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High-resolution electromechanical model of a heart; courtesy of N. Trayanova
Video of electromechanical heart model courtesy of N. Trayanova
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BEIRUT (Reuters) – Anti-government rebels killed 28 soldiers on Thursday in attacks on three army checkpoints around Saraqeb, a town on Syria’s main north-south highway, a monitoring group said.
Some of the dead were shot after they had surrendered, according to video footage. Rebels berated them, calling them “Assad’s Dogs”, before firing round after round into their bodies as they lay on the ground.
The highway linking the capital Damascus to the contested city of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial center, has been the scene of heavy fighting since rebels cut the road last month. Saraqeb lies about 40 km (25 miles) south of Aleppo
In other developments, China put forward a new initiative to resolve the 19-month-old conflict, including a phased, region-by-region ceasefire and the setting up of a transitional governing body.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Beijing had made the proposal to international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi – whose own call for a truce over the Muslim holiday of Eid was largely ignored by both sides.
The United States meanwhile has called for an overhaul of Syria’s opposition leadership, signaling a break with the largely foreign-based Syrian National Council to bring in more credible figures.
A meeting in Qatar next week of foreign powers backing the rebels will be an opportunity to broaden the coalition against President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Zagreb on Wednesday.
The United States and its allies have struggled for months to craft a credible opposition coalition, while Assad has counted on the support of Russia, Iran and, to a lesser extent, China. International efforts to end the violence have all foundered.
More than 32,000 people have been killed since protests against Assad, an Alawite who succeeded his late father Hafez in ruling the mostly Sunni Muslim country, first broke out on city streets. The revolt has since degenerated into full-scale civil war, with the government forces relying heavily on artillery and air strikes to thwart the rebels.
CHECKPOINT ATTACKS
The army has lost swathes of land in Idlib and Aleppo provinces but is fighting to control towns along supply routes to Aleppo city, where its forces are fighting in many districts.
The head of the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdelrahman, said two of the attacked checkpoints at Saraqeb were on the Damascus-Aleppo highway. The third was near a road linking Aleppo with Latakia, a port city still mostly controlled Assad’s forces.
“The rebels will not stay at the checkpoints for long as Syrian warplanes normally bomb positions after rebels move in,” Abdelrahman said.
Five rebels died in the fighting and at least 20 soldiers were killed at the third site, including those shot after surrendering, he said.
The video footage showed a group of petrified men, some bleeding, lying on the ground as rebels walked around, kicking and stamping on their captives.
One of the captured men says: “I swear I didn’t shoot anyone” to which a rebel responds: “Shut up you animal … Gather them for me.” Then the men are shot dead.
Reuters could not independently verify the footage.
The Observatory said the al Qaeda-inspired Jabhat al-Nusra rebel group was responsible for the executions.
Islamist rebel units are growing in prominence in the war – a cause for concern for international powers as they weigh up what kind of support to give the opposition.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is not providing arms to internal opponents of Assad and is limiting its aid to non-lethal humanitarian assistance. It concedes, however, that some of its allies are providing lethal assistance.
Russia and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at increasing pressure on the Assad government, leading the United States and its allies to say they could move beyond U.N. structures for their next steps.
China has been strongly criticized by some Arab countries for failing to take a stronger stance on the conflict. Beijing has urged the Assad government to talk to the opposition and take steps to meet demands for political change.
“More and more countries have come to realize that a military option offers no way out, and a political settlement has become an increasingly shared aspiration,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in Beijing.
He said China’s new proposal was aimed at building international consensus and supporting peace envoy Brahimi’s mediation efforts.
(Additional reporting by Ayat Basma, Laila Bassam and Dominic Evans in Beirut and Terril Yue Jones in Beijing; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
World News Headlines – Yahoo! News
A mix of bamboo and plant fiber composite combine to create this classic Grove case. There are tons of achingly cool etched patterns to choose from on the site, or you can design your own. For: iPhone 4/4S, 5, Cost: From $ 79
Click here to view this gallery.
