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Saturday, January 7, 2012

Odd Stories: Pie Fairy Says Farewell to a Friend

Willis "Bill" Welch with one of The Pie Fairy's treats.



Columbus, Ohio – A man somewhat famous for his friend only known as “The Pie Fairy” has revealed he won't be getting any more of the pastry treats.

Willis Welch, who still doesn't know who exactly is responsible for leaving him pies for the last 35 years, received a note with the desert stating “It has been a great ride. Still not telling you who I am yet, but my wings are shorter now and I am a little too fat to fly anymore. But I still love you!!”

All he knows about the person who has been treating him for three-and-a-half decades is the person knows him well enough to know pecan pie is his favorite. His story became national news after it appeared in a book in 2006.

He used to think his daughters were at the bottom of it but stopped after the consistently denied they had anything to do with it. Even though his daughters asked him not to eat the pies, Willis' sweet tooth kept winning out and he would eat them.

The pies started appearing in 1976 and followed him after he moved to Reynoldsburg.

The Pie Fairy seems to have a good sense of humor. After he got national recognition in 2006, the next year the Fairy left him a tiny pecan torte and a note chiding him for keeping the publicity for himself. The next day however Willis got a new full-sized pie with a note reading “Just kidding.”

The final note concluded “Won’t say bye or so long, just . . . keep on keeping on!”

Odd Stories: Art Student Hangs Painting in Major Museum Himself


Andrzej Sobiepan


Warsaw – Instead of waiting decades for his paintings to appear in museums, Andrzej Sobiepan decided to take the initiative upon himself to hang one in a major Polish art gallery.

After he got nationwide attention for his stunt, he told reporters he hoped young artists would get more space from galleries.

Inspired by Banksy, the world-renown graffiti artist, Sobiepan said he “decided that I will not wait 30 or 40 years for my works to appear at a place like this. I want to benefit from them in the here and now."

Museum officials apparently weren't aware of the painting after he hung it up on December 10th for three days, not only giving him the recognition he desired but also revealing several security flaws.

Museum director Mariusz Hermansdorfer stated the action revealed some security breaches, but he also considered it a "witty artistic happening” and “Has shown that the young generation of artists, unlike their predecessors, wants to see their works in museums.”

The museum has kept the painting on display in its cafe and ready to sell at a major Poland charity auction on Sunday.

Odd Stories: Acquittal Questioned Because of Sleeping Judge


Stockholm – A prosecutor in Sweden has one of the best reasons to question the acquittal of a man charged with signing off on fake invoices totalling 36-thousand dollars– the judge fell asleep. Twice.


"I don't know if the [judge] in question was particularly tired or something to that effect. This just simply should not happen," said regional prosecutor Nils-Eric Schultz.

The man was acquitted, and possibly got away with the crime, after the court ruled there wasn't enough evidence to prove the invoices were fake.

Schultz said the judge had been asleep while the defendant was being questioned and each time the judge fell asleep, the trial was interrupted.

Odd Stories: Long-Lost Ring Returned to Relatives




Longwood, Florida/Oakton, Virginia - In the nearly 20 years he's been scuba diving, Reed Banjanin came across many things, but he didn't expect to find a class ring from 1923.


The ring once belonged to Louise Hearst and was found last July 25 feet below the surface of a spring in Longwood, Florida.


He found it in perfect condition while scuba diving with his metal detector and got a hit on the object. Hearst's name was engraved on the ring shortly after her graduation from Mississippi Women's College, now known as William Carey University. She changed her surname to Entzminger when she married.


After what seems like nearly a century since it was last seen by human eyes, the ring was not only found by Banjanin, but returned to the family.


Her grandson, John Entzminger, was celebrating his 75th birthday when he got the call about Banjanin finding the ring.

Entzminger received Banjanin’s call, on Dec. 17: his birthday.

"I just couldn't believe it," said the Oakton, Virginiaman. "I had absolutely no idea that my grandmother lost it."

It's believed Louise lost the ring while vacationing with her husband's family in Seminole County.


Finding Entzminger proved challenging for Banjanin, who began with an online search for Mississippi Women’s College alumnae records, where he discovered Hearst was from Hattiesburg, Miss.


“I spent a good few weeks trying to find out more about her. I prayed about it, and had the ring next to my bed every night.”


Eventually, Banjanin stopped looking, but a couple weeks before Christmas a friend reminded him about his search. Determined to give it one more try, he found Hearst lived in Forest County, Miss., and married John Entzminger. After finding out she died in 1975, he used findagrave.com to locate her relatives and track down her grandson.


John says he plans on giving the ring to his grandchildren.


However I must ask the question: Is the math off on this one? Maybe he's her son instead of grandson.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Dog Frees Itself from Burial By Avalanche


Silver Brelsford with Oly after he was returned to the family.


Bozeman, Montana/Salmon, Idaho - Several days after an avalanche accident killed his owner and left him buried for days, a Welsh corgi has reappeared outside the motel room rented by the man and his wife.

The dog, Oly, is said to have somehow freed himself from about 50 feet of snow.

"We don't have a lot of data on dogs and avalanches. What we do know is that humans very, very, very rarely survive such a long burial," said Mark Staples, avalanche specialist for the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center in Montana.

Kerry Gaillard, David Gaillard's wife, was able to survive by holding onto a tree. She searched for him for hours before skiing to help.

David's body was found later and the lack of a body for Oly made authorities assume he was dead as well. David was a wildlife conservationist and alpine outdoorsman who was much-loved by the conservation community.

