Secret Surveillance Vehicles Active in Staten Island
September 28, 2009
SI Live
By Peter N. Spencer
It could be a van with a plumber logo on it or a yellow livery cab. Or maybe it’s a generic gray sedan, driven by a man who looks like an accountant.
The only way you will really know what the top-secret surveillance vehicle that recently hit the streets of the Mid-Island’s 122nd Precinct looks like is if you get busted in some criminal act.
Similar to the one launched by the Island’s MTA police two years ago, the $55,000 high-tech ride was funded by City Councilman James Oddo (R-Mid-Island/Brooklyn) to help combat quality-of-life crimes. The “vehicle” has helped nab dozens of graffiti vandals on and around the Staten Island Railroad.
Oddo had a warning for others:
“People should think long and hard before they do anything wrong, because we are watching.”
Advance sources are mum on the exact make and model of the vehicle, but did say it is equipped with a periscope, digital cameras, recorders and some “neat computer stuff.”
Click here for the full report from SI Live
US Dollar to Become Obsolete
September 28, 2009
The Guardian
By Heather Stewart
The United States must brace itself for the dollar to be usurped as the world’s reserve currency as American dominance wanes in the wake of the financial crisis, the World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, warned yesterday.
Speaking ahead of the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Istanbul, he said it was time for a “responsible globalisation”, in which decision-making was shared between the old powers and developing countries such as China and India.
Ever since the post-second world war Bretton Woods agreement, which cemented the dollar’s ascendancy over sterling, Americans have been able to rely on borrowing cheaply from the rest of the world as governments banked on the dollar as a safe bet. But Zoellick said the greenback’s status could be under threat from the growing strength of the Chinese yuan and the euro.
“The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar’s place as the world’s predominant reserve currency. Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar,” Zoellick told an audience at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. From now on, he said, confidence in the US currency – and its economy – would have to be earned. “The future for the United States will depend on whether and how it will address large deficits, recover without inflation that could undermine its credit and currency, and overhaul its financial system.”
Zoellick’s comments came as Beijing launched the first yuan-denominated bond available to outside investors, as it gradually makes its currency more exchangeable on international markets.
“I expect China will inevitably be drawn outward,” he said. “Over 10 to 20 years, the renminbi [yuan] will evolve into a force in financial markets.”
Several countries, including China and Russia, have repeatedly raised what they see as the problem of excessive dollar hegemony.
Zoellick predicted that the tumultuous events of the credit crunch would eventually lead to a radically different world economic order. He welcomed the expanded role of the G20 group of nations, agreed by leaders at their summit in Pittsburgh last week; but warned against excluding bodies such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, which have a much broader membership. “The G20 should operate as a ‘steering group’ across a network of countries and international institutions,” he said.
Claire Melamed, ActionAid’s head of policy, said the decision at Pittsburgh to shift economic decision-making away from the G8, which includes Italy and Canada but not China and India, could reverberate for decades. “The shift from the G8 to the G20 … has the potential to be hugely significant, breaking not just the power of the US but that particular group of countries that have had everything their own way for so long,” she said.
Developing country governments have blamed the US, with its deregulated financial markets and decade-long borrowing binge, for dragging the world to the brink of the abyss over the past 12 months. Zoellick said all countries would have to learn to rely less on rampant American consumption to drive growth in the world economy.
“A more balanced and inclusive growth model for the world would benefit from multiple poles of growth,” Zoellick said. “With investments in infrastructure, people, and private businesses, countries in Latin America, Asia and the broader Middle East could contribute to a ‘New Normal’ for the world economy.”
Leaders in Pittsburgh also agreed to transfer some of the voting rights of over-represented rich countries at the IMF to under-represented developing economies, but detailed negotiations about how the balance of power will change – and which countries will agree to give up some of their votes – will go on until 2011.
At this week’s meetings in Istanbul, which will be attended by the chancellor, Alistair Darling, and Mervyn King, Bank of England governor, the World Bank is likely to ask donor governments for more funding to mitigate the impact of the credit crunch on the world’s poorest countries.
The IMF, meanwhile, is expected to give more details of how it will spot future crises and urge governments to take preventative policy measures – tasks set for it by the G20 last week.
Click here for the full report from The Guardian
Pesticides Linked to Brain Cancer in Children
September 29, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Children living with parents who use pesticides around the home are significantly more likely to develop brain cancer than children who are not exposed to such chemicals, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
Researchers matched each of 400 fathers and 250 mothers who reported having been exposed to pesticide products — including insecticide, herbicide and fungicide — with a non-exposed person of the same sex, age and status. All participants lived in residential areas of Florida, New Jersey, New York or Pennsylvania. None of them lived in New York City. All were parents of children who had participated in the Atlantic Coast childhood brain cancer study.