[More from Mashable: YouTube’s 20 Most-Shared Ads in October]
If you’re in the market for a new iPhone case, why not give wood a chance? We have found 10 gorgeous cases made from natural materials.
Take a look through our hand-picked selection in the photo gallery above. Let us know in the comments below if you’d consider a wooden cover for your Apple device.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Mitch Lucker, the lead singer of extreme heavy metal band Suicide Silence, died on Thursday of injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident in Huntington Beach, California, police said.
The band from Southern California was given the Golden Gods award for best new talent by Revolver magazine in 2009.
Lucker, 28, was on a new Harley Davidson motorcycle driving in the Orange County city of Huntington Beach on Halloween night when he lost control and crashed into a light pole, according to a statement from the local police department.
He was taken to the University of California, Irvine Medical Center where he later died, police said. Investigators said they were looking into the cause of the collision and whether alcohol was a factor.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” the band said in a post on Facebook. “Mitch passed away earlier this morning from injuries sustained during a motorcycle accident.”
Suicide Silence in 2007 came out with the album “The Cleansing” and followed that up with the 2009 “No Time to Bleed” and last year’s “The Black Crown,” which made its way to No. 9 on the Billboard hard rock chart.
The band, whose musical style is referred to as “deathcore,” is originally from Riverside, California, a working-class community 50 miles east of Los Angeles.
(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Will Dunham)
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
(Reuters) – U.S. health officials have found bacteria in lots of an injected steroid and a heart drug made by New England Compounding Center, the pharmacy linked to contaminated steroids that have claimed the lives of at least 28 people.
The Food and Drug Administration said it identified different types of bacteria in three separate recalled batches of NECC‘s preservative-free betamethasone and in a single batch of NECC-supplied cardioplegia solution.
Betamethasone is an injectable steroid, while cardioplegia is used during heart surgery.
The FDA had previously confirmed the presence of a deadly fungus in two different NECC batches of a different injectable steroid tied to the national fungal meningitis outbreak. That drug, preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate, was used to treat back and joint pain.
The agency said it did not know how significant the bacterial contamination was in terms of the risk for human disease and said it had not received reports of confirmed cases of infection related to the organisms found in the two products.
However, the findings “reinforce the FDA’s concern about the lack of sterility in products produced at NECC’s compounding facility,” the agency said in a statement.
Federal health officials previously said they were investigating whether two other NECC products could be linked to fungal infections in three patients, including two who had undergone heart surgery.
NECC, located in Framingham, Massachusetts, shut down in early October and recalled all of its products.
The FDA said tests for fungus in the lots of betamethasone and cardioplegia are still underway.
The latest tally from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists 386 cases of fungal meningitis and 28 deaths linked to injections of NECC steroids.
(Reporting by Deena Beasley; Editing by Andre Grenon and Lisa Shumaker)
Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Maria Elena Salazar refuses to set out plates of her missing son’s favorite foods or orange flowers as offerings for the deceased on Mexico‘s Day of the Dead, even though she hasn’t seen him in three-and-a-half years.
The 50-year-old former teacher is convinced that Hugo Gonzalez Salazar, a university graduate in marketing who worked for a telephone company, is still alive and being forced to work for a drug cartel because of his skills.
“The government, the authorities, they know it, that the gangs took them away to use as forced labor,” said Salazar of her then 24-year-old son, who disappeared in the northern city of Torreon in July 2009.
The Day of the Dead — when Mexicans traditionally visit the graves of dead relatives and leave offerings of flowers, food and candy skulls — is a difficult time for the families of the thousands of Mexicans who have disappeared amid a wave of drug-fueled violence.
With what activists call a mix of denial, hope and desperation, they refuse to dedicate altars on the Nov. 1-2 holiday to people often missing for years. They won’t accept any but the most certain proof of death, and sometimes reject even that.
Numbers vary on just how many people have disappeared in recent years. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says 24,000 people have been reported missing between 2000 and mid-2012, and that nearly 16,000 bodies remain unidentified.