Dimock Water to Be Checked By EPA




Stating the residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania are claiming their wells have been polluted by a nearby fracking facility, federal regulators are considering the option of shipping fresh water to the townspeople.

This treatment is taking place after just a month after the Environmental Protection Agency deemed the water to be safe for consumption after they presented hundreds of pages of data linking their water's pollution to fracking.

If the EPA does go along with it, it's sure to be one of the strongest blows against the fracking industry. For years fracking has been theorized to be the reason water supplies across the country have become polluted or able to be set on fire. Along with the water damage, which has unknown short- and long-term effects, is the direct link between fracking and earthquakes. Some of the earthquakes are in areas which hardly ever happen to them.

The EPA said January 5th they will conduct their own tests on the area's water. It is already aware of the effects the gas extraction process had on the Wyoming town of Pavilion. In that case the agency's report expressed the concluding chemicals related to fracking were present in the town's aquifer.

Previous to this development the company Cabot Oil & Gas was providing water to about a dozen homes for three years until state regulators said it could stop if they wish. Now that their water supplies have stopped, some are showering in pond-water.

The residents started complaining about the foul-smelling cloudy water they were getting from their faucets in 2008.

Bloomberg gives Tax $ to Private Tennis Club on Randall's Island By Juan Gonzalez

East Harlem - community leaders are furious about the proposed expansion of a $19 million private tennis center at Randall’s Island that is connected to tennis legend John McEnroe.

Those leaders want to know why Mayor Bloomberg keeps handing barrels of money to the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, the public-private group that manages the 256-acre park.

Since 2003, City Hall has provided an astonishing $155 million for 65 new ballfields, new bike and hiking paths, comfort stations, and shoreline reconstruction at Randalls, and plans to spend another $22 million by 2013, according to the Independent Budget Office.

All that investment has steadily turned the island into an idyllic and isolated playground for affluent New Yorkers who flock to the golf range and the tennis courts, and for private schools that bus their students to the park each weekday to use the sparkling new fields.

Court fees at the two-year-old Sportime tennis center, for example, run from $72 to $102 per hour. And that’s on top of annual fees of $500 to $750.

Meanwhile, improvements for an adjacent East Harlem park languish.

“The East River esplanade in this neighborhood has giant holes in the pavement where residents stare at river swirling below,” said George Sarkissian, district manager of Community Board 11. “As for the E. 107th St. Pier, it is completely dilapidated, yet we’re told there’s no money to fix it.”

Randalls Island Foundation even benefits from special allocations Bloomberg occasionally slips into the budget.

Since 2005, for example, the mayor, a one-time member of Randall’s Island’s high-powered board of directors, has quietly earmarked $8.9 million to the foundation from his discretionary city capital budget allocations.

The mayor’s earmarks have been done so discreetly that even East Harlem City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, who chairs the Council’s Parks Department Committee, did not know about them until the Daily News alerted her last week.

“This reaffirms to me the murky element to these private-public partnerships,” Mark-Viverito said.

Over the years, Randall’s Island Foundation has devised an array of privatization schemes — all without meaningful input from the park’s neighborhoods.

Several years ago, the foundation’s effort to lure a private aquatic theme park to Randall’s collapsed. Then its pay-to-play plan, which would have handed 20 Manhattan private schools exclusive use of the park’s renovated ballfields during weekdays — in exchange for $2 million annual payments — was struck down by the courts. Judges ruled twice that Bloomberg failed to give the City Council a chance to vote on the plan.

In 2009, Sportime was granted a 20-year concession for the tennis center, though critics claim that plan, too, should have required City Council approval.

The John McEnroe Tennis Academy, which operates there, charges thousands of dollars for enrollees. McEnroe’s brother Mark McEnroe, the general manager, notes that scholarships and free court time are provided to the community.

“Thanks to Sportime, more tennis instruction, more tennis courts, and more tennis hours are made available to children of the surrounding communities than ever before,” Parks Department spokeswoman Vickie Karp said.

You would expect some benefits for the community from a public park.

Mark McEnroe admitted recently his center wants to do a better job of public relations. He and the Randall’s Foundations could start, says Mark-Viverito, by revealing how much money the center is making, and exactly how it will better serve the community.

Randall’s Island, after all, is still a public park, not a private playground.

'Chimera' monkeys Created in Lab







By Ian Sample

The world's first monkeys to be created from the embryos of several individuals have been born at a US research centre.

Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre produced the animals, known as chimeras, by sticking together between three and six rhesus monkey embryos in the early stages of their development.
Three animals were born at the laboratory, a singleton and twins, and were said to be healthy, with no apparent birth defects following the controversial technique.

The chimeras have tissues and organs made up of cells that come from each of the contributing embryos.

The mixtures of cells carried up to six distinct genomes.

"The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who led the research. "The possibilities for science are enormous."

Scientists named the singleton Chimero, and the twins Roku and Hex, meaning six in Japanese and Greek. Hex was born after merging six individual embryos, according to a report in the journal Cell. "To our knowledge, these infants are the world's first primate chimeras," the authors write.

While all three monkeys are biologically male, blood tests revealed that Roku carried both male and female cells.

The first chimeric animals were created by researchers in the 1960s, when experiments with mouse embryos showed they could combine to form a single mouse of normal size. Since then, scientists have created chimeric versions of rats, rabbits, sheep and cattle.

