New Hampshire Health News Digest

Al-Zarqawi eluded capture but left clues, source says - Conflict in Iraq - MSNBC.com : BAGHDAD, Iraq - American special forces were tracking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaida in Iraq, near the town of Ramadi two months ago, but the Jordanian-born terrorist leader escaped by jumping out of a moving vehicle, a senior U.S. military source tells NBC News. Al-Zarqawi did, however, leave behind several key pieces of intelligence, the source said, the most important of which was his laptop computer. Photos released by the military last month were taken from the 'My Pictures' folder of that laptop, the source said. It was also full of telephone numbers. Also left behind in the car was a bag with about $100,000 in euro currency. Another bag contained mini, plug-in hard-drives, the source said, and evidently al-Zarqawi was using these to distribute information to his network in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was believed to have been headed to a secret meeting in Ramadi, and t...

local6.com - News - Nasal Spray Arouses Women's Desire To Have Sex In Minutes : A new nasal spray aphrodisiac for women that works in minutes may soon hit the market, according to a Local 6 News report. Doctors said women who used the drug PT-141 in test studies felt a tingling or throbbing followed by a strong desire to have sex immediately after spraying their noses. PT-141 is a synthetic version of a sex hormone that works on both men and women, according to a report. 'In the case of women, what we're really doing is sensitizing the vaginal tissue so when they get touched or stimulated, they would feel it a little bit more,' Dr. Carl Spana said. The spray allows the sex drug to work faster. 'It's a very simple product to use,' Dr. Spana said. 'Essentially, you take off the protective cap and place it at the base of your nostril and then they would just activate the device while breathing normally. 'It's a very simple prod...

War on Brats - 11/20/05 : Cafe's move to boot bad kids kicks up skirmish between the childless and the child-centered. 'I can't change the situation in Iraq; I can't change the situation in New Orleans. But I can change this little corner of the world,' says Dan McCauley, owner of A Taste of Heaven. CHICAGO -- Bridget Dehl shushed her 21-month-old son Gavin, then clapped a hand over his mouth to squelch his tiny screams amid the Sunday brunch bustle. When Gavin kept yelping 'yeah, yeah, yeah,' Dehl quickly whisked him from his highchair and out the door. Right past the sign warning the cafe's customers that 'Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven,' and right into a nasty spat roiling the stroller set in Chicago's changing Andersonville neighborhood. The owner of A Taste of Heaven, Dan McCauley, said he posted the sign -- at child level, with playful handprints -- in the hop...

The Observer | International | Machete killings fuel Indonesia's religious hatred Jihadists are being blamed for beheading of two Christian schoolgirls, reports Dan McDougall For peaceful Christians many of them refugees from Poso, the existence of Ninja-clad attackers brings back memories of 2001 when hundreds of masked Muslim men stormed one Christian village after another, firing automatic weapons, tossing petrol bombs and home-made grenades into houses and ordering terrified residents to get out for good. They killed anyone who dared to resist. ‘The people of the world called the beheadings of these girls barbaric,’ says David, a lay preacher in the town. ‘Pope Benedict led prayers in Rome for the safety of Christians here, but few governments have expressed real concern. We are on the verge of another jihad. ‘Almost all the religiously motivated aggression this year has been directed against Christians: schoolgirls murdered as the army turns a blind ey...

The Australian: Muslim fanatics terrorise a nation Islamist murders and threats have transformed the once-tolerant Netherlands into a place of armed bodyguards and fear, writes Anthony Browne A FILM about gay rights should hardly raise an eyebrow in The Netherlands, which for centuries has prided itself as a beacon of freedom of expression and was the first country to legalise gay marriage. But when Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee turned Dutch MP, started making a new film about the oppression of homosexuals under Islam, the threat to everyone taking part was deemed so great that she decided there would be no faces shown on screen and no end credits and that the entire production team would remain anonymous. Ali, a “lapsed Muslim” who revealed this week that she had finished the script, lives in a safe house under 24-hour protection. The precaution is as wise as the courage is extraordinary: Theo van Gogh, the director of Ali’s previous film, about d...

TorontoSun.com - Toronto And GTA - Hatred blinds U.S. to truth: Journalist By CP Four years after 9/11 and the 'crazy zeitgeist' that permeated the United States, most Americans have still not learned to know their enemies instead of just hating them, U.S. political journalist Chris Matthews says. In a speech to political science students at the University of Toronto yesterday, the host of the CNBC current affairs show Hardball had plenty of harsh words for U.S. President George W. Bush, as well as the political climate that has characterized his country for the past few years. 'The period between 9/11 and Iraq was not a good time for America. There wasn't a robust discussion of what we were doing,' Matthews said. 'If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil -- they just have a different perspective.' He said Bush squandered an opportunity to unite the world against terrorism a...

Free trade losing steam President Bush and others will try to revive a global trade pact at APEC summit starting Friday. By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor When leaders of Asian and American nations meet Friday at an economic summit in South Korea, they have an ambitious goal: revive negotiations on a new global agreement to reduce trade barriers - a move that experts say could add some $300 billion a year to the global economy and help lift millions of people out of poverty. But to do so, they'll have to counter faltering worldwide momentum for free trade. Trade liberalization has never made easy politics. It inspires no natural upwelling of popular support, and in recent years opponents have become increasingly vocal. Signs of stalling support for greater economic openness abound, from the angry throngs who greeted President Bush recently in Argentina, to Europeans reluctant to slash agricultural price supports. Even a majority of Am...

Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam Melvin R. Laird From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005 Summary: During Richard Nixon's first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success -- until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly. MELVIN R. LAIRD was Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973, Counselor to the President for Domestic Affairs from 1973 to 1974, and a member of the House of Representatives from 1952 to 1969. He currently serves as Senior Counselor for National and International Affairs at the Reader's Digest Association. Today, we deserve a view of history that is based on facts rather than emotional distortions and the party line of tired politicians who play on emotions. Mine is not a rosy view of ...

PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart : "The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won't happen. And WHY it won't happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google's earnings. So why buy-up all that fiber, then? The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be ...

New Scientist Breaking News - Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless Deactivating a specific gene transforms meek mice into daredevils, researchers have found. The team believe the research might one day enable people suffering from fear – in the form of phobias or anxiety disorders, for example – to be clinically treated. The research found that mice lacking an active gene for the protein stathmin are not only more courageous, but are also slower to learn fear responses to pain-associated stimuli, says geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. In the experiments, the stathmin-lacking mice wandered out into the centre of an open box, in defiance of the normal mouse instinct to hide along the box’s walls to avoid potential predators. And to test learned fear, the mice were exposed to a loud sound followed by a brief electric shock from the floor below them. A day later, normal mice froze when the sound ...

E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago Indeed, the onetime productivity wonder has turned into a maddening time waster. Despite the brawniest corporate filters, more than 60% of what swarms into corporate in-boxes is spam. Since so much of what's received involves scams about millions languishing in nonexistent bank accounts, interoffice status contests, and people plopping unwanted meetings onto Outlook calendars, the e-mail blow-off factor is rising. That's imperiling the medium's former dependability. In the long run, perhaps the biggest death knell for e-mail is the anthropological shift occurring among tomorrow's captains of industry, the text-messaging Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so "ovr," "dn," "w/e (over, done, whatever)." No surprise, then, that on Rangaswami's orders, e-mail at Dresdner is beginning to fade as the collaboration tool of choice. Instead, workers there, as well as at places like Walt Disney (D...

200,000 protest Amman attacks-The Washington Times, America's Newspaper AMMAN, Jordan — At least 200,000 persons demonstrated yesterday against the recent bombings of three luxury hotels, while a new online statement attributed to terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi defended the attacks and threatened to cut off the head of Jordan’s King Abdullah II. An anti-terrorist demonstration of such size is unprecedented in the Arab world, where Zarqawi, his mentor, Osama bin Laden, and their al Qaeda organization have attained folk-hero status among Muslim masses. “Zarqawi, from Amman, we say to you: ‘You are a coward,’ ” protesters chanted while brandishing banners with the names of their tribes from every part of Jordan. A similar protest in Jordan two days after the attacks on three hotels in the capital, which killed 59 persons, mustered several thousand people. One attacker blew himself up at a wedding party in the ballroom of the Radisson SAS hotel. ...

Iraq Weapons Inspectors Find Empty Chemical Warheads - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council : "The find - only 11 days before the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, is to report to the security council on the progress of the weapons hunt - could potentially figure in Washington's arguments that President Saddam has no intention of disarming and must therefore face military attack. A UN spokesman in Baghdad said the warheads were uncovered during a visit to the Ukhaider ammunition storage area, 75 miles south of Baghdad. He said an inspection team had gone there to inspect a large group of bunkers constructed in the late 1990s. 'During the course of their inspection, the team discovered 11 empty 122mm chemical warheads and one warhead that requires further evaluation,' the spokesman, Hiro Ueki, said. 'The warheads were in excellent condition and were similar to ones imported by Iraq during the late 1980s.' UN officials said it did not immediat...

> energy.gov : Press Releases : U.S. Removes Iraqi Nuclear and Radiological Materials : Joint Operation Conducted with U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense WASHINGTON, DC -- Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced today that the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Defense (DOD) have completed a joint operation to secure and remove from Iraq radiological and nuclear materials that could potentially be used in a radiological dispersal device or diverted to support a nuclear weapons program. “This operation was a major achievement for the Bush Administration’s goal to keep potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists,” Secretary Abraham said. “It also puts this material out of reach for countries that may seek to develop their own nuclear weapons.” Twenty experts from DOE’s national laboratory complex packaged 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium and roughly 1000 highly radioactive sources from the former Iraq nuclear resear...

Sign of al Qaeda Desperation Zarqawi Sends Top Aide to Die by Richard Miniter Dead men tell no tales, but luckily for intelligence analysts, live women do. Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi was not able to detonate her bomb at the wedding party and fled with the guests as her husband exploded himself. Now, she is in the custody of the GID, Jordan’s intelligence agency. By all accounts, the interrogation is going slowly. Still, enough information is emerging for us to draw some lessons for the triple bombings in Amman, Jordan, on November 9. Mrs. al-Rishawi’s family history reveals just how effective the U.S. military has proven to be in eliminating insurgents. Jordanian intelligence has learned that three of her brothers were killed by coalition forces in Iraq. Her brother, Thamir al-Rashawi, a member al-Zarqawi’s inner circle, was killed in April 2004 in Fallujah, when a missile fired from a U.S. aircraft struck his pick-up truck. Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister Marwan al-...