Tuesday, Dec 16th
Last update09:33:48 AM GMT
The number of civilians killed or wounded in the Afghan war increased by 20 percent during the first 10 months of this year, compared with the same period last year, according to a U.N. report issued this week.
The top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, said as the world body released its latest quarterly report that insurgents are likely to stage high-profile attacks in the months ahead. "Before it gets better, it may get worse," he said.
Having won big in the fall elections, Republicans preparing to take over statehouses around the country are proposing to cut corporate taxes, weaken union clout and rewrite laws on discrimination, whistle-blowers and injured workers to the benefit of employers.
In short, they intend to push through a business lobbyist's wish list. In some cases, these priorities may even take preference over their short-term costs to state governments, many of which will start the year billions of dollars short.
Female veterans who become pregnant may be at more risk for mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, a study finds.
Researchers looked at data on 43,078 women who were veterans who served in Afghanistan or Iraq and were treated at the Veterans Health Administration over five years. Among the study participants, 32% of women who were pregnant had a mental health diagnosis, while 21% of women who were not pregnant received a mental health diagnosis.
The United Nations is probing a complaint that Bradley Manning, the detained Army private suspected of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks has been mistreated in custody. And WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange called Manning "a political prisoner" during an interview on MSNBC.
As The Huffington Post reported last week, Manning's supporters went public with their concerns about the harsh conditions of his imprisonment aboard a floating brig in Quantico, Va. -- he has no access to exercise or even a pillow and bedsheets during his 23 hours of solitary confinement a day -- after their complaints to the military over several months went unheeded.
A new study pre-published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives confirms that fluoridated water causes brain damage in children. The most recent among 23 others pertaining to fluoride and lowered IQ levels, the new study so strongly proves that fluoride is a dangerous, brain-destroying toxin that experts say it could be the one that finally ends water fluoridation.
"This is the 24th study that has found this association," explained Paul Connett, Ph.D., director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN). "[B]ut this study is stronger than the rest because the authors have controlled for key confounding variables and in addition to correlating lowered IQ with levels of fluoride in the water, the authors found a correlation between lowered IQ and fluoride levels in children's blood."
Billions of dollars in top-rated bonds backed by community banks have gone bust, debunking the defense offered by credit-rating agencies that wildly inaccurate ratings were limited to risky mortgage bonds that imploded and then triggered the U.S. financial crisis.
Government regulators and lawyers across the country are examining how credit-rating agencies came to bless as "investment grade" the now-toxic bonds made up of special securities issued by community bank holding companies.
The Federal Reserve Board, chastised for regulatory inaction that contributed to the subprime mortgage meltdown, also missed a chance to prevent much of the financial chaos ravaging hundreds of small- and mid-sized banks.
In early 2005, at a time when the housing market was overheated and economic danger signs were in the air, the Fed had an opportunity to put a damper on risk taking among banks, especially those that had long been bedrocks of smaller cities and towns across the nation.
Continued study of an approximately 40,000 year old finger bone from Siberia has identified a previously unknown type of human — one that may have interbred with the ancestors of modern-day Melanesian people.
The fossil scrap — just the tip of a juvenile female’s finger — was discovered in 2008 during excavations of Denisova cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. Anatomically, it looks like it could have belonged to a Neanderthal or a modern human.
The maker of multiple brands of glucose test strips -- Abbott Diabetes Care -- issued a voluntary recall of several hundred product lots of the test strips, due to falsely low readouts of blood glucose which could result in over- or under-treatment of diabetic patients.
The FDA warned that false results from glucose test strips may lead diabetic patients to try to raise their blood glucose unnecessarily, or they may fail to treat elevated blood glucose because of a false, low reading -- both scenarios posing a health threat.
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