By Camillus Eboh in Ajuba, Reuters, Feb. 21, 2013

Nigeria's secret service say they have arrested a "terrorist cell" trained in Iran who planned to attack U.S. and Israeli targets in Africa's most populous nation.

The State Security Service (SSS) said they arrested Abdullahi Mustapha Berende and two other Nigerians in December after Berende made several suspicious trips to Iran where he interacted with Iranians in a "high profile terrorist network".

"His Iranian sponsors requested that he identifies and gathers intelligence on public places and prominent hotels frequented by Americans and Israelis to facilitate attacks," SSS spokeswoman Marilyn Ogar said in a statement.

"There is conclusive evidence that Berende in collaboration with his Iranian handlers were involved in grievous crimes against the national security of this country." [....]

By Michael Moss for New York Times Sunday Magazine, Feb. 20/24, 2012

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. [....]

The conventional meme I gather is that Israel is blockading Gaza for the simple reason that it is mean and wants to punish the Palestinians there for no reason at all, and that security concerns are mere pretext for the blood-thirsty, civilian slaughtering military of the Jewish State. 

The notion that Israel is and always was starving the Gazan people, is of course an absolute lie and a blood libel in many instances.  But to my principal point this morning, I submit to you that Israel, and only Israel, is the one nation-state in the history of the world that would be accused of maintaining a prison of an entire population when that population has a border with another country that Israel has no control over.  That nation is Egypt and it is run by the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Here are the facts.  Egypt continues to prevent the free flow of goods and people into and out of Gaza.  Let me put it another way: Egypt, led by the latest sectarian dictator or sectarian dictator-puppet to enter the world stage, continues to blockade Gaza as Mubarek did.  And, to make matters "worse" (or not), Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, is now flooding the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza with sewer water to shut down that trade, and they are doing so for--get this, security reasons.

There is so much to be sad about in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  There is so much to be sad about when it comes to Israeli policy specifically.  But personally and to the extent I represent other Jews who cannot be accused of not listening to other viewpoints-- I just will continue without apology to turn off folks who lead with false charges of Israeli blockades or genocide or whatever.  That dog don't hunt, and reacting to that dog is what I find myself doing more often than not.  And that's cool, because we play with the hand we're dealt.

Contrary to what is often said, the “original sin” of the South is not slavery, or even racism.  It is cheap, powerless labor.

By Peer Gatter, ForeignPolicy.com, Feb. 18, 2013 (with Slideshow)

For Imam Yahya, one of the last kings of Yemen, qat was a delight, something to be praised in his poems. For his adversary, the revolutionary Mohammed al-Zubayri, the plant was "the devil in the shape of a tree."

That hardy tree -- famed among farmers for its drought resistance and whose leaves, when chewed, act as a psychoactive stimulant -- is today an integral part of Yemeni life. On average, 72 percent of Yemeni men chew the bitter leaves of the qat plant. The qat sector provides employment for one in every seven working Yemenis. The income qat provides allows many to remain in their rural hometowns instead of drifting into the cities to seek work. In some highland districts, over 90 percent of farmers are involved in qat agriculture.

Social life in Yemen revolves around qat. It is an accepted habit across all strata of society [....]

Author bio.:

AIRING TUESDAY, FEB. 19, 2013

PBS.org:

In the wake of the mass killings at Sandy Hook, FRONTLINE looks for answers to the elusive question: who was Adam Lanza?

In the wake of the mass killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, FRONTLINE investigates a young man and the town he changed forever. Adam Lanza left behind a trail of death and destruction, but little else. He left no known friends, no diary. He destroyed his computer and any evidence it might have provided. His motives, and his life, remain largely a mystery. In collaboration with The Hartford Courant, FRONTLINE looks for answers to the central—and so far elusive—question: who was Adam Lanza? .....

Also see:

How Do You Raise a Child Like Adam Lanza?
PBS.org, Feb. 15, 2013

For months, FRONTLINE and the Hartford Courant have been investigating the young man who took the lives of so many in Newtown, Conn.