Mitalipov's team produced the chimeric monkeys by carefully pushing four-day-old embryos together in a culture dish and waiting for them to grow. Within a few days, 90% of them had grown into early stage embryos called blastocysts that contained at least twice as many cells as usual.

The researchers implanted the chimeric embryos into five female rhesus monkeys, all of which became pregnant. Tests on the foetuses confirmed that all of the animals' organs and tissues contained cells from more than one embryo.

Chimeric animals – mice in particular – have become a powerful tool in scientific research. They are used to shed light on the exquisite process of embryonic development, such as why a particular cell gives rise to a specific kind of tissue, and to explore how individual genes work.

The creation of chimeric animals has also been used to test whether embryonic stem cells stored in laboratories are likely to turn into working tissues when injected into the body. A standard test is to inject stem cells into an early stage embryo. If the embryo grows into a chimeric animal, it means the stem cells have been incorporated into the animal's tissues and organs.

In a series of experiments described in the same paper, the researchers found it impossible to create chimeric monkeys by injecting stem cells into early stage embryos. Only when very young embryos were merged together could they make chimeric animals.

The difficulties the scientists faced could herald future problems in using embryonic stem cells to grow new tissues in humans. While stem cells inside embryos can grow into any tissue or organ, lines of embryonic stem cells cultured in labs seem to lose this ability, at least to some extent.

"If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can't do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos," said Mitalipov.

Robin Lovell-Badge, head of genetics at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, said there has been a suspicion that most human and monkey embryonic stem cell lines are different.

"This work supports this notion, as the macaque embryonic stem cells tested were unable to mix in with cells of the host embryos. This may be reassuring to those who worry that human embryonic stem cells could be used to make chimeric people, although in itself this should not be a concern, as such rare individuals already exist from the spontaneous merger of two early embryos. But it may be a concern for regenerative medicine if such cells are not as flexible as hoped," he said.

Indiana Law Would Criminalize “Inappropriate” Singing of National Anthem By David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff


Claiming there’s a right and wrong way to do it, a lawmaker in Indiana has introduced legislation that bans the inappropriate singing of the national anthem.
 
Republican Senator Vaneta Becker’s bill would set specific “performance standards” for “The Star-Spangled Banner” at events sponsored by public schools and state universities, or by private schools receiving state or local scholarship funds or vouchers.
 
The bill’s language does not offer a definition of an acceptable version of the song. Instead, Becker is leaving that up to the State Department of Education and the Commission for Higher Education.
 
If the measure becomes law, those not abiding by the appropriate standards will be fined $25.
 
Indiana citizens have been particularly sensitive to the singing of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” since May 2001 when Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler, performing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, changed the last line from “the home of the brave” to “the home of the Indianapolis 500.”
 
Massachusetts law forbids the use of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as dance music, as part of a medley or as an exit march…punishable by a fine of up to $100.
 
In October 2010 the House of Representatives of the Philippines passed a law that included jail time for improper singing of the Filipino national anthem, but the bill died in the Senate.

More Video on the Kaolin Spill

This video was uploaded roughly four hours ago from the Savannah Riverkeeper Youtube account.


Number of Americans Wounded in Iraq is Obscured by Fog of War…and Peace By Noel Brinkerhoff


Most Americans simply don’t want to think about the Iraq War anymore. But that is not an option for hundreds of thousands of veterans and their families.
 
Exactly how many U.S. troops died in Iraq is pretty well established: 4,487 dead. But determining how many U.S. personnel were wounded in the war and during the prolonged occupation that followed is much more uncertain.
 
The Department of Defense says 32,226 were hurt. But this total only includes soldiers who sustained combat-related wounds from an “external agent or cause” (i.e. getting shot or hit with shrapnel).
 
What about the men and women who came home with “invisible” wounds–brain injuries, post-traumatic stress (PTSD), depression, hearing loss, etc?
 
If those injuries are factored in, the U.S. count could soar into the hundreds of thousands, writes Dan Froomkin at Nieman Watchdog.
 
For instance, a RAND study three years ago estimated that 14% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans tested positive for PTSD, 14% for major depression and 19% for possible traumatic brain injury. Using those percentages against the 1.5 million who served in Iraq, Froomkin estimated that 200,000 could have PTSD or major depression and 285,000 may suffer from serious brain injuries.

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Time Cloak Created




— It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker.

Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don't see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It's not just that the thief is invisible — his whole activity is.

What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it's not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

We see events happening as light from them reaches our eyes. Usually it's a continuous flow of light. In the new research, however, scientists were able to interrupt that flow for just an instant.

Other newly created invisibility cloaks fashioned by scientists move the light beams away in the traditional three dimensions. The Cornell team alters not where the light flows but how fast it moves, changing in the dimension of time, not space.

They tinkered with the speed of beams of light in a way that would make it appear to surveillance cameras or laser security beams that an event, such as an art heist, isn't happening.

Another way to think of it is as if scientists edited or erased a split second of history. It's as if you are watching a movie with a scene inserted that you don't see or notice. It's there in the movie, but it's not something you saw, said study co-author Moti Fridman, a physics researcher at Cornell.

The scientists created a lens of not just light, but time. Their method splits light, speeding up one part of light and slowing down another. It creates a gap and that gap is where an event is masked.

"You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place," said study co-author Alexander Gaeta, director of Cornell's School of Applied and Engineering Physics. "You just don't know that anything ever happened."

