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South Wales: "Bullied" 12-Year-Old Schoolgirl Dies in Dad's Arms

Lulu Sinclair
Sky News, UK
Wed, 06 Oct 2010 04:21 UTC
Image
© Clive Stuckey
Holly Stuckey, dead at 12
A 12-year-old girl collapsed and died in her father's arms after apparently suffering months of bullying.

Holly Stuckey, of Bridgend, South Wales, who suffered from asthma, died after coming home from Maesteg Comprehensive School complaining of chest pains.

While her death is not being treated as suspicious, police are looking at the circumstances surrounding it.

After she died, Holly's parents, Clive and Lee, found hidden letters written by their daughter, giving details of months of misery.

Her father, a care worker, passed copies of the letters to police with the names of 13 children he claims were involved in her torment.

Keith Edwards, chairman of school governors, said police have "categorically" ruled out bullying as a factor in Holly's death.

"Obviously, these people are really, really hurting. It is such a tragic thing to happen to a 12-year-old girl. We have the greatest of sympathy for them," he said.
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Sherlock

Science for Sale: Protect Yourself From Medical Research Deception

Dr. Mark Hyman
Huffington Post
Sat, 02 Oct 2010 13:31 UTC
Image
© unknown
A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found over 40 percent of the best designed, peer-reviewed scientific papers published in the world's top medical journals misrepresented the actual findings of the research.(i) The "spin doctors" writing the papers found a way to show treatments worked, when in fact, they didn't.

Doctors and health care consumers rely on published scientific studies to guide their decisions about which treatments work and which don't. We expect academic medical researchers to determine what needs to be studied, and to objectively report their data. We rely on government regulators to prevent harmful medications from being approved, or to quickly remove harmful medications or treatments from the market.

What most physicians and consumers don't recognize is that science is now for sale; published data often misrepresents the truth, academic medical research has become corrupted by pharmaceutical money and special interests, and government regulators more often protect industry than the public. Increasingly, academic medical researchers are for hire, and research, once a pure activity of inquiry, is now a tool for promoting products.
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Wall Street

Shock Therapy for Wall Street: JPMorgan Suspends 56,000 Foreclosures; GMAC and BOA Many More

Ellen Brown
Truthout
Sat, 02 Oct 2010 12:57 UTC
"Maybe this is like shock therapy. Maybe this will actually get the lenders to the table and encourage them to work out deals that are to the benefit of everybody."

--Economist Karl E. Case, quoted in the New York Times

The hits are coming fast and furiously. It appears major Wall Street mortgage lenders could again be in serious trouble - and looking again for handouts.

On September 20th, Ally Financial Inc., which owns GMAC Mortgage, the nation's 4th largest lender, halted evictions and the resale of repossessed homes in 23 states. This was after a document processor for the company admitted that he had signed off on 10,000 pieces of foreclosure paperwork a month without reading them. The 23 states were all those where foreclosures must be approved by a court, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida and Illinois.
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Magnify

Female sexual dysfunction 'excuse by drug firms to sell pills'

Sarah Boseley
The Guardian
Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:17 UTC
Female sexual dysfunction pills
© Kevin Fitzgerald/Getty Images
Can loss of sexual desire in women be treated by pills, or is relationship counselling a better bet?
Pharmaceutical firms accused of trying to turn women's loss of desire into a condition treatable with pills.

Drug companies are today accused of attempting to turn the loss of sexual desire that some women experience into a medical condition that can be treated by pills.

Although drugs, from antidepressants to variants of Viagra, have been found ineffective, the companies are charged in an article in the British Medical Journal with inappropriately trying to create a market for pills to treat a condition that is as much psychosocial as biological, and which may need the intervention of a relationship counsellor as much as a doctor.

Ray Moynihan, a journalist and lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, argues in the BMJ that a variety of drug companies have tried to construct a scientific basis for medical treatment for women's loss of libido, running surveys that purport to find that it is widespread and devising ways to diagnose the condition.
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Ambulance

Health Reform to Worsen Doctor Shortage


Reuters
Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:46 UTC
The U.S. healthcare reform law will worsen a shortage of physicians as millions of newly insured patients seek care, the Association of American Medical Colleges said on Thursday.

The group's Center for Workforce Studies released new estimates that showed shortages would be 50 percent worse in 2015 than forecast.