The scientists further evaluated each participant’s level of exposure over the two years prior to the birth of their child by means of a phone interview featuring more detailed questions about home or work use of pesticides. Most “exposed” participants were exposed to pesticides through home use — such as garden or lawn care — rather than professionally.
The researchers found that children whose parents had been exposed to pesticides were significantly more likely to develop brain cancers, including astrocytomas and primitive neuroectodermal tumors. The risk of astrocytoma was especially increased by the use of herbicides.
Among “exposed” fathers, those who wore protective clothing or who washed immediately after pesticide use were significantly less likely to have children who developed brain cancer.
Prior studies have linked prenatal pesticide exposure to brain cancer, and the chemicals have also been linked to cancer in a number of animal studies. Researchers do not know exactly how the chemicals lead to cancer, but many pesticides are known to exhibit mutagenic, hormone mimicking or immune-hampering effects. The developing bodies of fetuses and children are especially susceptible to these effects.
Brain cancer is the second most common childhood cancer, after leukemia.
Click here for the full report.
Federal Reserve Hides Gold Swap Arrangements
September 23, 2009
Yahoo! Finance
By Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
The Federal Reserve System has disclosed to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. that it has gold swap arrangements with foreign banks that it does not want the public to know about.
The disclosure, GATA says, contradicts denials provided by the Fed to GATA in 2001 and suggests that the Fed is indeed very much involved in the surreptitious international central bank manipulation of the gold price particularly and the currency markets generally.
The Fed’s disclosure came this week in a letter to GATA’s Washington-area lawyer, William J. Olson of Vienna, Virginia , denying GATA’s administrative appeal of a freedom-of-information request to the Fed for information about gold swaps, transactions in which monetary gold is temporarily exchanged between central banks or between central banks and bullion banks.
The letter, dated September 17 and written by Federal Reserve Board member Kevin M. Warsh , formerly a member of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, detailed the Fed’s position that the gold swap records sought by GATA are exempt from disclosure under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
Warsh wrote in part: “In connection with your appeal, I have confirmed that the information withheld under Exemption 4 consists of confidential commercial or financial information relating to the operations of the Federal Reserve Banks that was obtained within the meaning of Exemption 4. This includes information relating to swap arrangements with foreign banks on behalf of the Federal Reserve System and is not the type of information that is customarily disclosed to the public. This information was properly withheld from you.”
When, in 2001, GATA discovered a reference to gold swaps in the minutes of the January 31-February 1, 1995, meeting of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee and pressed the Fed, through two U.S. senators, for an explanation, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan denied that the Fed was involved in gold swaps in any way. Greenspan also produced a memorandum written by the Fed official who had been quoted about gold swaps in the FOMC minutes, FOMC General Counsel J. Virgil Mattingly, in which Mattingly denied making any such comments.
The Fed’s September 17 letter to GATA confirming that the Fed has gold swap arrangements can be found here:
While the letter, GATA says, is far from the first official admission of central bank scheming to suppress the price of gold, it comes at a sensitive time in the currency and gold markets. The U.S. dollar is showing unprecedented weakness, the gold price is showing unprecedented strength, Western European central banks appear to be withdrawing from gold sales and leasing, and the International Monetary Fund is being pressed to take the lead in the gold price suppression scheme by selling gold from its own supposed reserves in the guise of providing financial support for poor nations.
Click here to continue reading the full article from Yahoo! Finance
Lose Weight, Sleep Better
September 29, 2009
WebMD
By Jennifer Warner
Losing weight may help obese people as well as their partners sleep better by easing sleep apnea symptoms.
A new study confirms that weight loss can significantly improve and potentially eliminate sleep apnea symptoms in obese people.
Researchers found that people with severe sleep apnea who lost the recommended amount of weight were three times more likely to experience a complete remission of sleep apnea symptoms compared with people who didn’t lose weight.
“These results show that doctors as well as patients can expect a significant improvement in their sleep apnea with weight loss,” researcher Gary Foster, director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University, says in a news release. “And a reduction in sleep apnea has a number of benefits for overall health and well-being.”
Sleep apnea is most common in overweight and obese people. The sleep disorder causes loud snoring and sleep disruptions as a result of the airway becoming temporarily blocked during sleep. If untreated, sleep apnea can also increase the risk of high blood pressure, stroke, and heart disease.
Although doctors have long advised overweight people with sleep apnea to lose at least 10% of their body weight to improve their condition, there has been little research to back up that advice.
