Children of Somali immigrants born in the US get a bonus gift – autism!

A mysterious connection: autism and Minneapolis’ Somali children

July 24, 2008

Elizabeth Gorman/Minneapolis Post

Short yellow school buses deliver children with special education needs to Minneapolis public schools every weekday morning. As students arrive at the elementary school where I work part time, I can’t help but notice something about the autistic kids as they climb down the buses’ steep steps: Almost all are Somali children.

Autism is a developmental disorder that doesn’t discriminate against race or class, and it is on the rise in the United States. But in Minneapolis, the mysterious disorder appears to be zeroing in on one of the city’s newest communities: First generation U.S.-born Somali-speaking children in Minneapolis schools are disproportionately identified as having autism.

“We’re definitely seeing it, and something is triggering it,” said Dr. Chris Bentley, director of Fraser, a nonprofit in Minneapolis that assists autistic children and their families.

Bentley is helping organize an unusual forum next month to discuss the issue. Members of the Somali community, autism advocates and officials at the state departments of health, education and human services have been invited to attend.

“This is something we’re looking at first in Minneapolis and then in St. Paul, but this is a much bigger issue than that,” she said, suggesting that studying what’s going on in the Somali community in Minneapolis may provide clues to understanding the causes of autism.

No conclusive research
It’s not clear what’s going on in other communities — such as St. Paul and Rochester, Minn. — with large numbers of Somali children because data there are less complete or unavailable.

And metro-area pediatricians couldn’t confirm that there is higher incidence of autism among Somali children in the Twin Cities, noting that there’s been little research on the question.

But, said Dr. Stacene Maroushek of Hennepin County Medical Center’s pediatric clinic, “the impression that there’s an increasing rate of autism in the Somali community is definitely there. And people are wondering what’s going on.”

Maroushek said that while there is a need for more medical research on immigrants and refugees, there is no conclusive medical data showing disproportionate numbers of Somali children with autism in Minneapolis.

The Minnesota Department of Health is scrambling to put together a “pre-pilot program” to assess autism in the general population. It has not developed a plan to assess numbers of immigrant children with autism, in part because of laws restricting access to school data.

In the meantime, there is concern in Minneapolis public schools.

The Minnesota Health Department estimates 1 percent of Minnesota’s children have autism. But the Minnesota Department of Education said that in the Minneapolis’ early childhood and kindergarten programs, more than 12 percent of the students with autism reported speaking Somali at home. According to Minneapolis school officials, more than 17 percent of the children in the district’s early childhood special education autism program are Somali speaking.

Almost 6 percent of the district’s total enrollment is made up of Somali-speaking students, and about 6 percent of the children in the district’s overall early childhood and kindergarten special education programs are Somali.

About a quarter of all autism children who attend autism classrooms for students functioning too low to be mainstreamed in regular schoolrooms are Somali. Special education specialists said that indicates that the degree of autism Somali children are developing is on the severe end of the autism spectrum.

“I’m not seeing Aspergers syndrome and the full spectrum of autism in Somali children. It is the more classic forms of autism in general; it is the more severe forms of autism that we’re seeing in our Somali babies that are born here,” said Anne Harrington, early childhood special education coordinator for the Minneapolis district and a specialist on the topic.

“If they’re having more children, many of the siblings also have autism. We have a number of [Somali] families who have two children on the autism spectrum and sometimes more. I’ve been working to get somebody to look at this and pay attention because it feels like this is too specific [to Somalis]. It’s got to be preventable,” Harrington said.

She said she knows of an apartment building with Somali residents in which almost every family has at least one autistic child.

A huge issue
Harrington said the Somali community is struggling to understand and recognize autism. She said that among Somali families there has been a lot of shame and confusion associated with having an autistic child. But that’s changing. “They’re beginning to be aware that this is a huge issue in their community, and they’re starting to come together and not isolate themselves,” she said.

According to a 2001 state health department study, there are an estimated 15,000 to 40,000 Somalis living in Minnesota, the biggest Somali population outside of East Africa. The state estimates that 67 percent of refugees who arrived in 2000, when Minnesota saw the biggest surge of Somali refugees, settled in Hennepin County. And nearly a third of all students who speak Somali at home in Minnesota attend Minneapolis public schools.

Harrington suggested that differences in the genetic make-up of Africans put them more at risk for developing autism than other immigrant groups, and noted that refugee women and children must undergo numerous immunizations.

(According to school data, the percentage of Hmong children and Latino children in Minneapolis public schools with autism is not as high as Somali children with autism.)

Harrington raised issues that are part of a long-standing debate over whether immunizations are linked to autism.

“They’re given more [vaccines] then we get, and sometimes they’re doubled up,” Harrington said. “Then their children are given immunizations. In Somalia, their generations have not received these immunizations, and then suddenly they’re getting just a wallop of them in the moms and then in the babies. That’s certainly a concern that’s been expressed to me by the Somali population.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends that refugee adults receive at least 10 vaccines.

But numerous studies have failed to prove any connection with symptoms of autism in children and vaccines.

“Research has not shown it’s related to shots or toxins — kids who haven’t received immunizations have the same baseline [for autism] as those who have,” said HCMC’s Maroushek.

Study in Sweden
There are some studies, however, that link autism and ancestry.

A Swedish newspaper published an article last week about that country’s Somali population and its high prevalence of autism. The story described a autism study that focused on Somalis. Doctors hypothesized that the high rates of autism in Somali children born in Sweden is due to the lower levels of sunlight and vitamin D immigrants get in Sweden compared with Somalia, a country near the equator. Dark skin that’s covered up and a diet that doesn’t include fatty fish limits absorption of vitamin D as well, according to the doctors.

And the journal Science published a study last week that linked shared ancestry to autism. (The study was also described in the Times of London.) A Harvard team funded by the National Institute of Mental Health studied Middle Eastern families in which cousins had married each other. In five of those cases, children showed genetic defects linked to autism. Many Muslim Somalis marry their first, second or third cousins, putting them a category suspected to be more at risk.

Struggle to find care
While experts are baffled by the causes of autism in U.S.-born Somali children, autism advocates say that the problem is compounded because Somali families struggle to find health services.

According to Huda Farah, a Somali advocate who collaborates with the health department and trains childcare providers who work with autistic Somali children, language barriers and a lack of understanding of the complex U.S. medical system are key reasons why many Somali parents don’t seek medical help for their autistic children.

Cultural barriers also impede: Unlike in the United States, children in Somalia aren’t taken to a doctor for developmental disorders.

Because Somali parents aren’t seeking medical help for their autistic children, it’s usually teachers who identify and track autism among those children, according to the Autism Society of America. Schools, however, do not make a formal autism diagnosis, but rather look to see if a child meets educational criteria to be placed in autism programs. Nor do Minneapolis schools refer children with autism to medical doctors.

EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson – Free trade is our only way forward

Free trade is our only way forward

June 7, 2008

Peter Mandelson/The Telegraph

These are not comfortable times for those committed to free trade.

In both Europe and the United States, there is increasing rhetoric about the need to protect people from change, some of it sincere but much of it populist and self-serving.

	Peter Mandelson is the EU commissioner for trade

In recent days there have been strong statements about the Doha round of World Trade Organisation negotiations. Those negotiations, which will come to a head at a ministerial meeting in the coming weeks, will decide whether the world enters a new era of freer trade, with fewer barriers between countries.

I believe that like Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy recognises that our economies are beset by global problems. I want President Sarkozy and other world leaders to accept that securing trade is an important part of the solution.

In Europe we have much to gain from a further opening of global trade. We are highly competitive, knowledge-based and innovative. We are the largest economy in the world. We are the biggest exporters. Our economies – and our living standards, which depend on our economic success – need open world markets.

But the protectionist rhetoric suggests that many do not see these benefits, and that they see global economic change in zero-sum terms: if Asia rises, we decline; what benefits are generated are captured by a small, rich clique; the openness boom that has sustained us for decades now threatens to eat us alive.

Few would disagree that globalisation has its dark side. I understand the concerns of those who feel under pressure as they face the impact of growing foreign competition.

But open markets and economic integration are still by far the best tool we have for increasing global economic welfare, including our own prosperity at home.

This is where leadership comes in. The right response from Europe’s leaders is a coherent strategy based on adaptation and reform. We must use the apparatus of the modern welfare state to give people the skills to adapt to change. We must invest in innovation, research and, above all, education.

And we cannot promote competitiveness in Europe if we shut out the stimulus of competition from abroad.

This may not be an easy pill to swallow, particularly in difficult economic times. We have means to protect ourselves from unfair trade – and we should do so. But keeping trade flowing is the condition for fighting the ills that plague us.

If a more open trade regime is agreed as a result of the Doha round, world economic activity will increase significantly. Whether that is measured in tens or hundreds of billions of euros a year will depend on the nature of the final outcome of those negotiations. But whatever the figure, it is hugely positive – and it is not growth that the world economy can afford to throw away.

Europe’s slice of this enlarged global pie would be significant: it might be as much as one quarter of the total. It would mean more demand for our products, more purchasing power for Europeans and more activity in our markets, stimulating our economies.

Again, this is not a zero-sum game. More trade means more European goods sold abroad. Freer trade also means lower-cost imports, including cheaper goods for consumers. Ask retailers what the best way is to keep prices low on the high street: not one will tell you that loading imports with high tariffs is the way to do it.

This is not just about economics. It’s also about politics. Global economic welfare is an essential component of global stability. Only stable, co-operating states can manage the growing squeeze on vital resources such as energy, food and water.

This is particularly important for vulnerable developing countries, as the food crisis has shown. They, like us, are grappling with a potentially lethal cocktail of rising commodity prices, the credit crunch and the oil price shock.

A failure by developed and developing countries to reach agreement on the future of global trade will knock confidence at a fragile time for the global economy. And it will weaken our ability to come together in other, more difficult negotiations, notably on climate change.

We in Europe have to accept that a fair and managed liberalisation of agriculture has a part to play in addressing the current food crisis.

Food protectionism will not feed the world’s hungry. No one is proposing to sacrifice European farm production on the altar of liberalism. The farming sector is important for Europe – including Britain – and we have clear comparative advantages. European agricultural production is increasingly producing what the market needs. We should not fear fair, increased competition.

But Europe cannot view the future of world trade solely through the lens of agriculture and agricultural subsidies. The prosperity of Europeans ultimately depends on the competitiveness and strength of our industrial goods and services.

The open, rules-based, non-discriminatory world trading system underpinned by the WTO is the essential platform on which our businesses trade, increasingly into very difficult markets. Those of us involved in negotiating on Europe’s behalf have been clear that there must be give and take from both sides: Europe must see genuine new market access coming from the developing economies of China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the like.

This is an important moment for Europe. My job as a European Commissioner is to represent the trade interests of all 27 member states – all of which know that they can get a better deal together than each could on its own.

Frank, robust debate is the lifeblood of Europe – as the British people know better than anyone. But public disagreements at critical moments in a global negotiation come with a cost to our ability to defend our interests.

The task for our leaders is to bring Europe together to help us shape globalisation in the interests of all.

Doha is not about individual personalities. It is a global undertaking to lock in the economic openness that has guaranteed our welfare over decades, lifting hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty. It is also a vital insurance policy against protectionism driving the global economic machine backwards in the future.

I will continue to work in the interests of all 27 member states to get a fair outcome in the negotiations. No one with Europe’s interests genuinely at heart would thank me for doing otherwise.

Utilizing special NYPD program, off-duty cops allowed to guard & patrol stores, private functions, and TV sets

Call em’ NYPD Green

Private firms paying uniformed cops for OT shifts

August 10, 2003

Joanne Wasserman/New York Daily News

Who needs Blackwater when you have this going on?! This article is posted on the Patrolmen’s “Benevolent” Association’s own website. Has anyone else seen anything like this anywhere? If you have, please comment or send what you’ve seen in.

More and more people are shelling out the green for the NYPD blue.

A Police Department program that allows officers to moonlight in uniform — providing security for stores, neighborhood associations and even private citizens – has skyrocketed in popularity.

Nearly half the NYPD’s 22,272 street cops have registered with the paid detail unit, which pays off-duty officers $30 an hour for shifts that can range from four to 12 hours.

Police officials say there was a spike in the number of companies that signed on after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, and persistent concerns about security have boosted the program’s popularity.

“Out of fear, they wanted to have some sort of extra protection,” said Capt. William Mahaney, commanding officer of the unit, which assigns the officers on a rotating basis to paying customers.

Critics of the program, including the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, say officers are forced to take these jobs because their city salaries are too low.

They also say it stratifies the city, allowing those who can afford extra protection to buy it.

Nonetheless, the program has continually expanded since it began in 1998 with 40 cops, who were hired by the National Basketball Association to guard visiting players at hotels.

Steady work

This year, as many as 150 cops work each day for 200 or more clients. Forty of those clients are considered steady employers, including Rockefeller Center, the “Today” show, Daffy’s clothing stores, the World Financial Center, the Greenwich Village Alliance and Rochdale Village in Queens.

Occasional clients include 10 synagogues, Yankee Stadium and MTV.

