8% of Troops Given Drugs for Psychiatric Problems
March 24, 2010
ABC World News
By Martha Raddatz and Michael Murray
After years on the battlefield or in the trenches, many American soldiers are showing signs of psychological distress. An increasing number of soldiers are turning to medication to alleviate their symptoms.
From the isolated outposts of Afghanistan to the bloody streets of Fallujah in Iraq, U.S. troops have been fighting, dying and suffering unbearable emotional scars. A 2008 Rand Corporation study found under 20 percent of soldiers reported psychological distress in some form.
Some have unfortunately committed suicide, but ABC News has been told that an increasing number — at least 8 percent of the force — are now using pills to treat themselves. Some are turning to antidepressants, such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, which are prescribed right on the front lines.
“We are sending soldiers into the field, into combat missions, who are suicidal,” said former Air Force psychologist Jason Prinster. “And we are prescribing medication that has significant side effects.”
He also told ABC News that the Army’s culture of treating physical injuries as more serious than psychological ones can lead to bad operating procedure, in his opinion. “If your leg is broken, if you have a physical problem, you can stay inside the wire. If you are anxious, afraid, hopeless, it’s not OK,” he said.
Soldiers say the side effects can affect their combat readiness; some medications cause sluggishness and disorientation. Army Sgt. Chuck Luther told ABC News that “some would make me more depressed, some would make me jittery.”
Soldier Said He Was Given Prescriptions, No Therapy
Luther was an Army sergeant based in Taji, Iraq. He told ABC News he didn’t get therapy for his emotional problems, just drugs to help him make it through his deployment.
“Mortars would come in … suicide bombers. It was taking a toll on me … and then seeing fellow soldiers being killed in front of you.”
ABC News asked Col. John Looper, an Army psychologist stationed in Iraq, what he thought of the prescriptions. “If the treating clinician feels that a given service member might be restored to full functioning with a course of antidepressant medication or anti-anxiety medication, we have the wherewithal to do that,” he told us.
The military is making an effort to provide therapy to service members having mental health issues, but given the remoteness of some bases, it is not always possible, and remains a real concern.
Click here for the full report
Facebook Linked To Rise in Syphilis
March 24, 2010
telegraph.co.uk
Case have increased fourfold in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside, the areas of Britain where Facebook is most popular.
Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, claimed staff had found a link between social networking sites and the spread of the bacteria, especially among young women.
He said: “Syphilis is a devastating disease. Anyone who has unprotected sex with casual partners is at high risk.
“There has been a fourfold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected with more young women being affected.
“I don’t get the names of people affected, just figures, and I saw that several of the people had met sexual partners through these sites.
“Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex.”
In Teesside there were 30 recorded cases of syphilis last year, but the true figures are expected to be much higher.
Research has shown that young people in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside were 25 per cent more likely to log onto social networking sites than those in the rest of Britain.
A Facebook spokesman said: “The assertion that Facebook is responsible for the transmission of syphilis is ridiculous. Facebook is no more responsible for STD transmission than newspapers responsible for bad vision. Today’s reports exaggerate the comments made by the professor, and ignore the difference between correlation and causation.
“As Facebook’s more than 400 million users know, our website is not a place to meet people for casual sex – it’s a place for friends, family and co-workers to connect and share.”
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Relaxed Minds Remember Better
March 24, 2010
Reuters
By Kate Kelland
Researchers from the United States said their findings could help develop new therapies for people with learning disabilities and some types of dementia.
“This study establishes a direct relationship between events at the circuit level of the brain…and their effects on human behavior,” said Ueli Rutishauser of the California Institute of Technology, who worked on the study.
Synchronization in the brain is influenced by “theta waves” which are associated with relaxation, daydreaming and drowsiness, but also with learning and memory formation, the scientists explained in the study in the journal Nature.
While scientists already know that relaxed minds are better at receiving new information, this study pinpoints a mechanism by which relaxation neurons work together to improve memory.
“Our research shows that when memory-related neurons are well coordinated to theta waves during the learning process, memories are stronger,” said Adam Mamelak, a neurosurgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORIES
Erin Schuman of the California Institute of Technology, who also worked on the study, said many learning disabilities appear to be linked to deficiencies in sensory processing and timing.
“These results provide a potential explanation for these deficits,” she said in an email to Reuters.
