Green Leafy Vegetables Reduce Risk Of Diabetes
August 23rd, 2010
BBC News
By: Emma Wilkinson
In an analysis of six studies into fruit and vegetable intake, only food including spinach and cabbage was found to have a significant positive effect.
A portion and a half a day was found to cut type 2 diabetes risk by 14%, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reports.
But experts urged people to continue to aim for five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.
The researchers from Leicester University reviewed data from the studies of 220,000 adults in total.
They found that eating more fruit and vegetables in general was not strongly linked with a smaller chance of developing type 2 diabetes but “there was a general trend in that direction”.
Yet when it came to green leafy vegetables, which the researchers said also includes broccoli and cauliflower, the risk reduction was significant.
The team calculated that a daily dose of 106g reduced the risk of diabetes by 14% – a UK “portion” is classed as 80g.
It is not clear why green leafy vegetables may have a protective effect but one reason may be they are high in antioxidants, such as vitamin C and another theory is that they contain high levels of magnesium.
Study leader Professor Melanie Davies, professor of diabetic medicine at the University of Leicester, said the message to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day remains an important one.
But she added: “People like very specific health messages.
“We know that intake of fruit and vegetables is important, but this study suggests that green leafy vegetables seem to be particularly important in terms of preventing diabetes.”
The team are now planning a study in people at high risk of developing the condition to see if increasing their intake of vegetables like spinach and kale can help to reduce their chances of being diagnosed with diabetes.
Fruit and veg
In 2008/09, the National Diet Nutrition Survey showed that, although fruit and vegetable intake has risen over the past decade, only a third of men and women eat the recommended five-a-day.
In an accompanying editorial in the BMJ, Professor Jim Mann from the University of Otago in New Zealand, stressed that the message of increasing overall fruit and vegetable intake must not be lost “in a plethora of magic bullets,” even though green leafy vegetables clearly can be included as one of the daily portions.
Dr Iain Frame, director of research at Diabetes UK said: “We already know that the health benefits of eating vegetables are far-reaching but this is the first time that there has been a suggested link specifically between green leafy vegetables and a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes.”
But he warned the evidence was limited and it was too early to isolate green leafy vegetables and present them alone as a method to cut the chances of developing the condition.
“We would be concerned if focusing on certain foods detracted from the advice to eat five portions of fruits and vegetables a day, which has benefits in terms of reducing heart disease, stroke, some cancers and obesity as well as type 2 diabetes.”
Diabetes UK is currently funding research into whether fermentable carbohydrates found in foods such as asparagus, garlic, chicory and Jerusalem artichokes could help weight loss and prevent Type 2 diabetes.
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Zinc Helps Prevent Pneumonia In The Elderly
August 23rd, 2010
Natural News
By: Ethan A. Huff
A new report published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has found that zinc plays a very important role in health maintenance. In a study of over 600 seniors from 33 different nursing homes in the Boston area, researchers found that seniors with healthy blood levels of zinc are 50 percent less likely to develop pneumonia than those with sub-par levels.
The study was a follow-up to a previous one which found that people given 200 international units (IU) of vitamin E every day for one year are 20 percent less likely to develop upper respiratory infections, including common colds. But after a follow-up, the trial also revealed that a majority of those same participants had low levels of zinc in their blood.
Subjects in the first trial were supplemented with only half the recommended daily intake of zinc and other essential vitamins, but those who had normal blood levels of the mineral overall experienced less infections and needed fewer antibiotics. Those with zinc deficiencies were far more prone to developing prolonged illness.
Zinc is a necessary mineral for maintaining health in many other areas as well. The eyes and prostate, for example, need zinc in order to function properly.
“[Zinc] is…important for the proper functioning of the immune system — which you definitely want in top working order! Zinc also aids in the regulation of blood pressure and the mineralization of bone,” explains Elaine Magee in her book Food Synergy: Unleash Hundreds of Powerful Healing Food Combinations to Fight Disease and Live Well.
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Light Treatment Clears Psoriasis, Boosts Vitamin D Levels
August 23rd, 2010
Natural News
By: S.L. Baker
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about 7.5 million Americans suffer from the chronic, autoimmune skin disease called psoriasis that causes irritated, flaky and thick patches of red skin; some forms of psoriasis are also associated with joint pain. Most medical treatment for the often painful and quality-of-life robbing disease center around controlling symptoms with medications like cortisone. But now research just published in the August issue of the Archives of Dermatology indicates there’s a non-drug way to clear and maybe cure the disease naturally — exposure to vitamin D boosting UV-B light.
