cryptogon.com

The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that, despite UN denials, there is now a mountain of evidence suggesting the strain originated in Nepal, and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as UN peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010 — two years ago today. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base.

“What scares me is that the strain from South Asia has been recognized as more virulent, more capable of causing severe disease, and more transmissible,” said John Mekalanos, who chairs the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. “These strains are nasty. So far there has been no secondary outbreak. But Haiti now represents a foothold for a particularly dangerous variety of this deadly disease.”

More than 500,000 Haitians have been infected, and Mekalanos said a handful of victims who contracted cholera in Haiti have now turned up in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and in Boston, Miami and New York, but only in isolated cases.

Turkey, a NATO member, may play a key role, Nikolai Patrushev, who used to head the country’s intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, told Interfax in comments confirmed by his office. The U.S. and Turkey are working on a possible no-fly zone to protect Syrian rebels, Patrushev said.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

…

The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.

According to a study by Barclays Capital, the mania for skyscrapers over the last 140 years is a sure indicator of an imminent crash.

It points out that the construction boom that threw up New York’s Chrysler and Empire State buildings preceded the New York crash of 1929 and Great Depression.

More recently, Dubai built a forest of skyscraping offices, hotels and apartment buildings, including the world’s tallest, the Burj Khalifa, before it got into terrible financial difficulties. In 2010 Dubai had to be bailed out by its neighbour, Abu Dhabi, to avoid going bankrupt.

Bar Cap’s report said: “Thankfully for the world economy, there is not currently a skyscraper under construction that is planned to overtake the height of the Burj Khalifa.”

However, BarCap said the “unhealthy correlation” between construction of the world’s tallest buildings and economic crashes was likely to ensnare China, which is home to half of the world’s skyscrapers currently under construction.

India, which has just two skyscrapers, sometimes defined as buildings over 240 metres (787ft) tall, is also on the radar after giving the go-ahead to its first skyscraper building boom, with 14 under way, including the world’s second-tallest tower in the financial capital, Mumbai.

Andrew Lawrence, director of property research at Barclays Capital in Hong Kong, said: “Building booms are a sign of excess credit.”

Lawrence said that historically, skyscraper construction had been characterised by bursts of sporadic, but intense activity that coincided with easy credit, rising land prices and excessive optimism, but often by the time the buildings were finished, the economy had slipped into recession.

Nurse practitioner Marge Fitzsimmons, who has spent her whole life in LeRoy, N.Y., lives just a few miles from the school the teens attend.

“It started out with sudden head jerks in the middle of October,” Fitzsimmons told NBC News, the tics occasionally interfering with her ability to talk.

It got so bad she had to leave her job working with developmentally disabled patients until the tics subside.

“The motor tics wouldn’t stop, and the vocal tics started, and I went to one of the bosses and said I have to go.”

She hasn’t been back to work in two months. On a good day, Fitzsimmons said, the tics are sporadic. On a bad day, she cannot control them. Extensive testing – including a CAT scan and blood work – didn’t provide any answers, the same frustration experienced by the teens.

Another topic for discussion: at least another 2 children have begun exhibiting similar symptoms as the other 12; and it’s possible that as many as 16 children have contracted this ‘mystery illness.’ (For obvious reasons, some parents are seeking to keep their children as far away from the media spotlight as possible.)

…

It was also recently revealed that Erin Brockovich has become interested in this case.

“It’s happened before, all around the world, in different parts of the world. It’s a rare phenomena. Physicians are intrigued by it,” Mechtler told TODAY on Wednesday. “The bottom line is these teenagers will get better.”

On the show Tuesday, psychologist and TODAY contributor Dr. Gail Saltz noted that just because the girls’ symptoms may be psychological in origin doesn’t make them any less real or painful.

“That’s not faking it. They’re real symptoms,” Saltz continued. “They need a psychiatric or psychological treatment. Treatment does work.’’

Conversion disorder symptoms usually occur after a stress event, although a patient can be more at risk if also suffering from an illness. Symptoms may last for days or weeks and can include blindness, inability to speak, numbness or other neurologic problems.

It’s unclear which of the girls first showed symptoms, or whether any particular event triggered the outbreak. High school cheerleader and art student Thera Sanchez says her tics, stammer and verbal outbursts appeared out of the blue after a nap one day last October.

“I was fine. I was perfectly fine. There was nothing going on, and then I just woke up, and that’s when the stuttering started,” Sanchez told TODAY.

“I’m very angry,’’ Sanchez told TODAY’s Ann Curry during an interview Tuesday. “I’m very frustrated. No one’s giving me answers.’’

The New York State Health Department has been investigating the case for more than three months and says the school building is not to blame. Officials from the LeRoy Junior-Senior High School in upstate New York, where all the girls attended when their symptoms began, have released environmental reports, conducted by an outside agency, showing no substances in any of the school buildings that could cause health problems.

Health officials ruled out carbon monoxide, illegal drugs and other factors as potential causes. Officials say no one at the school is in any danger.

“We have conclusively ruled out any form of infection or communicable disease and there’s no evidence of any environmental factor,’’ Dr. Gregory Young of the New York Department of Health told NBC News.

But some of the girls’ parents say they’re not satisfied with the explanations so far.

Parents have been demanding answers since late 2011.

An investigation was launched into why these children — all girls who attend the same school, Le Roy, in New York — have come down with this mysterious illness.

Visits to psychologists, medical doctors, MRIs, and more, have been conducted over the past months. Nothing has been revealed.

The story took an unsettling turn this week when a government health official told parents not to worry, that they know what’s been making the children suffer these symptoms; but that the government will not permit the disclosure of details, not even to the parents.

Named only as Andreas L, the priest told a court in Braunschweig that he had first abused the nine-year-old son of a widowed woman parishioner.

After being banned by his diocese from making further contact with the boy, he abused two brothers, aged nine and 13.

…

According to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, farmer income derived from Afghanistan’s opium crop in 2011 was $1.4 billion (1.09 billion euros), representing nine percent of GDP.

“Opium is therefore a significant part of the Afghan economy and provides considerable funding to the insurgency and fuels corruption,” Yury Fedotov, executive director of the UN office, said in a statement.

Afghanistan grows about 90 percent of the world’s opium. The UN said poppy-crop cultivation covered more than 131,000 hectares in 2011, up seven per cent from the previous year.

The overall opium crop increased by 61 per cent, from 3,600 metric tons in 2010 to 5,800 metric tons in 2011.

Using American dollars and US passports, the agents passed themselves off as members of the Central Intelligence Agency in the operations, notably in London, according to memos from 2007 and 2008, said the report.

Jundallah (Soldiers of God) says it is fighting for the interests of the southeastern province’s large ethnic Baluch community, whose members, unlike most Iranians, mainly follow the Sunni branch of Islam.

The Baluch straddle the border with neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan and Jundallah militants have taken advantage of the unrest in the region to find safe haven in the border region.

In July it claimed responsibility for attacking the Grand Mosque in the provincial capital Zahedan, reportedly targeting members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps, killing 28 people.

“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” a US intelligence officer told Foreign Policy.

In all, S&P, which took away the United States’ AAA rating last summer, lowered the ratings of nine countries, complicating Europe’s efforts to find a way out of a debt crisis that still threatens to cause worldwide economic harm.