The findings suggest that if doctors were able to optimize the state of the brain, by ensuring it was relaxed, and then synchronize the delivery of the things it needed to learn, the outcome, or memory, might be better, she said.
The research team studied eight volunteers who were shown 100 photos of a range of objects and allowed to view each for one second. Fifteen to 30 minutes later they were shown another 100 photos — 50 new ones and 50 from the first set — and asked to recall which ones they had seen before and say how confident they were in their answers.
Using electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes, the researchers recorded neuron activity and the “background” electrical signals in regions of the brain where memories are formed. They found that recognition was stronger when the learning took place while neurons were firing in sync with theta waves.
Most studies of theta waves are conducted in rats, with only a few in humans, partly because EEG electrodes need to be placed directly on the brain’s surface to get precise measurements.
This study was conducted with volunteers with epilepsy and who were undergoing EEGs, which are often used to find the source of epileptic seizure activity. The researchers said steps were taken to ensure the patients’ underlying medical condition did not affect the outcome of the study.
Click here for the full report
Rick Egusquiza – The National Enquirer
Click the picture or link below to hear Kevin’s interview with Senior Reporter & Entertainment Editor for The National Enquirer, Rick Egusquiza.
More on Rick…
How The Enquirer Got The Goods
The Scandal Begins
John Edwards Love Child
Caught on Tape
Pulitzer Nomination
Rick Egusquiza on The Kevin Trudeau Show 03/24/10
The Kevin Trudeau Show: 3-24-10
Today, Kevin explains why people are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore!
Regulators Collect Cushy Bonuses During Crisis
Home Sales Fall to Record Low in February
Private Security Guards Kill Somali Pirate
Maximize Your Downline
March Madness Membership Drive
Plus, Rick Egusquiza, the Senior Reporter for The National Enquirer, gives you the juicy story behind breaking the John Edwards controversial affair AND why it took so long for the rest of the mainstream media to pick up on it!
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New-Home Sales Fall to Record Low in February
March 23, 2010
Daily Finance
By: Joseph Lazzaro
The U.S. housing sector took another step backward in February — new-home sales, weighed down by blizzards and weak buyer demand, unexpectedly fell 2.2% to a record-low annual rate of 308,000, the U.S. Commerce Dept. announces today.
Economists had expected February new home sales to rise to a 315,000 annualized rate, according to a Bloomberg survey. It was the fourth straight monthly decline for new home sales, and the streak will raise doubts among some economists on the likelihood of a U.S. housing sector recovery this year.
Weakness Despite Homebuyer Help
January’s new home sale total was also revised to a 315,000 annualized rate, up slightly from the previously released 309,000 annualized rate. New home sales totaled a 345,000 rate in December, 2009, and 362,000 in November, 2009. They hit a 12-month high of only 419,000 in July, 2009, and totaled 354,000 a year ago, in February, 2009.
The four-month sales decline has occurred despite the expanded home buyer tax credit. Congress had extended and increased the home purchase tax credit — to $8,000 for first-time buyers, $6,500 for repeat home owners — and buyers have until Apr. 30, 2010 to take advantage of the program.
In another troubling trend, inventories, which had been trending lower for more than a half-year, unexpectedly rose again in February, inching higher to a 9.2-month supply, from a 9.1-month supply in January. Still, the February median sales price of a new home rose 5.2%, to $220,500, compared to a year ago.
Most parts of the country shared the pain in February: New home sales plunged 20% in the Northeast, fell 18% in the Midwest, and decreased 4.6% in the South. One bright spot — they surged 20.8% in the West.
Can’t Blame the Weather Completely
New homes sales figures are significant since increases have been strongly correlated in the past with higher demand and an economic expansion. That’s because when new homes are sold, owners tend to buy durable goods and big ticket items for their new residence — furniture, appliances, home supplies. An uptrend in these purchases is good news for the economy and bullish for the stock market.
However, government statisticians also caution that the new home sales statistic contains a margin of error and is subject to revisions.
There’s no way to sugar-coat the February data or the four-month downtrend. Not all of the recent decline can be attributed to this year’s extreme winter weather — not an ideal season to buy and move into a new home. The weakness also reflects understandable buyer caution in the face of barely stabilizing home prices. After all, who wants to buy a depreciating asset? Many potential buyers are no-doubt seeing the high inventory totals and holding off their purchase, calculating that prices may drop in the quarters ahead. Others are holding off due to job market uncertainty.