Comprising the “tanning rays” from the sun that are blocked by sunscreen and long feared for supposedly causing wrinkles and “age spots”, UV-B light, it turns out, actually promotes health by increasing levels of vitamin D. Now a team of scientists from St. Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, have found that treatment with narrow-band UV-B rays greatly increases serum levels of vitamin D in the wintertime. And they’ve shown how adequate exposure to UV-B light therapy can clear psoriasis. In fact, the new finding is powerful evidence that a lack of the “sunshine” vitamin is involved in the development and worsening of this skin condition.
The researchers studied 30 consecutive patients with psoriasis who were treated with narrow-band UV-B light three times per week between October 2008 and February 2009. The research subjects’ psoriasis cleared and their serum vitamin D levels (which were measured before the study, after four weeks of treatment and after the treatment was finished) were compared with those of 30 control patients who also had psoriasis but did not have any UV-B therapy. The researchers also assessed the severity of the patients’ psoriasis symptoms and their skin disease-related quality of life before and after treatment.
The results showed that levels of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is considered the most accurate measurement of vitamin D levels in the body, had increased significantly among individuals receiving UV-B therapy — rising from about 23 nanograms per milliliter to 59 nanograms per milliliter at the end of treatment. However, there was no change in the control group.
“At the end of the study, all patients in the treatment group were vitamin D sufficient, but 75 percent of the control group had vitamin D insufficiency,” the authors wrote in their paper. What’s more, the control group’s skin condition didn’t improve at all. And in the group treated with UV-B light exposure, their psoriasis severity scores decreased dramatically — from 7.1 at the beginning of the study to only 0.5 after light therapy.
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Nearly 85% Of New Drugs Provide Little Or No Benefit
August 23rd, 2010
Natural News
By: Jonathon Benson
Corruption and fraud in the drug industry is nothing new, but a new report to be presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association reveals that most new pharmaceutical drugs offer practically no benefits and a whole lot of negative side effects.
Donald Light, sociologist, professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and author of the new study, explains that the drug industry as a whole produces all sorts of “lemon” drugs that do not work, whose efficacy has not been proven and whose manufacturers are protected from responsibility by industry protection laws.
“Sometimes drug companies hide or downplay information about serious side effects of new drugs and overstate the drugs’ benefits,” he said in a press release. “Then, they spend two or three times more on marketing than on research to persuade doctors to prescribe these new drugs. Doctors may get misleading information and then misinform patients about the risks of a new drug.”
According to an independent review, only about 15 percent of new drugs even work as stated, and most new drugs — whether they offer a benefit or not — come with serious side effects that are now a significant cause of death in the U.S.
The report explains that drug companies deliberately expose large amounts of people to ineffective, harmful drugs in trials, but skew them to make it look as if the drugs are effective. They then submit hosts of incomplete, inaccurate data to the FDA for approval, followed by large marketing campaigns designed to convince doctors to prescribe the newly approved drugs for both approved and unapproved uses.
According to the report, an analysis of 111 final drug applications revealed that 42 percent were missing adequate randomized trials, 40 percent had inaccurate dosage testing, 39 percent failed to show drug efficacy, and roughly half revealed the drugs to have serious adverse side effects.
Light also emphasized that, because drug companies control both the scientific testing process and the selection of which tests get submitted to the FDA or get published, the entire process is biased and flawed.
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Rare Syndrom Strikes High School Football Team
August 23rd, 2010
Oregon Live
By: Jerry Ulmer
Ten McMinnville High School football players remained hospitalized Saturday as they were treated for a rare soft-tissue condition after participating in an “immersion camp” at the school last week.
The players are suffering from “compartment syndrome” — soreness and swelling — that affects their triceps. They have received intravenous fluids to ward off a potential kidney disorder, according to Dr. Craig Winkler, who is treating seven of the players. Earlier Saturday, 12 players were at Willamette Valley Medical Center, but two were released by Saturday night, a spokeswoman said.
“The reason we’re treating these players so aggressively is to prevent renal disease,” Winkler said. “If it’s significant enough, it could actually end up in dialysis.”