Police officials said the service also has attracted some wealthy New Yorkers who want to hire New York’s Finest, including New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams, who has used cops for parties at her upper East Side apartment, and a man who hired cops to work at his son’s bar mitzvah.

“Quite frankly, I don’t have any problem” with the program, said Honi Klein, executive director of the Village Alliance Business Improvement District, which hired cops to patrol Eighth St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves., as well as St. Marks Place.

“The merchants wanted people in uniform,” Klein said. “When it comes to patrolling, they can become a little more intimately acquainted with merchants. [On-duty] officers have a much larger area to cover.”

At a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Manhattan last week, a young officer said there was only one reason she was working there: She needs the dough.

“I have a daughter in private school,” said the cop, who had just escorted a woman out of the store for loitering in the bathroom. “I have bills, and I don’t make enough money.”

She earns $34,000 a year as a second-year street cop. If she works one six-hour paid detail shift a week, it means an extra $180 for her family.

‘On duty all the time’

If cops see a crime being committed where they are working, they are officially off the business’ payroll as of that moment – and are expected to respond just as they would if they were off-duty, said Mahaney. “You’re on duty all the time,” he said.

“It’s a shame that New York City police officers have to work these second jobs in the first place,” said PBA President Patrick Lynch. “The program is filling a void, and the void is the city is not paying their police officers a professional salary.”

Lynch also said the companies were paying for security “that New York City should be doing.”

Robert McCrie, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said paying for extra security using city cops creates a double standard.

“The problem is, this resource is not being made available fairly to everybody,” he said. “It has created an inequity.”

Mahaney insisted the program is a win for everybody.

“The officers get a chance to earn extra income,” he said. “Stores and other organizations get additional security, and the public benefits by having a uniformed presence over and above what’s normally on duty.”

The program also has begun to show financial benefit to the city.

In 2002, the city took in $431,000 in administrative fees that participants are required to pay. This year, the city has received $350,000 and expects that amount to double by year’s end.

Thomas Reppetto, head of the Citizens Crime Commission, said the need for additional protection is “a fact of life in America today.”

“There is a tremendous demand for security, and I don’t think the Police Department could ever have the resources to cover all those requests,” he said.

The unit started in 1998 with 40 cops a day. Now as many as 150 moonlight daily and 11,000 cops participate in the unit.

Insurance companies, utilizing black box technology in cars, offering discounts to “good drivers”

Insurer offers discounts to drivers with motors

July 28, 2008

Tom Hester Jr./AP

A high-tech monitoring device makes it possible to reduce insurance premiums for drivers who avoid jackrabbit starts and slam-on-the-brakes stops, an insurance company says.

The catch? Bad drivers who take a chance on the program may wind up paying a surcharge instead.

Auto insurer Progressive Corp. has begun offering its drivers the chance to cut their costs based on how they actually drive, not only on their age, credit score and number of tickets or accidents on their record.

The monitoring device _ sort of like a black box for cars _ tells Progressive what time people drive, how many miles they’ve driven, how fast they accelerate and how often they hit the brakes. It does not track where people go.

Under Progressive’s program, customers can earn a first-term discount of up to 10 percent just for signing up. When they renew their policy, their rate could decrease by up to 60 percent based on their driving habits. But it could also increase by up to 9 percent.

Richard Hutchinson, a Progressive general manager, said the program is designed for drivers who are consistent and safe.

“We want people to know that the program is not right for everyone,” Hutchinson said.

“It’s for people who drive at low-risk times of day and who keep alert for others on the road,” he said. “They don’t make fast lane changes or follow too closely behind other drivers so they don’t have to overreact or slam on the brakes.”

Progressive began the program in Alabama in late June. It’s also been made available in Minnesota, Oregon and Michigan. A national rollout of the program will continue through 2009.

It starts in New Jersey on Aug. 8. The company will be the first to offer such a program in the Garden State, whose motorists have the highest auto insurance rates in the nation at an average of $1,184 per vehicle.

Other companies also recently began offering similar options.

GMAC Insurance and OnStar vehicle services last year started a new program that allows motorists to earn an extra discount based on the miles they drive.

“The consumer is really being given an opportunity to potentially reduce their auto insurance premium in exchange for giving their auto insurer access to information that currently isn’t available to them,” said Michael Barry, a vice president at the Insurance Information Institute.

The concept has been utilized elsewhere, too. After conducting a pilot scheme beginning in 2004, Norwich Union launched a pay-as-you-drive insurance program in 2006 in Great Britain.

Several insurers in recent years have offered monitoring of a particularly vulnerable population of drivers _ teenagers. Under American Family Insurance Co.’s program, for example, a camera records audio and video images of the road and the teen driver when motion sensors detect swerving, hard braking, sudden acceleration or a collision.

There’s an extra benefit to monitored driving programs _ they help cut traffic congestion and pollution, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

But Charles Samuelson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, told The Star Ledger of Newark for Monday’s editions that the group has worries about privacy.

“We see this as kind of a creeping abduction of people’s data,” he said. “Basically, once they collect that data, it belongs to the insurance company. That’s a big problem.”

Progressive spokeswoman Tara Chiarell disagreed, saying the customer owns the data and Progressive doesn’t sell it or share it. The company uses it only for claims purposes. She also said Progressive has never been subpoenaed by a court to submit pay-as-you-drive data.

Customers can access their data on a secure, password-protected Web site, which allows them to get an up-to-date view of their driving habits and how those habits are affecting their rate, she said.

AAA Mid-Atlantic spokesman David Weinstein said if a link between electronic monitoring and accident probability becomes clear, they would like to see all drivers’ insurance premiums based on that information, “not just select drivers who grant their permission.”

Black boxes now in most cars that store driving information

Car Crash Recorders

‘Black Boxes are moving from airlines to autos.

September 2, 2002

Benny Evangelista/San Francisco Chronicle

Most people know that electronic flight data recorders — also known as “black boxes” — are a critical source of information to aircraft crash investigators.

Yet most motorists don’t realize that if they’re driving a newer model car, especially from General Motors or Ford, chances are good that their vehicle also has a device that can record accident data.

Now, traffic safety experts and makers of these types of devices are pushing for more widespread use of this technology, which they say can lead to safer cars, better drivers, lower insurance rates and faster accident investigations.

Information downloaded from the data recorder of a 2000 Chevrolet Camaro is playing an important role in the case of a Livermore woman charged with vehicular manslaughter in connection with a crash in February.

And next month, a Southern California firm will go a step further by selling a black box to parents who want to monitor the driving habits of their teenage sons or daughters.

Although privacy and legal experts warn there’s a danger that data from these black boxes could be misused, the devices appear on track to become a standard item in cars within a few years.

