Former Head of the National Institutes of Health on Autism and Childhood Vaccines
May 13th, 2008Via: CBS:
Dr. Bernadine Healy is the former head of the National Institutes of Health, and the most well-known medical voice yet to break with her colleagues on the vaccine-autism question.
In an exclusive interview with CBS News, Healy said the question is still open.
“I think that the public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis as irrational,” Healy said.
“But public health officials have been saying they know, they’ve been implying to the public there’s enough evidence and they know it’s not causal,” Attkisson said.
“I think you can’t say that,” Healy said. “You can’t say that.”
Healy goes on to say public health officials have intentionally avoided researching whether subsets of children are “susceptible” to vaccine side effects – afraid the answer will scare the public.
“You’re saying that public health officials have turned their back on a viable area of research largely because they’re afraid of what might be found?” Attkisson asked.
Healy said: “There is a completely expressed concern that they don’t want to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large by scaring people. “First of all,” Healy said, “I think the public’s smarter than that. The public values vaccines. But more importantly, I don’t think you should ever turn your back on any scientific hypothesis because you’re afraid of what it might show.”
As an example, Healy points to the existing vaccine court claims.
CBS News has learned the government has paid more than 13,000 brain injury claims in vaccine court since 1988, but is not studying those cases or tracking how many of them resulted in autism.
The branch of the government that handles vaccine court told CBS News: “Some children who have been compensated for vaccine injuries…may ultimately end up with autism or autistic symptoms, but we do not track cases on this basis.”
“What we’re seeing in the bulk of the population: vaccines are safe,” said Healy. “But there may be this susceptible group. The fact that there is concern, that you don’t want to know that susceptible group is a real disappointment to me. If you know that susceptible group, you can save those children. If you turn your back on the notion that there is a susceptible group… what can I say?”
Government officials would not respond directly to Healy’s views… but reiterated, vaccines are safe.
Like Healy, the Kings and the Meads support vaccination, but say it can be made safer.
At age 10, William’s life is full of intensive therapy.
“Horrifying is a good word,” his father George said. “It was horrendous to watch your own child become, in effect, a zombie. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It was awful.”
Jordan, also 10, can’t even communicate as well as he did as a toddler.
“Oh yeah, he doesn’t talk at all anymore” said Jordan’s father, Fred.
Soviet Republic of Britain: Town Halls Should Map Race and Religion to Identify ‘Tension Hotspots’
May 13th, 2008Via: DailyMail:
More than 10 million people are to have their everyday disputes, their politics and their business lives checked by new “tension monitoring” committees.
The committees are to be set up to try to cut the risk of riots or disturbances in the aftermath of terrorist outrages or outbreaks of local racial trouble.
They will ask for and file reports on named troublemakers whose political activities are considered to be raising community tensions.
Reports on the behaviour and attitudes of local residents will be collected by community workers, neighbourhood wardens, local councillors and provided by voluntary organisations, according to a paper published by Communities Secretary Hazel Blears today.
It will then be considered by the monitoring committees run by town halls.
A sample “tension monitoring form” for use in checking on the likelihood of local racial or religious trouble asks for details of individuals considered to be making political trouble.
The monitoring committees will ask for information on those identified as troublemakers with includes “age, gender, ethnicity and faith” of those being reported on.
The call for monitoring of everyday life in the cause of “community cohesion contingency planning” was made by Mrs Blears in a paper aiming to help identify “tension hotspots” and improve cohesion – the Government’s buzzword for reducing racial and religious strife.
The word was adopted in 2006 after the once-dominating left-wing doctrine of multiculturalism was dropped by Labour because it made tensions worse rather than better.
But the establishment of monitoring committees in town halls is likely to generate new concerns about spying and surveillance by local councils.
…
The committees will include representatives from housing authorities, schools, the NHS, the fire brigade, community workers and neighbourhood wardens in area which have them. Voluntary, community and faith groups will also be asked to provide information.
They will record “qualitative community intelligence” alongside reports of race incidents, gang and turf conflicts, disputes between neighbours, complaints about noise, and examples of low local trust, including low trust in politicians.
Economic activity, including business investment, and housing demand will also be monitored. So will political extremism.
The “sample tension monitoring form” provided by civil servants as a model for councils to follow in recording information calls for the name of the monitor and his or her organisation to be filed.
It asks for an assessment of whether levels of community tension are high, medium or low.
