By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, Feb. 13/14, 2013

[....] The gun debate has focused on mass shootings and assault weapons since the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., but far more Americans die by turning guns on themselves. Nearly 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national suicide rate has climbed by 12 percent since 2003, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for teenagers.

Guns are particularly lethal. Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether the deaths were in homes with guns, but a series of individual-level studies since the early 1990s found a direct link. Most researchers say the weight of evidence from multiple studies is that guns in the home increase the risk of suicide.[....]

The 113th Congress, including both the House and Senate, gained 11 Democrats, lost nine Republicans, and added six women. It also lost a mustache and seven businesspeople.  

And, it lost its only atheist but gained a Hindu and a Buddhist.

By Julian Borger, The Guardian, Feb. 8, 2013

A report out today by the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington says that the Obama administration has made the decision that the US can make do with just two thirds of its current arsenal of deployed strategic nuclear warheads.

The current ceiling, agreed in the 2010 New Start Treaty with Russia, allows for 1550 of these warheads, consisting in the US case of Minuteman III missiles, submarine-launched Trident missiles and long-range bombers (the 'triad' of US deterrence). The new report says Obama will cut that to 1000-1,100 after an inter-agency review found it would not affect national security and save many billions of dollars.

However, the administration will seek to make the cuts in tandem with Russia, as an extension of New Start, thereby ducking the need for Senate approval of a new treaty [....]

Also see:

Obama to Renew Drive for Cuts in Nuclear Arm
By David E. Sanger, New York Times, Feb. 10, 2013

WASHINGTON — President Obama will use his State of the Union speech on Tuesday to reinvigorate one of his signature national security objectives — drastically reducing nuclear arsenals around the world — after securing agreement in recent months with the United States military that the American nuclear force can be cut in size by roughly a third.

 Mr. Obama, administration officials say, is unlikely to discuss specific numbers in the address, but White House officials are looking at a cut that would take the arsenal of deployed weapons to just above 1,000. Currently there are about 1,700, and the new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia that passed the Senate at the end of 2009 calls for a limit of roughly 1,550 by 2018.

But Mr. Obama, according to an official who was involved in the deliberations, “believes that we can make pretty radical reductions — and save a lot of money — without compromising American security in the second term. And the Joint Chiefs have signed off on that concept.” [....]

By David L. Kirp, New York Times guest Op-Ed, Feb. 9/10, 2013

[....]  Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.

Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. [....]

As someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I’ve never seen the likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe its transformation offers a nationwide strategy. [....]

[David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the forthcoming book “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.”]

BBC News, Feb.10, 2013

Police who are investigating a series of sexual assaults in the southern French city of Marseille have arrested identical twin brothers. The 24-year-old unemployed delivery drivers, named locally as Elwin and Yohan, were placed under investigation on Friday.  Officers say they are sure that one of the two men carried out the attacks, but that they do not know which.

Standard DNA tests are unable to differentiate between their DNA. There have been six similar sexual attacks in Marseille on women aged between 22 and 76 between September 2012 and January 2013.

Police got a lead from CCTV footage on a bus, and as a result they arrested the twin brothers. A victim also identified one of them as her attacker, but could not tell them apart [....]

By Yasir Ghazi, New York Times, Feb. 9/10, 2013

[....]  The camp, on the site of a former American military base near the Baghdad airport known as Camp Liberty, is home to about 3,400 Iranian exiles who are members of Mujahedeen Khalq, or M.E.K., a militant organization. It was removed from the State Department’s terrorist list in September after years of intensive lobbying from prominent American politicians and former military officers, who viewed the group as a legitimate democratic alternative to the Iranian government.

In an e-mail sent to news media outlets in Iraq, the military wing of Hezbollah in Iraq, a militant organization believed to have connections to the main Lebanese group and to Iran, claimed responsibility for the attack and warned that others would follow. [....]

Also see:

Attack on Iranian dissident group in Iraq
By Jane Arraf in Baghdad, Al Jazeera, Feb. 9, 2013

By Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Argument @ ForeignPolicy.com, Feb. 7, 2013

Will Hugo Chávez's revolution die with him?

[....] In explaining the rise of the political left in Latin America over the past decade, Chávez's persona looms large. Politicians like Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Chávez for laying the groundwork toward a renewed form of populism, Latin America's version of socialism. Chávez's illness has only served to highlight that debt. "The issue of the health of brother Chávez is a problem and a worry not just of Venezuela, but of all the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist people," Morales said in January, speaking from behind a podium reading, "We Are All Chávez." But Chávez's charisma and ruthless political genius fail to explain why he has been able to achieve such regional clout. Through a canny use of petrodollars, subsidies to political allies, and well-timed investments, Chávez has underwritten his Bolivarian revolution with cash -- and lots of it. But that effective constellation of money and charisma has now come out of alignment, leaving a power vacuum that will be difficult for Chávez's political heirs across the hemisphere to fill.

