Sales skyrocket for bulletproof backpacks, kids' body armor... -

Sales skyrocket for bulletproof backpacks, kids' body armor... - 



Demand for a Utah company’s bulletproof backpacks and even child-sized body armor has skyrocketed in the aftermath of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.
Amendment II has been in business for a couple of years now, selling its brand of lightweight armor called “Ryno-Hide” to police agencies and the military. They began putting sheets of the armor in children’s backpacks a year ago.
“The concept came up as things happened at schools,” Rich Brand, Amendment II’s Chief Operating Officer, told FOX 13 on Tuesday. “Children need protection as well.”
Brand said initially, they would only sell a handful of the backpacks and child-sized body armor at gun shows. The backpacks retail from $150-300. After the Newtown shooting that killed 20 children, the demand for the product skyrocketed. There has been so much demand, the company said, it has overloaded their website.
“Our armor was being bought to protect people, the ‘preppers,’ is the term,” Brand said of those who would typically buy it for personal use. “At this point, it’s transcended to everyone. Anyone who’s sending out a child into the world, seeing what can happen now, they want to protect their children.”
Brand insisted they did not seek to capitalize on the school shooting. Parents FOX 13 spoke with on Tuesday had mixed reaction to the idea of pint-sized body armor and bulletproof backpacks.
“Times are crazy right now,” said Rene Salas. “People are shooting all the time, out of their mind.”
Others said they believed it would instill more fear in children.

Read more - 
http://fox13now.com/2012/12/18/sales-skyrocket-for-utah-companys-bulletproof-backpacks-and-kids-body-armor/

Service Dogs Pick Up Scent of Diabetes Danger -

Service Dogs Pick Up Scent of Diabetes Danger - 



About two times a night, Shana Eppler wakes up to an alarm and slips into her daughter Abbie's room to test the 8-year-old's blood sugar.

Diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of 4, Abbie experiences low blood-sugar levels, a potentially dangerous condition known as hypoglycemia that can cause the loss of consciousness.

The alarm Ms. Eppler uses to avoid a health emergency is a furry one named Gracie, an 70-pound, 3-year-old British Labrador retriever trained to sniff out high and low blood-sugar levels. When Abbie's sugar level rises or falls below a certain target at night, Gracie rings a bell and Ms. Eppler gets up.

"The scenting part comes naturally," says Ms. Eppler, of Colorado Springs, Colo. "They are hunting blood sugars instead of ducks."

Diabetic, or hypoglycemic, "alert dogs" are a growing class of service dogs best known for guiding the visually impaired, sniffing out drugs and bombs, or providing mobility assistance for people with severe disabilities. Most recently, they have been trained to sniff out cancer and oncoming seizures. Toni Eames, president of International Association of Assistance Dog Partners, estimates there are over 30,000 assistance dogs working in the U.S., including dogs that have been trained by individuals.

The dog's accuracy and speed can beat medical devices, such as glucose meters and continuous glucose monitors, according to doctors, owners and trainers. With their acute sense of smell, the dogs—mostly retrievers—are able to react to a scent that researchers haven't yet identified.

Read more - 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324001104578163423121970336.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Health%26Wellness

