Wednesday, Jul 30th
Last update05:08:45 AM GMT
Far from learning the lessons of past conflict, the country's military seem ever more willing to resort to brute force.
The general promised "disproportionate" force to destroy entire villages identified as sources of Hizbullah rocket fire, the reasoning being that they are "not civilian villages" but rather "military bases" – the kind of reasoning that can land you in a war crimes tribunal.
The Food and Drug Administration has told the Laboratory Corporation of America that it is illegally marketing a blood test to detect ovarian cancer, according to a warning letter posted Wednesday on the F.D.A.’s Web site. The test, introduced in June, has raised hopes among women and their doctors because it promises to detect ovarian cancer at an early stage, when it is still treatable.
But some outside experts, including the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists, have said the test had not been proved accurate and might cause women to have unnecessary surgeries to remove their ovaries. The F.D.A. itself, in a previous letter to LabCorp, said the test “may harm the public health.”
An US federal appeal court has blocked a judge's order that 17 Chinese detainees at the Guantanamo Bay camp should immediately be released.
A district court had said it was wrong for the Bush administration to continue holding the Chinese Muslim Uighurs, as it had no evidence against them.
It also had fewer side effects than many standard drugs used to help those battling despair.
Researchers compared the effects of the plant hypericum perforatum - popularly known as St John's Wort - with placebos or a wide range of old and new anti-depressants, including those from the new generation of SSRI drugs, such as Prozac and Seroxat.
The findings could prompt more GPs to prescribe St John's Wort.
In Germany, it is commonly given to children and teenagers.
1) The Senate is made up of multi-millionaires who maintain power by accepting and granting favors. Those with large amounts of money, such as the Big Pharma lobby, mostly get what they want even though the American public is typically shafted in the arrangement. Senators don't need their paychecks; they get high on brokering power and facilitating deals to the highest bidder, based on whichever political party is most in control and who their friends may be.
2) While the House has some entrenched multi-millionaires who operate like those in the Senate, most members of the House are not the cream of any crop and could not make as much money in the private sector as they are being paid by their position in the House of Representatives (which includes a retirement plan that would be the envy of every American). Most of these people desperately need their paychecks and will do almost anything to keep them coming.
Although a great deal is now known about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, little has been asked - and less revealed - about the years of solitary military detention and interrogation without trial at naval brigs in Virginia and South Carolina endured by two U.S. citizens and a legal resident - Yaser Hamdi, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri.
The U.S. embassy in Lebanon said on Wednesday that two American citizens were missing and appealed for information on their whereabouts.
The embassy said on its website two Americans -- who are believed to be journalists -- had not been heard from since October 1 when they left Beirut for the northern city of Tripoli, where anti-U.S. Sunni Muslim militant groups are active.
Last week, the country's third largest bank was nationalised. This week, the government dismissed the board of directors of Landsbanki, its second-largest bank, and put it into receivership. On Monday, the Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, warned its citizens the country faces bankruptcy.
Iceland, with a population the size of Bristol, is rated by the UN as the most developed society on earth. But it now faces less welcome distinction as the country worst exposed to the credit crunch, with banking debts several times bigger than its economy.
The government should not be building predictive data-mining programs systems that attempt to figure out who among millions is a terrorist, a privacy and terrorism commission funded by Homeland Security reported Tuesday. The commission found that the technology would not work and the inevitable mistakes would be un-American.
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