“That’s small solace to the ‘Big Brother’ conspiracy theorists, but if it saves some people’s lives, I think there are ways to do it so that the rights of the owners of the vehicles are protected,” said Philip Haseltine, president of the Automobile Coalition for Traffic Safety Inc., an Arlington, Va., group whose members include the biggest automakers in the United States, Japan and Germany.

The National Transportation Safety Board has advocated use of electronic data recorders in motor vehicles since 1997. Numerous studies, including a report released last August by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, have since noted the potential benefits of car black boxes. Integrating data recorders with wireless technology such as global positioning systems or cellular telephones could help speed emergency help to victims of a serious accident.

“Event Data Recorders (EDRs) offer great potential for improving vehicle and highway safety,” the report said.

“A measurement is worth a thousand opinions,” said Dr. Ricardo Martinez, former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE

Martinez, an emergency room physician, said he wants black boxes mandated for all vehicles and says gathering proper data from crashes, which killed 42, 116 people in 2001, is as important a public health issue as medical research.

“You can’t attack any problem until you understand the cause,” said Martinez, who now heads an Atlanta firm involved in an effort with the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop a data recorder and accident reporting device called the MacBox.

Martinez said that while he was at the safety administration during the Clinton administration, he was astounded by the lack of data gathered from real crashes.

Air bags, he said, were originally designed based on controlled laboratory crashes, not real-world crashes.

“They’re not for protecting (crash) dummies — they’re for protecting people,” he said.

The agency experimented with black boxes in cars as early as 1974, and since the early 1990s, automakers have quietly installed EDR devices in cars along with the air bags.

General Motors began installing EDRs in some 1990 models to glean information about how air bags were being deployed.

By 1994, GM’s Sensing and Diagnostic Module began measuring the severity of crashes that triggered an air bag. And in 1999, GM designed the module to save data for about five seconds before a crash. The data includes the car’s speed, engine revolution rate, throttle opening and application of the brakes.

HELPING BOTH SIDES

Haseltine noted that the sensors helped GM win a lawsuit filed by the family of Jerome Brown, the NFL star killed in a 1992 accident. The family contended the air bag in his Chevrolet Corvette had deployed early.

But sensors also helped owners of Pontiac Sunfires and Chevrolet Cavaliers who complained that the air bags were deploying at a low speed, Haseltine said.

Sensor model data revealed a programming problem, and the models were recalled.

Ford, meanwhile, began installing a Restraining Control Module in 1997 to control air bags and seat belts. It has since upgraded the module to record vehicle information five seconds before a crash, including front and side acceleration, driver and passenger air bag deployment and whether seat belts were buckled.

“More and more, we’re going to see manufacturers who have been thus far hesitant to follow GM’s lead,” Haseltine said.

All new GM cars and almost all Fords have data recorders, said Don Gilman, a business manager for Vetronix Corp. of Santa Barbara. His firm has struck deals with both GM and Ford to make hardware and software that allows third parties, such as accident reconstruction firms and law enforcement officers, to download the black-box data.

Gilman said most other automakers have quietly installed some level of data recording in their cars but do not allow third parties to download the information.

Vetronix has sold about 1,000 of its black-box downloading systems to customers who include the California Highway Patrol.

“It’s an unbiased witness,” Gilman said. “It will tell you information, and if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Other private companies, like RoadSafety International Inc. of Camarillo (Ventura County) and Independent Witness Inc. of Salt Lake City, are marketing black-box data recorders. DriveCam Inc. of San Diego markets a camera that captures the video and audio from inside a car, along with braking, accelerations and cornering before a crash.

FLEET OPERATORS

Operators of fleets have been the main market for black boxes. Mike Lyons, presidemt of Independent Witness, said his firm’s crash data recorders are in nearly all cabs in the Las Vegas area. And after the death of star Dale Earnhardt, NASCAR ordered the videotape-size boxes installed in every race car to compile data from crashes during the 2002 season.

The company is also trying to persuade insurance companies that the devices can lower costs and rates, possibly using them to monitor high-risk drivers. Lyons said, “The vision of our company has always been to affect insurance rates.”

RoadSafety President Larry Selditz said his company has installed about 10, 000 black-box systems in 10 years, mainly in “high-risk” fleets such as ambulances. The mere existence of a box monitored by a fleet manager is often enough to change unsafe driving habits, such as the surprising 25 percent of paramedics who were not buckling up, he said.

“Our focus changed as we started to do emergency response (vehicles),” he said. “We saw a real need to change driving behavior.”

Next month, RoadSafety plans to start selling a scaled-down, $280 version of its commercial box to parents worried about setting their teenagers loose behind the wheel.

The box, which plugs into the computerized diagnostic system present in cars sold since 1996, sets off an alarm for speeding, burning rubber, braking hard or unbuckled seat belts. The box also stores seven days’ worth of data on a memory card that parents can plug into a home computer.

“Our system is like being able to sit next to your teenager when they drive, ” Selditz said.

However, he agreed lines must drawn to preserve privacy. “My concern is, who is going to get the data and how’s it going to be used?” he said. “None of us wants Big Brother watching. I don’t want an invasion of my privacy. I never want to see this mandated.”

The international Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association has launched a project to create a universal standard defining the data that a motor vehicle’s black box should record, including date, time, location, velocity, direction, number of occupants and whether seat belts were buckled.

Most proponents of black boxes agree laws should be written to make the data stored in the devices the legal property of a vehicle’s owner, and mandating a court order and other legal checks and balances when the information is sought by law enforcement.

PANDORA’S BOX

However, the spread of black boxes could unlock a Pandora’s box of privacy and legal issues if safeguards aren’t addressed now, said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Sobel is especially concerned about future black boxes that can report a person’s location.

“Once you’ve created some kind of a database, it’s difficult to anticipate the potential future uses of that information or anticipate who could be interested,” he said. “It could be an employer or a spouse, or any number of people who might want some information about where a person was at a particular time.”

Black-box proponents say the devices provide objective information about a crash that can help speed resolution of insurance disputes or court suits.

But Livermore attorney Timothy Rien said the data he has seen so far in one case raise questions about their reliability.

Rien is defending Nicole LaFrenier, a Livermore woman accused of causing a Feb. 24 crash in which three young men died when her Camaro slammed into a tree. A preliminary hearing is scheduled later this month.

Rien, who had never used data from a car black box, obtained a court order and had an accident reconstruction firm download information from the car’s Sensing and Diagnostic Module. Although police investigators determined LaFrenier was the only one in the car wearing a seat belt, the black box indicated she was not, Rien said.

“There are two or three things we know that are wrong that are contradicted by police,” Rien said. He said the data recorders “are not infallible.”