This is all happening in beams of light that move too fast for the human eye to see. Using fiber optics, the hole in time is created as light moves along inside a fiber much thinner than a human hair. The scientists shoot the beam of light out, and then with other beams, they create a time lens that splits the light into two different speed beams that create the effect of invisibility by being too fast or too slow. The whole work is a mess of fibers on a long table and almost looks like a pile of spaghetti, Fridman said.

It is the first time that scientists have been able to mask an event in time, a concept only first theorized by Martin McCall, a professor of theoretical optics at Imperial College in London. Gaeta, Fridman and others at Cornell, who had already been working on time lenses, decided to see if they could do what McCall envisioned.

It only took a few months, a blink of an eye in scientific research time.

"It is significant because it opens up a whole new realm to ideas involving invisibility," McCall said.

Researchers at Duke University and in Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have made progress on making an object appear invisible spatially. The earlier invisibility cloak work bent light around an object in three dimensions.

Between those two approaches, the idea of invisibility will work its way into useful technology, predicts McCall, who wasn't part of either team.

The science is legitimate, but it's still only a fraction of a second, added City College of New York physicist Michio Kaku, who specializes in the physics of science fiction.

"That's not enough time to wander around Hogwarts," Kaku wrote in an email. "The next step therefore will be to increase this time interval, perhaps to a millionth of a second. So we see that there's a long way to go before we have true invisibility as seen in science fiction."

Gaeta said he thinks he can get make the cloak last a millionth of a second or maybe even a thousandth of a second. But McCall said the mathematics dictate that it would take too big a machine — about 18,600 miles long — to make the cloak last a full second.

"You have to start somewhere and this is a proof of concept," Gaeta said.

Still, there are practical applications, Gaeta and Fridman said. This is a way of adding a packet of information to high-speed data unseen without interrupting the flow of information. But that may not be a good thing if used for computer viruses, Fridman conceded.
There may be good uses of this technology, Gaeta said, but "for some reason people are more interested in the more illicit applications."

Another Arrest as Murdoch Hacking Scandal Investigations Continue


Cheryl Carter


Essex, England – British police report they arrested one of the people who were involved in the United Kingdom's phone hacking scandal which caused a media uproar.

Identified as Cheryl Carter by the BBC, she's described as a “long-serving former assistant to ex-News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks and other executives at Rupert Murdoch's News International. “

So far 23 people have been arrested because of the investigations into phone and computer hacking as well as police bribery.




In more interesting news, the now-defunct newspaper's competitor, The Daily News, hired Colin Myler.  Myler was the executive editor of News of the World when it was shut down in the middle of 2011.

He will start working at the Daily News on January 10th.  In the past he has also worked at the New York Post and the Sunday Mirror in the UK.

 

Rape Definition Expanded By Government


Washington D.C. - The government has at long-last expanded the definition for rape to include victims and attackers of any gender, including woman-on-man and man-on-man. It also expands the meaning to cover when the victim is incapable of giving consent due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or age.

Supporters say the expansion of the definition is one that's long overdue because lawmakers and authorities use crime statistics to determine where resources and money for victims.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett called the change a "very, very important step because it counts men and because it includes rapes outside of physical force.

Secretive Tylenol Recall Kills Child




Ellensburg, Washington - Due to what's being called a “stealth recall” the company Johnson and Johnson may be responsible for the death of a two-year-old.

Daniel and Kathy Moore are suing the company after the July 2010 death of their son. River Moore died after consuming tainted Children's Tylenol that fatally damaged his liver after he coughed up blood. The couple claims the company quietly purchased the bottles instead of issuing a recall to the public.

The family's lawyer, Joseph Messa, said "extensive testing done on River before and after his death ruled out viruses or other conditions as the cause."

Proof of the company's plot rests with several internal email between the executives of McNeil Consumer Healthcare, one of the other companies named in the suit. One of them praises the secretive plan's success, stating “This was a major win for us as it limits the press that will be seen.”

The lawsuit states “Defendant Johnson & Johnson, a Fortune 50 Company with $60 billion in annual sales, knew of defects, impurities and contamination in the children's drugs and, yet, embarked on a ‘phantom’ or ‘stealth’ recall of these drugs to hide these problems so the general public, ignorant of the dangers, would continue buying and administering these brand name drugs to their children.”

Some of the other companies named in the suit are Costco, three Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries, consumer health business head Collen Goggins,and the retailers and distributors of the medication.  The charges are of recklessness, negligence, breach of warranty, infliction of emotional distress, and conspiracy amongst others. 

Johnson and Johnson contest, saying their actions were a precautionary measure and the potential for serious medical events is remote" but consumers who purchased the products should discontinue use.

Texas Teen Soon to Return Home


El Paso - Jakadrien Turner, the teenager who was deported to Colombia after giving ICE officials – who never took the time to confirm her identity nor find out she was unable to speak Spanish – a false name, is likely to return to her Texas home soon.

Jakadrien's release comes after the U.S. embassy provided the needed documents to Colombia. It also states she was working in a call center before she American and Colombian officials were alerted about her true citizenship status. Between that time and now Colombia claims she was in a welfare program.


Update: Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin announced Jakadrien Turner is on the way to being returned to the United States.

Holguin said they are looking into how she was deported into Colombia and allowed entry into the country.

Turner is presently five months pregnant.

Update: She is now back with her family.


