Corporate Branding Attacks Teen Charity

January 29, 2010

Wallet Pop

By Lou Carlozo

You couldn’t blame Lauren McClusky of Chicago if she were a bit squeamish about using her last name in this story without fear of reprisal from Ronald McDonald and his legal posse.

For McClusky, 19, finds herself at the center of a thorny dispute that involves a series of charity concerts she’s put on over the past three years. She dubbed the event “McFest” (more on that in a moment) — but McDonald’s sees that as an infringement on its trademarks, something the McDonaldland lawyers refer to as “the McFamily of brands.”

These include (deep breath): McPen, McBurger, McBuddy, McWatch, McDouble, McJobs, McShirt, McPool, McProduct, McShades, McFree, McRuler, McLight — and even the prefix “Mc” itself.

“But not McFest,” pointed out McClusky, who declined to change her last name for this story. “The whole reason I called it McFest in the first place is my name.”

Her original co-chair for the first McFest also shared the “Mc” prefix in her surname, so it seemed a natural. And indeed, not a single McDonald’s attorney seemed to object in 2007 and 2008, when McClusky’s McFests raised $30,000 for the Chicago chapter of Special Olympics.

But when McClusky applied to have the McFest name protected, McDonald’s filed an opposition. So instead of donating funds from her 2009 concert to Special Olympics, McClusky’s had to hire lawyers to answer a series of administrative proceedings McDonald’s filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. To date, it’s cost her roughly $5,000 — money she wishes had gone to Special Olympics kids instead of attorneys.

The daughter of independent radio promoter Jeff McClusky, Lauren McClusky could of course just change the event name. But that would involve starting from square one in terms of the awareness and name recognition she’s already created for her concert series. “It’s hard to change the name of something that’s already established and locally known,” she said.

As for McDonald’s actions, McClusky says she’s frustrated by the company’s desire to clamp down on and in effect penalize a charity event — especially when McDonald’s supports Special Olympics as well. “It has nothing to do with food, arches or their colors,” she said. “And our M’s are pointy, not curved.”

McClusky hopes for a truce that will allow her to keep the McFest name. Still, she’s unwilling to make a corporate sponsorship tradeoff along the lines of “McDonald’s Presents McFest.” For their part, McDonald’s representatives maintained that they have no desire to squash McClusky’s charitable efforts, and desire an “amicable resolution.”

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Scientists: DNA Can be Fabricated

January 29, 2010

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Scientists from the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company Nucleix have demonstrated that it is possible to create fake DNA samples and plant them as evidence at a crime scene, in a paper published in the journal Forensic Science: International Genetics.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said lead researcher and Nucleix co-founder Dan Frumkin. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

In addition to having developed a method of fabricating DNA evidence, Nucleix has also developed a method of detecting faked DNA that it plans to sell to forensics labs.

The scientists have developed two different ways to manufacture DNA samples in order to fool law enforcement. The first involves using DNA profiles from law enforcement databases, which record the code at 13 different spots on a person’s genome. Using a pooled library of DNA samples from a number of different people, the geneticists were able to physically construct DNA that was identical to a suspect’s DNA at those 13 points. It would take only 425 different DNA snippets to be able to construct every possible permutation, the researchers said.

The second method involved collecting actual DNA from the person whose genetic material was to be faked, such as by collecting a strand of their hair or saliva from a cup they had used.

In both cases, the DNA was then reproduced in large quantities using a technique called whole genome amplification. This DNA was inserted into red blood cells, which were then passed off as a real DNA sample.

A normal blood sample would contain both red and white blood cells, and the red blood cells would contain no DNA. In addition to this difference from a normal sample, amplified DNA lacks certain molecules contained by normal DNA. Forensics labs are unlikely to test for either of these anomalies without cause, however.

“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” said Tania Simoncelli of the American Civil Liberties Union, in response to the study. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”

The researchers warned that their techniques could also be used to replicate enough of a person’s DNA to carry out genetic testing on them without their consent, thus violating their right to genetic privacy.

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Bin Laden Urges Abandoning Dollar & Rebukes US on Climate Change

January 29, 2010

Reuters

By Cynthia Johnston

The authenticity of the tape, aired on Friday and the second by bin Laden to air on Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera this week, could not be immediately confirmed.