Click here for the full report.
Regulators Who Watched as Crisis Built Collected Cushy Bonuses
March 23, 2010
HouseingWatch.com
By: Charles Feldman
Where were you when the housing bubble was building to crisis proportions?
Some government regulators were counting their bonuses, it appears. The Associated Press, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain government payroll data, found that during the boom years of 2003 – 2006, as the crisis was being primed by lax lending and risk-laden balance sheets, the agency watchdogs in charge of supervising U.S. banks handed out “at least $19 million in bonuses.” The agencies include the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The money was given to regulators for their — ready for this — “superior performance.” You just can’t make this stuff up, folks…and I live in Hollywood, where fantasy IS reality.
Most of the money was given to the financial examiners who were supposed to be closely watching the banks and what the banks were doing. Even in 2008, the year the world as we knew it all but came to its financial end, the Office of Thrift Supervision was still giving out bonuses to more than 90 of its financial examiners for their “exceptional work,” reports the AP.
These were the same regulatory agencies that failed to flag the coming crisis, and that internal government investigations subsequently found to be lacking in their supervisory roles.
A spokesman for the FDIC, which gave out most of the bonus money, had no comment for the AP. An OCC spokesman, on the other hand, invoked the standard banker defense when he cited the need to “recruit and retain the very best people.” He also noted that the banks his agency regulated tended to do better than some of the others. You gotta give this dude high marks for trying. Like I said at the outset, you can’t make this stuff up.
Click here for the full report.
Private Security Guards Kill Somali Pirate for First Time
March 24, 2010 by Andrew
Filed under Government
March 23, 2010
AOL News
By: Katharine Houreld
Private security guards shot and killed a Somali pirate during an attack on a merchant ship off the coast of East Africa in what is believed to be the first such killing by armed contractors, the EU Naval Force spokesman said Wednesday.
The death comes amid fears that increasingly aggressive pirates and the growing use of armed private security contractors onboard vessels could fuel increased violence on the high seas. The handling of the case may have legal implications beyond the individuals involved in Tuesday’s shooting.
The guards were onboard the MV Almezaan when a pirate group approached it twice, said EU Naval Force spokesman Cmdr. John Harbour. During the second approach on the Panamanian-flagged cargo ship which is United Arab Emirates owned, there was an exchange of fire between the guards and the pirates.
An EU Naval Force frigate was dispatched to the scene and launched a helicopter that located the pirates. Seven pirates were found, including one who had died from small caliber gunshot wounds, indicating he had been shot by the contractors, said Harbour. The six remaining pirates were taken into custody.
Crews are becoming increasingly adept at repelling attacks by pirates in the dangerous waters of the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. But pirates are becoming more aggressive in response, shooting bullets and rocket-propelled grenades at ships to try to intimidate captains into stopping.
Several organizations, including the International Maritime Bureau, have expressed fears that the use of armed security contractors could encourage pirates to be more violent when taking a ship. Sailors have been hurt or killed before but this generally happens by accident or through poor health. There has only been one known execution of a hostage despite dozens of pirate hijackings.
International navies have killed about a dozen pirates over the past year, said Harbour. Hundreds more are believed to have died at sea, either by drowning or through dehydration when their water and fuel runs out, said Alan Cole, who heads the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s anti-piracy initiative.
Pirate attacks have not declined despite patrols by dozens of warships off the Somali coast. The amount of ocean to patrol is too vast to protect every ship and pirates have responded to the increased naval presence by moving attacks farther out to sea.
Experts say piracy is just one symptom of the general collapse of law and order in the failed state of Somalia, which has not had a functioning government in 19 years. They say attacks on shipping will continue as long as there is no central government capable of taking on the well-armed and well-paid pirate gangs.
Click here for the full report.
Report: NATO Covers Up Civilian Deaths
March 23, 2010
PrisonPlanet.com
By: Daniel Tencer
A British reporter who reported on an apparent cover-up of the killing of an Afghan family says the NATO-led forces in that country habitually lie about innocent civilians’ deaths.
Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan correspondent for the Times of London, says the “embed culture” of reporting in war zones results in military censorship and self-censorship that allows military commanders to get away with falsehoods about civilian deaths.