Thursday, January 5, 2012

Video of Some of the Kaolin Spill's Effects

Fish Imitates Octopus That Imitates Fish




Indonesia/California/Gottingen - The infamous mimic octopus, known to impersonate flatfish, lionfish, and sea snakes, now has an imitator of its own.

The jawfish, a tiny fish that surely would be eaten by almost any other animal in the ocean, usually stays close to its burrow ready to retreat from any danger. It was noticed in July of 2011 during a trip to Indonesia by Godehard Kopp of the University of Gottingen (Germany) clinging to the octopus. The fish was imitating an octopus that imitates another fish species. In spite of how close it was to the octopus, the fish seems to be unnoticed.

Kopp sent the video he made about the jawfish to the people who discovered it, Rich Ross and Luiz Rocha of the California Academy of Sciences. Because this behavior has never been documented before they published it in the journal Coral Reefs. They theorize the jawfish “hitches a ride with the octopus for protection, allowing it to venture away from its burrow to look for food—a case of 'opportunistic mimicry.' “

Dr. Rocha said about the discovery "This is a unique case in the reefs not only because the model for the jawfish is a mimic itself, but also because this is the first case of a jawfish involved in mimicry. Unfortunately, reefs in the Coral Triangle area of southeast Asia are rapidly declining mostly due to harmful human activities, and we may lose species involved in unique interactions like this even before we get to know them."

Ohio Earthquake Was Not a Natural Event, Expert Says





By Kim Palmer


Ohio - A 4.0 magnitude earthquake in Ohio on New Year's Eve did not occur naturally and may have been caused by high-pressure liquid injection related to oil and gas exploration and production, an expert hired by the state of Ohio said on Tuesday.

Ohio's Department of Natural Resources on Sunday suspended operations at five deep well sites in Youngstown, Ohio, where the injection of water was taking place, while they evaluate seismological data from a rare quake in the area.

The wells are about 9,000 feet deep and are used to dispose of water from oil and gas wells. The process is related to fracking, the controversial injection of chemical-laced water and sand into rock to release oil and gas. Critics say that the high pressure injection of the liquid causes seismic activity.

Won-Young Kim, a research professor of Seismology Geology and Tectonophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday that circumstantial evidence suggests a link between the earthquake and the high-pressure well activity.

"We know the depth (of the quake on Saturday) is two miles and that is different from a natural earthquake," said Kim, who is advising the state of Ohio.

Data collected from four seismographs set up in November in the area confirm a connection between the quakes and water pressure at the well, Kim said.

"There is circumstantial evidence to connect the two -- in the past we didn't have earthquakes in the area and the proximity in the time and space of the earthquakes matches operations at the well," he said.

A spokesman for Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich, a strong supporter of oil and gas exploration in the state, said Ohio could announce a preliminary decision whether to continue the suspension of the wells as early as Wednesday.

The state was already looking into the cause of earlier seismic activity from 10 previous earthquakes, beginning in March, 2011.

According to Kim, this is not the first time Ohio tremors have been linked to human activities. "We have several examples of earthquakes from deep well disposal in the past," Kim said.

A quake of 4.2 magnitude in Ashtabula, Ohio, on January 26, 2001, was believed to be due to deep-well injection, he said. And in 1987 there was an incident with a correlation to high pressure deep well injection, he said.

There are 177 so-called "class two" deep wells in Ohio, according to Tom Stewart, executive vice president of Ohio Oil and Gas Association. They all operate under federal guidelines spelled out by the Clean Water Act.

There is no evidence that the wells in Youngstown were operating at higher pressures than allowed, Stewart said.

"We haven't seen anything from anyone at (the state agency) that would lead us to believe that the well was not operating properly," he said.

Kim said that even though the wells have stopped pumping water into the rock, the area might not have experienced its last earthquake. "It could take a couple of years for the earthquakes to go away. The migration of the fluid injected into the rock takes a long time to leave," Kim said.

Ohio's Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown, said the quick response by the state shows it is a serious issue.
"There are things we need to know about drilling and earthquakes," Brown told Reuters on Tuesday.

Brown said he supports new energy exploration that brings jobs to the state but has questions about how companies will handle fracking and wastewater disposal. "They have got to answer the question of what they are going to do with the waste just like nuclear power," Brown said.

Avoiding Fracking Earthquakes: Expensive Venture By Edward McAllister


United States - With mounting evidence linking hundreds of small earthquakes from Oklahoma to Ohio to the energy industry's growing use of fracking technology, scientists say there is one way to minimize risks of even minor temblors.

Only, it costs about $10 million a pop.

A thorough seismic survey to assess tracts of rock below where oil and gas drilling fluid is disposed of could help detect quake prone areas.

But that would be far more costly than the traditional method of drilling a bore hole, which takes a limited sample of a rock formation but gives no hint of faults lines or plates.

The more expensive method will be a hard sell as long as irrefutable proof of the link between fracking and earthquakes remains elusive.

"If we knew what was in the earth we could perfectly mitigate the risk of earthquakes," said Austin Holland, seismologist at the Oklahoma Geological Survey. "That is something that we don't have enough science to establish yet."

A 4.0 New Year's Eve quake in Ohio prompted officials to shut down five wells used to dispose of fluid used in the hydraulic fracturing process. That comes less than a year after Arkansas declared a moratorium due to a surge in earthquakes as companies developed the Fayetteville Shale reserve.

Experts say the quakes do not necessarily appear to be caused during the process of fracking, a controversial extraction technique that involves injecting chemical-laced water and sand into shale rock to release oil and gas.