McMinnville School District officials continue to investigate the cause of the condition. Superintendent Maryalice Russell said Friday that she didn’t believe the workout prescribed by first-year coach Jeff Kearin was excessive. The camp was in preparation for the first week of practice, which begins Monday.
Kearin has experience coaching in college, including at USC and UNLV, but a former colleague dismissed the idea that such a background could lead the Grizzlies’ coach to push high school players too far.
“He’s been an educator for a long time,” said Los Angeles Valley College coach Jim Fenwick, who worked with Kearin at Cal State Northridge. “He’s very conscientious about the high school development and the kids.”
Fenwick, formerly head coach at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, said he offered Kearin, 50, a job as an assistant this season should he decide against taking a high school coaching job.
“He works well with kids,” Fenwick said. “His personality is not a big, hard-nosed, lineman’s mentality, or a weight-room-mentality guy.”
The players are being treated for high levels of creatine kinase, a protein that can harm the kidneys.
Doctors are keeping a close watch on the CK levels of the players, some of whom entered the hospital with levels higher than 42,000, well beyond the level of 3,000 needed before they are discharged.
Winkler said that “95 percent” of the players are responding well to treatment. One player is “not responding adequately,” though, and would be treated with more fluid to flush out his kidneys faster.
Dennis Nice was among the parents waiting at the hospital for reports on the CK levels. Nice and his wife Margaret — parents of Joshua, 17, and Daniel, 16 — have been at the hospital around the clock since Wednesday.
“It’s just a matter of time,” Dennis Nice said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. We’re just waiting for the numbers to drop. All the parents pretty much know each other now. We’re all supportive of each other.”
Daniel Nice was one of three players to undergo surgery to reduce swelling. His CK levels had dropped from 17,000 to 6,600 by Saturday, according to his father.
Junior Kyle Downing said he had slight swelling in his triceps Tuesday but it receded. He took a blood test as a precaution Thursday night, however, and it revealed a CK level of 18,000. It has dropped to 6,000 since he was admitted Friday.
The cause of the condition has school officials, parents and doctors puzzled. Winkler said most cases of compartment syndrome are due to trauma.
“We could only find like 10 documented cases of triceps compartment syndrome,” he said. “It’s very, very rare.”
Some have speculated that a workout that targeted the triceps, in a hot wrestling room at the school Sunday, could be the cause. But Downing, who has been lifting weights all summer, disagreed.
“It definitely wasn’t the workout. The workout was fine,” he said. “It was basically nothing. The complete triceps workout was about one minute. This is odd.”
Russell said Friday that she supports the coaching staff. Rene Downing, Kyle’s mother, said Saturday that “the kids are crazy about the coach. He’s a good coach.”
Kyle Downing said the team remains excited about the season.
“This is a speed bump for us,” he said. “This is definitely a big building block. This is adversity at its greatest. To all the teams we play, I’d have to say, ‘Watch out.’ ”
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Barack Obama Elementary Opens In Maryland
August 23, 2010 by Duffy
Filed under Government
August 23, 2010
NBC News
By: Megan McGrath
The first school in the D.C. area named after the current president opens Monday morning as the school year begins in Prince George’s County.
Barack Obama Elementary School opens its doors in Upper Marlboro, Md., for the first time Monday. The school is being touted as being an environmentally friendly “green” school. There have been other schools named after President Obama in the country, but this will be a first in his own backyard in the D.C. region.
That’s just one of several new initiatives for Prince George’s Public Schools this year. The District also will open an all-male charter school in Upper Marlboro. Called Possibility Prep, the new school will emphasize math, science and engineering. Officials hope that the all-male environment will do away with many distractions and allow students to focus on their studies.
School officials are hopeful that this year’s opening will be free of the scheduling problems that plagued the first day of school last year. Last fall, thousands of students were late to class because of a computer glitch that made a mess of class schedules.
School superintendent William Hite said the problems have been fixed and student who enrolled by Aug. 9 will have their schedules Monday.
Blagojevich Hints That Feds Were After Obama
August 23, 2010 by Duffy
Filed under Government
August 23, 2010
ABC News
By MATTHEW MOSK and RHONDA SCHWARTZ
Former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich recognizes that daunting challenges await as prosecutors prepare to mount a new effort to convict him on corruption charges, but he told ABC News Friday he sees a triumphant political comeback in his future that will be no less dramatic than the one pulled off by Winston Churchill.
