New Hampshire Health News Digest

SPACE.com -- The Coming Age of Planets : "The first was discovered in 1995. It was enormous -- half the size of Jupiter -- yet orbiting the star at a distance eight times closer than Mercury. Scientists did not think it was possible, that such a thing could exist. It did not fit their models. Yet there it was, undeniable, circling and circling with the ageless precision of the cosmos. Once again, the universe had popped a new surprise on humanity. And once again, humanity shook its collective head, took a deep breath, and saw the universe afresh. They called it, eventually, Bellerophon, the first exoplanet. We live in a new age of discovery, the first days of a new renaissance. It is the dawn of the age of planets. The discovery of the first extra-solar planet -- 51 Pegasi B, later dubbed Bellerophon -- was the clarion call announcing this new age. It's an age which will come to revolutionize our relationship with the universe as much as Galileo's d...

Philadelphia Inquirer | 06/30/2005 | Sunni announces a political group for Iraqi insurgents : It was another effort to draw the faction into the political process. U.S. officials had confirmed negotiating with rebels. By Patrick Quinn Associated Press BAGHDAD - A Sunni Arab politician who brokered secret talks between American officials and insurgents said yesterday that he had formed a group to give political voice to Iraqi fighters, and demanded a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal. The announcement by Ayham al-Samarie marked another effort to draw disenfranchised Sunnis into the political process. Samarie, a former cabinet member and a dual Iraq-U.S. citizen, is thought to have strong tribal links among Sunni Muslims, who are are thought to make up the backbone of an insurgency. American officials including Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld had confirmed that the United States had negotiated with the insurgents. [...] On the political front, Samarie sai...

For 5 months 'I stayed in the box'-Editorials/Op-Ed-The Washington Times, America's Newspaper For 5 months 'I stayed in the box' By James H. Warner June 29, 2005 As a Marine Corps officer, I spent five years and five months in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam. I believe this gives me a benchmark against which to measure the treatment which Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat, complained of at the Camp of Detention for Islamo-fascists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The senator's argument is silly. If he believes what he has said his judgment is so poor that his countrymen, assuming, of course, that he considers us his countrymen, have no reason not to dismiss him as a witless boob. On the other hand, if he does not believe what he said, the other members of the Senate may wish to consider censure. Consider nutrition. I have severe peripheral neuropathy in both legs as a residual of beriberi. I am fortunate. Some of my comrades suffer partial ...

AhmadinejadWithHostage Originally uploaded by redtailstinger2 . Iran's new president was a key figure in the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran. Here's a picture of the bastard.

Andrew C. McCarthy on Iraq on National Review Online It was good to hear the commander-in-chief remind people that this is still the war against terror. Specifically, against Islamo-fascists who slaughtered 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Who spent the eight years before those atrocities murdering and promising to murder Americans — as their leader put it in 1998, all Americans, including civilians, anywhere in the world where they could be found. It is not the war for democratization. It is not the war for stability. Democratization and stability are not unimportant. They are among a host of developments that could help defeat the enemy. But they are not the primary goal of this war, which is to destroy the network of Islamic militants who declared war against the United States when they bombed the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, and finally jarred us into an appropriate response when they demolished that complex, struck the Pentagon, and killed 3000 of us on ...

Freestar Media, LLC Below is our letter to begin the development process. Read our letter starting the project here. Press Release For Release Monday, June 27 to New Hampshire media For Release Tuesday, June 28 to all other media Weare, New Hampshire (PRWEB) Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land. Justice Souter's vote in the "Kelo vs. City of New London" decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner. On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the a...