But one thing is clear: just as there are households without Day of the Dead altars, there are thousands of graves of the unidentified dead scattered across the country, with no one to remember them.
An investigation conducted by the newspaper Milenio this week, involving hundreds of information requests to state and municipal governments, indicates that 24,102 unidentified bodies were buried in paupers’ or common graves in Mexican cemeteries since 2006. The number is almost certainly incomplete, since some local governments refused to provide figures, Milenio reported.
And while the number of unidentified dead probably includes some indigents, Central American migrants or dead unrelated to the drug war, it is clear that cities worst hit by the drug conflict also usually showed a corresponding bulge in the number of unidentified cadavers. For example, Mexico City, which has been relatively unscathed by drug violence, listed about one-third as many unidentified burials as the city of Veracruz, despite the fact that Mexico City’s population is about 15 times larger.
Consuelo Morales , who works with dozens of families of disappeared in the northern city of Monterrey, said that “holidays like this, that are family affairs and are very close to our culture, stir a lot of things up” for the families. But many refuse to accept the deaths of their loved ones, sometimes even after DNA testing confirms a match with a cadaver.
“They’ll say to you, ‘I’m not going to put up an altar, because they’re not dead,” Martinez noted. “Their thinking is that ‘until they prove to me that my child is dead, he is alive.”
Martinez says one family she works with at the Citizens in Support of Human Rights center had refused to accept their son was dead, even after three rounds of DNA testing and the exhumation of the remains.
“It was their son, he was very young, and he had been burned alive,” Martinez said by way of explanation.
The refusal to accept what appears inevitable may be a matter of desperation. Martinez said some families in Monterrey also believe their missing relatives are being held as virtual slaves for the cartels, even though federal prosecutors say they have never uncovered any kind of drug cartel forced-labor camp, in the six years since Mexico launched an offensive against the cartels.
But many people like Salazar believe it must be true. “Organized crime is a business, but it can’t advertise for employees openly, so it has to take them by force,” Salazar said.
While she refuses to erect an altar-like offering for her son, she does perform other rituals that mirror the Day of the Dead customs, like the one that involves scattering a trail of flower petals to the doorsteps of houses to guide spirits of the departed back home once a year.
Salazar and her family still live in the same home in Torreon, though they’d like to move, in the hopes that Hugo will return there. They pray three times a day for God to guide him home.
“We live in the same place, and we try to do the same things we used to,” said Salazar, “because he is going to come back to his place, his home, and we have to be waiting for him.”
Mistrust of officials has risen to such a point that some families may never get an answer they’ll accept.
The problem is that, with forensics procedures often sadly lacking in Mexican police forces, the dead my never be connected with the living, which is the whole point of the Mexican traditions.
“As long as the authorities don’t prove the opposite, for us they’re still alive,” Salazar said. “Let them prove it, but let us have some certainty, not just the authorities saying ‘here he is.’ We don’t the government to just give us bodies that aren’t theirs, and that has happened.”
Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Jewish students in the University of California system labeled terrorists for their support of Israel. Black high school students pelted by bananas on a Tennessee campus tour. A hostile student in Maryland challenging his professor to a fight after the teacher limited the use of cell phones and laptops during lectures.
In a society where anonymous Internet commenters freely lob insults, and politicians spew partisan barbs, the decline of basic civility isn’t limited to academia. But the push for more polite discourse — often as an extension of more entrenched diversity efforts — is firmly taking root on campus.
From the University of Missouri to Penn State and Vanderbilt, colleges across the country are treating the erosion of common decency as a public health epidemic on par with measles outbreaks and sexually transmitted diseases.
“What we’re trying to do is remind me people of what they already know, to get back in touch with things they probably learned growing up,” said Noel English, who heads a new Missouri civility campaign called “Show Me Respect,” a nod to the state’s nickname.