Sleep Apnea Solution
In the study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers looked at the effect of weight loss on sleep apnea in 264 obese adults with type 2 diabetes.
The participants were randomly divided into two groups. One group received a weight loss program with portion-controlled diets and an exercise program of 175 minutes of exercise per week. The second group received no weight loss advice and participated in a diabetes management program.
After one year, the weight loss group lost an average of 24 pounds; the second group lost just over 1 pound.
Those in the weight loss group were three times as likely to experience a remission of their sleep apnea symptoms (13.6% vs. 3.5%) and had about half the instances of severe sleep apnea as the second group.
In addition, the study showed that people in the second group experienced a worsening of their sleep apnea symptoms.
Foster says these results show that weight loss can significantly reduce the symptoms of sleep apnea and without treatment the sleep disorder can progress rapidly.
Click here for the full report.
An Upside to The Economic Crisis
September 29, 2009
CNN
By Theresa Tamkins
Are you finally ready for some good news about the recession? As it turns out, a shaky economy might actually be good for your health.
In a bad economy, therapists often suggest taking control of things patients can, including eating right, exercising.
Although it seems hard to believe, a new analysis of the Great Depression — the mother of all economic bad times — suggests that mortality dropped and life expectancy increased during that period.
Researchers estimate that around that time, a year with a 5 percent drop in the gross domestic product was associated with a 1.9-year gain in life expectancy, while a 5 percent rise in the GDP lowered life expectancy by about one to two months.
And it’s not just the Great Depression, says José A. Tapia Granados, M.D., of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Past research has shown similar results — at least a drop in mortality — in periods of U.S. economic recession during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as in recessions in other countries, Tapia says. Health.com: How exercise may boost your mood
“In some sense it is good news,” he explains. “The usual view of a period of recession is that everything is bad during these periods.”
In a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Tapia and his colleague Ana V. Diez Roux analyzed the economic growth and population health in the United States between 1920 and 1940, including the years of the Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1933.
Life expectancy in general increased 8.8 years between 1920 and 1940, but gains fluctuated with the economy. Health.com: Will your depression diagnosis protect you from employment discrimination?
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They found that mortality declined and life expectancy increased during the Great Depression, as well as in the recessions of 1921 and 1938, compared with other years during that period. Suicides did increase during the Great Depression, but they made up less than 2 percent of deaths during that time.
When the researchers looked at six other major causes of death — including heart and kidney disease, tuberculosis, and traffic accidents — between 1920 and 1940, they noted that those causes all declined during recessions and rose during boom times. (A similar pattern was found for child and infant mortality too.) Health.com: Natural remedies for pain, sleep, PMS, and more
During the Great Depression, life expectancy increased from 57.1 years in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1933, and nonwhites in particular showed large gains; nonwhite males gained eight years in longevity during the Depression, increasing from 45.7 years in 1929 to 53.8 years in 1933.
Although he didn’t study homicide rates, Tapia says that some research suggests that homicides tend to drop during economic recessions.
Although it’s not clear why mortality rates might decrease during a recession, it is known that people tend to smoke and drink less, and they tend to eat out and drive less often, Tapia says. Although these are often for purely economic reasons, it can translate into fewer fatalities, he says.
Another theory is that in poor economic times, people come together and support one another more than they do when an economy is roaring, according to Tapia. Health.com: How to recognize the symptoms of depression
“This would improve the level of social cohesion and social support and could have a protective effect on health,” he says.
Christopher Ruhm, Ph.D., has conducted research on mortality during recent recessions. He says the new findings aren’t “out in left field” and are consistent with research in milder recessions. However, the magnitude of the effect — and that it appeared during a time of almost total economic collapse, not just a recession — was unexpected.
“When you have the collapse of an economy, I would have thought there would be other things going on that are more than reversing that,” says Ruhm, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. “The Soviet Union, when it broke up and the economy just collapsed, that wasn’t good for people’s health.”
Health Library
MayoClinic.com: Health A – Z
Since doctors have made such strides with life expectancy in the past century (we are now expected to live until 77.7 years of age in the U.S.), the economy may have a smaller impact on health than the gains seen in the new study, he says.
“In a modern economy, I wouldn’t think you’d see anything near that large,” Ruhm says. His research suggests that for each percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, mortality drops by half a percent.
“That’s a nontrivial effect, but in terms of major determinants of health, it’s not the dominant determinant of health or anything close to it,” he says. Health.com: 10 things to say (and 10 not to say) to someone with depression
Ruhm says his research doesn’t provide any clues to coping with a job loss, but he has had people tell him they lost 30 pounds after being laid off because they stopped eating out and started exercising more. “That’s just anecdotal evidence, but it turns out the data provide some support for that,” he says.