Herald Sun: How the Left gets loonier [24jun05] : "How the Left gets loonier FIRST they backed Saddam against his victims. Now our cultural elite backs terrorists against Douglas Wood, the Australian they kidnapped. You say I exaggerate? I reply: Andrew Jaspan. Jaspan is editor-in-chief of The Age, Australia's most Left-wing daily newspaper, and on ABC radio on Wednesday said how 'boorish' and 'coarse' Wood was at his press conference this week when he called his captors 'a---holes'. You might wonder whether Jaspan, the Englishman whose paper on that same day published a big picture on page one of naked girls from Big Brother, has the right to call anyone else 'coarse'. But far more shocking was his apparent demand that Wood be more grateful to the men who'd snatched him, kicked him in the head, kept him blindfolded and bound for 47 days, shaved him bald, killed two of his colleagues, made him beg for his life, and -- says ...

scientists create zombie dogs | Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au : Zombie dog Eerie ... boffins have brought dead dogs back to life, in the name of science. SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years. Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution. The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity. But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock. Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre. However rather th...

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass. While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen grou...

My Way News : "Fireworks Likely When NASA Blows Up Comet LOS ANGELES (AP) - Not all dazzling fireworks displays will be on Earth this Independence Day. NASA hopes to shoot off its own celestial sparks in an audacious mission that will blast a stadium-sized hole in a comet half the size of Manhattan. It would give astronomers their first peek at the inside of one of these heavenly bodies. If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1 - about 80 million miles away from Earth at the time of impact. 'It's a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with a third bullet in the right place at the right time,' said Rick Grammier, project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Scientists hope the July 4 collision will gouge a crater in the comet's surface large enough to reveal its pristine core and perhaps yield cosmic clues to the origin of ...

ABC7Chicago.com: Chicago pairing surveillance cameras with gunshot recognition systems : June 26, 2005 — The police are watching. And in Chicago, they're listening, too. City officials are using new technology that recognizes the sound of a gunshot within a two-block radius, pinpoints the source, turns a surveillance camera toward the shooter and places a 911 call. Officials can then track the shooter and dispatch officers to the scene. Welcome to crime-fighting in the 21st century. 'Instead of just having eyes, you have the advantage of both eyes and ears,' said Bryan Baker, chief executive officer of Safety Dynamics in Oak Brook, which makes the systems. After a successful pilot program, Chicago officials have installed 30 of the devices alongside video surveillance cameras in high-crime neighborhoods, with 12 more on the way, and dozens more to follow, Baker said. The system's formal name is Smart Sensor Enabled Neural Threat Recognition and Identif...

Newsday.com: U.S. Reasserts Control in Afghanistan KHAKERAN VALLEY, Afghanistan -- Skimming low over the desert in helicopters with guns at the ready, American troops advanced Sunday into southern Afghanistan, seeking to reassert control after a spate of attacks raised fears of an Iraqi-style insurgency here. The troops hopped from village to village in Khakeran Valley, searching mud huts and wheat fields, meeting village elders and detaining at least two men. Up to 300 insurgents are believed to be holed up in the valley, about 130 miles northeast of the main southern city of Kandahar, said Lt. Luke Langer, a platoon leader in the 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade. "The enemy has been using the Khakeran Valley as a sanctuary," he said. "Without question, I know the Taliban are in the area and I'm sure we will make contact. From talking to local people, we know the enemy are very angry with us being here." About 465 suspected insu...

Weekly book reviews and literary criticism from the Times Literary Supplement Since classical times, Sappho has been a source of fascination and romantic construction. The ancients, who had nine books of her poems at their disposal, were unstinting in their admiration. Some called her a tenth Muse. Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, calls her a wonder, “for in this whole span of recorded time we know of no woman to challenge her as a poet even in the slightest degree”. In modern times, with only fragments of her poetry remaining, she has remained one of the most famous and evocative names from antiquity, a figure viewed by some with narrowed, by others with widened eyes; a socio-historical enigma, a littérateurs’ Lorelei, a feminist icon, a scholars’ maypole. It is difficult to judge her for ourselves when so little of her work remains. What we have consists on the one hand of quotations and more general references in ancient authors, and on the other hand of torn scraps from...

