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December 2009

Israel harvested organs in '90s without permission

Sun, 12/20/2009 - 14:19 — admin

JERUSALEM – Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.
The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.
Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."
The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.
In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."
Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.
Hiss became director of the institute in 1988. He said in the interview that the practice of harvesting organs without permission began in the "early 1990s." However, he also said that military surgeons removed a thin layer of skin from bodies as early as 1987 to treat burn victims. Hiss said he believed that was done with family consent. The harvesting ended in 2000, he said.
Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report "anti-Semitic."
The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.
Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."
While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel's Health Ministry told Channel 2, "The guidelines at that time were not clear." It added, "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."

Gift Baskets

Sun, 12/20/2009 - 09:04 — admin

Archaeological sites in the Middle East show that weaving techniques were used to make mats and possibly also baskets, circa 8 000 BC. Baskets made with several interwoven techniques were common at 3 000 BC.

The carrying of a basket on the head, particularly by rural women, has long been practiced. Representations of this in Ancient Greek art are called Canephorae.

Gift Baskets

Obama hails 60th Senate vote for health care

Sun, 12/20/2009 - 06:47 — admin

WASHINGTON – Outnumbered Republicans are vowing to delay passage of historic health care legislation as long as possible after jubilant Democrats locked in Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson as the 60th and decisive vote.
Nelson's backing puts President Barack Obama's signature issue firmly on a path for Christmas Eve passage. Democrats will need to show 60 votes on two additional occasions, with the next — and most critical — test vote set for about 1 a.m. Monday.
"This bill is a legislative train wreck of historic proportions," the Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said at a Saturday news conference. He pointed to cuts to Medicare that CBO said totaled more than $470 billion over a decade, with reductions in planned payments to home health care agencies and hospices. He also said the bill includes "massive tax increases" at a time of double-digit unemployment.
Republicans also noted that CBO concluded that under the bill, "federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period, as would the federal budgetary commitment to health care."
To get Nelson's vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., agreed to a series of concessions on abortion and other issues demanded by Nelson, a Democrat, then informed Obama of the agreement as the president flew home from climate talks in Copenhagen.
Obama welcomed the breakthrough, saying, "After a nearly centurylong struggle, we are on the cusp of making health care reform a reality in the United States of America."
The Congressional Budget Office said the Senate bill would extend coverage to more than 30 million Americans who lack it. It also imposes new regulations to curb abuses of the insurance industry, and the president noted one last-minute addition would impose penalties on companies that "arbitrarily jack up prices" in advance of the legislation taking effect.
CBO analysts also said the legislation would cut federal deficits by $132 billion over 10 years and possibly much more in the subsequent decade.
At its core, the legislation would create a new insurance exchange where consumers could shop for affordable coverage that complied with new federal guidelines. Most Americans would be required to purchase insurance, with federal subsidies available to help defray the cost for lower and middle income individuals and families.
In a concession to Nelson and other moderates, the bill lacks a government-run insurance option of the type that House Democrats inserted into theirs. In a final defeat for liberals, a proposed Medicare expansion was also jettisoned in the past several days as Reid and the White House maneuvered for 60 votes.

EU gives Kraft more time on Cadbury bid

Wed, 12/09/2009 - 12:48 — admin

BRUSSELS (AFP) –
Europe's competition watchdog on Wednesday extended its probe into Kraft Foods Incorporated's hostile takeover bid for British confectionery group Cadbury after the US giant offered "remedies" to antitrust concerns.

European Commission competition authorities will not now come up with a judgment on Kraft's bid until January 6 next year, from the original December 14 deadline, a commission official said.

"The date goes back because they have offered remedies," said commission competition spokesman Jonathan Todd. "That automatically triggers an extension of 10 working days," longer in this case due to the holiday season.

"We have submitted remedies in a few affected markets," explained Kraft spokesman Michael Mitchell, without giving details.

"We don?t expect material divestments to be required in relation to the overall combined business.

"We are confident we will find a solution that is acceptable to all parties," he added.

Kraft, which has been repeatedly snubbed by Cadbury's management, on Friday appealed directly to shareholders with details of its offer, worth about 10.1 billion pounds (11.2 billion euros or 16.5 billion dollars) in cash and shares.

Shareholders now have until January 5 to accept the offer, which is worth three pounds in cash and 0.2589 new Kraft Foods shares per Cadbury share.

Kraft, which launched a formal takeover bid last month, is the world's second biggest food group after Nestle. Cadbury is meanwhile the second largest confectionery company behind Mars.