In an article for Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Starkey explained he never would have discovered that locals in Paktia agree it was US and Afghan forces who killed two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local government officials during a February night-time raid.
Starkey reported earlier this month at the Times of London:
The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman’s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery”, Nato claimed that the force had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room.
A Times investigation suggests that Nato’s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown.
“The only way I found out NATO had lied — deliberately or otherwise — was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors,” Starkey writes at the Nieman Web site. “In Afghanistan that is quite unusual. … NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged.”
Starkey says there is overwhelming military influence exerted on reporters in Afghanistan.
Some journalists in Kabul are hamstrung by security rules set in Europe or America … These reporters can’t leave their compounds without convoys of armed guards. They couldn’t dream of driving around rural Paktia, dressed up in local clothes and squashed into the back of an old Toyota Corolla, to interview the survivors of a night raid.
Ultra risk-averse organizations go even further and rely almost entirely on video footage and still images gifted by the entirely partial combat-camera teams or the coalition’s dedicated NATO TV unit, staffed by civilian ex-journalists who churn out good news b-roll. Others lap up this material because it’s cheaper and easier than having their own correspondents in a war zone.
Starkey says the problem is exacerbated by the practice of “embedding” journalists with the military, which — though it may help keep the journalist death toll down — compromises reporting.
“British troops will only accept journalists who let military censors approve their stories before they are filed,” he writes. “Ostensibly, this is to stop sensitive information reaching the insurgents. In my three and a half years in Afghanistan, the British invariably use it as an opportunity to editorialize.”
Starkey notes that, despite the fact the UN corroborated his story about the killings in Paktia province, he continues to be the target of a NATO campaign to discredit him.
But he says it’s important that his sort of work continue. “NATO lies and unless we check them, they get away with it. If we check them, they attack us. It’s unpleasant but important. There’s no doubt in my mind that we must continue to question what the soldiers want us to know.”
Click here for the full report.
Health Care Plan will Tax Us to Eternity
March 24, 2010 by Brandy
Filed under Government
March 23, 2010
Prisonplanet.com
By: Steve Watson and Paul Watson
H.R. 3590, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, [2] to give it its full title, is rammed full of tax increases which will further economically cripple Americans already laboring under the worst financial crisis since the great depression.
The partnering Reconciliation Act, currently in the Senate, also contains a raft of pork barrel and tax hikes, there to fund the trillion dollar cost of nationalizing medicine.
As reported by Bloomberg News [3]today, analysis by the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation reveals that the bill will generate $409.2 billion in additional taxes by 2019.
In addition, the Congressional Budget Office states that the bill also levies almost $69 billion more in penalties for those who fail to meet mandates to buy insurance.
The Journal of Accountancy [4] boils down some of the tax hikes and penalty fees in H.R. 3590 and the Reconciliation Act – the highlights include:
Excise Tax on Uninsured Individuals – Individuals who fail to maintain minimum essential coverage will be subject to a penalty equal to $750. The fee for an uninsured individual under age 18 is one-half of the adult fee.
Excise Tax on High-Cost Employer Plans – The federal government would impose a 40% tax on the value of employer-sponsored health coverage exceeding certain thresholds. Those levels are projected to be $8,500 for self only and $23,000 for any other level by the year 2013. This excise was announced with fanfare [5] by the White House and labor unions in January and remains in the final bill.
Increase in additional tax on distributions from Health Savings Accounts and Archer Medical Savings Accounts not used for qualified medical expenses – An increase from 10% to 20% on taxes of money in a health savings account not used for qualified medical expenses. For Archer medical savings accounts, an increase from 15% to 20%.
Additional Hospital Insurance Tax on High-Income Taxpayers – High income tax payers, making on a joint return over $250,000 and a standard return over $200,000, are required to pay an additional 0.5% of wages. This applies to both self-employed, and regularly employed individuals.
Fees on Health Plans – A fee applied to all health insurance providers based upon net premiums and any third party fees associated with the administration of those programs. The fees will total $6.7 billion annually. This figure begins at $8 billion in the Reconciliation Act and rises to $14.3 billion by 2018.
Tax on Indoor Tanning Services – The act imposes a 10% tax on amounts paid for indoor tanning services. Like a sales tax, the tax will be collected from the person tanning when payment for the tanning services is made.
Business Insider boils down 15 more tax hikes here [6] – highlights include:
To read the rest of the report click here.