Under the heading “political” monitors are asked to provide “details of situation/incident (ie where, when, who (age, gender, ethnicity, faith), and what (useful to specify whether ‘experienced, evidence, or potential).”
Councils are told that under data protection law they are allowed to record details of individuals as long as the material is “fairly” gathered and stored.
Texas: “In-School Suspension Program” Uses GPS Tracking Systems Attached to Students
May 13th, 2008You’ve got to hand it to the New York Times. This one goes down smooth. The GPS system is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It tracks, it traces, it slices, it dices, it gets results, it saves lives. And it saves money! Who needs jail for the kiddies when an “in-school suspension program” is available?
“Big Brother,” you say.
Phooey.
“This is a device that connects you to a buddy who wants to keep you safe and help you graduate,” says Dave Leis, a spokesman for NovaTracker, the company that makes the tracking system.
If that’s not double plus good, I don’t know what is.
Now, I got sidetracked from all the better-living-through-surveillance claptrap onto a different issue. The article says that Jaime Pacheco doesn’t eat breakfast at home, but when he gets to school and activates his tracking unit, he heads to the cafeteria. Does “in-school suspension” include some form of breakfast? Indeed, I think it does.
What gastronomical delights await the kiddies at Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas?
* Shudder *
After some meandering around the high school’s website, I found this menu.
What you’ve got there is a recipe for diabetes and ADHD. Highly refined white flour, sugar, cast off slag from unthinkable, industrial meat production operations and salt. We almost certainly don’t want to know what else.
I called Becky over to look at it and we were both struck dumb by the sight of a main breakfast entrée called a “Breakfast Stick.”
WTF is a breakfast stick?
I played with the handy feeding time configurator and the breakfast stick looks like some form of corn dog. But what’s in that thing?
Anyway, gazing upon the U.S. now just seems like looking at Hell as a fractal. You zoom in, and there’s more Hell. Zoom in again, more Hell. Zoom in again, GPS tracked students. Zoom in again, breakfast stick.
Via: New York Times:
Jaime Pacheco rolled out of bed at dawn last week to the blaring chorus of two alarms. Then Jaime, a 15-year-old high school freshman, smoothed his striped comforter, dumped two scoops of kibble for the dogs out back and strapped a G.P.S. monitor to his belt.
Jaime Pacheco, a student in East Dallas, has not missed school since being chosen by a judge to carry a device that tracks his movements.
By 7:15, Jaime was in the passenger seat of his grandmother’s sport-utility vehicle, holding the little black monitor out the window for the satellite to register. A few miles down the road, at Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas, he got out of the car, said goodbye to his grandmother and paused to press a button on the unit three times. A green light flashed, and then Jaime headed for the cafeteria with plenty of time before the morning bell.
It was not always like this. Jaime used to snooze until 2 p.m. before strolling into school. He fell so far behind that he is failing most of his classes and school officials sent him to truancy court.
Instead of juvenile detention, Jaime was selected by a judge to be enrolled in a pilot program at Bryan Adams in which chronically truant students are monitored electronically. Since Jaime started carrying the Global Positioning System unit April 1, he has had perfect attendance.
“I’m just glad they didn’t take him to jail,” said Jaime’s grandmother Diana Mendez, who raised him. “He’s a good kid. He was just on a crooked path.”
Old Gas Pumps Can’t Handle Ever-Rising Prices
May 13th, 2008Via: AP:
REARDAN, Wash. (AP) — Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can’t register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.
The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.
Many of the same pumps can only count up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers to fill their tanks all the way.
As many as 8,500 of the nation’s 170,000 service stations have old-style meters that need to be fixed — about 17,000 individual pumps, said Bob Renkes, executive vice president of the Petroleum Equipment Institute of Tulsa, Okla.
At Chip Colville’s Chevron station in this eastern Washington town, where men in the family have pumped gas since 1919, three stubby, gray pumps were installed when gas was less than $1 a gallon. They top out at $3.999, only 30 cents above the price of regular gas at Colville’s station.
“In small towns, where you don’t have the volume, there’s no way you can afford to pay for the replacements for these old pumps,” Colville said. “It’s just not economically feasible.”
The problem is worse in extremely rural areas, where “this might be the only pump in town that people can access,” said Mike Rud, director of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association.
Demand for replacements has caused a months-long backlog for companies that make or rebuild the mechanical meters — and that’s just for stations that can afford the upgrade.