The Fourth Rail: In Response to a Question The data cited (numbers of attacks, etc.) is important, in that it gives us a sense of enemy capability. It does appear that, in certain ways, enemy capability to cause mayhem is improving. This is, however, normal in any sort of warfare, insurgency or otherwise. It is to be expected that enemies will become more deadly as time passes. This is so much a baseline feature of warfighting that Carl von Clausewitz, perhaps the greatest military scientist of them all, stated that escalation was one of the two universal features of war. This is not an essay on Clausewitz (though I have written such a piece in the past, for the interested). For our purposes, it is enough to say that time permits the enemy to develop specialized techniques for fighting your particular kind of training; and that, as the enemy loses more men and material, he becomes more committed to winning rather than wasting what he has lost. Also, as you and he become more ...

Victor Davis Hanson on the War on Terror on National Review Online F or all the talk of imperial America, and our frequent "police actions," we are hardly militarists. Protected by two oceans, and founded on the principles of non-interference in Europe's bloody internecine wars, the United States has always been rightly circumspect about going to war abroad. The American people are highly individualistic, skeptical of war's utility, and traditionally distrustful of government — and wary of the need of their sacrifice for supposed global agendas. So we go to war reluctantly. And being human, our support for war hinges on its being short and economical, and waged for professed idealistic principles. Wars that drag on past three years — from the Civil War to Vietnam — can often lead to demonstrations and popular disdain. By the same token, some politics are more compatible with the American perception of the need to fight. It was not only Lincoln's ...

A Daily Briefing on Iran : "Somewhere north of Tehran, living perhaps in villas near the town of Chalous on the Caspian Sea coast, are between 20 and 25 of al-Qaida’s former leaders, along with two of Osama bin Laden’s sons. Men such as Saif al-Adel, the former military commander of al-Qaida, and Suleiman Abu Ghaith, the bespectacled bin Laden spokesman, are not in hiding but rather in the care — or custody — of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. “They are under virtual house arrest,” not able to do much of anything, said one senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. How they got there and what will happen to them is one of the more intriguing stories of the war on terror, one that is filled with secret movements, stolen communications and a failed attempt at a prisoner exchange involving Iranian dissidents. “We believe that they're holding members of al-Qaida's management council,” Fran Townsend, President Bush’s counterterrorism czar, said of Iran. ...

Winds of Change.NET: Training Grounds, Magnets, and Hunters in Iraq : "Training Grounds, Magnets, and Hunters in Iraq by Bill Roggio A CIA report leaked to the press indicates Iraqi is becoming a training ground for terrorists on par with or exceeding that of Afghanistan in the 1990s. This isn’t news, however, as the National Intelligence Council came to a similar conclusion in January of this year. The latest report indicates that terrorists are gaining “a broad range of skills, from car bombings and assassinations to coordinated conventional attacks on police and military targets” and are likely to take their skills with them to their home countries, and even infiltrate Western societies “once the insurgency ends.” This fact is often used as a criticism of the invasion of Iraq, however it also provides credibility to the “Flypaper” or “Magnet” theories attributed to the invasion: bringing the war to the heart of the Middle East would issue a challenge to al Qaeda that ca...

Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment by Thomas DiLorenzo Rossum also quotes Hamilton as saying that the election of senators by state legislatures would be an "absolute safeguard" against federal tyranny. George Mason believed that the appointment of senators by state legislatures would give the citizens of the states "some means of defending themselves against encroachments of the National Government." Fisher Ames thought of U.S. senators as "ambassadors of the states," whereas Madison, in Federalist #62, wrote that "The appointment of senators by state legislatures gives to state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government, as must secure the authority of the former." Moreover, said Madison, the mere "enumeration of [federal] powers" in the Constitution would never be sufficient to restrain the tyrannical proclivities of the central state, and were mere "parchment barriers" to tyranny. Structural...

10News.com - News - Shelters Upset PETA Killed Animals Instead Of Adopting Out : PETA guilty of cruelty to animals NORFOLK, Va. -- Two North Carolina counties have stopped turning over shelter animals to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Officials said they were surprised to learn the group euthanized cats and dogs instead of trying to find them homes. They said they believed the animals were being taken for evaluation, and were being adopted out -- and that euthanasia would be only a last resort. PETA said unfortunately, even some healthy animals may be euthanized if PETA cannot find them homes. Documents show PETA euthanized about 6,100 domestic animals from 2001-2003. Two PETA employees have been charged with animal cruelty for dumping dead animals they collected in eastern North Carolina into a shopping center's garbage bins."

