Taking Just a Little Too Much Tylenol Each Time Can Be Deadly
November 28, 2011
Time
By Maia Szalavitz
“Try this: never take Tylenol again and you won’t even have to be concerned with this. Duh!” –KTRN
Taking just a little bit too much acetaminophen (Tylenol) over the course of days or weeks is more likely to be fatal than taking a single, massive overdose, according to a new study. In part, that’s because when people take such a “staggered overdose,” physicians aren’t always able to identify the problem in time to help.
Acetaminophen is one of the most commonly used drugs in the world, with 28 billion doses purchased in the U.S. in 2005 alone. But its very familiarity can obscure the fact that it is a powerful drug, and that taking only slightly higher than recommended doses can cause potentially fatal liver damage. Tylenol overdose is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the U.S., leading to 26,000 hospitalizations and nearly 500 deaths annually, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
The new study, led by Dr. Kenneth Simpson of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, followed 663 hospital patients who had suffered from acetaminophen overdose between 1992 and 2008. Of these patients, 161 had taken a staggered overdose, increasingly escalating their use of painkillers containing acetaminophen to treat common pain like toothache, headache and muscle pain.
Click here for the full report.
7 Natural Cures for Migraines
November 28, 2011
MSN
By Nikki Jong
“There are natural and non-drug cures for everything. I have a friend who suffers from migraines. The doctors have her on so many drugs – no wonder she is still sick. She doesn’t want to try any natural remedies and she still eats meatloaf. Doctor’s orders.” –Chris Davis KTRN
For most people who experience an occasional headache, a couple of aspirin will usually do the trick. Migraine sufferers don’t have it so easy. Not only do many migraine meds have side effects that range from nausea and stomach ulcers to an increased risk of stroke and even heart attack, but up to two-thirds of users have also reported that they don’t deliver satisfactory results.
What to do? Plenty, according to the latest research.
Although researchers haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly why migraines strike, they do understand the physiological changes that occur when a migraine hits. When the nerve cells in the brain become overstimulated, they release chemicals that cause inflammation and swelling in the blood vessels in the neck and brain. The cures listed below work by addressing these issues. Here are seven surprising natural cures for migraines that help prevent and reduce the frequency and severity of migraine attacks.
1. Exercise
Exercise has long been recommended to migraine sufferers, and now there’s new evidence to support the theory that physical activity appears to help prevent migraines. In a 2011 randomized, controlled study from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, researchers found that aerobic exercise was as effective at preventing migraines as the preventive migraine medication topiramate (brand name Topamax). A third of the patients in the three-month study exercised on a stationary bike three times per week for 40 minutes, while another third took a topiramate regimen that was gradually increased to the highest tolerable dose (a maximum of 200 milligrams per day).
The exercisers and drug group both experienced a similar reduced number of migraines, but 33 percent of topiramate users also experienced adverse side effects, while the exercisers reported none. The researchers concluded that regular exercise may be an option for migraine sufferers who don’t want to adhere to a daily medication regimen, and the medical community agrees that the findings are encouraging.
How it helps: Regular, gentle exercise helps to reduce tension and ward off stress, a well-known trigger for many migraine sufferers. Exercise also triggers the release of endorphins, which act as a mild sedative.
How much helps: The Department of Health and Human Services recommends 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity per week, ideally spread out over the course of the week. Beware that intense exercise can actually trigger rather than prevent migraine, so don’t overdo it.
Click here for the full report.
Leaked UN Report Reveals Torture, Lynchings And Abuse In Post-Gaddafi Libya
November 28, 2011 by William
Filed under Government
November 28, 2011
The Independent
By Kim Sengupta, Solomon Hughes
“Our efforts in Libya sure don’t seem to be paying off. Not much has changed there is seems.” –KTRN
Thousands of people, including women and children, are being illegally detained by rebel militias in Libya, according to a report by the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Many of the prisoners are suffering torture and systematic mistreatment while being held in private jails outside the control of the country’s new government.
The document, seen by The Independent, states that while political prisoners being held by the Gaddafi regime have been released, their places have been taken by up to 7,000 new “enemies of the state”, “disappeared” in a dysfunctional system, with no recourse to the law.