For many station owners — who, because of relatively small profit margin on gas, aren’t raking in money even though gas prices are marching higher — replacing the pumps altogether with electronic ones is just not an option.
“The new ones run between $10,000 and $15,000 apiece,” Colville said. “It’s an expense that’s not worth it.”
Mechanical meters can be retrofitted with higher numbers when pump prices climb another dollar. The last time that happened was in late 2005, when gas went over $3 a gallon, and owners of the older pumps installed kits that went to $3.999.
This time around, owners of the old pumps will need to install another kit that can handle prices up to $4.999, and possibly higher. Industry experts say those changes could cost as much as $650 per pump.
This Mob Is Big in Japan
May 13th, 2008Must read. Full text follows.
Via: Washington Post:
This Mob Is Big in Japan
By Jake Adelstein
Sunday, May 11, 2008; B02
I have spent most of the past 15 years in the dark side of the rising sun. Until three years ago, I was a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, and covered a roster of characters that included serial killers who doubled as pet breeders, child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls, and the John Gotti of Japan.
I came to Japan in 1988 at age 19, spent most of college living in a Zen Buddhist temple, and then became the first U.S. citizen hired as a regular staff writer for a Japanese newspaper in Japanese. If you know anything about Japan, you’ll realize how bizarre this is — a gaijin, or foreigner, covering Japanese cops. When I started the beat in the early 1990s, I knew nothing about the yakuza, a.k.a. the Japanese mafia. But following their prostitution rings and extortion rackets became my life.
Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians. And as far as the United States is concerned, Japan may be refueling U.S. warships at sea, but it’s not helping us fight our own battles against organized crime — a realization that led to my biggest scoop.
I loved my job. The cops fighting organized crime are hard-drinking iconoclasts — many look like their mobster foes, with their black suits and slicked-back hair. They’re outsiders in Japanese society, and perhaps because I was an outsider too, we got along well. The yakuza’s tribal features are also compelling, like those of an alien life form: the full-body tattoos, missing digits and pseudo-family structure. I became so fascinated that, like someone staring at a wild animal, I got too close and now am worried for my life. But more on that later.
The Japanese National Police Agency (NPA) estimates that the yakuza have almost 80,000 members. The most powerful faction, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is known as “the Wal-Mart of the yakuza” and reportedly has close to 40,000 members. In Tokyo alone, the police have identified more than 800 yakuza front companies: investment and auditing firms, construction companies and pastry shops. The mobsters even set up their own bank in California, according to underworld sources.
Over the last seven years, the yakuza have moved into finance. Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has an index of more than 50 listed companies with ties to organized crime. The market is so infested that Osaka Securities Exchange officials decided in March that they would review all listed companies and expel those found to have links with the yakuza. If you think this has nothing to do with the United States, think again. Americans have billions of dollars in the Japanese stock market. So U.S. investors could be funding the Japanese mob.
I once asked a detective from Osaka why, if Japanese law enforcement knows so much about the yakuza, the police don’t just take them down. “We don’t have a RICO Act,” he explained. “We don’t have plea-bargaining, a witness-protection program or witness-relocation program. So what we end up doing most of the time is just clipping the branches. . . . If the government would give us the tools, we’d shut them down, but we don’t have ’em.”
In the good old days, the yakuza made most of their money from sleaze: prostitution, drugs, protection money and child pornography. Kiddie porn is still part of their base income — and another area where Japan isn’t acting like America’s friend.
In 1999, my editors assigned me to cover the Tokyo neighborhood that includes Kabukicho, Japan’s largest red-light district. Japan had recently outlawed child pornography — reluctantly, after international pressure left officials no choice. But the ban, which is still in effect, had a major flaw: It criminalized producing and selling child pornography, not owning it. So the big-money industry goes on, unabated. Last month’s issue of a widely available porn magazine proclaimed, “Our Cover Girl Is Our Youngest Yet: 14!” Kabukicho remains loaded with the stuff, and teenage sex workers are readily available. I’ve even seen specialty stores that sell the underwear worn by teenage strippers.
The ban is so weak that investigating yakuza who peddle child pornography is practically impossible. “The United States has referred hundreds of . . . cases to Japanese law enforcement authorities,” a U.S. embassy spokesman recently told me. “Without exception, U.S. officials have been told that the Japanese police cannot open an investigation because possession is legal.” In 2007, the Internet Hotline Center in Japan identified more than 500 local sites displaying child pornography.