According to Ruhm, outplacement counselors and therapists often advise people to take control of things they can do something about, such as paying attention to what you eat, trying to be a little more active, or working harder to connect with family. “At least the parts you can control, try to move those in a positive way — and the data suggest that people actually do that,” he says.
Click here for the full report.
People Can Exclude STDs & Abortions in Health Records
September 29, 2009 by Andrew
Filed under Government
September 28, 2009
CNSNews.com
By Nicholas Ballasy
Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D.-R.I.) says people will be able to stop doctors from including records of sexually transmitted diseases and abortions in the new national system of Electronic Health Records that was mandated by the stimulus law enacted in February.
The law says that doctors, hospitals and other health care providers must create an Electronic Health Record (EHR) for every American by 2014 or else face deductions in their Medicare payments. The EHRs are supposed to be integrated into a national health care IT system where health-care providers nationwide as well as the government would have the ability to access them when authorized.
“This is totally going to be up to the individual,” Kennedy told CNSNews.com when specifically asked if these EHRs would include any STDs or abortions in a person’s medical history.
Title XIII of the stimulus law provided for “the development of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure” that would include “the qualified electronic health record” of “each person in the United States by 2014.”
The law specifically says that this “means an electronic record of health-related information on an individual that — (A) includes patient demographic and clinical health information, such as medical history and problems lists; and (B) has the capacity — (i) to provide clinical decision support; (ii) to support physician order entry; (iii) to capture and query information relevant to health care quality; and (iv) to exchange electronic health information with, and integrate such information from other sources.”
These records–including a person’s “medical history and problems list”–must be put into a national system that allows for “the electronic linkage of health care providers, health plans, the government and other interested parties to enable electronic exchange and use of health information among all the components in the health care infrastructure in accordance with applicable law,” says the law.
The law further requires the secretary of health and human services “to improve the use of electronic health records and health care quality by requiring more stringent measures of meaningful use over time,” according to an explanation of the law published by the House Appropriations Committee in February.
Nonetheless, Rep. Kennedy says individuals will be able to opt out of having doctors and health care providers list any STDs or abortions they have had.
By contrast, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.), who is a doctor, said completeness may be required in the electronic health records for both clinical and liability reasons.
“This is totally going to be up to the individual,” Kennedy told CNSNews.com last when asked whether the records would have to include any STD or abortion a person might have had.
“So, obviously, for the full effectiveness of the person, it’s to their benefit to have everything on a record, but it’s going to be totally up to the individual,” said Kennedy. “We’re not going to get people to fully buy into this if they don’t feel comfortable with the record–and the one way to not make them feel comfortable with the record is to force everything on them and say, ‘This is a mandate, you’re going to have to do this or that.’ Because if that happens, then people aren’t going to want to buy in and the system’s not going to work.
“So what’s going to happen is this is going to be someone’s–people’s opportunity to choose, because they are going to know there are safeguards, and I think over time they are going to get more and more comfortable that this is in the best interest of them and their personal health,” said Rep. Kennedy. “But absolutely, we are going to make sure that’s it’s all up to the individual, because we are not going to get widespread adoption if people don’t feel that their privacy is protected. Privacy is the cornerstone of making sure this thing works.”
Ashley Katz, executive director of Patient Privacy Rights, a non-profit health privacy watchdog group, agreed with Kennedy about the importance of protecting the privacy of electronic health records but said that electronic health records as currently used are not generally designed to allow people to exempt parts of their medical history.
Click here to continue reading the full article from CNSNews.com
Girl Dies from Cervical Cancer Vaccine
September 29, 2009
Reuters
Matthew Jones
GlaxoSmithKline’s cervical cancer vaccine Cervarix probably did not cause the death of a British teenager shortly after she was given the drug, a health official said on Tuesday.
“I think it is unlikely that will be the case,” said Dr Caron Grainger, joint director of public health in the area where the 14-year-old girl died, when asked about the possibility of any connection between the death and Cervarix.
News of the death came shortly before a possible decision by U.S. health regulators on whether to approve Cervarix for sale in the United States.
“I think once we get into the investigation … we may discover there is another cause of her death,” Grainger told the BBC.
“The message for parents at this moment in time and for young girls receiving this vaccine is that you should go ahead with the vaccination,” said Grainger, who works for the National Health Service in the central English city of Coventry.
Police are treating the girl’s death as “unexplained” and said a post-mortem was taking place on Tuesday.
The teenager, named by a police source as Natalie Morton, fell ill on Monday after being vaccinated at her school under a national immunization program against the sexually-transmitted human papilloma virus (HPV).