“It is necessary for us to avoid doing business in the dollar, and to finish with it in the fastest possible time,” bin Laden said on the brief tape.

Saudi-born bin Laden has never been found and is believed to still be hiding in the mountainous border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is known to suffer from ill-health.

U.S. soldiers and Afghan militia forces launched a large-scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on the United States in pursuit of bin Laden, believed to have been hiding in the region with supporters after Afghanistan’s Taliban government was removed from power.

In excerpts from Friday’s tape lasting under three minutes, bin Laden also blamed Western countries for climate change.

“Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality,” he said. “All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.”

He added that while wealthy nations had agreed to the Kyoto Protocol that binds them to emission targets, former U.S. President George W. Bush had later rejected such limitations before Congress in deference to big business.

The United States never ratified the existing Kyoto Protocol, whose present commitments expire in 2012, and has said it will not sign up to an extended Kyoto Protocol, preferring a new agreement.

In a separate audiotape earlier this week on Al Jazeera also purportedly of bin Laden, he claimed responsibility for the failed December 25 bombing of a U.S.-bound plane and vowed to continue attacks on the United States.

In that message, addressed “from Osama to Obama,” bin Laden said the attempt to blow up the jet as it neared Detroit was a continuation of al Qaeda policy since September 11 2001.

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Senate Permits Government To Borrow an Additional $1.9 Trillion!

January 29, 2010

Breitbart

By Andrew Taylor

The Democratic-controlled Senate has muscled through a plan to allow the government to go a whopping $1.9 trillion deeper in debt.
The party-line 60-40 vote was successful only because Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown has yet to be seated. Sixty votes were required to approve the increase. The measure would lift the debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion. That’s about $45,000 for every American.Democrats had to scramble to approve the plan, which means they won’t have to vote on another increase until after the midterm elections this fall. To win the votes of moderate Democrats, President Barack Obama promised to appoint a special task force to come up with a plan to reduce the deficit. The House must still vote on the measure before it’s sent to Obama for his signature.

Senate Democrats are counting on their soon-to-expire 60-vote majority to raise the U.S. debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion so they do not have to take more politically painful votes on government borrowing until after the November elections.

They have no room for error. In the face of monolithic Republican opposition, they will need all 60 votes Thursday to let the government continue borrowing almost 40 percent of what it spends, much of it from China and other Asian nations who buy U.S. securities.

The legislation would put the government on track for a national debt of $14.3 trillion—equal to about $45,000 for every American—and provide a vivid reminder of the United States’ dire fiscal straits. New estimates released by the Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday show that the U.S. this year could run a deficit matching last year’s record $1.4 trillion shortfall.

To make raising the debt ceiling easier for moderates and politically endangered Democrats to swallow amid a populist uprising against government borrowing and spending, President Barack Obama promised in his State of the Union address Wednesday night to appoint a bipartisan task force to come up with a plan for dealing with the spiraling debt.

“I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans,” he said.

The 60 votes Democrats need from their own caucus include those of incumbents facing difficult re-election battles this year as well as longtime opponents of raising the debt limit, such as Sen. Evan Bayh.

The task was made more difficult last week when Republican Scott Brown won the late Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat from Massachusetts. On Feb. 11, when Brown plans to take office, the Democrats’ majority shrinks to 59 in the 100-member Senate and the Republicans will have a 41-vote ability to block what they do not like in Obama’s and Democratic leaders’ agendas.

If the $1.9 trillion debt ceiling increase fails, the Senate would immediately vote on a fallback $635 billion increase already approved by the House. But that would require still another vote before the Nov. 2 Election Day to raise the ceiling again.

“It took 200 years to build the federal debt to a total of $1.9 trillion,” Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican, said. “Now the majority wants to increase the current limit … by $1.9 trillion so that we can finance the government’s borrowing binge long enough to get us past the November 2010 elections.”

Congress has until mid-February before the current $12.4 trillion debt ceiling is reached, so there would not be an immediate crisis if the measure were to be defeated. But a losing vote—the tally was scheduled for around noo (1700 GMT), when financial markets are open—could unnerve the stock market. Lawmakers in both parties have promised they will not permit a market-rattling, first-ever default on U.S. obligations.