Through our reporting, at least one thing has become clear: His mother, Nancy, knew something was different about Adam, even from his days as a student at Sandy Hook Elementary.

But what? And how did Nancy, who worked so hard to help him, handle raising a child with developmental difficulties even as her older son flourished?

In the course of the investigation, Courant reporters Alaine Griffin and Josh Kovner met with Wendy Wipprecht, whose son was in Adam’s first-grade class when the two boys were just six years old. Watch this clip of their conversation (at link), and tune in next Tuesday, Feb 19, for our two-part series on the tragedy in Connecticut: Raising Adam Lanza and Newtown Divided. Check your local listings here.

Jeez, I didn't expect a news story to just come flat out with it.

LAST autumn Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, leased a Stratasys 3D printer. He wanted to print a gun, and more—he and the group he founded, Defense Distributed, wanted to develop blueprints for 3D printing of guns and gun parts, and distribute those blueprints online. Mr Wilson’s motives are overtly political; he wants to “[expand] a free sphere of action...in contradistinction to a planned regulatory scheme...The file is the message. Anyone can have it, anyone can print it, anyone can use it.” Stratasys was not amused. Mr Wilson says they reclaimed their printer before he had even set it up.

Here's an interesting idea.  Any thoughts on this, Dagbloggers?

From ABC News:

Giving a cranky child cough medicine to put him or her to sleep may not seem like child abuse, but it can be dangerous or even deadly for the child.

Parental misuse of cough medicine nearly killed one Texas infant recently, according to Amitava Dasgupta, a toxicologist called in to consult on the case. The infant came into Children's Memorial Hermann "in bad shape" and was taken directly to the intensive care unit and put on a ventilator, he said.

The mother gave the infant one dose of "cough medicine in the afternoon and one in the evening to put the baby to sleep so it wouldn't disturb them," Dasgupta said.

He suspected it was an occasional trick used by the mother. It was unclear whether the infant got an adult or pediatric dose.

"The baby became unresponsive ... and almost died from an overdose of dextromethorphan, a common ingredient in cough medicine," he said. "In this case, it was not an intentional overdose, it was lack of information."

Review of Oliver Sacks' new book, Hallucinations [300pp. Picador. £18.99,]

by Raymond Tallis for The Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 13, 2013

[....] the isolation hallucinations impose on those who suffer from them is compounded by a reluctance to speak of them. And yet they are extremely common, as Sacks points out in his opening chapter when he talks about the “silent multitudes” of visual images that may fill the gathering darkness when eyesight starts to fail. The Charles Bonnet syndrome – named after the polymath physician who first described it in the eighteenth century – is marked by extraordinarily complex and variable images. This is how Rosalie, a blind ninety-year-old woman in a nursing home, described what she “saw”: [....]

There is an intuitive explanation of why perceptual loss – as in blindness and in experimental sensory deprivation tanks – should be associated with hallucinations: that nature, the brain, the mind, abhors a vacuum. This, however, does not explain why, in Rosalie’s case, the symptoms began only many years after she had gone blind. Nor does it account for the richness of her hallucinations. The general propensity to hallucinate, however, is unsurprising, given the complexity of the processes – cerebral and mental – that underpin ordinary perception and the extent to which the world we experience around us is a construct that goes far beyond the raw material of sensation. It is not surprising that they can be induced in so many different ways. Sacks’s masterly catalogue raisonné of these coinages of the mind surveys the effect of drugs (prescribed and recreational), migraine (where there are transient alterations of the blood flow to parts of the brain), epilepsy (in which there are massive spontaneous neural discharges), delirium (associated with fevers and toxins of various sorts), sleep (normal and abnormal), disturbances of body image (following loss of a limb or a stroke), near-death experiences (after cardiac arrest), and direct stimulation of the brain (in waking subjects undergoing epilepsy surgery). In doing so, he draws on his previous writing, and in some respects this could be seen as the summa neurologica of this supreme observer of the phenomenology of neurological disease. [....]