DOWN TO EARTH

Technology commonly thought to be limited to airliners is used to monitor automobiles. Two products are:

THE WITNESS BLACK BOX: From Independent Witness Inc. of Salt Lake City, Utah, the battery-powered device has sensors that monitor the motion of a vehicle. In the event of a crash, the device records the time, date, direction and severity of impact. The firm also designed a box to record the seismic impact on buildings during an earthquake. .

ROAD SAFETY TEEN DRIVER SYSTEM: From Road Safety International Inc. of Camarillo, the device is marketed to parents of teenage drivers. The box plugs into a car’s computer diagnostic system to monitor factors like speed, brakes, engine RPMs, and G-force. An alarm sounds for speeding, hard turns or stops, or an unbuckled seat belt. A “spotter switch” also reminds the driver to look behind the vehicle and at the rearview mirrors before backing up. Flash memory stores seven days’ worth of data.

The Abbreviated

by Stefan Fobes

Seen as a victory by American anti-vaccine advocates and as an historic admission by the US government that vaccines cause autism, the Department of Health & Human Services recently conceded in a lawsuit that five vaccines simultaneously given to a Georgia girl, Hannah Poling when she was 19 months old, “aggravated a rare underlying metabolic condition that resulted in a brain disorder with features of autism spectrum disorder”. The sick crap about these vaccine cases is that you cannot sue the manufacturers directly. They are held in a special vaccine “court” and the best outcome possible even in there is to get some money from a federal vaccine fund. Even if a person believes the government is good and loving, and of course, there are people who do lie to milk some payments for themselves, but this unreasonable scorched earth policy is the smoking gun proof in this pudding of the Siamese twin style relationship between the government and the drug companies.

The government and medical associations insist that vaccines are 100% safe, and that there’s zero proof of any link between them and autism, despite all of the evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Safe? Hell, maybe the government’s right and what happened to little Hannah Poling is just an isolated case. Maybe not, though. Judicial Watch found, through a Freedom of Information Act request, that there were over 8,000 adverse reaction reports related to Merck’s HPV Gardasil vaccine in the two years since it has been approved for girls. These include the experiences of: Jamie Venice, who passed out and had a seizure after her shot, and three others who got paralyzed after theirs, and fifteen deaths to top it all off. The FDA, in an email to CBS, said none of these events are surprising to them, nor are the faintings that are “a common event” with teens and young adults after vaccinations. I bet if you asked the FDA about the Russian spy guy who had all the radioactive poison in his body before he died, they’d have said he was Olympic ready!

In America the debate is swirling and swarming. What’s causing the blaze of autism rate increases? It’s so mysterious. In 1990 the national rate of autism was 1 in 166 children. Now it’s 1 in 150. Yes, you guessed right, I’m going to bring up mercury. Jim Donnelly, father of a boy who developed autism after taking his shots (pun intended) says that when he got tested, 20 times the EPA safety limit of mercury was found in his body. Actually, no amount of mercury is safe. Some children’s bodies dump most of it out, but others don’t and these end up as the many sad statistics. This is why, when Dr. Mady Hornig of Columbia University did his own mercury-autism link experiment, he found this:

Hornig injected a strain of mice with genetic tissues similar to those found in children with mercury-laden vaccines equivalent to what kids got in the 1990’s. The mice developed profound brain problems.

So what types of behavior did Hornig see in the mice, and how does that compare with what we call autism? Dr. Hornig answers, “All sorts of strange behaviors that were repetitive in nature, where animals would just keep repeating the same behavior in a very stereotyped fashion.”

It wasn’t just repetition — the mice withdrew from their surroundings like autistic children. They resisted change and developed brain abnormalities affecting emotion and thinking, also like autistic children.

The National Autism Association is thinking along similar lines, questioning the validity of one of the studies saying that mercury containing ingredient thimerosal has no link to autism that the AMA and FDA no doubt love to throw in the faces of those disputing the official story about vaccines. PR Newswire reports:

“This study presents a greatly over-simplified explanation of a very complex
problem,” according to NAA board chair Claire Bothwell. “Rising numbers do
not confirm that thimerosal never had a role. We now know that many autistic
children suffer from heavy metal toxicity, but body burden testing for mercury
and other toxins has never occurred, despite numerous requests to the CDC and
NIH from parents.”

They raise some very good questions.

– Why do so many children regress into autism after receiving vaccines,
subsequently have symptoms of heavy metal toxicity, then get better when
mercury is removed through chelation?

– How can mercury and other toxic metals be removed from the bodies of our
children more safely and efficiently?

– What biological abnormalities exist that cause some individuals to be
unable to detoxify heavy metals?

They pretty much answered their first one themselves. Thimerosal, the preservative in vaccines, is 50% mercury by weight. The FDA (right above the reference part) tells you this on its own website. It is just one of many newts in a nasty little witch’s brew of ingredients. The Philadelphia Bulletin writer just talks about this like it’s so everyday. “Vaccines for shingles and the chicken pox also make use of aborted fetal cells. Although the vaccines themselves do not contain cells or tissues, they are grown on cells. For example, Hepatitis B is grown on fungal yeast cells. And the polio vaccine, in addition to being grown on aborted-fetal cells, is grown on monkey kidney cells.”

Am I the only one dropping f bombs like it’s World War 2 or what?

Other ingredients, as listed on cdc.gov are aluminum, another heavy metal linked to breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, MSG, the excitotoxin which literally gets braincells so hyper that they die, and formaldehyde, which blocks RNA from fully forming and is used to preserve corpses because it kills most fungi and bacteria.

Mercury itself is a highly potent neurotoxin. In the sardine can I call home, New York, It is illegal to dispose of rechargable batteries. Why? The “City” says: “While rechargeable batteries reduce waste and can be more economical than regular household batteries, they may contain mercury, cadmium, lead and other heavy metals.”

These things are like the size of my pinky. What’s so wrong about them? It seems they are officially classified as a level 59 biohazard. Just kidding. But the Illinois EPA is not. What they say about the health problems associated with mercury horrifies me. “This depends on how much has entered your body, how it entered your body, and how long you have been exposed. Exposure to even small amounts of mercury over a long period may cause negative health effects including damage to the brain, kidney, lungs and a developing fetus. Brief contact with high levels of mercury can cause immediate health effects including loss of appetite, fatigue, insomnia and changes in behavior or personality.” Amazing info. It gets even worse. This is their protocol for handling mercury spills.

All mercury spills, regardless of quantity, should be treated seriously. If you have a broken mercury containing device or an elemental mercury spill in your home, contact the Illinois Department of Public Health at 888/522-1282 immediately for cleanup procedures.

Do

• Leave the area if you are not involved in the cleanup.
• Open windows and doors to ventilate the area.
• Collect very small amounts of mercury with adhesive tape or an eyedropper. Store it in a sealed plastic container for transport to a household hazardous waste collection.