22 Stats That Prove That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Young Men In America -

22 Stats That Prove That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Young Men In America - 



When are we finally going to admit that we have a very serious problem with this generation of young men in America?  We have failed them so dramatically that it is hard to put it into words.  We have raised an entire generation of young males that don’t know how to be men, and many of them feel completely lost.  Sometimes they feel so lost that they “snap” in very destructive ways.  Adam Lanza and James Holmes are two names that come to mind.  Why is it that mass murderers are almost always young men?  Why don’t young women behave the same way?  Sadly, Adam Lanza and James Holmes are just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem in our society.  Our young women vastly outperform our young men in almost every important statistical category.  Young men are much more likely to perform poorly in school, they are much more likely to have disciplinary problems and they are much more likely to commit suicide.  In the old days, our young men would gather in the streets or in the parks to play with one another after school, but today most of them are content to spend countless hours feeding their addictions to video games, movies and other forms of entertainment.  When our young men grow up, many of them are extremely averse to taking on responsibility.  They want to have lots of sex, but they aren’t interested in marriage.  They enjoy the comforts of living at home, but they don’t want to go out and pursue career goals so that they can provide those things for themselves.  Our young men are supposed to be “the leaders of tomorrow”, but instead many of them are a major burden on society.  When are we finally going to admit that something has gone horribly wrong?
There is even a name for this generation of young men that does not want to grow up.  It is called the “Peter Pan generation”.  They want to enjoy the benefits of being grown up without ever taking on the responsibilities.  A member of this “Peter Pan generation” recent wrote an article for the Daily Mail in which he discussed what he and his friends are going through…
I haven’t yet had to grow up so, well, I haven’t.
Reckless, irresponsible and immature? Yes. But at least I can take comfort in the fact I am not alone.
Last week, I read that there is even a name for people such as me. We are the ‘Peter Pan generation’; a sizeable group of 25 to 40-year-olds who exist in a state of extended adolescence, avoiding the trappings of responsibility — marriage, mortgage, children — for as long as possible.
‘Our society is full of lost boys and girls hanging out at the edge of adulthood,’ says Professor Frank Furedi, a sociologist who has been studying this phenomenon, at the University of Kent.
‘Another word sometimes used to describe these people is “adultescent” — generally defined as someone who refuses to settle down and make commitments, and who would rather go on partying into middle age.’
Young men in America didn’t always behave this way.  Several decades ago, men in America moved away from home, got married and had children much earlier than they do now.  But the young men of today seem to want to put off the “markers of adulthood” for as long as possible.  The following is from an outstanding article by Sandy Hingston…
Sociologists cite five “markers” or “milestones” that have traditionally defined our notion of adulthood: finishing school, moving away from the parental home, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. In 1960, 65 percent of men had ticked off all five by age 30; by 2000, only a third had. The experts have plenty of explanations for what’s come to be called “extended adolescence” or “emerging adulthood”—or what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls the “Odyssey Years.” They blame helicopter parents, the burden of student loan debt, much higher poverty rates among young people (nearly half of all Americans ages 25 to 34 live below the national level), and a dearth of vo-tech training and manufacturing jobs. Almost 60 percent of parents are now giving money to their grown kids—an average of $38,340 per child in the years between ages 18 and 34. Whatever happened to the son looking after his mom?
So why is all of this happening?
Well, there are a whole host of reasons.  But certainly parents and our education system have to bear much of the blame.  In the old days, young men were taught what it means to “be a man”, and morality was taught to young men both by their parents and in the schools.  But today, most young men have very little understanding of what “manhood” is, and our society has taught them that morality doesn’t really matter.  Instead, television and movies constantly portray young men as sex-obsessed slackers that just want to party all the time, so that is what many of our young men have become.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T

How much better off would our society be if we had trained this generation of young men to love, honor, protect and take care of others?
How much better off would our society be if we had nurtured the manhood of our young men instead of teaching them to be ashamed of it?
How much better off would our society be if we had disciplined our young men and taught them morality when they were getting off track instead of just letting them do whatever they wanted?
The following are 22 stats that prove that there is something seriously wrong with young men in America today…
#1 Males account for approximately 70 percent of all Ds and Fs in U.S. public schools.
#2 About two-thirds of all students in “special education programs” are boys.
#3 The average American girl spends 5 hours a week playing video games.  The average American boy spends 13 hours a week playing video games.
#4 The average young American will spend 10,000 hours playing video games before the age of 21.
#5 One study discovered that 88 percent of all Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 play video games, and that video game addiction is approximately four times as common among boys as it is among girls.
#6 At this point, 15-year-olds that attend U.S. public schools do not even rank in the top half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math or science literacy.
#7 In 2011, SAT scores for young men were the worst that they had been in 40 years.
#8 According to a survey conducted by the National Geographic Society, only 37 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find the nation of Iraq on a map.
#9 According to the New York Times, approximately 57 percent of all young people enrolled at U.S. colleges are women.
#10 It is being projected that women will earn 60 percent of all Bachelor’s degrees from U.S. universities by the year 2016.
#11 Even if they do graduate from college, most of our young men still can’t find a decent job.  An astounding 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed during 2011.
#12 Pornography addiction is a major problem among our young men.  An astounding 30 percent of all Internet traffic now goes to pornography websites, and one survey found that 25 percent of all employees that have Internet access in the United States even visit sex websites while they are at work.
#13 In the United States today, 47 percent of all high school students have had sex.
#14 The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate on the entire planet.  If our young men behaved differently this would not be happening.
#15 In the United States today, one out of every four teen girls has at least one sexually transmitted disease.  If our young men were not sex-obsessed idiots running around constantly looking to “score” these diseases would not be spreading like this.
#16 Right now, approximately 53 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 24 year old age bracket are living at home with their parents.
#17 According to one survey, 29 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are still living with their parents.
#18 Young men are nearly twice as likely to live with their parents as young women the same age are.
#19 Overall, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents in the United States right now according to Time Magazine.
#20 Today, an all-time low 44.2% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are married.
#21 Back in 1950, 78 percent of all households in the United States contained a married couple.  Today, that number has declined to 48 percent.
#22 Young men are about four times more likely to commit suicide as young women are.
So what do you think about this generation of young men in America?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