“I’m not ruling out doing something I’ve spent my whole adult life doing,” Blagojevich said when asked about a possible return to politics. “I believe some of the greatest stories in history are some of the great comebacks. You think about Winston Churchill, I mean he spent years in the political wilderness … . If Churchill can comeback from something like that, when I’m vindicated, I certainly don’t write myself off.”
Blagojevich sat down with ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross Friday as he embarked on a media tour aimed at recovering his reputation in the aftermath of a (mostly) favorable courtroom verdict – a jury this week found him guilty on only one of 24 counts, lying to federal agents. The panel could not find agreement any of the corruption charges, including most sensational government claim, that he attempted to cash-in the senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama for a new job or for campaign contributions.
The now famous Chicago pol-turned-reality TV star — known better as “Blago” — spent the 80-minute interview casting himself in the role of the persecuted David. Goliath, in this telling, was a team of federal prosecutors that remains hell-bent on collecting the scalp that sits under his generous mop of thick brown hair.
“This is a person determined to get his trophy,” he said of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
Blagojevich told ABC News that shortly after his 2008 arrest, investigators tried to convince him to offer damaging information on “folks in higher places” in exchange for lenience. Blagojevich said that Obama, even more than himself, had a longstanding, close association with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer who had become the subject of his own federal probe – one that ultimately led to Rezko’s conviction on fraud and bribery charges. The former governor said his very first meeting with Obama, then about to join the Illinois senate, came by way of Rezko’s personal introduction.
LA Reveals Plans For $578M High School
August 23, 2010 by Duffy
Filed under Government
August 23, 2010
Yahoo News
By: Christina Hoag
Next month’s opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968.
With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.
The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.
“There’s no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,’” said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.”
Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic.
“New buildings are nice, but when they’re run by the same people who’ve given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they’re a big waste of taxpayer money,” said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. “Parents aren’t fooled.”
At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex’s namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and preservation of pieces of the original hotel.
Partly by circumstance and partly by design, the Los Angeles Unified School District has emerged as the mogul of Taj Mahals.
The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation’s costliest — the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.
The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation’s second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation’s lowest performing.
Los Angeles is not alone, however, in building big. Some of the most expensive schools are found in low-performing districts — New York City has a $235 million campus; New Brunswick, N.J., opened a $185 million high school in January.
Nationwide, dozens of schools have surpassed $100 million with amenities including atriums, orchestra-pit auditoriums, food courts, even bamboo nooks. The extravagance has led some to wonder where the line should be drawn and whether more money should be spent on teachers.
“Architects and builders love this stuff, but there’s a little bit of a lack of discipline here,” said Mary Filardo, executive director of 21st Century School Fund in Washington, D.C., which promotes urban school construction.
Some experts say it’s not all flourish and that children learn better in more pleasant surroundings.
Many schools incorporate large windows to let in natural light and install energy-saving equipment, spending more upfront for reduced bills later. Cafeterias are getting fancier, seeking to retain students who venture off campus. Wireless Internet and other high-tech installations have become standard.
Some pricey projects have had political fallout.
After a firestorm over the $197.5 million Newton North High School in Massachusetts, Mayor David Cohen chose not to seek re-election and state Treasurer Timothy Cahill reined in school construction spending.
Now to get state funds for a new school, districts must choose among three designs costing $49 million to $64 million. “We had to bring some sense to this process,” Cahill said.
In Los Angeles, officials say the new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget.
Still, even LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines derided some of the extravagance, noting that donations should have been sought to fund the RFK project’s talking benches commemorating the site’s history.
Connie Rice, member of the district’s School Bond Oversight Committee, noted the megaschools are only three of 131 that the district is building to alleviate overcrowding. RFK “is an amazing facility,” she said. “Is it a lot of money? Yes. We didn’t like it, but they got it done.”
Construction costs at LA Unified are the second-highest in the nation — something the district blames on skyrocketing material and land prices, rigorous seismic codes and unionized labor.
James Sohn, the district’s chief facilities executive, said the megaschools were built when global raw material shortages caused costs to skyrocket to an average of $600 per square foot in 2006 and 2007 — triple the price from 2002. Costs have since eased to $350 per square foot.
On top of that, each project had its own cost drivers.
