideal state in which it has come down to us.
The swastika was once a symbol of the solar chariot. It is corroborated by archeological finds unearthed not far from the Nizhnyaya Krasavka Settlement of the Saratov Region. The site of the ancient settlement of the Arians has been examined by students and professors for three years already. Within this period the expedition acquired around 20,000 artifacts of various value.
Madrid - They have renamed it the city recovered from the Euphrates and it is found in the Syrian enclave of Tall Qabr on the banks of the river that, with the Tigris, was the centre of the birth of civilisation in Mesopotamia. It is a circularly planned city, dating back to 2,600 years before Christ.
Galician archaeologists from an expedition from the University of Coruna made the discovery, led by Jean Luis Montero, who identified two layers dating back to from the IV to first millennium before Christ. Since 2008 the multidisciplinary expedition, made up of 20 people, has been working in the area known as the Hill of the Tomb in the Euphrates Valley on an excavation campaign in collaboration with the Syrian government in which various universities are participating with Spain's Superior Centre for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Syrian Ministry of Culture.
Strange lights in the sky, believed to be UFOs, were spotted all over the borough by dozens of people.
After our report last week of cross-shaped lights being spotted above Long Eaton the previous weekend, a number of readers from all over the borough came forward with their own sightings.
John Henshaw, 46, said he and his neighbours in Shipley View went out into the street to see eight orange lights dart across the night sky on Saturday, October 31. They were convinced the lights were nothing to do with Bonfire displays.
Whatever dropped out of the sky in Kecksburg more than 40 years ago, NASA officials insist they have no records documenting its origin, recovery or supposed removal by the military.
No records of a meteor, as state police immediately described it to reporters.
No records of a Russian space satellite, as some conspiracy theorists claim it might have been.
No records of anything related to the incident, actually, despite a large network of eyewitness reports of an orange fireball over the Mt. Pleasant Township community on Dec. 9, 1965.
A New York investigative journalist's seven-year campaign to seek available documents from the federal agency, supported by the recently renamed SyFy channel, turned up nothing about Kecksburg.
