New Hampshire Health News Digest

New Scientist Take a leap into hyperspace - Features : "EVERY year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year's winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious? The AIAA is certainly not embarrassed. What's more, the US military has begun to cast its eyes over the hyperdrive concept, and a space propulsion researcher at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has said he would be interested in putting the idea to the test. And despite the bafflement of most physici...

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Secret services say Iran is trying to assemble a nuclear missile : Document seen by Guardian details web of front companies and middlemen Ian Cobain and Ian Traynor Wednesday January 4, 2006 The Guardian The Iranian government has been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according to the latest western intelligence assessment of the country's weapons programmes. Scientists in Tehran are also shopping for parts for a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, with 'import requests and acquisitions ... registered almost daily', the report seen by the Guardian concludes. The warning came as Iran raised the stakes in its dispute with the United States and the European Union yesterday by notifying the International Atomic Energy Authority that it intended to resume nuclear fuel research next week. Tehran has refused to rule out a return to attempts at uranium enrichment, the key ...

Chicago Sun-Times - News Case against secondhand smoke vanishes into thin air October 22, 2005 BY DENNIS CONSTANT Despite the claims of anti-smoking groups that research studies have conclusively proved that secondhand tobacco smoke causes lung cancer, the city councils of Arlington Heights, Evanston and Wheeling rejected smoking bans. The three Illinois municipalities have created significant restaurant industries that play an important role in their economies, and the council members concluded that the risks of loss of businesses were not worth the health benefits that some claimed would result from a ban on smoking. Now the Chicago City Council is considering banning smoking in virtually all restaurants, bars and commercial buildings. Anti-smoking groups with a collectivist political agenda, allied with “cancer industry” organizations that rely on fear to enhance their considerable cash flow, have filled the media with claims about secondhand tobacco smoke that are questionable at b...

CNN.com - Earliest Mayan writing found beneath pyramid - Jan 5, 2006 : "ANTIGUA, Guatemala (Reuters) -- Archaeologists excavating a pyramid complex in the Guatemalan jungle have uncovered the earliest example of Mayan writing ever found, 10 bold hieroglyphs painted on plaster and stone. The 2,300-year-old glyphs were excavated last April in San Bartolo and suggest the ancient Maya developed an advanced writing system centuries earlier than previously believed, according to an article published Thursday in the journal Science. The glyphs date from between 200 B.C. and 300 B.C., and come from the same site in the Peten jungle of northern Guatemala where archaeologist William Saturno found the oldest murals in the Mayan world in 2001. Radiocarbon tests indicate the writing is 100 years older than the murals depicting the Mayan creation myth."

SPACE.com -- Record Set for Space Laser Communication : "Record Set for Space Laser Communication By Ker Than In a cosmic version of laser tag, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft and an Earth-based observatory successfully exchanged laser pulses with each other while millions of miles apart. The feat sets a new record for laser transmission in space, a process which may one day be used to communicate across interplanetary distances and provide scientists with a powerful tool to measure the movement of planets and test fundamental principles in physics. MESSENGER was launched in 2004 on a six-year voyage to Mercury. In late May of 2005, scientists used the spacecraft’s Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA), an instrument designed to map Mercury’s surface, to exchange laser pulses with NASA’s Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory in Maryland. MESSENGER was approximately 15 million miles (25 million km) away at the time. The experiment, reported today, marks the first successful back-and...

Gang terrorizes train in France-World-The Washington Times, America's Newspaper PARIS -- A gang of more than 20 youths -- thought to be North African immigrants -- terrorized hundreds of train passengers in a rampage of violence, robbery and sexual assault on New Year's Day, French officials said yesterday. The five-hour-long criminal frenzy was "totally unacceptable," French President Jacques Chirac told reporters. "Those guilty will be found and punished, as they deserve." The gang of between 20 and 30 youths boarded the train, heading from Nice on the French Riviera to Lyon, in eastern France, early on Jan. 1, as it carried 600 passengers home from New Year's Eve partying overnight. Once inside, they went wild, forcing passengers to hand over mobile phones and wallets, and slashing seats and breaking windows. A 20-year-old woman cornered by several of the marauders was sexually molested. "It was a real scene of pillage on the ...

Counter-Terrorism Operations : "Young, Clueless and Dead January 4, 2006: An unexpected ally in the war on terror is, increasingly, poorly trained terrorists who either kill themselves, or screw up their operations. The number of accidental or premature explosions by suicide bombers is increasing, as is the accidental detonation of bombs under construction. In Afghanistan and Iraq, there have been recent incidents of suicide bombs going off before the bomber reached their objective, Many bombers are intercepted by security personnel because of poor discipline and ignorance. In Pakistan and Iraq, bombs under construction have been going off so often that terrorists believe there is something more than their inexperience at work. Iraqi terrorist bomb makers have been eating up by rumors that the Americans now have an electronic device that can set off a bomb at will. Actually, such a device is under development, but it’s already having an impact on the morale of the increasingly les...

ThreatsWatch.Org: InBrief: al-Qaeda's Democracy Problem : Sunnis may have voted for a secular Shiite candidate By Bill Roggio AL ASAD AIR BASE, IRAQ: The day before the parliamentary election, al Qaeda issued an “urgent statement announcing new attacks launched today against the American and Iraqi forces’ ‘strongholds,’ and to spoil ‘their celebrations of ‘democratic’ disbelief and adultery.’” Other Islamists and Salafist terrorist groups offered less than forceful protestations of the election and vowed not to commit acts of violence against voters or polling places. After the latest and not-so-greatest al-Qaeda offensive fizzled out, the terrorist group issued another statement vowing to continue their campaign of terror in Iraq. The question is, to what end? Does al Qaeda have the ability to influence events in Iraq, the forwarding of Democracy? LtCol Starling, the Operations Officer of Regimental Combat Team - 2, the unit in charge of western Anbar province, met with a very sen...