Read more - 

http://www.prisonplanet.com/22-stats-that-prove-that-there-is-something-seriously-wrong-with-young-men-in-america.html

Giving breasts a squeeze could hinder cancer growth -

Giving breasts a squeeze could hinder cancer growth - 


Women suffering from breast cancer may benefit from giving their breasts an extra squeeze – literally.
According to researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, placing mechanical force on malignant mammary cells can actually reverse their irregular growth process and put them back on track for a normal growth pattern.
“We are showing that tissue organization is sensitive to mechanical inputs from the environment at the beginning stages of growth and development,” said Daniel Fletcher, professor of bioengineering at Berkeley and faculty scientist at the Berkeley Lab, as well as the study’s lead investigator.
Breast tissue grows, shrinks and shifts throughout the course of a woman’s life in a structured pattern – and ultimately stops growing at some point.  Breast cancer is often characterized by a breakdown in this normal growth pattern, causing breast cancer cells to grow irregularly.
Through a previous experiment at the Berkeley Lab, researchers showed it was possible to prevent these malignant cells from transforming into a tumor by manipulating the cells’ surrounding environment through the use of biochemical inhibitors.  Ultimately the surrounding healthy cells could persuade the cancerous cells to grow normally again.
The most recent work from the Berkeley Lab utilizes the same concept, but introduces mechanical inhibitors rather than chemical inhibitors.  The researchers grew malignant breast epithelial cells in a gelatin-like substance, which was injected into flexible silicon chambers.  They then applied force to the silicon over time, and ultimately witnessed the malignant cells grow into more healthy-looking cells.  Time-lapse microscopy showed the change in the compressed breast cells over time.
While their research is compelling, the researchers do not advocate for compression bras or force alone to treat breast cancer.
“Compression, in and of itself, is not likely to be a therapy,” Fletcher said. “But, this does give us new clues to track down the molecules and structures that could eventually be targeted for therapies.”


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/12/18/giving-breasts-squeeze-could-hinder-cancer-growth/?test=latestnews

Study: Watching Porn Tied To Short-Term Memory Loss -

Study: Watching Porn Tied To Short-Term Memory Loss - 


Watching excessive amounts of online pornography can adversely affect a person’s short-term memory and decision-making ability.

In the first study of its kind, German scientists linked the brain’s ability to complete a task, reason, and understand concepts with people’s viewing of pornographic images. The 28 heterosexual men in the University of Duisburg-Essen study were tasked with viewing a combination of pornographic and non-pornographic pictures while also trying to keep their order straight.

The men – an average age of 26 – viewed the pictures and were asked to touch a “yes” or “no” key to indicate whether the mixed sexual and non-sexual images had been seen four slides before. The study found a significantly greater amount of wrong answers from the men who viewed more of the pornographic images.

The men who saw slideshows of clean images scored an average of 80 percent correctly, while men who were viewing the pornographic images only scored 67 percent correctly.

Read more - 
http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2012/12/17/study-watching-porn-tied-to-short-term-memory-loss/

2012 'was the best year ever' - 'Never in history of world has there been less hunger, less disease more prosperity' -

2012 'was the best year ever' - 'Never in history of world has there been less hunger, less disease more prosperity' - 




It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.

To listen to politicians is to be given the opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind, on page 30, describes as an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And what about the concerns that the oil would run out? Ministers have spent years thinking of improbable new power sources. As it turns out, engineers in America have found new ways of mining fossil fuel. The amazing breakthroughs in ‘fracking’ technology mean that, in spite of the world’s escalating population — from one billion to seven billion over the last two centuries — we live in an age of energy abundance.