Democrats and Republicans alike share responsibility for running up the debt, but it falls upon Democrats to pass the measure since they control the government. It makes no difference that Republicans routinely backed increases in the debt when former President George W. Bush was in office.

Republicans blame recent generous spending bills enacted by the Democratic-controlled Congress for driving up the debt. Those measures, however, are just one relatively small part of the problem. The far bigger element is a sharp drop-off in tax revenues because of the recession and the economy’s slow recovery, as well as higher costs, since more people are taking unemployment benefits and food stamps in tough times.

As part of the debt ceiling bill, the Senate will also vote on new budget rules that would make Congress cover any increases in government benefits with either a corresponding tax increase, spending cuts elsewhere or a combination of the two. The same would apply for new tax cuts, such as the tax credit Obama proposed Wednesday night for small businesses that hire more workers. The tax cuts would have to be “paid” for with corresponding spending cuts or increases in other taxes.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat whose own re-election is in danger this November, reversed course and came out in support of the new rules after moderate Democrats in the House insisted on them as condition for passing a new $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.

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FDA Tells Drug Companies to be Aware of Abuse

January 29, 2010

Los Angeles Times

By Andrew Zajac

The Food and Drug Administration is calling on pharmaceutical firms to give more attention to the potential for abuse of new drugs when subjecting them to pre-market testing.

The agency this week released a draft of voluntary guidelines to assist drug makers in figuring out which compounds should be placed under the Controlled Substances Act. The law regulates the handling, record-keeping and dispensing of drugs deemed to be dangerous or addictive if misused — in some cases imposing criminal penalties for misuse.

The guidelines urge researchers to look beyond traditional indicators such as whether a compound is addictive and consider other characteristics that could lead to abuse. Advances in chemistry have created properties in drugs that may include previously unrecognized abuse potential, the FDA said.

Though FDA officials said no specific event triggered release of the guidelines, they pointed to the anesthetic propofol as an example of a drug that might be flagged for restrictions if subjected to more rigorous consideration of potential abuse.

Propofol was in the cocktail of drugs that caused the death of pop star Michael Jackson. It currently is not a controlled substance, but that status has been under review by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which enforces the Controlled Substances Act.

“Until recently, there hadn’t been much indication that it was being abused. But we have gotten calls from the [healthcare] industry telling us, ‘You need to take a look at it,’ ” said DEA spokeswoman Barbara Carreno.

She said the DEA initially had not thought propofol was subject to abuse because it required careful administration with a needle and was regarded simply as an anesthetic. But medical professionals have found that the drug also induces a mild euphoria and other pleasant side effects. Since it’s not a controlled substance, propofol is relatively accessible in medical settings.

Anesthesiologist Scott Fishman said propofol was one of a number of drugs that “were released for one purpose, and society — or the street — finds another use.”

In urging drug developers to cast a wide net for indicators of abuse potential, the FDA is saying, “Let’s do the testing instead of society doing the testing,” said Fishman, who is chief of pain medicine at the UC Davis School of Medicine. Fishman said drug makers might balk at the higher costs that could result from following the proposed guidelines.

A spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said her organization had not studied the document.

The FDA will collect industry and public comment for two months before issuing final guidelines.

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The Way to Weight Loss – Vitamin D

January 29, 2010

Natural News

By E. Huff

A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Minnesota found that overweight people have better success in losing weight when their vitamin D levels are increased. Dr. Shalamar Sibley, the researcher who headed the study, placed 38 obese men and women on a diet program and discovered that those whose vitamin D levels were increased lost up to a half pound more than those who followed the diet plan only.
When combined with a reduced-calorie diet, it appears that supplementation with vitamin D helps to promote increased weight loss among those whose levels are low to begin with. For each nanogram per milliliter increase in vitamin D precursor in the blood, it was observed that an extra half pound loss in weight was able to be achieved while the diet plan.

