Those who cut themselves - many as young as 10 - are often dismissed as attention-seekers. But their distress is real, and their numbers are increasing, reports Kate Hilpern
Chloe was just 12 when she started self-harming. "I was very quiet and an easy target for bullies. My brother was unwell, so I didn't want to bother my parents, and I had very few friends. One day in class, I dug my nails into my arm to stop me crying, and I was surprised by how much the physical pain distracted me from the emotional pain. Before long, I was regularly scratching myself, deeper each time."

The following year, on another particularly bad day, Chloe came home to find a knife on the kitchen side. "It felt almost instinctive to cut myself and afterwards, I felt so much better. By the time I was 15, I was using scissors or blades several times a day and never left home without something sharp."

Chloe hid her scars, but one day a friend saw her diary. This led to Chloe's mum, Jo, finding out. "It was a big shock," says Jo. "Chloe, who is now 17, has always been a very sensible, studious young lady. I didn't even know she was unhappy. Making matters worse was the fact that I got such bad advice. I was told not to discuss anything with Chloe, just to march her into treatment. It didn't work."

Last week, official statistics revealed an alarming rise in children who self-harm. These figures show that in the past year, NHS hospitals treated more than 18,000 girls and 4,600 boys between 10 and 19 after they had deliberately harmed themselves - a rise of 11 per cent. During the same period, cases involving children between 10 and 14 rose from 4,008 to 5,192 - a rise of 30 per cent.

According to Sarah Brennan, chief executive of YoungMinds, "An equally striking finding, which reflects Jo's experience, was the lack of confidence among parents and professionals about how to deal with it."

So what's going on? Why are so many young people - children, for goodness sake - self-harming? And where did the phenomenon, one that many people hadn't even heard of until recently, come from anyway?

Rachel Welch, project manager at selfharm.co.uk, isn't convinced self-harming is on the rise. It's just we are more aware of it, says the 35-year-old. Indeed, even the Bible includes stories about self-harming and the World Health Organisation has long recognised it as a problem, not just in the West but in developing countries.

A Defense Department program transfers military-grade weapons and vehicles to local law enforcement. It's the last thing we need

America's streets are looking more and more like a war zone. Last week, in a small county in upstate New York with a population of roughly 120,000 people, county legislators approved the receipt of a 20-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle, donated by the US Defense Department to the county sheriff.

Between the Armored Personnel Carriers locking down main streets in major American cities - mimicking our MRAPs in Afghanistan - or Special Weapons and Tactics (Swat) and Special Forces units canvassing our country, if we're not careful, this militarization of our domestic policing will make-over America, and fast.

Here's how it all happened. A little-known Pentagon program has been quietly militarizing American police forces for years. A total of $4.2bn worth of equipment has been distributed by the Defense Department to municipal law enforcement agencies, with a record $546m in 2012 alone.

In the fine print of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1997, the "1033 program" was born. It allows the Defense Department to donate surplus military equipment to local police forces.

Though the program's existed since the 1990s, it has expanded greatly in recent years, due, in part, to post-9/11 fears and sequestration budget cuts. The expanse, however, seems unnecessary given that the Department of Homeland Security has already handed out $34bn in "terrorism grants" to local polices forces - without oversight mind you - to fund counter-terrorism efforts.

Additional militarization, then, deserves congressional attention as the program is harmful and must be scaled back for a number of reasons.

First, the program is transforming our police into a military. The results of such over-militarized law enforcement are apparent from the dispersion of Occupy protesters in Oakland to the city-wide lockdown in Boston. As retired police chief Norm Stamper stated to the Associated Press:

We make a serious mistake, I'm convinced, in equipping domestic law enforcement, particularly in smaller, rural communities, with this much military equipment.

Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was "closed" due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown.

The Park Service will also have rangers on duty to police the ban... of access to an ocean. The government will probably use more personnel and spend more resources to attempt to close the ocean, than it would in its normal course of business.

This is governing by temper-tantrum. It is on par with the government's ham-fisted attempts to close the DC WWII Memorial, an open-air public monument that is normally accessible 24 hours a day. By accessible I mean, you walk up to it. When you have finished reflecting, you then walk away from it.

