Student Suffers Alcohol Poisoning After Fraternity Hands Out Alcoholic Enemas... -

Student Suffers Alcohol Poisoning After Fraternity Hands Out Alcoholic Enemas... - 




A student from the University of Tennessee was hospitalized with alcohol poisoning after he was subjected to an alcoholic enema.

According to The Tennessean, Alexander Broughton, 20, was dropped off at the university’s medical center at around 1:30 a.m. Saturday unresponsive with a blood alcohol level greater than 0.4, which is poisonous and could be deadly.

Broughton was at a party at the Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity house when several members handed out rubber tubing to give each other alcoholic enemas, the paper reports.

Knoxville police say that an alcoholic enema increases and speeds up the effect of alcohol on the body.

Police also told The Tennessean that investigators found two other fraternity members passed out when they arrived at the house.

Police aren’t sure if the incident with Broughton was a result of hazing, or if he decided to undergo the enema willingly, but they are looking into both possibilities.

The university is now debating on the future of Phi Kappa Alpha. The fraternity is suspended for 30 days, and may be permanently banned, depending on the investigation.

Broughton has since been discharged from the medical center.

Read more -
http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2012/09/25/police-student-suffers-alcohol-poisoning-after-frat-hands-out-alcoholic-enemas/

BPA From Plastics, Food Packaging, Linked To Obesity -

BPA From Plastics, Food Packaging, Linked To Obesity - 



Since the 1960s, manufacturers have widely used the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) in plastics and food packaging. A study by researchers from New York University, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a sample of nearly 3,000 children and teens across the country and found a “significant” link between the amount of BPA in their urine and the prevalence of obesity.

The researchers speculate on a possible underlying mechanism, alluding to other studies that have shown that the chemical may disrupt mechanisms of human metabolism in ways that increase body mass. They also note studies that have revealed associations between urinary levels of BPA and incidences of adult diabetes, cardiovascular disease and abnormal liver function.

The vast majority of BPA in our bodies comes from ingestion of contaminated food and water. The compound is often used as an internal barrier in food packaging. When heated or washed, plastics containing BPA can break down and release the chemical into the food or liquid they hold. As a result, roughly 93 percent of the U.S. population has detectable levels of BPA in their urine.

Read more -
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/09/is-the-can-worse-than-the-soda/

Just One in Fifty victims of ‘surgical’ US strikes in Pakistan are known militants -

Just One in Fifty victims of ‘surgical’ US strikes in Pakistan are known militants - 




Late in the evening on 6 June this year an unmanned drone was flying high above the Pakistani village of Datta Khel in north Waziristan.


The buzz emitted by America's fleet of Predators and Reapers are a familiar sound for the inhabitants of the dusty hamlet, which lies next to a riverbed close to Pakistan's border with Afghanistan and is a stronghold for the Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur.

As the drone circled it let off the first of its Hellfire missiles, slamming into a small house and reducing it to rubble. When residents rushed to the scene of the attack to see if they could help they were struck again.

According to reports at the time, three local rescuers were killed by a second missile whilst a further strike killed another three people five minutes later. In all, somewhere between 17 and 24 people are thought to have been killed in the attack.

The Datta Khel assault was just one of the more than 345 strikes that have hit Pakistan's tribal areas in the past eight years but it reveals an increasingly common tactic now being used in America's covert drone wars – the "double-tap" strike.

More and more, while the overall frequency of strikes has fallen since a Nato attack in 2011 killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and strained US-Pakistan relations, initial strikes are now followed up by further missiles in a tactic which lawyers and campaigners say is killing an even greater number of civilians. The tactic has cast such a shadow of fear over strike zones that rescuers often wait for hours before daring to visit the scene of an attack.

"These strikes are becoming much more common," Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents victims of drone strikes, told The Independent. "In the past it used to be a one-off, every now and then. Now almost every other attack is a double tap. There is no justification for it."

The expansive use of "double-tap" drone strikes is just one of a number of more recent phenomena in the covert war run by the US against violent Islamists that has been documented in a new report by legal experts at Stanford and New York University.

The product of nine months' research and more than 130 interviews, it is one of the most exhaustive attempts by academics to understand – and evaluate – Washington's drone wars. And their verdict is damning.

Throughout the 146-page report, which is released today, the authors condemn drone strikes for their ineffectiveness.

Despite assurances the attacks are "surgical", researchers found barely 2 per cent of their victims are known militants and that the idea that the strikes make the world a safer place for the US is "ambiguous at best."