US chocolate maker Hershey and Italian peer Ferrero had said last month that they were mulling bids for Cadbury, which could whip up a bidding war with Kraft.

French rocker Hallyday hospitalized in LA

Wed, 12/09/2009 - 09:16 — admin

PARIS – France's biggest rock star, Johnny Hallyday, has been hospitalized in Los Angeles for an infection following back surgery.
A statement from his Paris press office says Hallyday, an entertainment icon for decades, is "under observation" for the infection linked to Nov. 26 surgery on a herniated disc.
The statement late Tuesday says he should be out in a few days but gives no other details.
Hallyday is on a multi-country tour called "Route 66," a reference to his age and homage to the American rock that has inspired his music.
Producer Jean-Claude Camus said on French radio that Hallyday's hospitalization could thwart his plans to spend the holidays at his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, where filmmaker Roman Polanski is under house arrest.

Obama using grab-bag approach to fight recession

Wed, 12/09/2009 - 07:50 — admin

WASHINGTON – Franklin Roosevelt, confronted with the worst economic crisis in the nation's history, wrote the book on government jobs programs. Since FDR, presidents have been less ambitious because the economic challenges they faced were less severe.
President Barack Obama, battling the worst downturn since FDR's time, has put together a grab-bag program that borrows a little from Roosevelt but much more closely resembles the approach taken by recent presidents of both parties, who have leaned heavily on tax cuts to spur job creation.
Obama's New Deal-lite approach represents a compromise between putting more resources into getting the country out of a recession and the limitations he faces with budget deficits that have already soared past the $1 trillion mark, raising concerns among the foreign investors who buy America's debt.
Given those soaring deficits, Obama is not trying to push jobs programs of the scale that FDR used to fight the 1930s Depression, when he created an alphabet-soup collection of government agencies to put people back to work, from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Works Progress Administration.
Instead, Obama is emphasizing further increases in infrastructure spending beyond what is already in the pipeline from the $787 billion economic stimulus bill.
Taking a page from past Republican and Democratic administrations, Obama also is proposing tax credits targeted to small businesses to help them hire new workers and give them a tax break for buying new equipment to expand and modernize their operations.
He also is proposing extending a number of programs already included in his February stimulus measure, including extra support to state and local governments to keep them from having to lay off workers.
"Obama is trying an eclectic approach to jump-starting employment growth and that is not surprising given that the labor market today is the worst it has been since the Great Depression," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.
Obama's efforts are sizable compared with the stimulus measures offered by recent administrations — also not surprising, given that the recession that began in December 2007 is the longest and deepest since the 1930s.
President George W. Bush offered immediate tax rebates when he was trying to get the country out of the brief and mild downturn that hit during his first year in office.
Like Obama, Ronald Reagan also faced unemployment above 10 percent during his first term, but his answer to the 1981-82 recession was to emphasize a major tax cut that reduced the top tax rates. Reagan's jobs program was a sizable military buildup that increased troop strength and bolstered employment among defense contractors.
Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford also battled serious recessions in the 1970s, but their government stimulus efforts had to take into account soaring inflation from a series of oil shocks that gave the country a new economic worry: stagflation, a toxic mix of inflation and economic stagnation.
Just as Obama sought to highlight his efforts to bolster the economy with a jobs summit last week, a number of presidents have held high-level economic gatherings at the White House to showcase their concerns about various economic maladies.
Not all of those sessions have ended well. The Ford administration was ridiculed for its WIN buttons, standing for "Whip Inflation Now," which proved as ineffective as Ford's other ideas for curbing inflation.
Obama's new proposals come with a price tag to be determined later. Obama said the government could afford the new efforts because the administration had just trimmed the ultimate cost of the unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program by $200 billion. But his effort to capture bank bailout funds for further economic stimulus is already running into stiff opposition from Republicans.
Obama is seeking to split the difference between his worries over how a weak economy will affect Democrats' chances in the 2010 elections and his concerns about soaring budget deficits. Republicans say all the TARP funds should go to reduce a budget deficit that soared to $1.42 trillion last year and is projected by the administration to remain above $1 trillion annually for the next two years.
Private economists said the program is likely to hit $200 billion or more after Democrats, who control Congress, get through massaging the plan. That would come on top of the $787 billion stimulus program passed in February.
Economists normally are skeptical of government jobs programs, arguing that by the time Congress manages to pass the program, the recession is usually over and the economy is generating jobs on its own. But as in the 1930s, the current downturn is viewed as severe enough to warrant government help.