The report will come as uncomfortable reading for the Western governments, including Britain, which backed the campaign to oust Gaddafi. A UN resolution was secured in March in order to protect civilians from abuses by the regime, which was at the time mercilessly suppressing the uprising against the Gaddafi regime.
There was evidence, says the report by Ban Ki-moon, due to be presented to the Security Council, that both sides committed acts amounting war crimes in the bitter battle for Colonel Gaddafi’s hometown, Sirte. The Secretary-General who recently visited Libya, echoes the concern expressed by many world leaders over the killing of the former dictator by rebel fighters pointing out that Gaddafi was captured alive before being put to death.
The report also stresses that it is a matter of great praise that the country has been liberated after 42 years of totalitarian rule. The victorious opposition – which formed a new interim government this week – fully intends to follow a democratic path and introduce a functioning legal system, he says. The report is due to be circulated among members of the UN Security Council, and discussed next week.
However, Ban Ki-moon also presents a grim scenario of the growing power of the armed militias that control of the streets of many towns, including those of the capital, Tripoli, and the settling of internecine feuds through gun battles resulting in deaths and injuries.
Meanwhile the lawlessness has resulted in the vast majority of the police force not being able to return to work. In the few places where they have been back on duty under experienced officers, such as Tripoli, their role has been restricted largely to directing traffic.
Libya is the only Arab uprising to have attracted direct Western military support, despite the closer links forged with the West in recent years by the Gaddafi regime. The resistance in London, Washington and elsewhere to Nato-led intervention in other Arab countries has centred largely on a lack of coherent opposition. Political backers of the air strikes in Libya had cited the National Transitional Council (NTC) as a credible alternative to the Gaddafi regime.
Click here for the full report.
SWAT Team’s Shooting Of Marine Causes Outrage
November 28, 2011
CBS News
By The Associated Press
“Absolutely disgusting. We should all be outraged at this. All over a possible involvement in a drug-trafficking organization. The War on Drugs is sure working, isn’t it? Why can’t they just knock on the door? Do they really need a SWAT team for this? These cops deserve jail for life. They committed murder and left a family in ruins.”
Jose Guerena Ortiz was sleeping after an exhausting 12-hour night shift at a copper mine. His wife, Vanessa, had begun breakfast. Their 4-year-old son, Joel, asked to watch cartoons.
An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood — until an armored vehicle pulled into the family’s driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.
They were a sheriff’s department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a “boom” and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a gun outside.
A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his family, she said, when he grabbed his own gun — an AR-15 assault rifle.
What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.
The officers — four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 — moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting “Police!” in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds passed before they opened fire into the house.
And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and child cowered in a closet.
“Hurry up, he’s bleeding,” Vanessa Guerena pleaded with a 911 operator. “I don’t know why they shoot him. They open the door and shoot him. Please get me an ambulance.”
When she emerged from the home minutes later, officers hustled her to a police van, even as she cried that her husband was unresponsive and bleeding, and that her young son was still inside. She begged them to get Joel out of the house before he saw his father in a puddle of blood on the floor.
But soon afterward, the boy appeared in the front doorway in Spider-Man pajamas, crying.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said its SWAT team was at the home because Guerena was suspected of being involved in a drug-trafficking organization and that the shooting happened because he arrived at the door brandishing a gun. The county prosecutor’s office says the shooting was justified.
But six months after the May 5 police gunfire shattered a peaceful morning and a family’s life, investigators have made no arrests in the case that led to the raid. Outraged friends, co-workers and fellow Marines have called the shooting an injustice and demanded further investigation. A family lawyer has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the sheriff’s office. And amid the outcry in online forums and social media outlets, the sheriff’s 54-second video, which found its way to YouTube, has drawn more than 275,000 views.
The many questions swirling around the incident all boil down to one, repeated by Vanessa Guerena, as quoted in the 1,000-page police report on the case:
“Why, why, why was he killed?”
Click here for the full report.
Feds Seize 130+ Domain Names in Mass Crackdown
November 28, 2011 by William
Filed under Government
November 28, 2011
Torrent Freak
“This demonstrates that the US government can shut down any website whenever it wants.” –KTRN
US authorities have initiated the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. With just a few days to go until “Cyber Monday” more than 100 domain names have been taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies. The seizures are disputable, as the SOPA bill which aims to specifically legitimize such actions is still pending in Congress.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have resumed “Operation In Our Sites”, the domain name seizing initiative designed to crack down on online piracy and counterfeiting.