A study published earlier this year in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 75 percent or more of American teens and adults are deficient in vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is linked to all sorts of serious illnesses including cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Researchers in the weight loss study are unsure whether vitamin D deficiency causes obesity or if obesity causes vitamin D deficiency. Nevertheless, there is a clear connection between the two.
Vitamin D, in conjunction with calcium and sunlight, helps to properly assimilate food and regulate normal blood sugar levels. When there is a lack of calcium, oftentimes due to a vitamin D deficiency, the body increases production of synthase, a fatty acid enzyme that coverts calories into fat. Calcium deficiency can cause synthase production to increase by up to 500 percent, explaining the correlation between low levels of vitamin D and obesity.
Mainstream research has only begun to scratch the surface about the importance of vitamin D in general health maintenance. A clinical study conducted in April of 2000 revealed that patients who were bound to wheelchairs because of chronic fatigue and body weakness became mobile after just six weeks of supplementation with 50,000 IU of vitamin D per week. Other studies are showing remarkable healing from all kinds of diseases when vitamin D is brought up to proper levels.
Although current guidelines suggest daily intake somewhere between 400 and 600 IU, recent research is suggesting that this may be too low. Getting between 4,000 and 10,000 IU a day will have a much more therapeutic effect, boosting health and fending off disease. When natural sunlight is not an option, supplementation with vitamin D3 is the next best option.

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Heal Yourself in 15 Days

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An Idle Brain May Raise Learning Abilities

Why is it so hard to remember even things we don’t want to forget? The problem, suggests a growing body of research, may be that we’re thinking about them too much in the first place.Popular wisdom once held that a mind at rest was like an engine idling — not much going on under the hood. To glean insights into how the brain worked, scientists would study only volunteers in action, measuring their physiological or biochemical responses as they completed specific mental tasks. But more recently, thanks in large part to the proliferation of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which precisely maps brain activity based on changes in blood-oxygen levels, neuroscientists have found that important activity in the brain — related in particular to memory and learning — may occur when it is at rest.
Many studies over the past decade have suggested that sleep is crucial to the consolidation of memories and learning; people who take a nap after learning a new task, for instance, remember it better than those who don’t snooze. And now a small but compelling new study from the lab of New York University (NYU) cognitive neuroscientist Lila Davachi finds similar evidence that the brain at rest, even while remaining awake, is conducting meaningful activity. “Your brain is doing work for you even when you’re resting,” says Davachi, who just published a study in Neuron showing that certain kinds of brain activity actually increase during waking rest and are correlated with better memory consolidation. “Taking a rest may actually contribute to your success at work or school,” she adds.
The 16 participants who served as Davachi’s guinea pigs in the study were each scanned, while at rest, before the experiment began. Then, each volunteer was asked to lie flat on the bed of an fMRI machine, outside the magnet, while shown a series of paired images. First they looked at pairs of faces and objects, and were instructed to imagine the person pictured interacting with the object (such as a beach ball). Then they got a few minutes’ rest, before being rolled into the magnet for another scan. The experiment was repeated with pairs of new faces and scenes. Afterward, the participants took a pop quiz to measure their recognition of the faces, objects and scenes they had previously seen.
The purpose of the scans was to compare the relative levels of spontaneous neural activity in two key brain regions involved in memory — the hippocampus and visual cortex — during rest, both before and after the visual tasks. The NYU team noticed that levels of activity in the two areas were more closely correlated several minutes after people had looked at the images than before they started the experiment. That suggests that the visual-learning tasks had affected the brain’s seemingly random firings during rest, and perhaps that the brain was conducting memory-consolidating activity during that time.What’s more, the more closely correlated the brain activity during the rest period, the better the person performed on the tests of recognition. “We found that higher correlations [of activity in the hippocampus and visual cortex] during rest periods leads to high future memory,” notes Arielle Tambini, a graduate student in Davachi’s lab and lead author of the paper.While the NYU study tested memory and simple recognition, other recent research looking at activity in the brain at rest and the learning of complex visual tasks has yielded similar results. Neurologist Maurizio Corbetta of Washington University in St. Louis recruited 14 people to use their peripheral vision to identify a hidden pattern — an inverted T — that was flashed briefly on a screen inside an fMRI machine. After each daily training session, lasting one to two hours for about a week, participants were given an hour’s rest, during which time Corbetta scanned their brains.
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, Corbetta’s team found that spontaneous brain activity in two separate regions of the cerebral cortex appeared to be correlated after the participants had learned the visual task, but were not linked beforehand. The brain activity in those who were best at finding the hidden pattern onscreen was most strongly related. “Our test was like a video game. What this research shows is that we have a very dynamic landscape of ongoing activity [in the brain] even when we are at rest,” notes Corbetta.One question that has plagued researchers is whether the observed increase in brain activity that occurs after the completion of a mental task is just a ripple or echo effect, rather than a distinct event that helps solidify memories. Harvard researcher Dale Stevens believes he has more or less ruled out the former possibility by showing that even tasks that produce similar levels of neural activity while they are being performed, such as recognizing a face versus a landscape, result in different levels of activity after each task is completed. In Stevens’ studies, brain activity remained high after people viewed landscapes, but was much lower after they looked at faces. People tend to be much better at remembering landscapes than faces, so it makes sense that those differences would be mirrored in the brain-activity levels during rest periods, says Stevens, whose paper was published online in Cerebral Cortex in December 2009.While the NYU, Washington University and Harvard studies all used different approaches, their overall findings were remarkably similar. “The brain is trying to weave ideas together even when you don’t think you are thinking of anything,” notes Johns Hopkins behavioral neurologist and memory expert Dr. Barry Gordon. That’s something to keep in mind the next time you catch yourself daydreaming in a meeting or idly surfing Facebook when you should be studying.