Local Insurgents: ‘Islamic Thinkers’ Menace Gay N.Y. On the evening of July 11, 2004, Kristine Withers walked down 37th Avenue, a main drag in Jackson Heights, Queens, and passed what had become a familiar sight: a group of tables set up on the sidewalk by the Islamic Thinkers Society, a local group of militant Islamists. On the tables, copies of the Koran and books espousing the group’s strict religious beliefs shared space with tracts on Zionism, pamphlets on the dangers of homosexuality, and signs bearing messages like “Your Terrorists Are Our Heroes.” Ms. Withers, who identifies herself as a lesbian and a political conservative, was offended by the group’s message. The Islamic Thinkers Society had become a regular feature at local gay-pride parades, where they’ve called for the castration and death of gay men, according to several witnesses who spoke to The Observer. But Ms. Withers said it was as much the anti-American messages as the anti-gay ones that riled her up...

The Belmont Club: Who's On First? Well, I know it's really bad form to post someone else's post in its entirety, but Wretchard of the Belmont Club is just the best, and his post today is just fantastic. He was having problems with his old blog, so you can find him now at http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com. I highly recommend you visit his blog! "Glenn Reynolds links to Karl Zinmeister's article in American Enterprise Online, The War is Over, and We Won where Zinmeister claims that: Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. ... With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue -- in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war. ...

Rare Gene Discourages Alcohol Dependence Among Jews : from Center for the Advancement of Health Study: Jews Have Fewer Problems With Alcohol Dependence A new study suggests that genes, not religion, may help explain why Jews generally have fewer problems with alcohol than Caucasians in general. The study findings, which appear in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, also suggest that the protective effects of this gene may be undermined by a culture that encourages drinking. The gene, ADH2*2 is a rare variation of ADH2, which produces a more active form of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in alcohol metabolism. However, explains lead author Deborah Hasin, Ph.D., from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 'the exact reason why ADH2*2 tends to discourage heavier drinking isn't known.' 'Recently, reports have shown a relatively high prevalence [approximately 20 percent] of ADH2*...

No faking female orgasm in scientific research - Yahoo! News : COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Women may be able to fool their partners by faking an orgasm but a brain scanner will catch them out every time, a conference heard Monday. Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have used scans to show that different areas of the brain are stimulated during an orgasm but are not activated when a woman fakes it. 'Women can imitate orgasm quite well,' Gert Holstege told a fertility meeting Monday. 'But there is nothing really happening in the brain.' He and colleagues took brain scans of 13 women and 11 men, aged 19-49 who had volunteered for the study, while they were being sexually stimulated by their partner and during an orgasm and compared them to images of their brains at rest. 'We wanted to know what the brain was doing during orgasm,' Holstege said. When women genuinely achieved an orgasm, areas of the brain involved in fear and ...

New Scientist Breaking News - Happiness helps people stay healthy : People who are happier in their daily lives have healthier levels of key body chemicals than those who muster few positive feelings, a new study suggests. This means happier people may have healthier hearts and cardiovascular systems, possibly cutting their risk of diseases like diabetes. Previous studies have shown that depression is associated with health problems compared to average emotional states. But few studies have looked at the effects of positive moods on health. Now, researchers at University College London, UK, have linked everyday happiness with healthier levels of important body chemicals, such as the stress hormone cortisol. “This study showed that whether people are happy or less happy in their everyday lives appears to have important effects on the markers of biological function known to be associated with disease,” says clinical psychologist Jane Wardle, one of the research team. “Perhaps la...

No American 'Gulag' : By Pavel Litvinov Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet 'prisoner of conscience' adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the 'gulag of our time.' 'Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?' I asked him. 'Sure,' he said, 'but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees.' The word 'gulag' was a bureaucratic acronym for the main prison administration in Stalin's Soviet Union. After publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago,' it became a symbol for the system of forced-labor camps that have been an integral feature of communist countries. Millions of prisoners confined in the gulag had not been involved ...