The new round comes exactly a year after 82 domains, including Torrent-Finder, were taken over in 2010. At the time ICE labeled the actions “Cyber Monday crackdown,” referring to the Monday following Thanksgiving where consumers are persuaded to shop online.
TorrentFreak has identified more than 130 domains taken over by the government during the last 24 hours, which makes this the largest seizure round to date. The authorities have yet to comment via official channels, but we assume that they will use the same justification for the domain seizures as they did last year.
“Intellectual property crimes are not victimless,” said Attorney General Eric Holder at the time.
“The theft of ideas and the sale of counterfeit goods threaten economic opportunities and financial stability, suppress innovation and destroy jobs. The Justice Department, with the help of our law enforcement partners, is changing the perception that these crimes are risk-free with enforcement actions like the one announced today,” Holder added.
Compared to previous seizure rounds, there are also some notable differences to report. This time the action appears to be limited to sites that directly charge visitors for their services. Most of the domains are linked to the selling of counterfeit clothing (e.g. 17nflshop.com), and at least one (autocd.com) sold pirated auto software.
Click here for the full report.
Comfortably Numb
November 28, 2011
Info Wars
By Jim Q
“This article is dead on. It just seems most Americans are either brain dead or oblivious. Perhaps they would rather focus on having 2.3 children and living in a house with a white picket fence.” –KTRN
As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can’t help but wonder whether there is anyone home. Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb? I’ve concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators.
Both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement are a reflection of the mood change in the country, which is a result of government overreach, political corruption, dysfunctional economic policies, and a financial system designed to enrich the few while defrauding the many. The common theme is anger, frustration and disillusionment with a system so badly broken it appears unfixable through the existing supposedly democratic methods. The system has been captured by an oligarchy of moneyed interests from the financial industry, mega-corporations, and military industrial complex, protected by their captured puppets in Washington DC and sustained by the propaganda peddling corporate media. The differences in political parties are meaningless as they each advocate big government solutions to all social, economic, foreign relations, and monetary issues.
There is confusion and misunderstanding regarding the culprits in this drama. It was plain to me last week when I read about a small group of concerned citizens in the next town over who decided to support the Occupy movement by holding a nightly peaceful march to protest the criminal syndicate that is Wall Street and a political system designed to protect them. My local paper asked for people’s reaction to this Constitutional exercising of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Here is a sampling of the comments:
Click here for the full report.
Citizens For Health Launches Initiative To Fight Corn Refiners Association Fraudulent HFCS Campaign
November 28, 2011
Natural News
By Jonathan Benson
“Everyone should know by now that high fructose corn syrup is a no-no. Avoid it at all costs. Not only will it make you fat, it will also help get you addicted to food which is what they want to begin with.” –KTRN
The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) has been busy the past few years trying to salvage the reputation of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a heavily-processed chemical sweetener derived from corn starch that a growing number of Americans are now seeking to avoid for health reasons. The industry’s latest marketing stunt involves renaming HFCS to “corn sugar” in order to make the additive sound healthier and more appealing to the public.
Many NaturalNews readers will recall CRA’s ridiculous television ad campaign alleging that HFCS is the same as “sugar,” and that consuming it is safe in moderation. Well, the group has now modified the campaign to refer to HFCS as “corn sugar,” and is petitioning the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to grant approval for this deceitful name change.
The FDA has not yet made a decision on the matter, but that has not stopped CRA from already using the term “corn sugar” in various marketing materials. In fact, some companies have already begun using the term on ingredient labels, which is a violation of the FDA’s policies concerning false and misleading product labeling.
Click here for the full report.
New Ron Paul Mailer Tells Iowans He’s ‘Despised By The Washington Establishment’
November 28, 2011 by William
Filed under Government
November 28, 2011
Caucus Insider
By Jennifer Jacobs
“Ron Paul, once again, is 100% correct.” –KTRN
In a new campaign mailer that arrived at Iowa homes today, Ron Paul shreds three rival GOP candidates’ past policy stances and tells voters that his “record of being right while others were wrong” sets him apart.
“Ask anyone in Congress or even anyone in this race. Whether or not they agree with everything I say, they will admit I stick to my principles and that I am despised by the Washington establishment for taking on both parties,” Paul says in the seven-page letter.