Michelle Malkin: FORCE MULTIPLIERS Russ Vaughn is a Vietnam vet and wonderful poet whose work is well-known and widely published by milbloggers. Force Multipliers Wikipedia: force multiplier-a military term referring to a factor that dramatically increases (hence multiplies) the combat-effectiveness of a given military force. In Iraq an IED explodes, An American soldier dies, But that blast will grow as the media blow It up before our eyes. And trumpet to the watching world, These fifth column falsifiers, Like sheep they bleat we face defeat, Our foe’s force multipliers. Osama and his minions know, In combat they can’t beat us; So they hope and pray will come a day, Our own media will defeat us. Ignoring all the good we’ve done, Liberals focus on the gore, On losses mounting and body counting, To prove we’ve lost this war. They disgraced us once in Vietnam, So now these leftists feel, That again they’ll win with media spin, And make America kneel. But defeatists aren’t the only ones, L...

Iran 's future? Watch the streets - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune For months Iranian activists and even moderate clerics have been concerned about the radical tendencies of Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the past few weeks - after he said that the Holocaust was a myth, called for Israel to be wiped off the map and banned Western music from state-run radio and television, the concern spread around the world. But there is another development in Iran - this one positive and with great potential - that the world should not miss: civic defiance against Ahmadinejad's authoritarianism is increasing. From the outset of his term, the new president's policies exhibited a volatile mixture of nationalism and radical Islamic social engineering. While touting Iran's nuclear program, he has promised to redistribute wealth to the poor and curb capitalists (without yet delivering on either promise). Ahmadinejad's language has been r...

Blogger Threatened to be Sued by Sozialgericht Bremen for Appearing in Google Bjoern Harste is a well-known German blogger – he owns a supermarket and writes about his daily experiences at work in his Shopblogger blog. Now, he received a Cease & Desist by the Sozialgericht Bremen ( a court of law for dealing with cases in the area of German social services) for having one of his blog posts appear in the Google results top ten for “Sozialgericht Bremen” Welcome to the world wide web, Sozialgericht, and welcome to Google. Now the Sozialgericht Bremen wants Bjoern to stop using the words “ Sozialgericht Bremen ” in his archive. Apparently, the Sozialgericht Bremen thinks the result they dislike will stop appearing in Google, not knowing that it’s actually link text that is more important for such a position... and that it’s not easy to silence a blogger because other bloggers will jump in to help. Bjoern complied by removing the unwanted words, but is publishing the Sozialgericht’s ...

Answering Back to the News Media, Using the Internet - New York Times Answering Back to the News Media, Using the Internet By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE Published: January 2, 2006 Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, or so goes the old saw. For decades, the famous and the infamous alike largely followed this advice. Even when subjects of news stories felt they had been misunderstood or badly treated, they were unlikely to take on reporters or publishers, believing that the power of the press gave the press the final word. The Internet, and especially the amplifying power of blogs, is changing that. Unhappy subjects discovered a decade ago that they could use their Web sites to correct the record or deconstruct articles to expose what they perceived as a journalist's bias or wrongheaded narration. But now they are going a step further. Subjects of newspaper articles and news broadcasts now fight back with the same methods reporters use to generate articles and broadc...

ABC News: Millions Brace for Higher Credit Card Payments : Forced to Pay More Every Month … Millions of consumers who carry monthly balances are getting hit this month with higher minimum payment requirements as card issuers start implementing the January 2003 guidelines issued by the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and other federal regulators. The companies require that minimum payments go toward monthly interest charges as well as toward the principal. Instead of paying a 2 percent minimum, consumers will be required to pay at least 4 percent each month. Some consumers, however, may not see an increase because the payments they are making already include a reasonable amount of principal, said Barbara Grunkemeyer, deputy comptroller for credit risk with the Office of the Comptroller. … Even If It's for Your Own Good The new rules are meant to get people to pay down their debt faster, but in the short term many who get by paying just the minimum are ...

The Observer | Magazine | Dr John Briffa: Appetite for change Nutrition Appetite for change In four years of fatty fads and scare stories, Dr John Briffa has taken every opportunity to take a bite out of dietary orthodoxy. But here, in his final column, he reveals the one basic rule of healthy eating Sunday January 1, 2006 The Observer When I began writing for The Observer four years ago, I was of the opinion that a fair amount of dietary dogma was lacking in substance. More than that, my belief was that by eating what is traditionally billed as a 'healthy' diet we could well be digging a hole for ourselves with our knives, forks and spoons. Over the years, one of my aims has been to expose sometimes deep-set concepts that, by my reckoning, have been fuelled less by concern for public health and more by the food industry's desire for profit. My final column here seems like an appropriate opportunity to review whether, over the past years, we have shown any signs of an incr...

Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World 'US planning strike against Iran' By JPOST.COM STAFF [Print this Article] [EMail this Article] [Subscribe] [SMS Alerts] [JPost Toolbar] [JPost ePaper] Talkbacks for this article: 139 The United States government reportedly began coordinating with NATO its plans for a possible military attack against Iran. The German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel collected various reports from the German media indicating that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are examining the prospects of such a strike. According to the report, CIA chief Porter Gus, in his last visit to Turkey on December 12, requested Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide military bases to the United States in 2006 from where they would be able to launch an assault. The German news agency DDP also noted that countries neighboring Iran, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, and Pakistan were also updated regarding the supposed p...