Former US West CEO Joseph Nacchio was released from prison last week after completing a four year insider trading sentence. He still claims the NSA framed him on the insider trading charges - after he refused to participate in their illegal phone surveillance program in 2001. US West was the only major telecommunication program that refused to spy on its customers. According to the Wall Street Journal, Nacchio feels vindicated by Edward Snowden's recent revelations about NSA spying on Americans' phone and email communications.

Nacchio was convicted of selling US West stock based on inside information about the company's deteriorating financial health. He denies this, claiming he believed US West's lucrative contracts with the federal government would continue. Instead his refusal to cooperate with the NSA resulted in the wholesale cancellation of government contracts.

Nacchio had evidence supporting this claim. However the judge ruled it was classified and prevented his defense team from presenting it. The redacted NSA files were only made public after the former CEO was convicted and sentenced. However Harper's and others have always supported Nacchio's contention that he was prosecuted in retaliation for saying "no" to the NSA.

Whether or not Vlaccio is guilty of insider trading (all the legal arguments are summarized at Race to the Bottom), the most illuminating information in the redacted files is that the NSA was pressuring US West to spy on customers in February 2001. This was a good seven months before the 9-11 attacks, the supposed justification for curtailing Americans' civil liberties.

Kuwait: Gulf states plan to study a project which will identify homosexuals and transgender individuals through a 'clinical test' which will be added to the list of medical tests one has to undergo to obtain a visa. If individuals are revealed to be homosexual or transgender, they will be denied entry into the country, a local daily reported yesterday, quoting a senior official in Kuwait's Ministry of Health.

"Homosexuals and 'third-sex' individuals can be detected through clinical tests during the routine medical examination for visa", Public Health Department Director Dr Yousuf Mendakar said. 'Third-sex' is a common term used in Gulf states to refer to transsexuals or people with gender identity disorder. The senior official added that an individual who is identified as homosexual will have 'unfit' stamped on his medical report; a term often used for people who fail medical tests which will automatically disqualify their visa application.

Dr Mendakar's statements did not specify the test or the people targeted in the new project. It was also unclear whether this excluded cross-dressers or included all homosexuals in general. He also did not explain how medical examiners intend to determine a visitor's sexual orientation. "Expatriates undergo medical tests at local clinics, but the new procedure includes stricter measures to find out homosexuals and transgenders so that they are banned from entering Kuwait or any GCC state", he added.

Police in Washington could have avoided shooting dead a woman pursued by officers in a car chase that led to the lockdown of the Capitol this week, the driver's sister, former New York police sergeant Valarie Carey, said late on Friday.

The family of Miriam Carey, whose one-year-old daughter Erica was in the car with her during the encounter with police on Thursday, has said she suffered from post-partum depression.

Carey, 34, a resident of Stamford, Connecticut, tried to drive her black Infiniti coupe through a barrier near the White House, then sped toward Capitol Hill, leading police on a high-speed chase that ended when her car got stuck on a median and police shot her.

"My sister could have been any person traveling in our capital," Valarie Carey told reporters outside her Brooklyn home. "Deadly physical force was not the ultimate recourse and it didn't have to be."

The chase and shooting came at a time of high political tension in the U.S. capital with Congress debating how to resolve the shutdown of the federal government. The Capitol was locked down after the shots were fired.

Police in Washington could have avoided shooting dead a woman pursued by officers in a car chase that led to the lockdown of the Capitol this week, the driver's sister, former New York police sergeant Valarie Carey, said late on Friday.
The family of Miriam Carey, whose one-year-old daughter Erica was in the car with her during the encounter with police on Thursday, has said she suffered from post-partum depression.

Carey, 34, a resident of Stamford, Connecticut, tried to drive her black Infiniti coupe through a barrier near the White House, then sped toward Capitol Hill, leading police on a high-speed chase that ended when her car got stuck on a median and police shot her.

"My sister could have been any person traveling in our capital," Valarie Carey told reporters outside her Brooklyn home. "Deadly physical force was not the ultimate recourse and it didn't have to be."