Do Not

• Use a vacuum cleaner to clean up mercury. A vacuum cleaner will spread mercury vapors and tiny droplets and increase the area of contamination.

Should have a read about when you need to dispose of mercury containing products. In the government’s eyes, it is like you have little arks of the covenant around. And this is what we are told to believe is safe??? Hell no! The reason Alex Donnelly’s tests came back with 20 times the EPA safe limit for mercury in him is because the vaccines have that much in them. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports the insanity that not only does the EPA classify liquids with 200 parts per million of mercury in it as hazardous waste, but also that flu shots have 50,000 parts per million of mercury. You do the math. They also report that 80% of flu shots have mercury in them. No wonder there was the ad blitz back in ‘06 pushing Americans to take the flu shot. Here’s what the governor of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana had to say on 60 Minutes back in 2005 about FEMA’s conduct right after Hurricane Katrina hit. And the video itself.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA–we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, “Come get the fuel right away.” When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. “FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.” Yesterday–yesterday–FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, “No one is getting near these lines.” Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America–American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

Much praise to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for writing this article. This is how so many babies were deliberately and coldly turned into distorted versions of their former selves.

In 2000, the CDC met with pharmaceutical companies and the FDA in secret to review its findings linking Thimerosal with the dramatic rise in neurological illnesses. According to transcripts, participants were alarmed about the undeniable links between the Thimerosal and widespread brain damage in children. Dr. Bill Weil told the group, ”You can play with [the results] all you want. They are statistically significant.” Dr. Richard Johnston admitted he feared his grandchild getting a Thimerosal-containing vaccine. But the group was most concerned with keeping the findings secret. ”Consider this embargoed information,” said Dr. Roger Bernier, a senior director at the National Immunization Program, at the meeting’s close. The CDC now says it has ”lost” the data that supported the crucial study and has persistently defied congressional requests and federal law requiring it to open up the federal Vaccine Safety Database to scientists and the public.

Wouldn’t give it to his own grandkid, yet let so many die like that. And there are going to be people out there reading this that will believe that if something isn’t safe, the government would tell them. Running over to people who have more respect for bathroom tissue than them. Autism isn’t the only serious epidemic out there. Oh, and those docs and medical organizations saying vaccines don’t cause autism? They’re on the take. Millions of dollars from Merck, Sanofi Aventis, and Wyeth to the Academy of Pediatrics for grants, conferences, and medical education classes. And helped build their headquarters. Total conflict of interest. Dr. Paul Offitt, Mr. babies can take 10,000 vaccines at once and a big shiller for the industry, holds a patent on the Rotateq vaccine he developed with Merck. Corruption all over the place. One vaccine advocacy group admitted taking payments from Merck.

I see in many articles that the mercury in vaccines was supposed to have been removed. If that is the case, then why would Bush move to veto a bill that would ban it? He said it would “cost too much”. And why is that? Because it’s in dozens of vaccines. This is a list of dozens of vaccines with mercury in them, compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Fine reporting done by Steve Wilson of WXYZ Detroit.

A loving grandmother and president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Renee Jenkins is among those in medicine, in government, in the media, pretty much telling parents this problem’s been solved…there is no mercury in the routine schedule of childhood vaccines anymore, except maybe just “trace” amounts. She’s talking about a mercury-based vaccine preservative called Thimerosal…and the truth is there’s still as much as ever in 11 vaccines including most flu vaccines injected into pregnant women and kids, and some of them younger than 9 get two doses in a season. And also high levels of mercury from Thimerosal in tetanus shots and the boosters routinely injected into 11-year-olds…and also in some meningitis and diphtheria-tetanus formulas, too.

Heidi Scheer/Mother of Autistic Child: …and I know for a fact people that have gone to their physician and have been told there was no Thimerosal in their vaccine, then the parents asked to see the package insert and they find it there.

Yes, always ask to see the insert, even if you want to load up your child with shots. Dan Olmsted, an investigative reporter for UPI, put out a gigantic 113 article series on the vaccine-mercury-autism links called The Age of Autism. In his travels, he found that in the Amish area of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where most do not vaccinate or take drugs for religious reasons, there were only six children who had autism in the whole county out of the population of 22,000. Of the six, three from Pennsylvania lived right under a plume from a mercury emitting coal-fired power plant. The others from out of state lived in areas with elevated environmental mercury. He also tells a similar story of a Chicago practice, all with patients who had never vaccinated. Incredible info.

All true, but intriguing nonetheless. I also found a family medical practice in Chicago called Homefirst that has thousands of never-vaccinated children as patients. According to its medical director, Mayer Eisenstein, he’s aware of only one case of autism and one case of asthma among those kids — not the 1 in 150 and 1 in 10 that are the national averages for those disorders — and he has the medical records to prove it.

And now for the biggest part of all this. Last year, In Prince George County, Maryland, 2,300 unvaccinated kids were barred from attending school for over a month and, if the parents would not vaccinate their children, they would have to pay a fine and go to jail. This strident little whore, who was obviously enjoying her little petty power trip, said, “We need those children in school, we need them immunized, we need them safe.” Safe? Firing you would be a great start. The local Fox affiliate was selling a lie about how parents need to comply with the law. And then right at the end said oh, there’s a waiver you can get. The State’s Attorney General, Glen Ivey played tough guy and said, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way was to all line up in Circuit Court and have their children be mass injected. No doctors or anything. Just treated like chickens at a factory farm. And the people showed up and took it.

This reminds me of how I see even regular bars are carding everyone and they just meekly pull out their IDs. Don’t even know any better. This has to stop quick, otherwise they’ll be meat for things even worse than Maryland. Called out on the Alex Jones radio show, he admitted there is no law state, local, or federal that says you have to take vaccines, there is a waiver form that you can ask for, and that one of the vaccines the school wanted the kids to take, Hepatitis B, was one he refused to let go in his kids’ bodies. Listen to that exchange here. Yes, there are mandates and school policies, and you will be intimidated, but by law, the principals have to have it in their desks for parents. If you ask and they say they don’t have it or don’t know what you are talking about they have to be told that they better cut the crap, give the waiver form or be sued. And they will cave like the cowards they are because only cowards try to systematically screw others over on a regular basis. I know this from highly annoying personal experience.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Especially in this era of ease of availability of information. This work is dedicated to the beautiful spirits that run and squeal and cry and make all those funny noises, who will be the ones who will grow up and really turn all this around and bring about the mega changes that will make this planet the paradise it should be. May you never become a statistic. May you never be abbreviated.