Advances in medicine and technology mean that people across the world are living longer. The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55 this year. Ten years ago, it was 50. The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight years. Deaths from malaria have fallen by a fifth in half a decade.

Nature can still wreak havoc. The storms which lashed America’s East Coast in October proved that. But the speed of New York City’s recovery shows a no-less-spectacular resilience. Man cannot control the weather, but as countries grow richer, they can better guard against devastation. The average windstorm kills about 2,000 in Bangladesh but fewer than 20 in America. It’s not that America’s storms are mild; but that it has the money to cope. As developing countries become richer, we can expect the death toll from natural disasters to diminish — and the same UN extrapolations that predict such threatening sea-level rises for Bangladesh also say that, in two or three generations’ time, it will be as rich as Britain.

Read more - 
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/8789981/glad-tidings/

Futuristic handcuffs would administer shocks, drugs -

Futuristic handcuffs would administer shocks, drugs - 



Sometimes an invention comes along that makes you excited about the future.
For a long time, it seems that handcuffs have been stuck in the movies of old. They restrain you, but, odd for our interactive world, that's all they seem to do.
Might I tempt you toward futuristic handcuffs that will offer you a small involuntary judder?
I am grateful to Gizmodo for discovering that Patent Bolt has lucked upon a patent that offers bound(less) excitement.
For these are handcuffs that offer surprises. Indeed, they might make the idea of being tased, bro, not quite so bad.
The patent is called "Apparatus and System For Augmented Detainee Restraint."
The augmentations it offers are truly quite something. You see, these handcuffs are "configured to administer electrical shocks when certain predetermined conditions occur."
These shocks might be "activated by internal control systems or by external controllers that transmit activation signals to the restraining device."
This progressive tool is the brainchild of Scottsdale Inventions.

Read more - 
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57558038-71/futuristic-handcuffs-would-administer-shocks-drugs/

Twitter has started rolling out the option to download all your tweets -

Twitter has started rolling out the option to download all your tweets -



Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has promised in recent months that an option for users to download an archive of all the tweets from their accounts would be available this year. At least for some, this long-awaited feature has arrived – and we’ve had a play with the archive browsing tool.

The first report of the new option that we saw in the wild was from user @Psilosophy, who indicates where the option supposedly can be found for those who have it enabled – at the bottom of your Settings page.

Go to Twitter settings. Scroll down to "Your Twitter Archive". Download ALL your tweets. Even your first. DO IT. DO EEEEEET NOW!
— Psanta(@Psilosophy) December 16, 2012

Twitter user Navjot Singh also has the option available on one of his accounts and he has briefly blogged about the process, explaining:

“Twitter informs that they will mail you the download link when the archive is ready. Yes, its just like how Facebook’s archive system works. Once you get the mail and download it you will get a zip file with archive in html form. Extracting it (sic) and you will see all your tweets sorted in calendar format.”

Read more -
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/12/16/twitter-has-started-rolling-out-the-option-to-download-all-your-tweets/

CIA 'tortured and sodomised' wrongly detained German citizen -

CIA 'tortured and sodomised' wrongly detained German citizen - 


CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on, the European court of human rights said in a historic judgment released on Thursday.

In a unanimous ruling, it also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.

Masri was seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and handed over to a CIA "rendition team" at Skopje airport and secretly flown to Afghanistan.

It is the first time the court has described CIA treatment meted out to terror suspects as torture.

"The grand chamber of the European court of human rights unanimously found that Mr el-Masri was subjected to forced disappearance, unlawful detention, extraordinary rendition outside any judicial process, and inhuman and degrading treatment," said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

He described the judgment as "an authoritative condemnation of some of the most objectionable tactics employed in the post-9/11 war on terror". It should be a wake-up call for the Obama administration and US courts, he told the Guardian. For them to continue to avoid serious scrutiny of CIA activities was "simply unacceptable", he said.

Jamil Dakwar, of the American Civil Liberties Union, described the ruling as "a huge victory for justice and the rule of law".

The use of CIA interrogation methods widely denounced as torture during the Bush administration's "war on terror" also came under scrutiny in Congress on Thursday. The US Senate's select committee on intelligence was expected to vote on whether to approve a mammoth review it has undertaken into the controversial practices that included waterboarding, stress positions, forced nudity, beatings and sleep and sensory deprivation.