"While previous projections showed a baseline shortage of 39,600 doctors in 2015, current estimates bring that number closer to 63,000, with a worsening of shortages through 2025," the group said in a statement.

"The United States already was struggling with a critical physician shortage and the problem will only be exacerbated as 32 million Americans acquire health care coverage, and an additional 36 million people enter Medicare."
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Bad Guys

The Meaning of "Austerity"


The Corbett Report
Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:49 UTC
With massive protests taking place in dozens of European cities today, September 29th, 2 years on from the launch of the banksters' campaign of plundering the Western economies, James Corbett explains the real meanings behind the words which psychopaths in power tell us daily...

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Family

Depression up 25 percent on Gulf after oil

Jay Reeves
Associated Press
Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:41 UTC
oil spill depression
© AP
In this Sept. 15, 2010 photo, Margaret Carruth sits on the tailgate of her pickup truck going through.

Orange Beach, Alabama - Before the BP oil spill, the Gulf Coast was a place of abundant shrimping, tourist-filled beaches and a happy if humble lifestyle. Now, it's home to depression, worry and sadness for many.

A Gallup survey released Tuesday of almost 2,600 coastal residents showed that depression cases are up more than 25 percent since an explosion killed 11 people and unleashed a three-month gusher of crude into the Gulf in April that ruined many livelihoods. The conclusions were consistent with trends seen in smaller studies and witnessed by mental health workers.

People just aren't as happy as they used to be despite palm trees and warm weather. A "well-being index" included in the Gallup study said many coastal residents are stressed out, worried and sad more often than people living inland, an indication that the spill's emotional toll lingers even if most of the oil has vanished from view.

Margaret Carruth is among those fighting to hang on.
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USA

It Is Official: The US Is A Police State

Paul Craig Roberts
Sott.net
Sun, 26 Sep 2010 14:11 UTC
Image
© Unknown
On September 24, Jason Ditz reported on Antiwar.com that "the FBI is confirming that this morning they began a number of raids against the homes of antiwar activists in Illinois, Minneapolis, Michigan, and North Carolina, claiming that they are 'seeking evidence relating to activities concerning the material support of terrorism.'"

Now we know what Homeland Security (sic) secretary Janet Napolitano meant when she said on September 10: "The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that--the old view." The new view, Napolitano said, is "to counter violent extremism right here at home."

"Violent extremism" is one of those undefined police state terms that will mean whatever the government wants it to mean. In this morning's FBI's foray into the homes of American citizens of conscience, it means antiwar activists, whose activities are equated with "the material support of terrorism," just as conservatives equated Vietnam era anti-war protesters with giving material support to communism.
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Better Earth

"Dramatically Poisonous" Economy Heading to "Catastrophic" Collapse, Says Acclaimed Economist


ActivistPost.com
Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:47 UTC
The economy is to serve the people, not the people to serve the economy -- Manfred Max-Neef

Acclaimed economist Manfred Max-Neef, author of the award-winning book From the Outside Looking in: Experiences in 'Barefoot Economics' recently appeared in a must-see interview on Democracy Now where he says a second, more catastrophic crisis is unavoidable because our economic model is "dramatically poisonous." Max-Neef explains that "Greed is the dominant value today in the world and as long as that persists, we're done!" But he doesn't just mean done economically, he means done as a species.

Going beyond facts and figures to describe economics, his philosophy is based on a macro-world view, where he accounts for the biosphere, human creativity, security and happiness, and life in all of its manifestations. He reveals that the majority of economists have great knowledge, more than ever before, but they lack understanding. The two differ as, "knowledge is a function of science, whereas understanding is holistic," explained Max-Neef. Using the metaphor of love to simplify: we may read and accumulate great knowledge about love, but we can never fully understand it until we fall in love and experience it.

His philosophy of humanizing economics, or "Barefoot Economics," stems from spending years living in and studying the culture of poverty to better understand the economics of it. He concludes that the poverty culture has entirely different principles than our modern culture, where they must depend on enormous creativity, cooperation and solidarity of people. In poverty, "you cannot be an idiot if you want to survive," he quipped.
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USA

The Indispensable People? The Collapse of Western Morality

Paul Craig Roberts
CounterPunch
Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:30 UTC
kill indians
Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.

In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel's genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.

I don't mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.
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