Instead, it's the need to dispose of millions of gallons of contaminated fluid extracted from each drilling site, either to be recycled or trucked to a separate location to be pumped deep underground.

The pressure caused by water pushed far below the surface for a long period has been linked to an increase in seismic activity, as water enters fissures and lubricates fault lines which can cause earthquakes in places otherwise free of them.

"It basically greases the wheels of the earthquake process that is there naturally and causes the earthquakes to occur at lower stress levels than they might normally have needed to occur," said Larry Brown who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Precautions can be taken to mitigate risks of earthquakes near disposal wells, such as lowering injection pressure and avoiding areas with a history of seismic activity, though none of these guarantee total safety.

QUESTIONED LINK
On paper, the link between fracking and quakes is compelling. As the oil and gas industry embarked on a massive expansion of hydraulic fracturing across Arkansas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the number of earthquakes in areas where wastewater was injected back underground surged tenfold.

Data from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which had seismographs set up in Youngstown on Saturday, concluded that the earthquake occurred at the same depth as the well, about 2 miles below the surface.

"There is a relationship between when they started to inject into the well and the earthquakes started near the bottom of the well so it is unlikely to be coincidental," said John Armbruster at Lamont-Doherty.
But some researchers say the link has not been proven.

In Oklahoma, which saw a tenfold increase in earthquakes since 2009 to over 1,000, officials at the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OKGS) say more proof of a link to fracking is needed.

"The strong correlation in time and space as well as a reasonable fit to a physical model suggest that there is a possibility these earthquakes were induced by hydraulic fracturing," according to a OKGS report released in August. "However, the uncertainties in the data make it impossible to say with a high degree of certainty."

Occupy Wall Street's Livestream Operators Arrested by Adam Martin


New York City - Occupy Wall Street is in the middle of one of its day-long marches in New York Tuesday, protesting the National Defense Authorization Act, but for those following along on the Global Revolution livestream, the real action is happening in the broadcast studio itself. That's because police have apparently just raided the Brooklyn studio of Globalrevolution.tv and taken some of the project's key volunteers into custody.
  The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others.

In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui.

If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left.

But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission.

Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick, Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective:

There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved.

In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer." By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn.

New England Journal: 200 Years of Medical History By Marilyn Marchione

Unhappy with today's health care? Think of what it was like to be sick 200 years ago.

No stethoscopes, antibiotics, X-rays or vaccines. Bloodletting was a common treatment. If you had a heart attack or a stroke, doctors put you in bed and hoped for the best. If you needed surgery, you got a few shots of whiskey and a bullet to bite.

Into this medical dark age, two Boston doctors brought a beacon of light. They started what is now the New England Journal of Medicine with the idea that science should guide care — not whoever argued loudest or had the most persuasive theory.

The first 100 copies in January 1812 were delivered by horseback. Today, 2 million people read the journal online every month. It is the oldest continuously publishing medical journal in the world, and it has touched lives in more ways than you may know. Some examples:


—Stroke victims now get clot-busting medicine, not dark rooms to ride out their brain trauma, because a 1995 study in the journal proved its benefit.
—Heart attack patients have arteries unclogged without surgery, then go home on medicines that studies in the journal showed could prevent future attacks.
—Women with early stage breast cancer can have just the lump removed followed by radiation instead of losing the whole breast, thanks to a 1985 study that found the lesser surgery just as good.
—Bone marrow and organ transplants — radical ideas when first tried half a century ago — are now routine. Even face transplants are becoming more common: three were described in last week's issue.
—Rehydration is now recognized as the main treatment for many diarrheal diseases. A journal article warned against bloodletting in 1832 as cholera ravaged New York City.
—People no longer suffer surgery without anesthesia, a field that grew from Henry Jacob Bigelow's 1846 report on the first successful use of inhaled ether.
—Medicine is more ethical, and study participants have more protections, because of a 1966 report in the journal about researchers failing to get informed consent. Another top journal had rejected the article as too controversial.


The New England Journal started decades before the American Medical Association was founded in 1847 and is widely credited with promoting evidence-based care.

"It has been very good for society," said Pat Thibodeau, head librarian and associate dean for the Medical Center Library at Duke University. "When I go in, I'm hoping my doctor has read the New England Journal of Medicine or something similar and is following that information."
"It's the cream of the crop," said Dr. Barron Lerner, a Columbia University physician and medical historian.

"They get the best research submitted to them, and they do an extremely good job of peer reviewing" to make sure it is solid, he said.
That's what Boston surgeon John Collins Warren and James Jackson, who helped found Massachusetts General Hospital, hoped for the journal, which is now published weekly. It got its current name in 1928, seven years after it was bought by the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Warren's father, John Warren, surgeon to George Washington's troops, wrote the first article, on chest pain. Doctors had been debating whether it was caused by plaque — "the cement that builds up in arteries" — or blood clots, said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, the journal's editor-in-chief since 2000. Both proved correct — the "cement" fractures and allows a clot to form that blocks an artery, he said.
Heart care has been a journal specialty, and two prominent doctors — Elizabeth Nabel and Eugene Braunwald of Brigham and Women's Hospital — trace its evolution in this week's issue. Nabel is former director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and now is president of the Boston hospital.

They describe the first human cardiac catheterization — now a common diagnostic procedure — that Werner Forssman performed on himself in 1929. Under local anesthesia, he put a catheter into his arm and maneuvered it into his own heart.