Paul, a congressman from Texas who has been campaigning aggressively in Iowa, says he’s the only candidate who predicted the current economic mess.
He slams rival GOP presidential candidates Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, in that order.
Paul doesn’t mention Newt Gingrich by name. Recent polling in Iowa shows Gingrich, Cain, Romney and Paul clustered at the top. Perry is not in the top tier.
“In one of his opinion columns, Herman Cain referred to the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks as a ‘win-win for the taxpayer,’” Paul writes. “Rick Perry signed a letter with a Democrat urging Congress to pass TARP. Mitt Romney still defends his support for this massive bailout.”
All this is bad enough, Paul says, but there’s more.
“Massachusetts’ RomneyCare plan … has swamped Massachusetts in new costs.”
Click here for the full report.
Black Friday Shoppers Shot, Pepper-Sprayed
November 28, 2011
Yahoo News
By CBCNews.CA
“There are two issues here. People need to calm down over Black Friday. It’s not worth it. And second, the cops need to back off. Yes, they are crazy shoppers, but is pepper spray really necessary?” –KTRN
Black Friday, the biggest U.S. shopping day, has taken unfortunate turns in some communities as harried shoppers seek out bargains — with at least two shootings and a pepper-spray incident that injured 20 shoppers.
Two men were shot and injured in armed robberies outside separate Wal-Mart stores, one in northern California and the other in South Carolina.
The pepper-spray incident happened at a Los Angeles-area Wal-Mart shortly after the store opened Thursday evening as shoppers prowled the aisles for discounts. Children were among those hurt by the woman’s pepper spray, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“This was customer-versus-customer shopping rage,” Los Angeles police Lt. Abel Parga said, according to the newspaper.
“She was competitive shopping.”
Police were looking for the woman believed to be behind the pepper-spraying, but haven’t been able to get a reliable description of her, the Times said.
Police in Fayetteville, N.C., were also searching for two suspects after gunshots rang out at a local mall early Friday. And a man was facing charges in upstate New York after two women were injured in a fight at a Wal-Mart.
But most of the crowds that gathered to hunt for Black Friday bargains were peaceful, with hundreds of people lining up at stores such as Best Buy and Target, which opened at midnight ET following the U.S. Thanksgiving.
Click here for the full report.
NATO Attack Allegedly Kills 24 Pakistani Troops
November 28, 2011 by William
Filed under Government
November 28, 2011
Yahoo News
By SEBASTIAN ABBOT
“If this story isn’t proof that we need Ron Paul as president, who knows what is. If it were up to Paul, we wouldn’t be fighting in Pakistan to begin with. Yay for war.” –KTRN
Pakistan has blocked vital supply routes for U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan and demanded Washington vacate a base used by American drones after coalition aircraft allegedly killed 24 Pakistani troops at two posts along a mountainous frontier that serves as a safe haven for militants.
The incident Saturday was a major blow to American efforts to rebuild an already tattered alliance vital to winding down the 10-year-old Afghan war. Islamabad called the bloodshed in one of its tribal areas a “grave infringement” of the country’s sovereignty, and it could make it even more difficult for the U.S. to enlist Pakistan’s help in pushing Afghan insurgents to engage in peace talks.
A NATO spokesman said it was likely that coalition airstrikes caused Pakistani casualties, but an investigation was being conducted to determine the details. If confirmed, it would be the deadliest friendly fire incident by NATO against Pakistani troops since the Afghan war began a decade ago.
A prolonged closure of Pakistan’s two Afghan border crossings to NATO supplies could cause serious problems for the coalition. The U.S., which is the largest member of the NATO force in Afghanistan, ships more than 30 percent of its non-lethal supplies through Pakistan. The coalition has alternative routes through Central Asia into northern Afghanistan, but they are costlier and less efficient.
Pakistan temporarily closed one of its Afghan crossings to NATO supplies last year after U.S. helicopters accidentally killed two Pakistani soldiers. Suspected militants took advantage of the impasse to launch attacks against stranded or rerouted trucks carrying NATO supplies. The government reopened the border after about 10 days when the U.S. apologized. NATO said at the time the relatively short closure did not significantly affect its ability to keep its troops supplied.
Click here for the full article.