In the Great Depression, unemployment hit 25 percent in 1933, the year that FDR took office. The unemployment rate this time around is expected to be nowhere near that level, but it could still surpass the post-World War II record of 10.8 percent set in 1982 before a sustained recovery takes hold next summer. The jobless rate is currently at 10 percent.

"Roosevelt's efforts in the Great Depression gave a sense of hope to people who had lost hope," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight. "In the current situation, Obama's program is aimed at giving companies enough confidence to start hiring a little sooner than they otherwise would."

First Monarch Butterflies in Space Take Flight (SPACE.com)

Wed, 12/09/2009 - 07:14 — admin

The
first-ever Monarch butterflies in space have taken flight on the International Space
Station to the delight of astronauts aboard.

Space
station commander Jeff Williams, of NASA, beamed video of the first of several
Monarch butterflies fluttered its gossamer wings in weightlessness last week,
just after the insect emerged from its cocoon and began floating around their
enclosure.

"It is
beautiful," Williams radioed Mission Control. "It's always beautiful to see a
little bit of Earth up here."

The video
showed one adult Monarch butterfly floating gently in microgravity as it opened
and closed its wings to dry them.

"Congratulations
to the experiment team," Williams said.

"They are
very proud parents," Mission Control radioed back. "Glad you finally got the video.
It's a pretty awesome site."

The Monarch
butterflies are the first ever sent to space. They began emerging just days
after several Painted Lady butterflies began emerging from their own cocoons in
a separate enclosure.

The Monarch
and Painted Lady butterflies arrived at the station as catepillars last month on the space
shuttle Atlantis as part of an educational experiment. And while butterfly
larvae have been sent to space before, the colorful insects on the space
station now are the first to successfully go through all phases of their
development — from larva to pupa to adult butterfly — in orbit.

More than 170,000
students between kindergarten and 12th grade and 2,800 teachers are following
the experiment on Earth, where they are comparing the space butterflies'
lifecycle with that of similar insects on the ground. The butterflies also have
their own Twitter page "ButterflySpace" where status updates of their space
mission appear.

At least
one difference between space Monarch butterflies and their terrestrial
counterparts has already been revealed. On Earth, the wings of a newly-emerged
Monarch butterfly can take anywhere between three and five minutes to dry. But
aboard the space station, it took about 15 minutes. 

The Monarch
and Painted Butterflies were delivered to the space station inside a habitat
known as the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus Science Insert – 03. It
was built by BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado at
Boulder.

Because of
the cramped quarters, the Monarch butterflies — which began emerging Nov. 30 — were
only expected to live about four days, instead of the two weeks they would
survive on Earth, NASA officials said. The space Painted Lady butterflies,
meanwhile, are expected to live about a week, about half what they would on
Earth.

The
butterflies are not the first critters to live among the human crew of the
International Space Station. Two orb weaving spiders managed to spin
wild webs in weightlessness last year, with astronauts checking in on them
from time to time.

Spider
Success! Weightless Webs Spun in Space
The
Strangest Things in Space
SPACE.com
Video Show - Life Aboard the International Space Station
Original Story: First Monarch Butterflies in Space Take FlightSPACE.com offers rich and compelling content about space science, travel and exploration as well as astronomy, technology, business news and more. The site boasts a variety of popular features including our space image of the day and other space pictures,space videos, Top 10s, Trivia, podcasts and Amazing Images submitted by our users. Join our community, sign up for our free newsletters and register for our RSS Feeds today!

NJ Business Broker

Tue, 12/01/2009 - 01:45 — admin

As noted at the beginning, it is impossible to enumerate all of the types of laws and regulations that impact on business today. In fact, these laws have become so numerous and complex, that no business lawyer can learn them all, forcing increasing specialization among corporate attorneys. It is not unheard of for teams of 5 to 10 attorneys to be required to handle certain kinds of corporate transactions, due to the sprawling nature of modern regulation. Commercial law spans general corporate law, employment and labor law, healthcare law, securities law, M&A law (who specialize in acquisitions), tax law, ERISA law (ERISA in the United States governs employee benefit plans), food and drug regulatory law, intellectual property law (specializing in copyrights, patents, trademarks and such), telecommunications law, and more.

Businesses often have important "intellectual property" that needs protection from competitors in order for the company to stay profitable. This could require patents or copyrights or preservation of trade secrets. Most businesses have names, logos and similar branding techniques that could benefit from trademarking.