After buildings were demolished at the site of the 2,400-student Roybal school, contaminated soil, a methane gas field and an earthquake fault were discovered. A gas mitigation system cost $17 million.
Over 20 years, the project grew to encompass a dance studio with cushioned maple floors, a modern kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven, a 10-acre park and teacher planning rooms between classrooms.
The 1,700-student arts school was designed as a landmark, with a stainless steel, postmodernistic tower encircled by a rollercoaster-like swirl, while the RFK site involved 15 years of litigation with historic preservationists and Donald Trump, who wanted to build the world’s tallest building there. The wrangling cost $9 million.
Methane mitigation cost $33 million and the district paid another $15 million preserving historic features, including a wall of the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub and turning the Paul Williams-designed coffee shop into a faculty lounge.
Sohn said LA Unified has reached the end of its Taj Mahal building spree. “These are definitely the exceptions,” he said. “We don’t anticipate schools costing hundreds of millions of dollars in the future.”
How WikiLeaks Keeps Its Funding Secret
August 23, 2010 by Duffy
Filed under Government
August 23, 2010
By Jeanne Whalen and David Crawford
The controversial website WikiLeaks, which argues the cause of openness in leaking classified or confidential documents, has set up an elaborate global financial network to protect a big secret of its own—its funding.
Some governments and corporations angered by the site’s publications have already sued WikiLeaks or blocked access to it, and the group fears that its money and infrastructure could be targeted further, founder Julian Assange said in an interview in London shortly after publishing 76,000 classified U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan in July. The move sparked international controversy and put WikiLeaks in the spotlight.
In response, the site has established a complex system for collecting and disbursing its donations to obscure their origin and use, Mr. Assange said. Anchoring the system is a foundation in Germany established in memory of a computer hacker who died in 2001.
WikiLeaks’s financial stability has waxed and waned during its short history. The site shut down briefly late last year, citing a lack of funds, but Mr. Assange said the group has raised about $1 million since the start of 2010.
WikiLeaks’s lack of financial transparency stands in contrast to the total transparency it seeks from governments and corporations.
“It’s very hard work to run an organization, let alone one that’s constantly being spied upon and sued,” Mr. Assange said in the interview. “Judicial decisions can have an effect on an organization’s operation. … We can’t have our cash flow constrained entirely,” he said.
Among the cases WikiLeaks has faced, the Swiss bank Julius Baer & Co. in 2008 sued for damages in federal court in California, alleging that the site had published stolen bank documents. The court ordered the disabling of the wikileaks.org domain name, but the bank withdrew its lawsuit after civil-rights advocates protested.
Though Mr. Assange declined to name donors or certain companies through which donations flow, he provided some insight into the funding structure that allows the group to operate.
The linchpin of WikiLeaks’s financial network is Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation. WikiLeaks encourages donors to contribute to its account at the foundation, which under German law can’t publicly disclose the names of donors. Because the foundation “is not an operational concern, it can’t be sued for doing anything. So the donors’ money is protected, in other words, from lawsuits,” Mr. Assange said.
The German foundation is only one piece of the WikiLeaks network.
“We’re registered as a library in Australia, we’re registered as a foundation in France, we’re registered as a newspaper in Sweden,” Mr. Assange said. WikiLeaks has two tax-exempt charitable organizations in the U.S., known as 501C3s, that “act as a front” for the website, he said. He declined to give their names, saying they could “lose some of their grant money because of political sensitivities.”
Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks gets about half its money from modest donations processed by its website, and the other half from “personal contacts,” including “people with some millions who approach us and say ‘I’ll give you 60,000 or 10,000,’ ” he said, without specifying a currency.
Retrieving money from the Wau Holland Foundation is a complicated task, he said. WikiLeaks must submit receipts to the foundation, which issues grants to reimburse them. Because German law requires the foundation to publicly disclose its expenditures, WikiLeaks uses “other foundations” to aggregate its bills and send them to Wau Holland, so that some of the companies WikiLeaks does business with remain anonymous, Mr. Assange said. This prevents anyone from seeing whom, for example, WikiLeaks pays for Internet infrastructure, or where that infrastructure is located.
To operate, the website needs several powerful computers linked to high-speed Internet connections. WikiLeaks particularly tries to obscure payments for “basic infrastructure that could be attacked,” for “servers that are engaged in source protection,” and for “security engineers,” Mr. Assange said.
