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Daily Archives: April 6, 2010
Roman Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois calling for the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI
U.S. Catholic Priest Rev. Roy Bourgeois is calling for Pope Benedict XVI to resign, saying the Pope either knew or should have known about the growing sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
“Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston was in a similar situation,” Bourgeois recently wrote. “Rather than protecting children from predatory priests, he tried to protect the Catholic Church from scandal. Cardinal Law was forced to resign.
“Silence is the voice of complicity,” Bourgeois continued. “As a Catholic priest for 38 years, I believe that, for the sake of the Church, Pope Benedict should resign as well.”
Roy is the founder of SOA Watch, an organization that protests the existence and teachings of the School of the Americas and its successor, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation located on Fort Benning.
U.S. School District to Begin Microchipping Students
(NaturalNews) A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.
The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.
Parents or school officials could log onto a school web site to see whether and when specific children had entered or exited which bus, and to look up the bus’s current location as provided by the GPS device.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized the plan as an invasion of children’s privacy and a potential risk to their safety.
“There’s absolutely no need to be tagging children,” said Stephen Brown, executive director of the ACLU’s Rhode Island chapter. According to Brown, the school district should already know where its students are.
“[This program is] a solution in search of a problem,” Brown said.
The school district says that its current plan is no different than other programs already in place for parents to monitor their children’s school experience. For example, parents can already check on their children’s attendance records and what they have for lunch, said district Superintendent Rosemary Kraeger.
Brown disputed this argument. The school is perfectly entitled to track its buses, he said, but “it’s a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves.” He raised the question of whether unauthorized individuals could use easily available RFID readers to find out students’ private information and monitor their movements.
Because the pilot program is being provided to the school district at no cost, it did not require approval from the Rhode Island ethics commission.
Collateral Murder – Wikileaks – Iraq
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Act now to help bring the truth of war to light.
On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released a classified U.S. military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad on July 12, 2007 — including two Reuters news staff. The video, which became news worldwide, is the product of countless volunteer hours, help from military sources, and monetary donations. As part of a process of its meticulous reporting, Wikileaks sent reporters to the Baghdad neighborhood where the attack took place, tracking down two children who were injured in the gunfight which killed their father. The investigation and production of the video cost WikiLeaks almost $50,000.
There is more. Concerned individuals have also given WikiLeaks an encrypted military video from a May 2009 attack in western Afghanistan which killed over 100 civilians, including many women and children, through bombing. The U.S. Military has said it would release the video, but it has not.
But you can help release that video to the public. WikiLeaks, which has successfully decrypted the footage, is currently devoting intensive resources to provide context to the footage, including tracking down witnesses and military experts. But this is expensive.
WikiLeaks needs your help to fund that work and the press conference to release the footage to the world. WikiLeaks did not Web-cast the Baghdad attack video press conference because it could not afford the $5,000 price tag at the National Press Club. Help fund the press conference and next time, let the world watch as the video is released for the first time.
Take action. Donate now and support the military whistleblowers who were brave enough to take action against what they knew was wrong.
Remember: Courage is contagious.
For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature
For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.
Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.
Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force, which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances.
Now this law appears to have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists, including Jack Sandweiss, Yale’s Donner Professor of Physics. Since 2000, Sandweiss has been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together as part of the STAR experiment at RHIC, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator, to study the law of parity under the resulting extreme conditions.
The team created something called a quark-gluon plasma — a kind of “soup” that results when energies reach high enough levels to break up protons and neutrons into their constituent quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Theorists believe this kind of quark-gluon plasma, which has a temperature of four trillion degrees Celsius, existed just after the Big Bang, when the universe was only a microsecond old. The plasma “bubble” created in the collisions at RHIC lasted for a mere millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, yet the team hopes to use it to learn more about how structure in the universe — from black holes to galaxies — may have formed out of the soup.
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When the gold nuclei, traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light, smashed together, the plasma that resulted was so energetic that a tiny cube of it with sides measuring about a quarter of the width of a human hair would contain enough energy to power the entire United States for a year.
It was the equally gargantuan magnetic field produced by the plasma — the strongest ever created — that alerted the physicists that one of nature’s laws might have been broken.
“A very interesting thing happened in these extreme conditions,” Sandweiss says. “Parity violation is very difficult to detect, but the magnetic field in conjunction with parity violation gave rise to a secondary effect that we could detect.”
Sandweiss and the team — which includes Yale physics research scientists Evan Finch, Alexei Chikanian and Richard Majka — found that quarks of a like sign moved together: Up quarks moved along the magnetic field lines, while down quarks traveled against them. That the quarks could tell the difference in directions suggested to the researchers that symmetry had been broken.