Researchers added that traumatic effects of the strikes go far beyond fatalities, psychologically battering a population which lives under the daily threat of annihilation from the air, and ruining the local economy.

They conclude by calling on Washington completely to reassess its drone-strike programme or risk alienating the very people they hope to win over. They also observe that the strikes set worrying precedents for extra-judicial killings at a time when many nations are building up their unmanned weapon arsenals.

The Obama administration is unlikely to heed their demands given the zeal with which America has expanded its drone programme over the past two years. Reapers and Predators are now active over the skies of Somalia and Yemen as well as Pakistan and – less covertly – Afghanistan.

But campaigners like Mr Akbar hope the Stanford/New York University research may start to make an impact on the American public.

"It's an important piece of work," he said. "No one in the US wants to listen to a Pakistani lawyer saying these strikes are wrong. But they might listen to American academics."

Reprieve, the charity which is trying to challenge drone strikes in the British, Pakistani and American courts, said the report detailed how the fallout from the extra-judicial strikes must be measured in terms of more than deaths and injuries alone.

"An entire region is being terrorised by the constant threat of death from the skies," said Reprieve's director, Clive Stafford Smith.

"Their way of life is collapsing: kids are too terrified to go to school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meeting or anything that involves gathering in groups."

Some of the most harrowing personal testimonies involve those who have witnessed "double-tap" strikes.

Researchers said people in Waziristan – the tribal area where most of the strikes take place – are "acutely aware of reports of the practice of follow-up strikes", and explained that the secondary strikes have discouraged ordinary civilians from coming to one another's rescue.

One interviewee, describing a strike on his in-laws' home, said a follow-up missile killed would-be rescuers. "Other people came to check what had happened; they were looking for the children in the beds and then a second drone strike hit those people."

A father of four, who lost one of his legs in a drone strike, admitted: "We and other people are so scared of drone attacks now that when there is a drone strike, for two or three hours nobody goes close to [the location of the strike]. We don't know who [the victims] are, whether they are young or old, because we try to be safe."

Read more - 
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/outrage-at-cias-deadly-double-tap-drone-attacks-8174771.html

Man Crushed by Road Flattening Truck On Orders of Chinese Officials -

Man Crushed by Road Flattening Truck On Orders of Chinese Officials - 

A villager in northern China attempting to resist a forced government relocation by remaining on his land was brutally crushed to death by a road flattening truck on the orders of a Chinese government official.


The story, which was censored in China’s state controlled media, has caused outrage amongst users of Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, given it’s horrifying similarity to what happened to student protesters who were crushed to death by tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
The victim, He Zhi Hua, refused to accept a paltry payment from the government which has forcefully evicted Changsha Village locals in order to re-appropriate their land for commercial use.
When Hua began a protest by lying down on the spot through which construction vehicles had to pass, the local Vice Mayor ordered workers for the state-owned company to murder Hua by driving over his body with a huge road-flattening truck.
Shocking images show Hua’s pulverized brains and his mangled body in the aftermath of the state-sponsored execution.
Fearing unrest if the story got out to a wider audience, the government sent in 200 men to keep angry locals at bay and hide the remains of the body. The man’s family was offered a sum of money in order to keep quiet about the incident.

Read more - 
http://www.infowars.com/man-crushed-by-road-flattening-truck-on-orders-of-chinese-officials/

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients -

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients - 



Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.

In their 40 years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works ad hoc, from sales reps, colleagues and journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are, too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all.

Read more - 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre/print

Facebook flooded with complaints after messages 'bug' - bug 'reveals private messages'... -

Facebook flooded with complaints after messages 'bug' -  bug 'reveals private messages'... - 

Facebook has denied claims that a software bug caused private messages dating from 2009 to be displayed on profiles overnight, insisting that the messages were left in public originally, but that members have since become more privacy-conscious.


The social network was deluged with complaints from members who claimed their old private messages have been re-published publicly on the social network.
Facebook admitted old messages were reappearing on profiles but quickly denied that there had been a privacy breach, as the messages were old public messages.
It appeared that members were shown old public "wall" postings that they wrongly believed were private messages. Observers said the outcry showed how the way people use Facebook has changed, as they have become more aware of their privacy online.
Facebook’s director of engineering, Andrew Bosworth, aimed to calm the panic.
"In case there was any concern, these are just wall posts and not personal messages… people just forget how we used to use the wall!," he said.

Read more -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9563855/Facebook-flooded-with-complaints-after-messages-bug.html