There’s talk in Japan of criminalizing simple possession, but some political parties (and publishers, who are raking in millions) oppose the idea. U.S. law enforcement officers want to stop the flow of yakuza-produced child porn into the United States and would support such a law. But they can’t even keep the yakuza themselves out of the country. Why? Because the national police refuse to share intelligence. Last year, a former FBI agent told me that, in a decade of conferences, the NPA had turned over the names and birthdates of about 50 yakuza members. “Fifty out of 80,000,” he said.
This lack of cooperation was partly responsible for an astonishing deal made with the yakuza, and for the story that changed my life. On May 18, 2001, the FBI arranged for Tadamasa Goto — a notorious Japanese gang boss, the one that some federal agents call the “John Gotti of Japan” — to be flown to the United States for a liver transplant.
Goto is alive today because of that operation — a source of resentment among Japanese law enforcement officials because the FBI organized it without consulting them. From the U.S. point of view, it was a necessary evil. The FBI had long suspected the yakuza of laundering money in the United States, and Japanese and U.S. law enforcement officials confirm that Goto offered to tip them off to Yamaguchi-gumi front companies and mobsters in exchange for the transplant. James Moynihan, then the FBI representative in Tokyo who brokered the deal, still defends the operation. “You can’t monitor the activities of the yakuza in the United States if you don’t know who they are,” he said in 2007. “Goto only gave us a fraction of what he promised, but it was better than nothing.”
The suspicions about the Yamaguchi-gumi were confirmed in the fall of 2003, when special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whom I’ve interviewed, tracked down several million dollars deposited in U.S. casino accounts and banks by Susumu Kajiyama, a boss known as “the Emperor of Loan Sharks.” The agents said they had not received a lead from the Tokyo police; they got some of the information while looking back at the Goto case.
Unlike their Japanese counterparts, U.S. law enforcement officers are sharing tips with Japan. Officials from both countries confirm that, in November 2003, the Tokyo police used information from ICE and the Nevada Gaming Control Board to seize $2 million dollars in cash from a safe-deposit box in Japan, which was leased to Kajiyama by a firm affiliated with a major Las Vegas casino. According to ICE Special Agent Mike Cox, the Kajiyama saga was probably not an isolated incident. “If we had some more information from the Japan side,” he told me last year, “I’m sure we’d find other cases like it.”
I’m not entirely objective on the issue of the yakuza in my adopted homeland. Three years ago, Goto got word that I was reporting an article about his liver transplant. A few days later, his underlings obliquely threatened me. Then came a formal meeting. The offer was straightforward. “Erase the story or be erased,” one of them said. “Your family too.”
I knew enough to take the threat seriously. So I took some advice from a senior Japanese detective, abandoned the scoop and resigned from the Yomiuri Shimbun two months later. But I never forgot the story. I planned to write about it in a book, figuring that, with Goto’s poor health, he’d be dead by the time it came out. Otherwise, I planned to clip out the business of his operation at the last minute.
I didn’t bargain on the contents leaking out before my book was released, which is what happened last November. Now the FBI and local law enforcement are watching over my family in the States, while the Tokyo police and the NPA look out for me in Japan. I would like to go home, but Goto has a reputation for taking out his target and anyone else in the vicinity.
In early March, in my presence, an FBI agent asked the NPA to provide a list of all the members of Goto’s organization so that they could stop them from coming into the country and killing my family. The NPA was reluctant at first, citing “privacy concerns,” but after much soul-searching handed over about 50 names. But the Tokyo police file lists more than 900 members. I know this because someone posted the file online in the summer of 2007; a Japanese detective was fired because of the leak.
Of course, I’m a little biased. I don’t think it’s selfish of me to value the safety of my family more than the personal privacy of crooks. And as a crime reporter, I’m baffled that the Japanese don’t share intelligence on the yakuza with the United States.
Then again, perhaps I’m being unreasonable. Maybe some powerful Japanese are simply ashamed of how strong the yakuza have become. And if they’re not ashamed, they should be.
jla.japan at gmail.com
Jake Adelstein is the author of the forthcoming “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.”
NSA vs. Military Academies
May 12th, 2008Via: Wired:
Even with a solid network design and passable software choices, there was an element of intuitiveness required to defend against the NSA, especially once it became clear the agency was using minor, and perhaps somewhat obvious, attacks to screen for sneakier, more serious ones.