The Missouri campaign comes after two white students pleaded guilty in April 2010 to misdemeanor littering charges for dumping cotton balls outside the school’s black culture center during Black History Month; the students were sentenced to 80 hours of community service, two years of probation and had their driver licenses suspended for two months. A 2009 survey of more than 3,500 students found that nearly one in seven reported incidents of harassment on campus, from racial slurs to hostile emails.
At a campus civility workshop earlier this week, Eric Waters, a junior from Mansfield, Texas, who is the football team’s starting tight end, described how other students often label Mizzou football players as “mean” and “disrespectful” womanizers, sometimes to his face.
“It’s not about the stereotypes people put on us,” he said. “We try to carry ourselves like true gentlemen.”
The University of Tennessee enacted its civility campaign in 2011. There had been a cotton ball incident at the Knoxville school’s black cultural center after President Barack Obama‘s election and, in 2010, bananas were thrown at a group of more than 100 black high school students from Memphis during a campus visit.
“We want to be a campus that’s welcoming to all, and hostile to none,” said Chancellor Jimmy Cheek, who now outlines the school’s 10 “principles of civility and community” at freshman orientation. The shared values range from inclusivity and collegiality to respect and integrity.
In some cases, the campus civility campaigns are being challenged by First Amendment advocates who fear that such programs muzzle unpopular speech in the name of tolerance and diversity.
That was the complaint at North Carolina State University, which revised a residence hall policy that, among other stipulations, prohibited dorm dwellers from wearing T-shirts or hanging posters “disrespectful and hurtful to others” while also requiring students to “confront behavior or report to staff incidents of incivility and intolerance.”
The new policy now includes a written caveat calling the civility effort a set of “voluntary expectations” while emphasizing that the school is “strongly committed to freedom of expression.”
“Civility is an important value,” said Robert Shibley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which protested the Raleigh university’s civility policy. “But at the same time, it can’t be made the paramount issue in a free society, because there has to be space for people who have intense feelings about things to express those feelings in a way that really communicates the urgency and the depths of feeling that lies behind their opinions.”
When campuses attempt to compel civil behavior, Shibley said, they become “so committed to civility that if you say something uncivil, you are going to be penalized In some way, that’s going too far. It starts to infringe on the very expressions that are protected by the First Amendment.”
Many credit Pier Forni, a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University, as the dean of the campus civility movement. He started the Hopkins Civility Project 15 years ago, wrote the 2002 book “Choosing Civility” and is a frequent guest speaker on other campuses, including at Missouri earlier this year.
For Forni, the culprits behind contemporary incivility are numerous, from what he called “the crisis of civil engagement” in this country to eroding workplace manners to “radical informality” heightened by Facebook and related social media. Yet he has no interest in making civil behavior a campus requirement.
“Civility should be promoted, not believed in,” he said. “Civility is not something to enforce. “
Among the schools embracing those beliefs is the University of Arizona, which last year opened the National Institute for Civil Discourse after the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six people and injured 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
In 2010, Rutgers University launched its “Project Civility” just before freshman Tyler Clementi killed himself when a roommate secretly recorded the teen’s sexual encounter with another man. English, the Missouri campaign leader, said the New Jersey student’s suicide helped influence her decision to start a program on campus.
She, too, favors the voluntary approach, though her initial instincts said otherwise.
“My first thought was, ‘I’m a lawyer, we need a rule or a policy,’ but then my thinking was, ‘That’s not really necessary,’” she said. “We can have all the policies in the world, but what we want to do is raise awareness and get people thinking … We want to change the culture so it just becomes embedded.”
Or, as Noor Azizan-Gardner, Missouri’s chief diversity officer, put it: “I’m hoping when they graduate they will know what it means to be civil, kind and compassionate.”
___
Online:
Show Me Respect: http://civility.missouri.edu/
University of Tennessee Principles of Civility and Community: http://civility.utk.edu/
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: http://thefire.org/
___ Alan Scher Zagier can be reached at http://twitter.com/azagier
Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (AP) — NBC will hold a benefit concert Friday for victims of Hurricane Sandy featuring some artists native to the areas hardest hit.
Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi of New Jersey and Billy Joel of Long Island are scheduled to appear at the concert, hosted by “Today” show co-host Matt Lauer.
Other performers include Christina Aguilera, Sting and Jimmy Fallon.
The telecast will benefit the American Red Cross and will be shown on NBC and its cable stations including Bravo, CNBC, USA, MSNBC and E! Other networks are invited to join in.
“Hurricane Sandy: Coming Together” will air at 8 p.m. EDT and will be taped-delayed in the West.
The telethon will be broadcast from NBC facilities in Rockefeller Center in New York City.
___
NBC is controlled by Comcast Corp.
Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NUEVA YORK (Reuters Health) – El antidepresivo
desvenlafaxina (Pristiq, de Pfizer) reduce los sofocos en las
mujeres postmenopáusicas, según señala un equipo médico.
A pesar de este resultado, que surge de un subestudio de un
ensayo aleatorio, la Administración de Alimentos y Medicamentos
de Estados Unidos (FDA, por su sigla en inglés) rechazó la
solicitud de Pfizer de aprobación de desvenlafaxina para el
tratamiento de los síntomas vasomotores de la menopausia, como
los sofocos, moderados a graves.
“El único tratamiento que aprobó la FDA para los sofocos de
la menopausia es la terapia con estrógeno”, dijo por e-mail la
autora principal, doctora JoAnn V. Pinkerton. “Las mujeres
necesitan alternativas no hormonales. Necesitan opciones”.
En Menopause, el equipo de Pinkerton, del Sistema de Salud
de University of Virginia, Charlottesville, publica los
resultados de un subestudio de efectividad de 12 semanas de
duración durante un estudio de un año con desvenlafaxina.
El grupo a tratar incluía 365 mujeres que, al azar, tomaron
100 mg/día de desvenlafaxina o placebo. Comparado con el
placebo, el fármaco redujo significativamente la cantidad y la
gravedad de los sofocos a la cuarta y la decimosegunda semanas.
A la semana número 12, desvenlafaxina redujo un 62 por
ciento la cantidad diaria de sofocos moderados y graves,
mientras que el placebo lo hizo un 38 por ciento, mientras que
la gravedad de los síntomas disminuyó, respectivamente un 25 y
12 por ciento.
Los autores analizaron también “una diferencia clínicamente
poco significativa”, es decir, una reducción de 5,35 sofocos
moderados y graves por día. Este resultado se obtuvo en el 64
por ciento de las mujeres tratadas con desvenlafaxina y en el 41
por ciento del grupo control.
“La desvenlafaxina es un tratamiento no hormonal seguro,
bien tolerado y efectivo, con reducciones estadísticamente y
clínicamente significativas de la frecuencia y la gravedad de
los sofocos en las mujeres postmenopáusicas con sofocos de
rápida aparición”, afirmó el equipo.
Pfizer retiró su solicitud de la FDA en febrero, pero el
producto sigue disponible para tratar el trastorno depresivo
mayor.
Pinkerton agregó por e-mail: “Es importante desarrollar
alternativas porque hasta el 75 por ciento de las mujeres padece
sofocos en la menopausia y el 25 por ciento de ellas necesita un
tratamiento”.
La autora comentó también que existen otros remedios no
hormonales. Dijo a Reuters Health que con su equipo evaluó la
gabapentina de liberación extendida (Serada, de Depomed) versus
placebo en un ensayo durante 24 semanas con 600 mujeres
postmenopáusicas.
La frecuencia y la intensidad de los sofocos disminuyeron
con gabapentina a las 12 y 24 semanas, y los sofocos “mejoraron
mucho” o “mejoraron” a las 24 semanas.
Los resultados fueron presentados este mes en la reunión
anual de la Sociedad Norteamericana de Menopausia. También este
mes, la FDA aceptó una nueva solicitud de aprobación para
Serada.
FUENTE: Menopause, online 25 de octubre del 2012
Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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