For a heart attack, "it used to be that all we did was put people to bed for five weeks," but studies in the journal showed "that that was the worst thing you could do," said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, its top editor from 1991 to 1999.

The journal also helped prove "germ theory" and the nature of infectious diseases.

"People didn't realize you could infect people when you were using your dirty gloves or not using gloves. People didn't realize tuberculosis was communicable. They thought it emanated from clouds they called miasma, clouds of dirty smoke in cities," said Lerner, the Columbia historian.

Not all was grand in the journal's history, though, as Allan Brandt, a Harvard University medical historian writes in this week's issue.
When Harvard Medical School debated admitting female students in 1878, the journal expressed concern about men and women mingling during surgeries normally witnessed only by one sex. The school didn't admit women until 1945, when World War II caused a shortage of men.

The journal also agreed with mandatory sterilization of "mental defectives" in the early 20th century. "Most alarming," Brandt writes, was its declaration in 1934 that "Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among its unfit." The journal later condemned Nazi medicine.

In recent years, it has tracked health policy, from the Clinton health care plan and the advent of managed care to current debates about Medicare.

There were oddball reports along the way, like the 2007 account of a cat named Oscar that had a knack for predicting when patients at a Providence, R.I., nursing home were close to death by curling up to them in their final hours.

The journal has printed few studies on alternative medicine because so little good research has been done on it, Drazen said. Unlike some other journals that like controversial research, the New England Journal tries to avoid it.

"People think the cutting edge is sharp. The cutting edge is very dull. It's very foggy and you don't know what the right answer is," so editors try to pick studies that are definitive enough to affect care, Drazen said.

That's why it publishes very few observational studies, the kind that in the 1990s led to pronouncements like "margarine is better than butter" only to be reversed by the next such study.

"Some of those are papers that we've seen and turned back," Drazen said. "I'm looking for a higher evidence standard."

U.S. Twin Births Have Doubled in Three Decades: Study




By David Beasley

Atlanta - The number of twins born in the United States has doubled in the last three decades largely as a result of fertility treatments, with one in 30 infants born in 2009 a twin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.

"The increases are quite widespread, affecting all age groups and all parts of the country," said Joyce Martin, a CDC epidemiologist and coauthor of the new study.

More than 137,000 twins were born in the United States in 2009, accounting for one in every 30 babies. That compares to 68,339 twins born in 1980 when just one in 53 infants born was a twin, the CDC said.

A third of the increase in the twin birth rate can be attributed to women waiting longer to have children, the CDC said. From 2000 to 2009, more than 35 percent of all births were to mothers ages 30 and over, up from 20 percent in 1980.

The number of twins per 1,000 births rose in all 50 states and doubled in Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Treatment for infertility such as in-vitro fertilization accounts for much of the remainder of the increase in twins, the CDC said.

"We seem to be making improvements, refinements to fertility-enhancing therapies, so that could then result in a lowering of the increase of the pace in twin and other multiple births," Martin told Reuters.
Twin births are riskier than single births, she said.

"Infants born in twin deliveries are at greater risk of poor outcome," she said. "They are born smaller, they are born earlier. They are more likely not to survive the first year. Most twins do fine, but they are at higher risk."

Lost Girl Pops Up in Colombia Compliments of ICE



Dallas – Somehow an African-American girl who spoke no Spanish at all was deported to Colombia by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, also known as ICE.

Jakadrien Turner, who was missing since April of 2010, was sent to the country after she gave Houston authorities a false name of an acual illegal immigrant who had warrants for her arrest.

According to News 8, ICE took Jakadrien's fingerprints but didn't confirm her idetity for some reason before deporting her to Colombia. Upon arrival the country gave her a work card and released her.

Her grandmother Lorene found out her location thanks to her Facebook messages.

"She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was," the elder Turner said.

Jakadrien ran away from home when she felt under too much stress brought on by the death of her other grandmother and her parents' divorce. After making her way to Houston, she was arrested for theft and gave the fake name. Along with the social media site and Dallas police, Lorene foun her grandaughter.

However all is not settled for the Turner family. Along with being pregnant, the Colombian government is refusing to return the girl to her family.

ICE has released a statement:

ICE takes these allegations very seriously. At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.

ICE claims it is aware of cases when people claim to be someone else in order to avoid being deported.

Despite it all however Lorene is confident her grandaughter's case will be resolved saying “I feel like she will come home. I just need help. And I need prayer. ”

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Washington Governor Pushes for Same-Sex Marriage





Olympia, Washington – Governor Chris Gregoire let her support for gay marriage be known today and hopefully will put the state on the path to becoming the seventh state in the country to grant full same-sex rights.

In a press conference she held Wednesday afternoon, she said "It is time in Washington state for marriage equality. It is time, it's the right thing to do."

Although the state's Democrats hold most of the power in both of the state's chambers, the certainty of it passing is still shaky, as several on the more conservative side if the party are on the Republicans' side.

Not always a supporter for gay marriage, Gregoire brought the issue to the forefront when she signed a bill that grants domestic partnership equaling marriage as long as it didn't violate federal law. The bill passed, but narrowly.

"Our gay and lesbian families face the same hurdles as heterosexual families-making ends meet, choosing what school to send their kids to, finding someone to grow old with, standing in front of friends and family and making a lifetime commitment. For all couples, a state marriage license is very important. It gives them the right to enter into a marriage contract in which their legal interests, and those of their children if any, are protected by well-established civil law," she said. Gay marriage supporters, of course, applauded her move.