So far, Wau Holland has distributed €50,000 ($64,000) to a WikiLeaks account in Germany, strictly in exchange for receipts, according to Daniel Schmitt, spokesman at WikiLeaks, and Hendrik Fulda, deputy board chairman of the foundation. Mr. Schmitt controls the account.
The average donation to WikiLeaks via the Wau Holland Foundation is about €20, Mr. Fulda said. The largest donation through the foundation—€10,000—arrived from a German donor after the publication of the Afghan war documents, he said, declining to reveal further details.
Mr. Schmitt said WikiLeaks needs about $200,000 a year to cover its operating expenses—mainly network fees, rent and storage costs for the sites where the servers are, and some hardware and travel expenses. Should it decide to pay salaries to its five staff members, as it is now considering, it would need about €600,000 a year, he said.
Paying salaries is a “sensitive subject,” he said, noting that outsiders might question the need for them.
Mr. Fulda of the foundation said WikiLeaks needs €10,000 to €15,000 a month to maintain its Web presence. Late last year, when donors were contributing only €2,000 to €3,000 per month, WikiLeaks was struggling to survive, he said. So it shut down its website in December, leaving up only an appeal for donors to transfer money to the group via the Wau Holland Foundation. Soon, donations per month increased 20-fold.
WikiLeaks reopened its website in May, but “within days … donations dropped back to near their former level,” Mr. Fulda said.
The fluctuation caught the attention of Wau Holland’s banking partners including eBayInc.’s PayPal, which demanded explanations for the surge and fall in donations. “I explained it wasn’t money laundering, just WikiLeaks donations,” Mr. Fulda said.
A PayPal spokeswoman said the company is “still processing payments for WikiLeaks.” She said that she couldn’t comment further on a specific account but that in general, PayPal is required by anti-money-laundering laws and its own anti-fraud regulations to investigate accounts when they exceed certain limits.
WikiLeaks has tried to diversify away from PayPal by adding other payment options to its site, including Flattr.com, a payment system based in Sweden, and Moneybookers, a system based in the U.K.
A spokeswoman for Moneybookers said the company used to provide services to WikiLeaks but “as they don’t adhere to Moneybookers’ standards, the agreement was terminated.” She declined to comment further.
Flattr.com said it was “really proud and happy to help” Wikileaks. “We think their work is exactly what is needed and if we can help just a little bit, we will,” said Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, founder of Flattr.com.
Unfair Rape Charges For WikiLeaks Founder Cancelled
August 23, 2010
BBC News
The Swedish Prosecution Authority website said the chief prosecutor had come to the decision that Mr Assange was not suspected of rape but did not give any further explanation.
The warrant was issued late on Friday.
Wikileaks, which has been criticised for leaking Afghan war documents, had quoted Mr Assange as saying the charges were “without basis”.
That message, which appeared on Twitter and was attributed directly to Mr Assange, said the appearance of the allegations “at this moment is deeply disturbing”.
In a series of other messages posted on the Wikileaks Twitter feed, the whistle-blowing website said: “No-one here has been contacted by Swedish police”, and that it had been warned to expect “dirty tricks”.
In its “official blog” on Saturday before the warrant was cancelled, Wikileaks said it was “deeply concerned about the seriousness of these allegations. We the people behind Wikileaks think highly of Julian and and he has our full support”.
The current whereabouts of Mr Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, are unclear.
More documents
The Swedish Prosecution Authority website said chief prosecutor Eva Finne had come to the decision that Julian Assange was not subject to arrest.
In a brief statement Eva Finne said: “I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.”
The website said there would be no further immediate comment.
Earlier, Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden’s prosecutors’ office, said there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation. She gave no details of the accusations. She said that as far as she knew they related to alleged incidents that took place in Sweden.
On Saturday she said the police investigation into the molestation charge continued.
Ms Rosander said: “The [chief prosecutor] will look into that later. She hasn’t been able to do that, but that’s not enough for being arrested. It’s not a serious enough crime.”
Media reports say Mr Assange was in Sweden last week to talk about his work and defend the decision by Wikileaks to publish the Afghan war logs.
Last month, Wikileaks published more than 75,000 secret US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.
US authorities criticised the leak, saying it could put the lives of coalition soldiers and Afghans, especially informers, at risk.
Mr Assange has said that Wikileaks is intending to release a further 15,000 documents in the coming weeks.