Iraqi ambassador, Petraeus, say Al-Qaeda moving to Pakistan & Afghanistan

Ambassador: al-Qaida leaving Iraq for Afghanistan

July 24, 2008

Pamela Hess/AP

To get a general idea of what might happen next, you might want to read my New Blood for Afghanstan article.

WASHINGTON — Al-Qaida’s foreign fighters who have for years bedeviled Iraq are increasingly going to Afghanistan to fight instead, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States said Wednesday.

“We have heard reports recently that many of the foreign fighters that were in Iraq have left, either back to their homeland or going to fight in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is now seeming to be more suitable for al-Qaida fighters,” said Ambassador Samir Sumaida’ie.

Al-Qaida had training camps and a headquarters in Afghanistan, under the protection of the then-ruling Taliban, until the U.S. invaded after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. With al-Qaida forced out of Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 quickly drew outside fighters there.

Sumaida’ie said al-Qaida is finding it now increasingly difficult to operate in Iraq, beginning with the rebellion of the largely Sunni tribes in Anbar Province in 2006 and 2007. Until then, al-Qaida had ruled by intimidation and violence, establishing physical control and setting up a shadow government in large swaths of Iraqi territory.

“There were large tracts that were run by al-Qaida, administered by al-Qaida — they had ministers, administrators, paid salaries and so on. This no longer exists, so they do not have any territory to control (where it) is safe for them to move in and around Iraq,” he said. “In whole areas they ceased to operate as effective terrorist networks.”

Sumaida’ie’s comments echoed those of the top U.S. military commander in Iraq. Gen. David Petraeus told The Associated Press last week that al-Qaida appears to be reassessing its chances of success in Iraq.

“They’re not going to abandon Iraq. They’re not going to write it off. None of that,” Petraeus said. “But what they certainly may do is start to provide some of those resources that would have come to Iraq to Pakistan, possibly Afghanistan.

“We do think they are considering what should be the main effort,” he said.

A U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence reporting said foreign fighters are generally not leaving Iraq for Afghanistan, but new recruits to al-Qaida are being sent to Afghanistan and Pakistan instead of Iraq. The numbers in all countries are small, however. The vast majority of al-Qaida in Iraq are native born, and extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan are overwhelmingly Pashtun fighters from the region.

Sumaida’ie’s remarks come as Democratic presumptive nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is conducting an overseas trip which included stops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama toured two war zones with Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.

Last week they issued a written statement saying that Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border area, where the Taliban is resurgent and Osama Bin Laden is believed to be hiding, should be the central front in the war against terrorism.

Monthly death tolls of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan surpassed U.S. military deaths in Iraq in May and June, even though there are far fewer coalition troops in Afghanistan.

Both Sumaida’ie and Petraeus warned, however, that security progress made in Iraq is not irreversible and al-Qaida could reassert itself there.

“If things break down in Iraq, they are capable of coming back,” Sumaida’ie said.

In landmark series of deals, China & Taiwan relax economic barriers

TIMELINE: Business, pleasure benefit in China-Taiwan thaw

July 4, 2008

Gillian Murdoch/Reuters

(Reuters) – Historic regular tourist flights between Taiwan and China began on Friday, in a show of conciliation between the long-time rivals whose fractious relations have been regarded as one of north Asia’s most dangerous flashpoints.

Ties between China and the self-ruled island over which it claims sovereignty have warmed since the landslide election victory of President Ma Ying-jeou, whom analysts say Beijing looks upon more favorably than his predecessor.

Here are some examples of how relations between the two have developed from the time Ma was elected.

– March 22, 2008: Ma elected. Pledges to boost local economy by improving trade with China, the world’s No. 4 economy, and loosening travel restrictions to attract more than 1 million Chinese visitors to the island a year.

– April 3: Taiwan regulators approve plan by Fubon Financial, one of the island’s largest financial services groups, to buy a stake in China’s Xiamen City Commercial Bank, a milestone move and the first such investment.

– April 12: Taiwan vice president Vincent Siew meets briefly with Chinese President Hu Jintao at annual Boao economic forum; both say they want closer economic ties.

– On same day Beijing approves Taiwan banks’ entry into China market, saying they can set up legal entities in markets such as Hong Kong and Macau, which can then open branches in China or buy into mainland lenders.

– June 12: Taiwan passes bill allowing its banks to exchange Chinese currency for Taiwan dollars Previous rules let only up to 20,000 yuan ($2,900) be exchanged per transaction on two groups of offshore Taiwan-held islands, Kinmen and Matsu, although Taiwan’s major cities saw black market trade.

– June 12/13: Beijing hosts first top-level talks in almost a decade. The two sides sign a deal to launch first regular weekend flights since 1949. Agreeing to set up representative offices to handle visa issues customarily handled in Hong Kong, they delay talks on direct cargo flights, a Taiwan priority item.

– June 16: Taiwan securities regulator announces plans to allow the island’s brokerages to invest up to 30 percent of their net assets in China, up from 10 percent previously.

– June 26: Taiwan says that in August it will relax the cap that stops listed Taiwan businesses from investing more than 40 percent of their net assets in China.

– June 30: Taiwan says China’s state news agency Xinhua and the People’s Daily newspaper, considered a mouthpiece of the Communist Party, can re-station reporters in Taiwan. The island kicked out those news organizations during a 2005 war of words.

– On same day Taiwan freezes, rather than raises, its $59 million foreign development aid budget, as Ma seeks to mend ties with China rather than wrest allies from Beijing via chequebook diplomacy. The budget is only enough to deepen ties with Taiwan’s 23 existing diplomatic allies.

– July 3: Taiwan says it will relax restrictions on mutual-fund investment in China-related stocks, allowing them to increase from 0.4 percent to 10 percent.

– July 4: First ‘weekend’ flights touch down in Taipei. They are the first regular flights, aside from a few charters on select holidays, since 1949, when defeated Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war.

Military Report: Secretly hire or recruit bloggers

Military Report: Secretly ‘Recruit or hire bloggers’

March 31, 2008

Noah Shachtman/Wired.com Danger Room

A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested “clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, there’s been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs — and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops’ time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, “Blogs and Military Information Strategy,” offers a third approach — co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. “Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise. “The comments are not ‘actionable’, merely thought provoking,” he tells Danger Room. “The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University.”

Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.”

The report introduces the military audience to the “blogging phenomenon,” and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces — specifically, the military’s public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units — might use the sites to their advantage.

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence… to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.

Denning, the report’s author, has promoted controversial opinions before. In the early 1990s, when she was chair of the Georgetown University’s computer science department, Denning emerged as the leading advocate for the so-called “Clipper Chip,” a cryptographic device for protecting communications — until the government wanted to listen in. The project was cancelled by 1996.