The chase and shooting came at a time of high political tension in the U.S. capital with Congress debating how to resolve the shutdown of the federal government. The Capitol was locked down after the shots were fired.

Police in Washington could have avoided shooting dead a woman pursued by officers in a car chase that led to the lockdown of the Capitol this week, the driver's sister, former New York police sergeant Valarie Carey, said late on Friday.

The family of Miriam Carey, whose one-year-old daughter Erica was in the car with her during the encounter with police on Thursday, has said she suffered from post-natal depression.

Carey, 34, a resident of Stamford, Connecticut, tried to drive her black Infiniti coupe through a barrier near the White House, then sped toward Capitol Hill, leading police on a high-speed chase that ended when her car got stuck on a median and police shot her.

"My sister could have been any person traveling in our capital," Valarie Carey told reporters outside her Brooklyn home.

"Deadly physical force was not the ultimate recourse and it didn't have to be."

The chase and shooting came at a time of high political tension in the U.S. capital with Congress debating how to resolve the shutdown of the federal government. The Capitol was locked down after the shots were fired.

In another incident that caused alarm in Washington, a man appeared to have set himself on fire at the National Mall on Friday. He was listed in critical condition at a hospital.

Mbabane - An extensive black market in human body parts has been uncovered in Swaziland's second-largest hospital.

Demand is strong in the country for human ingredients for use in traditional potions. Even the water used to wash corpses in the hospital mortuary is being sold to traditional healers.

"If they are selling parts from the hospital, they can steal from someone who has just died or is about to die," said Reverend Grace Masilela, a Nazarene Church preacher who said she was once a traditional healer.

Masilela revealed this at the weekend to a Swazi newspaper, but the practice of selling human organs from the mortuary at Raleigh Fitkin Memorial Hospital in the central commercial hub of Manzini is an open secret.

Traditional healers come to town to purchase herbs at the Manzini market and end their trip with a visit to the mortuary.

A human brain costs R1 000. Other parts, from internal organs to body fat, fetch from R400 to R1 000.

Body parts are roasted and pulverised into an ash, and mixed with herbs for a potion that is either drunk, ingested or in some cases rubbed into the blood through a razor cut to the skin. The user is then endowed with supernatural power, according to belief.

"Children's parts are favoured because they are considered pure. An elderly person's parts are liked because the consumer takes on the person's wisdom," said Charles Mngomezulu, a traditional healer, who added that he does not dabble in muti.

In ancient Rome, when times were tough and the plebs were restless the rulers would often resort to two time-proven techniques to hold on to power: bribery and distraction. By meeting the basic needs of the people by bribing them with money or food, and distracting them with the entertainment of various sorts of spectacles, the rulers of Rome ensured the loyalty, or at least the passivity, of the people.

Of course, providing bread (panem) and spectacle games (circenses) did nothing to address the underlying issues inherent in Roman society, and in fact exacerbated them by diverting time, money, and effort that might have been better spent actually fixing problems instead of ignoring them. For a number of reasons, including the politics of bread and circuses, the Roman Empire, one of the greatest of its or any time, eventually fell apart under its own weight.

Many people like to draw parallels between the Roman Empire and modern-day America. While these comparisons are often trite and over-simplified, modern comparisons to the "bread and circuses" tactics of ancient Rome warrant closer examination. This is because there are direct parallels between the "then" of ancient Rome and the "now" of American society.

Social "entitlement" programs in modern America are a direct parallel to the bread and money handouts of ancient Rome. Originally envisioned as a means to protect those not capable of working and to provide a temporary "safety net" for able-bodied, welfare and related programs in modern America instead have become a snare that is useful only in ensuring a steady stream of generations of voters utterly dependent upon government handouts for their survival.

With so many people on the public dole, and with many of the trappings of the middle class given to them for nothing, there is no real financial or social incentive for the poor to put in the work required to actually move into the middle class. Over time, politicians compete to see who can provide the greatest excesses from the public coffers to the most people possible, in order to ensure those politicians remain in power. And we all know what happens to a democracy soon after it reaches this point.