The results were so unexpected that Sandweiss and his colleagues waited more than a year to publish them, spending that time searching for an alternative explanation. The physicist is still quick to point out that the effect only suggests parity violation — it doesn’t prove it — but the STAR collaboration has decided to open up the research to scrutiny by other physicists.
“I think it’s a real effect, but we’ll know more in the upcoming years,” Sandweiss says.
Next, the team wants to test the result by running the experiment at lower collision energies to see if the apparent violation disappears when there is not enough energy to create the necessary extreme conditions.
If the effect proves to be real, it could help scientists understand a similar asymmetry that led to one of physics’ most fundamental mysteries — namely, why the universe is dominated by ordinary matter today when equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created by the Big Bang.
Sandweiss, for one, is looking forward to some answers. “I’d really like to see this evolve and find out exactly what’s going on,” he says.
Provided by Yale University
Scientist: FDA suppressed imaging safety concerns
WASHINGTON — A former Food and Drug Administration scientist said Tuesday his job was eliminated after he raised concerns about the risks of radiation exposure from high-grade medical scanning.
Dr. Julian Nicholas told an audience of imaging specialists that he and other FDA staffers “were pressured to change their scientific opinion,” by managers in the agency’s medical device division.
Nicholas, now a physician at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, said he and eight other staffers raised their concerns with the division’s top director Dr. Jeffrey Shuren last September.
“Scientific and regulatory review process for medical devices was being distorted by managers who were not following the laws,” Nicholas said. A month later Nicholas’ position was “terminated,” he said.
The allegations about suppression of scientific dissent within FDA are not the first, and come at an inopportune time for the agency.
Tuesday’s meeting was designed to kick off FDA’s campaign to reduce radiation exposure from medical scanning. The agency is seeking input from physicians and manufacturers on additional safety controls and training to improve CT scanners and other medical imaging devices.
Hundreds of studies have linked certain types of radiation, including the type used in medical imaging, to cancer that can surface decades later.
FDA medical reviewer Dr. Robert Smith, a colleague of Nicholas who also presented at Tuesday’s public meeting, said he hoped the FDA would learn a lesson from Nicholas’ testimony.
“Science must not be ignored, suppressed or distorted as that endangers the public,” Smith told the audience.
Agency spokesman Dick Thompson said in a statement the FDA’s inspector general looked into Nicholas’ allegations of retaliation against agency scientists and did not pursue further action or investigation. The agency’s policies do not allow staffers to be penalized for expressing scientific views, he added.
“It is not uncommon for scientists, both internal and external to the agency, to disagree on the safety and effectiveness of products under review or on the steps needed to achieve public health goals,” said the FDA statement.
Nicholas, an Oxford University-trained intestinal specialist, raised specific concerns about the safety and effectiveness of CT screening for colon cancer.
CT scans provide detailed, three-dimensional images of the body, but at a cost: one CT chest scan carries as much radiation as nearly 400 chest X-rays, according to the FDA.
As a reviewer of medical device applications, Nicholas repeatedly rejected a manufacturers’ request to market a CT scanner specifically for colon cancer screening. Nicholas said he is legally barred from naming the manufacturer or discussing the details of its application.
In a June 2009 letter to senior managers, Nicholas stressed that patients should be warned of the radiation risks of CT scanning.
“I hope you understand that the failure to include a warning on the label will mean that patients will undoubtedly develop abdominal cancer and leukemia,” Nicholas wrote “It may not happen tomorrow, but yes, sadly it will happen.”
Nicholas said he was ridiculed by agency managers for “raising the bugaboo of radiation.”
Medical experts are somewhat divided over the usefulness of the so-called virtual colonoscopy, which was designed as a less-invasive alternative to colonoscopy.
The American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology endorse the procedure for its potential to boost screening for colon cancer, the country’s second leading cancer killer.
But some insurers and the government’s own Medicare program refuse to pay for the procedure, questioning its effectiveness and the rationale of exposing healthy patients to radiation.
Supporters of the procedure say that virtual colonoscopies use low levels of radiation that don’t threaten older patients who get colonoscopies. Radiation exposure that causes cancer accumulates over a lifetime, making younger people the most at-risk population for screening.
“When we look at virtual colonoscopy, the benefits of detecting polyps far outweigh the theoretical risk the low amounts of radiation would have on people of that age,” said Dr. Michael Macari of New York University’s Langone Medical Center.
CT scans became popular because they offer a quick, relatively cheap way to get an almost surgical view of the body. Doctors are free to use them as they choose, but FDA approval for specific indications allows companies to tout those uses in marketing materials.
The average American’s radiation exposure has nearly doubled in the last three decades, largely due to CT tests, according to the FDA.
The FDA announced an effort to improve scanning safety after three California hospitals reported hundreds of acute radiation overdoses last year, with many patients reporting lost hair and skin redness.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.