Zach Silk, campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage – a group with gay rights, civil liberties, labor activists, and religious leaders amongst their members – said the group is supporting the effort.

Just a month previous Gregoire joined with Rhode Island's governor Lincoln Chafee, an Independent, in asking the Drug Enforcement Administration to permit doctors to prescribe medical marijuana.

German President Refuses to Resign




While expressing his refusal to resign, German president Christian Wulff admitted Wednesday he made a “grave mistake” by trying to stop a newspaper from publishing a story that would embarrass him.

"The call to the chief editor of Bild was a grave mistake, for which I am sorry and for which I apologize,"

The voice-mail in question was sparked by Wulff letting a low-interest rate on his home loan. He told the editor-in-chief there would be “war” if the article was published.

Despite pressure to resign as president and the distraction it poses for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who nominated him for the position, he said “[I will not resign] because I had great support in the past weeks from many citizens, my friends and employees. I like fulfilling my duties [as president] and have taken the job for five years and want to show at the end of the five years that I was a good, successful president. This has been a learning process. I went from being a state premier to president very quickly, without time to adjust or prepare. It all went very fast."

Murkel has, for the moment at least, decided to continue backing Wulff.

Mountain Dew: Unhealthy for You and Rats




Madison - In an attempt to disprove a claim from a who found a rat in a can of soda, PepsiCo made an odd defense: It's impossible because according to one of the company's scientists the bottling process would dissolve the rat into a “jelly-like substance”.

Ronald Ball claims in 2009 he bought a can of soda from a vending machine only to find, while drinking it, the body of a dead rat. After he sent it to the company in a Mason jar, he alleges the company destroyed the body.

That's when the disgusting defense came to light. The news came to light last week when one of the lawyers for the company asked the judge overseeing the case for time to prepare a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.


Army Expert Forgot About C-4 in Bag, Court Papers By Jeremy Pelofsky




Midland, Texas - A U.S. Army Special Forces engineer arrested for trying to take explosives aboard a U.S. commercial airliner in Texas told authorities he had forgotten they were in his bag and did not notice them when he packed, according to court papers filed on Tuesday.

Trey Scott Atwater, who had been deployed to Afghanistan three times, was charged with trying to board an aircraft with explosives when he tried to fly out of Midland, Texas, on December 31 to Dallas, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court.

He told authorities that his Special Forces Team procedure was to carry at least two blocks of C-4 on any operation and when he packed his bags to leave from Afghanistan in April 2011 he did not recall the explosives being there.

Atwater grabbed the bag out of his garage for his Christmas-time trip from North Carolina to Texas as a carry-on and put his children's items in it, but he did not see the C-4 explosives inside, the affidavit said.
He said that he had not used any C-4 in training since his return to the United States.
When he left North Carolina on December 24, airport screening officers confiscated a smoke grenade from his bag, according to the affidavit.

Atwater is an Army Sergeant First Class in the elite Green Berets, assigned as an instructor at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, where he is a member of the Special Forces Engineers, according to the Army Special Operations Command.

Unidentified Corpse Photos Posted Online

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FDA Quietly Ends Attempt to Regulate Antibiotics in Animal Feed By Noel Brinkerhoff


The Food and Drug Administration has decided to withdraw rules limiting the use of human antibiotics in animal feed, much to the dismay of environmental and consumer groups.
 
The FDA used the holiday season to quietly make the policy change by publishing its announcement in the federal register.
 
Health advocates argue that the inclusion of antibiotics such as penicillin, cephalosporin and tetracyclines in agricultural animal feed contributes to the development of drug-resistant superbugs. The FDA itself has repeatedly agreed with this finding, having first acknowledged in 1977 that too much utilization of antibiotics in healthy livestock could prove unsafe.
 
In addition, if an animal doesn’t eat its required daily dose of food, it also doesn’t ingest its required daily dose of antibiotics, and whatever harmful bacteria are being fought are not wiped out.
 
Rather than regulate the medications, the FDA now expects the farming industry to self-regulate itself on the use of antibiotics.

Montana Reaffirms Ban on Corporate Election Spending; Sets up Clash with Citizens United Ruling By Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky


Montana’s century-old ban on corporate spending in elections has been restored by a 5-2 vote of the state Supreme Court, bucking the Citizens United ruling from two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court.
 
Since 1912, Montana had prohibited corporations from contributing to political candidates and committees under the Corrupt Practices Act. But following the Citizens United decision, which threw out federal limits on corporate and union campaign spending, a conservative group filed suit in Montana to contest the state’s ban on corporate donations.
 
A lower court sided with Western Tradition Partnership’s lawsuit and tossed the Corrupt Practices Act. The ruling prompted an appeal by state Attorney General Steve Bullock, who personally appeared before the state Supreme Court to successfully argue the merits of the state’s case and won restoration of the law.
 
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Mike McGrath presented a lively history of Montana’s fight against corporate interference with elections, in particular the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which, prior to the Corrupt Practices Act, “controlled 90% of the press in the state and a majority of the legislature.” It continued to maintain “controlling ownership of all but one of Montana’s major newspapers until 1959.”
 
Lawyers for Western Tradition Partnership and its co-plaintiffs, Champion Painting and the Montana Shooting Sports Association, are considering whether to appeal the decision to the nation’s highest court.
Montana’s century-old ban on corporate spending in elections has been restored by a 5-2 vote of the state Supreme Court, bucking the Citizens United ruling from two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court.