The report, that runs to almost 6,000 pages based on a three-year review of more than 6m pieces of information, is believed to conclude that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" adopted by the CIA during the Bush years did not produce any major breakthroughs in intelligence, contrary to previous claims. The committee, which is dominated by the Democrats, is likely to vote to approve the report, though opposition from the Republican members may prevent the report ever seeing the light of day.

The Strasbourg court said it found Masri's account of what happened to him "to be established beyond reasonable doubt" and that Macedonia had been "responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the US authorities in the context of an extra-judicial 'rendition'".

In January 2004, Macedonian police took him to a hotel in Skopje, where he was kept locked in a room for 23 days and questioned in English, despite his limited proficiency in that language, about his alleged ties with terrorist organisations, the court said in its judgment. His requests to contact the German embassy were refused. At one point, when he said he intended to leave, he was threatened with being shot.

"Masri's treatment at Skopje airport at the hands of the CIA rendition team – being severely beaten, sodomised, shackled and hooded, and subjected to total sensory deprivation – had been carried out in the presence of state officials of [Macedonia] and within its jurisdiction," the court ruled.

It added: "Its government was consequently responsible for those acts performed by foreign officials. It had failed to submit any arguments explaining or justifying the degree of force used or the necessity of the invasive and potentially debasing measures. Those measures had been used with premeditation, the aim being to cause Mr Masri severe pain or suffering in order to obtain information. In the court's view, such treatment had amounted to torture, in violation of Article 3 [of the European human rights convention]."

In Afghanistan, Masri was incarcerated for more than four months in a small, dirty, dark concrete cell in a brick factory near the capital, Kabul, where he was repeatedly interrogated and was beaten, kicked and threatened. His repeated requests to meet with a representative of the German government were ignored, said the court.

Masri was released in April 2004. He was taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, by plane to Albania and subsequently to Germany, after the CIA admited he was wrongly detained. The Macedonian government, which the court ordered must pay Masri €60,000 (£49,000) in compensation, has denied involvement in kidnapping.

UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, described the ruling as "a key milestone in the long struggle to secure accountability of public officials implicated in human rights violations committed by the Bush administration CIA in its policy of secret detention, rendition and torture".

He said the US government must issue an apology for its "central role in a web of systematic crimes and human rights violations by the Bush-era CIA, and to pay voluntary compensation to Mr el-Masri".

Germany should ensure that the US officials involved in this case were now brought to trial.

Read more - 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/dec/13/cia-tortured-sodomised-terror-suspect

Anonymous targets Westboro Baptist Church for planning Newtown picket -

Anonymous targets Westboro Baptist Church for planning Newtown picket - 



The infamous hacker group Anonymous has struck again.

On Sunday, it posted the names and addresses of members of the extremist Westboro Baptist Church after the hate group announced plans to picket Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where 26 people were gunned down Friday.

Anonymous posted the following two messages on Twitter on the weekend: "Dear WBC Site Admin, you should really work on securing your personal infos. Er, too late..."

Earlier, it tweeted: "It's so nice of #WBC to provide the internet with a list of their twitter handles.."

The list of the church members, which also includes email addresses and work numbers, can be easily accessed on sites like armywtfmoments.com.

At the bottom of a story that appeared on now.msn.com, one reader posted: "Good for you Anonymous....These are not people....They are sub-human trash....For them to target ANY of these innocent victims and their families, is just further proof of that....There should be a petition passed around to have people like this ARRESTED and PROCECUTED for planning and/or disrupting ANY funerals, vigils, etc.....If there is a hell, everyone associated with this 'church' would have a first-class ticket to it."

Media reports say that hours after the tragedy, the group's Shirley Phelps-Roper tweeted: "Westboro will picket Sandy Hook Elementary School to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment."

On its website, GodHatesFags.com, the organization states its mission is to conduct peaceful demonstrations against "soul-damning, nation-destroying filth."

In the past, the vicious anti-gay group has picketed the funerals of U.S. soldiers and AIDS victims as well as the funerals of those who were killed in a shooting in Arizona.

Anonymous is also petitioning the U.S. government to recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group.

"Their actions have been directed at many groups, including homosexuals, military, Jewish people and even other Christians. They pose a threat to the welfare and treatment of others and will not improve without some form of imposed regulation," the petition reads.