In her 2006 paper, Denning warns that blogs can and will be used by America’s enemies. These sites, she argues, can also be used to serve U.S. government interests.

There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information. (emphasis mine)

Soy Blues

by Stefan Fobes

Soy. Is it good or is it bad? It’s a question that’s been long twisting around in my head, and no doubt, in many many others’. My searching started with a joint study done in Indonesia by British and Indonesian university researchers where they found that people eating tofu twice a day had 20% less memory function compared to those who ate it much less. The problem is, tofu products there contain formaldehyde, (also in vaccines) so it was definitely flawed. I wouldn’t even mention this, but amazingly, these crack brains are stumped about whether or not it’s a factor when it prevents RNA from fully forming and is used to preserve corpses because it kills most bacteria and fungi. In some ways they are geniuses, but at times….aiyiyiyi.

Something more solid came up here in the form of an American Cancer Society story headlined Soy May Fuel Estrogen Positive Breast Cancers. Reading it though, there’s no may about anything. Published in the ACS’s own Cancer Research journal, here are Associate Professor of Nutrition at the University of Illinois William G. Helferich and his colleagues’ study info on the effects of the soy protein genistein:

Helferich and colleagues used female mice from whom ovaries had been removed so that their hormone levels would resemble those of women past menopause with very little or no estrogen circulating in the blood.

They injected human ER-positive breast cancer cells into the mice. After tumors were established, different groups of mice got low, medium, and high levels of genistein in their diets, while other mice got none.

Over a period of seven months, the tumors grew larger the more genistein was consumed. Tumors of mice getting medium amounts of genistein grew about four times larger than those getting little or none, and tumors of those getting the highest amounts of genistein grew about eight times larger than those getting the least.

I saw this National Geographic show about life in prison the other day. One of the guys locked up said prison is hell. If that’s hell, then being a lab mouse must be like being in satan’s bedroom or something.

Women going through menopause seem to be particularly vulnerable. My own mother died of breast cancer a few years back when she was 51, and pretty much all she would eat the year before that was tofu fried in olive oil. I can’t help but wonder if this played a role somehow. Another part of the article seems to support my thoughts on this.

But estrogen also can increase the risk of some cancers and can fuel the growth of breast tumors made up of cells with many receptors for estrogen (ER-positive breast cancer). So experts suggest every woman understand her own cancer risk factors and talk with her doctor about whether to use HRT.

Plant Estrogens Can Mimic Human Estrogens

It has been known for some time that some proteins in soy, such as genistein, chemically resemble human estrogen so much that they are called phytoestrogens (plant estrogens) and may have similar effects, both good and bad.

Adding more fuel to the fire is a collaborative study by an investigator out of Syracuse University and National Institute of Environmental Health [part of the National Institutes of Health] researchers. The NIEH researchers found in a previous study that the soy protein genistein caused the mice to have irregular menstrual cycles, and problems with ovulation and fertility when they reached maturity. Here’s their data for their second study.

Female mice were injected with three different doses of genistein during their first five days of life. The genistein given to the mice was comparable to what human infants might receive in a soy-based formula, which is approximately 6-9 mg/kg per day. The researchers examined the effects on days 2 through 6.

The researchers found effects at all levels. Mice treated with the high dose (Gen 50 mg/kg) were infertile and mice treated with lower doses were subfertile, meaning they had fewer pups in each litter, and fewer pregnancies. Mice receiving the highest level of genistein, 50 mg/kg per day, had a high percentage of egg cells that remain in clusters, unable to separate and therefore develop abnormally. The researchers explain that oocytes [immature egg cells] that remain in clusters are less likely to become fertilized based on previous research. The largest difference between the genistein treated and normal mice was found at six days of age where 57 percent of the egg cells in the non-treated ovaries were single or unclustered; and only 36 percent in the genistein treated group were single.

We think genistein inhibits the oocytes or egg cells from separating apart,” said Wendy Jefferson, Ph.D. of NIEHS and lead researcher on the paper. “Since there are many egg cells in the same follicle instead of just one, the resources from the surrounding cells are spread too thin and they can’t get the support they need to become a mature functioning egg cell.”

“You need at least one good healthy single oocyte that is ovulated and fertilized by a sperm to get a healthy baby. Genistein seems to have a way of making this task very difficult,” said Newbold.

Another study conducted by Dr. Irina Ermakova at the Russian Academy of Sciences on female rats, some fed genetically modified soy, some given non genetically modified soy powder, and some fed a regular diet found that 55% of the babies of the rats fed GM soy died within 3 weeks, versus 9% of the rats fed non genetically modified soy. Over a third of the rats fed GM soy were grossly underweight. This is horrendous, because as the article detailing this study admits, GM soy consumption is widespread in America.

I have an excellent Halloween costume idea.

Certainly, it doesn’t affect everyone like this, or hospitals would always be jam packed. Some people have more of a susceptibility to these symptoms than others, but as the results of these studies indicate, the health effects should not be ignored, and soy should definitely not be put up on the vegetarian golden pedestal.

Natural Health Magazine contributer Sally Eauclaire Osborne included some more soy stories in Does Soy Have a Dark Side? A Japanese study where the subjects ate 30 grams of pickled roasted soybeans a day for three months had enlarged thyroids and suppressed thyroid function. A month after the study ended their health went back to normal. A study by North Shore University Hospital-Cornell University Medical College in Manhasset, New York found that children suffering from thyroid autoimmune disorders [immune system attacking body cells] were consuming significantly more soy based formulas than other healthy kids not suffering from them, including their own siblings. Cliff Irvine, a New Zealand reproductive endocrinologist found that the reccommended level of soy intake there was several times the minimum needed to change reproductive hormones in women. It’s not limited to women, though. It seems that old legend about soy making boys less manly has some truth to it. At least for monkeys. The Scotland Sunday Herald reports:

Soon after birth, like all male primates, human boys undergo a dramatic surge in testosterone – during this period the body produces high quantities of the principal male sex hormone. The reason for the surge is unknown, though testosterone is thought to be responsible for stimulating bone and muscle growth and the development of sexual characteristics.

In humans this “neonatal testosterone surge” takes place between one and five months of age. Monkey species undergo the same surge, including marmosets. However in the Edinburgh study when marmosets were fed with soy milk formula, which contains natural plant oestrogen, the surge was suppressed.

After 18-20 days, average testosterone levels in soy-fed marmosets were 30% lower than those fed on cow’s milk, and after 35-45 days levels were 55% lower than the control group.

I never liked soy. I really tried to develop a taste too when my mother put it in front of me. Thank god it didn’t take! I’d probably be too damped down now to write a sentence, much less whole articles. Or worse, I might have ended up…………..