Several Latin American leaders would like to succeed him, but no one meets the necessary conditions: Cuba's blessing, a fat wallet, a country that carries enough demographic, political and economic weight, potent charisma, a willingness to take almost limitless risks, and sufficient autocratic control to allow him or her to devote major time to permanent revolution away from home.

What will happen is partly in Cuba's hands. [....]

By Charles Recknagel, Asia Times Online, Feb. 7, 2013

An international human rights group says 54 foreign governments participated in the US intelligence agency's secret detention and rendition operations following terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

The new report, prepared by the New York-based Open Society, is the most extensive description yet prepared by a nongovernmental organization concerning a highly classified program run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Amrit Singh, the author of the report [....] speaking from New York, says she found evidence that 25 countries in Europe, 14 in Asia, and 13 in Africa lent some sort of assistance to the CIA in addition to Canada and Australia. [....]

It also claims that Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Macedonia were among the countries that themselves detained suspects and turned them over to the CIA. Moreover, the report maintains that Iran was involved in the capture and indirect transfer of individuals to the CIA [....]

By Sarah Lyall, New York Times, Feb. 6/7, 2013

LONDON — Shockingly bad care and inhumane treatment at a hospital in the Midlands led to hundreds of unnecessary deaths and stripped countless patients of their dignity and self-respect, according to a scathing report published on Wednesday.

The report, which examined conditions at Stafford Hospital in Staffordshire over a 50-month period between 2005 and 2009, cites example after example of horrific treatment: patients left unbathed and lying in their own urine and excrement; patients left so thirsty that they drank water from vases; patients denied medication, pain relief and food by callous and overworked staff members; patients who contracted infections due to filthy conditions; and patients sent home to die after being given the wrong diagnoses.

“This is the story of the appalling and unnecessary suffering of hundreds of people,” Robert Francis, the lawyer appointed by the government to lead the inquiry, said at a news conference [....] The report into what has been called the biggest scandal in the modern history of the health service found that many of the problems were due to the efforts of the hospital to meet health-service targets, like providing care within four hours to patients arriving at the emergency room. It also said that in its efforts to balance its books and save $16 million in 2006 and 2007 in order to achieve so-called foundation-trust status, which made it semi-independent of control by the central government, the hospital laid off too many people and focused relentlessly on external objectives rather than patient care. [....]

For more see:

Stafford Hospital: Does NHS boss have case to answer?
BBC News, Feb. 7, 2013, and these other links offered there:

• More hospitals to be investigated
• NHS cover-ups 'should be a crime'
• Stafford Hospital Q&A
• The patients who suffered

And this Guardian editorial:

Mid Staffs and the NHS: church in need of reformation, Feb. 6, 2013
What Francis has done is expose a new unhealthy, managerially obsessive culture of targets, money and incentives

So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of U.S. companies?

After all, the stock market is still in the midst of its historic rally. Real estate prices have finally leveled off, and for the first time in five years are actually rising in many locations. And the unemployment rate seems to have stabilized.

It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward a massive market correction, as much as 90%.

One such person publishing this research is Robert Wiedemer, an esteemed economist and author of the New York Times best-selling book Aftershock.

By John F. Burns, New York Times, Feb. 4/5, 2012

LEICESTER, England — Until it was discovered beneath a city parking lot last fall, the skeleton had lain unmarked, and unmourned, for more than 500 years. Friars fearful of the men who slew him in battle buried the man in haste, naked and anonymous, without a winding sheet, rings or personal adornments of any kind, in a space so cramped his cloven skull was jammed upright and askew against the head of his shallow grave.

On Monday, confirming what many historians and archaeologists had suspected, a team of experts at the University of Leicester concluded on the basis of DNA and other evidence that the skeletal remains were those of King Richard III, for centuries the most reviled of English monarchs. But the conclusion, said to have been reached “beyond any reasonable doubt,” promised to achieve much more than an end to the oblivion that has been Richard’s fate since his death on Aug. 22, 1485, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, 20 miles from this ancient city in the sheep country of England’s East Midlands.

Among those who found his remains, there is a passionate belief that new attention drawn to Richard by the discovery will inspire a reappraisal that could rehabilitate the medieval king and show him to be a man with a strong sympathy for the rights of the common man, who was deeply wronged by his vengeful Tudor successors. [.....]

I don't even know what to write about stories like this.

Maybe I do! Thank you, artappraiser, for getting me thinking. This and the gun issue are not at all unconnected. Everything in this country is a business - we have no social compacts like many cultures do as everything literally is about money, money, money. Foster kids and the children of broken families in general are the most likely to get a fake disorder slapped on them - as psychiatric care for children usually poses as a surrogate parent.

We are so off the deep end in having money over everything that the safety, health and well being of children no longer counts for anything at all. People act terribly shocked at children having their bodies riddled at Sandy Hook Elementary but the conditions for that to occur have been in this country for years. The same combination caused Columbine, Virginia Tech, etc. before.

The only thing that counts in America is making cash, cash, cash, and especially in times like these, the altered reality of pharmaceuticals and the sense of security of guns are hot commodities.