“One of the challenges was when they see a scan, deciding if this is it, or if it’s a cover,” says Dean. Spotting “cover” attacks meant thinking like the NSA — something Dean says the cadets did quite well. “I was surprised at their creativity.”
Legal limitations were a surprising obstacle to a realistic exercise. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools’ networks while also defending their own. But only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations (and heaven knows what else) is allowed to take down a U.S. network.
And despite the relative sophistication of the NSA’s assaults, the agency told Wired.com that it had tailored its attacks to be just “a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could distinguish the strongest teams from the weaker ones.”
In other words, grasshopper, nice work — but the NSA is capable of much craftier network take-downs.
U.S. Government Trying to Prevent Meat Company from Testing All of Its Cows for Mad Cow Disease
May 12th, 2008Via: Time:
The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.
The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Arkansas City, Kan.-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.
Less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows are currently tested for the disease under Agriculture Department guidelines. The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers.
“They want to create false assurances,” Justice Department attorney Eric Flesig-Greene told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
But Creekstone attorney Russell Frye contended the Agriculture Department’s regulations covering the treatment of domestic animals contain no prohibition against an individual company testing for mad cow disease, since the test is conducted only after a cow is slaughtered. He said the agency has no authority to prevent companies from using the test to reassure customers.
“This is the government telling the consumers, `You’re not entitled to this information,'” Frye said.
Chief Judge David B. Sentelle seemed to agree with Creekstone’s contention that the additional testing would not interfere with agency regulations governing the treatment of animals.
“All they want to do is create information,” Sentelle said, noting that it’s up to consumers to decide how to interpret the information.
Larger meatpackers have opposed Creekstone’s push to allow wider testing out of fear that consumer pressure would force them to begin testing all animals too. Increased testing would raise the price of meat by a few cents per pound.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. Three cases of mad cow disease have been discovered in the U.S. since 2003.
The district court’s ruling last year in favor of Creekstone was supposed to take effect June 1, 2007, but the Agriculture Department’s appeal has delayed the testing so far.
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
May 12th, 2008DT sent $50 and IL sent $100. Thank you.
China Establishes Company to Make its Own Jumbo Jets
May 12th, 2008Via: AP:
China has established a homegrown company to make passenger jumbo jets, state media reported Sunday — a step forward in the country’s quest to become less dependent on Boeing and Airbus.
China Commercial Aircraft Co. was established in Shanghai with registered capital of 19 billion yuan $2.7 billion, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
It said the central government and the Shanghai government are among the major shareholders, as are China’s two main aircraft manufacturing and servicing companies, China Aviation Industry Corp. I and China Aviation Industry Corp. II, which were split off from state-owned China Aviation Industry Corp. in 1999.
Europe’s Airbus has forecast that China’s domestic market will increase fivefold by 2026. Airbus and Chicago-based rival Boeing dominate the market for commercial airplanes carrying 100 or more people.
Xinhua said Commercial Aircraft Co. will be able to make planes with more than 150 seats.
General manager Jin Zhuanglong said in a Xinhua interview that it was too early to say when a Chinese-developed jumbo jet would be taking off, as it would take a long time to develop homegrown talent and do research.
“According to the development history of Airbus and Boeing, the development and success of civil planes cannot be realized by relying on one or two generations,” he said.
EARTHQUAKE KILLS THOUSANDS IN CHINA
May 12th, 2008Intersting Coincidence?, following the cyclone disaster in Burma—that killed some number of people that varies by orders of magnitude from day to day and by news agency.
Via: CNN:
Up to 5,000 people are feared to have been killed by Monday’s powerful earthquake in just one affected region of central China, the Chinese government said.
State-run news agency Xinhua said authorities in Sichuan Province believe that many people may have died, and about 10,000 people are believed to be injured, in Beichuan County, in the northeastern part of the province.
The Sichuan provincial disaster relief headquarters said 80 percent of the buildings collapsed in the Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County after the 7.8-magnitude quake, Xinhua reported.
Several hundred students are also feared to be buried in collapsed school buildings, the agency said.
The quake was “felt in most parts of China,” Xinhua reported, with the confirmed casualties in the provinces and municipality of Sichuan, Gansu, Chongqing and Yunnan.
Xinhua said several schools collapsed, at least partially, in the quake. At one, as many as 900 students were feared buried.