NJ Business Broker

Is Gene-Therapy Medical Treatment Ready for Prime Time? (Time.com)

Tue, 12/01/2009 - 00:25 — admin

At first it sounded like science fiction, curing genetic diseases by giving people new genes. Then it seemed like simple fiction: while theoretically possible, gene therapy appeared unlikely to become a true therapeutic option, the field having suffered years of complications and high-profile setbacks. But over the past year, a series of small but intriguing advances has suggested that the technique may hold real future potential.
In September, researchers at the University of Washington reported in the journal Nature that they had produced color vision in squirrel monkeys, which are normally born colorblind. Using a tiny syringe, researchers injected the single missing gene for color vision into the monkeys' eyes. The result was clear: monkeys that previously could not distinguish red, green and gray were easily able to pass a simian equivalent of a color-detection test. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)
Another study published in the Lancet in October found that gene therapy had restored partial vision to five children and seven adults with a congenital eye disease that causes blindness. And a paper published earlier this month in Science reported the successful treatment of two children with ALD, or adrenoleukodystrophy - a neurological disorder that leads to progressive brain damage and death in two to five years.
In the most recent study, published in November, researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported they had successfully gotten monkeys to grow bigger, stronger muscles within weeks - no anabolic steroids, exercise or genetic engineering required. Scientists injected genes directly into the right quadriceps of six healthy monkeys, and eight weeks later, the changes were plainly visible. The muscles in each monkey's right leg were larger and measurably more forceful than those in the left leg, and the effects remained for 15 months.
That study built on previous research by the Columbus-based team, which had successfully used gene therapy to treat rodents with the muscle-wasting disease muscular dystrophy. "We wanted to raise the bar and test a species closely related to humans," says neuroscientist Brian Kaspar, a co-leader of the study published in Science Translational Medicine. (Read "What Can Genetic Tests Tell You?")
The single gene injected into the monkeys was coded for the naturally occurring protein follistatin, which blocks the function of another protein called myostatin that hinders muscle growth. Past research in mice that were genetically engineered to have an extra copy of the follistatin-producing gene has shown that blocking myostatin, by increasing follistatin, causes muscles to bulk up fast. What Kaspar and his team found was that the same effect could be achieved simply by injecting genes - ferried aboard a small, non-disease-causing virus known as AAV, or adeno-associated virus - into the muscle. They further discovered that once the gene was delivered into the muscle-cell nucleus, muscles began producing their own constant supply of follistatin, and muscle fibers kept growing. Think of it as the body producing its own muscle-boosting drugs.
The findings got headlines, not least because they immediately raised the possibility of power-hungry athletes someday using gene doping to improve performance - a technique that would be much harder to detect than using performance-enhancing drugs. And while myostatin-blocking drugs are not yet available, the pharmaceutical companies Amgen and Wyeth are currently experimenting with myostatin inhibitors, with encouraging early results, and it's clearly something that antidoping agencies around the world are concerned about. The World Anti-Doping Agency has banned gene doping, and included "agents modifying myostatin function(s)" on its list of prohibited substances.
Scientists do not yet know whether myostatin-related gene therapy will even work in humans. Given the financial and regulatory hurdles to launching a first-phase trial, it could take years and several million dollars before researchers could replicate their animal findings in people. But advances like the muscle trial in monkeys help attract funds - largely from advocacy groups like the Muscular Dystrophy Association and charitable organizations founded by patient families, as well as drug companies and the federal government - to a field that has until now been somewhat better known for its failures. In 2003, for instance, two French children with a rare genetic immune disorder developed leukemia after they received gene-therapy injections containing retroviruses. The other 18 children in the trial were cured, but the setback reverberated through the field, dissuading researchers and funding. "A lot of financial interest has disappeared since it became clear that it's going to take a long time and it's not going to be easy [to develop gene-therapy drugs]," says Hank Greely of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics.
But despite gene therapy's public-image problem, scientists are optimistic. Many believe that over the next four to five years, they will be able to apply what they have learned from studying gene therapies for rare diseases to the treatment of more common ailments like epilepsy, arthritis and congestive heart failure. "[Gene therapy] still needs one killer app. One clear, unambiguous success," says Greely. "And then the money will flood in."
Read "A Gene to Cure Blindness."
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
View this article on Time.comRelated articles on Time.com:Troubled Soil How to Handle a Medical Crisis Dead Tree Alert: Paging Dr. Obama Dead Tree Alert: In Treatment Returns When Doctors Say, "We're Sorry"



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