NO PLANS TO HALT PROGRAM
Britain’s Department of Health said there were no plans to halt the program under which more than 1.4 million doses of Cervarix have been administered. “The vaccine has a strong safety record so precautionary measures are focused on the batch,” it said in a statement.
Grainger said only about 2,000 people had suffered any adverse reactions to the immunization program and that these were mostly minor. GlaxoSmithKline said on Monday it was working with regulators to understand the case better.
Sudden teenage deaths, in general, are not unknown. “Unfortunately, some young people do die suddenly for a variety of reasons, including cardiac causes. Sometimes they have been entirely well before their death,” said Dr David Elliman of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.
A small number of other girls at the Blue Coat Church of England School reported suffering from dizziness and nausea but were not admitted to hospital, health officials said.
The drug is given in three shots over six months.
The program to vaccinate girls aged 12 to 13 began in September 2008. Cervical cancer is the 12th most common women’s cancer in Britain, killing more than 1,000 women each year.
Should Cervarix gain U.S. approval it would compete with Merck & Co’s Gardasil, which has been on the U.S. market since 2006 and had sales of $268 million in the second quarter.
GlaxoSmithKline won support for its cervical cancer vaccine from an advisory panel to Japan’s Health Ministry on Tuesday, putting it on track to be the first company to offer such a vaccine in the world’s second-biggest drug market.
GlaxoSmithKline shares were trading 0.4 percent lower in London at 1223 GMT, down slightly more than the broader market.
Click on this link for the full report.
CDC to Impose Martial Law for H1N1
September 29, 2009 by Andrew
Filed under Government
September 28, 2009
Info Wars
By Kurt Nimmo
The following draft of an “isolation order” was discovered on the CDC’s website. It is a template for state and local officials to impose quarantines and what would effectively be martial law.
“Your illness [as determined by state and local officials] requires that you be isolated and requires further public health investigation and monitoring.”
Failure to obey will result in imprisonment without bail prior to trial and the possiblity of a two year prison term.
In other words, according to this document, officials can impose quarantine without evidence that somebody is actually infected with a virus that is now negligible at best. It may also be used to quarantine potentially millions of people suffering from any number of illnesses — or not suffering from any disease at the discretion of the state — that have nothing to do with H1N1. It is basically a carte blanche for martial law under the cover of protecting the public from a communicable disease that is demonstrably a manufactured and weaponized threat.
Click here to continue reading the full article from InfoWars
I’ve got your Erectile Dysfunction cure
September 29, 2009 by KT
Filed under Kevin's Blog
If you know someone in their 30’s, 40’s or 50’s suffering from erectile dysfunction, they have a serious medical problem. They need to wake up because you should be in your 70’s and 80’s and never have erectile dysfunction issues. And if they do, take notes…
What’s the cause of this problem?
* Mental and emotional stress. You need to do the thought field therapy techniques to resolve this issue.
* Diabetes. Someone may say, “I’m not diabetic.” Well, how do you know? You’re probably pre-diabetic. This is a major issue and you need to take control of it. Eleotin cures diabetes and that in itself almost always handles erectile dysfunction. If you don’t handle the diabetic issue or the pre-diabetic issue, you’re not going to solve the problem.
* High blood pressure. If you have high blood pressure issues, that’s going to cause problems with erectile dysfunction. So you need to address that, but never take the drugs prescribed for high blood pressure. In my book, More Natural Cures Revealed, I give you a whole bunch of cures for high blood pressure!
* Non-prescription and prescription drugs. Every single non-prescription and prescription drug can cause erectile dysfunction and the answer is not another drug.
* Circulation could be a major factor. You could have blockages in your arteries. You need to do either oral chelation or intravenous chelation. I would also use live cell therapy and the high precursors from AbleHeal.
* I would also take Vitamin E and not just any vitamin E; you’ve got to take the three brands that I recommend. There are also some herbs that are very powerful. Yohimbe and maca are two very powerful ones. Ginseng can also help a little bit. Chiropractic adjustments, surprisingly, can also help with getting energy flow back to that area in the male. Acupuncture is very effective. Alphabiotics is very effective.
When you address those causes the problem will be cured. Animals in the wild don’t have erectile dysfunction. Think about it. Our closest cousins, gorillas and chimpanzees, never have erectile dysfunction issues. They also don’t take any drugs. They don’t need Viagra. They’re fathering children in human years in their 90’s. Male gorillas have no erectile dysfunction ever in their life. But you, you’re 35 or 40 and already have erectile dysfunction.
Folks, you got to open your eyes, there is a major problem here!
Yours in health,
KT