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Bill Gates To Donate $10 Billion for Vaccines

Over the past 10 years, the Microsoft co-founder’s charity has committed $4.5 billion to vaccines and has been instrumental in establishing the GAVI alliance, a public-private partnership that channels money for vaccines in poor countries.
By increasing immunization coverage in developing countries to 90 percent, it should be possible to prevent the deaths of 7.6 million children under five between 2010 and 2019, Gates told reporters at the World Economic Forum.
Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization described Gates’ commitment to vaccines as “unprecedented” and called on governments around the world and the private sector to match it with “unprecedented action.”
Vaccination rates have already climbed remarkably in recent years, with even a poor African country like Malawi now boasting coverage rates similar to those in many Western cities.
“Over the last 10 years, the success of both increased vaccine coverage and getting new vaccines out has been phenomenal,” Gates said.
More cash is now needed to make the most of new vaccines becoming available, including ones against severe diarrhea and pneumococcal disease from GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Pfizer.
“We can take immunization to the next level, with the expanded uptake of new vaccines against major killers such as pneumonia and rotavirus diarrhea,” Chan said in a statement.
She said an extra two million deaths in children under five could be prevented by 2015 by widespread use of new vaccines and a 10 percent increase in global immunization coverage.
Further off, Glaxo is also in the final phase of testing a vaccine against malaria that Gates said could slash deaths from the mosquito-borne disease.
Gates warned against the risk of governments diverting foreign aid funding for health toward climate change, arguing that health should stay a top priority — not least because better health leads to a lower birth rate.
Curbing the globe’s population growth is critical for tackling global warming.

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Student Receives Vaccination Against Will

January 25th, 2010

Union-Tribune

By Tanya Sierra

The San Ysidro School District is investigating how a 13-year-old middle school student received the H1N1 flu vaccination last week over her objections and against the will of her parents.

Jose Gomez, 39, said he signed a form last November stating his daughter, a student at San Ysidro Middle School, was not to get a shot and reaffirmed that position to two people last week. The school provided vaccinations on Thursday.

District Nurse Anita Gillchrest said she investigated the incident and has forwarded a report to Superintendent Manuel Paul, but she said she could not reveal the details.

Gomez said San Ysidro Middle School officials insisted he sign a consent form even though he did not want his daughter to receive the vaccination. He said he was instructed to write “refuse” on the form and turn it in, which he did.

Nonetheless, his daughter was pulled from class to get the vaccination. She advised the security guard who escorted her to the vaccination area that she was not supposed to get the shot and was told that maybe “her mom changed her mind,” Gomez said.

The girl also told the woman providing the vaccines from the county health department that she was not supposed to receive the shot, Gomez said.

“According to their safety guidelines, if any child said ‘No,’ they were supposed to contact the parent,” Gomez said. “My daughter said no and they didn’t bother to contact me or my wife.”

Gomez said he did not want his daughter to receive the vaccination because he did not know what the solution contained and because his youngest daughter has allergic reactions to vaccinations.

“I didn’t want to risk it,” Gomez said. “Everyone gives you a different story about this vaccine and it’s scary.”

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