Posted on28 February 2013.
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Source: http://uwire.com/2013/02/28/tips-for-women-s-health-from-traditional-chinese-medicine/
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China Daily / Reuters
Drug lord Naw Kham is taken from a Chinese jail to be executed on Friday.
By Ed Flanagan, Producer, NBC News
BEIJING ? A notorious gang leader and drug lord from Myanmar was among four foreigners executed in China Friday, marking the first time Beijing has extradited, tried and put to death foreign nationals.?
Naw Kham and three accomplices from Thailand and Laos were given a lethal injection in Yunnan?s provincial capital, Kunming, late Friday afternoon.
The four were found guilty last year and sentenced Wednesday for the October 2011 hijacking of two cargo ships and the murder of 13 Chinese sailors on the Mekong River.
But Beijing?s decision to live broadcast the final moments of the men as they waited in their cells followed by their walk to waiting police cars to the execution facility has drawn criticism across China?s websphere.
The four were additional found guilty of smuggling drugs, kidnapping and hijacking cargo ships in the ?Golden Triangle,? a section of territory that overlaps parts of Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos that accounts for much of Asia?s opium and methamphetamines production.
Beijing contends that, while Naw Kham masterminded the hijacking of the two Chinese cargo ships, he also colluded with Thai soldiers who may have been responsible for the slaying of the sailors.?
Thai authorities are investigating nine of their soldiers alleged to be involved in the incident.
The capture of Naw Kham ? who was at the center of the region's bustling drug trade ? was a coup for Chinese police and anti-drug ministries, which reportedly spent a year tracking the infamous smuggler.
The search was unprecedented as it marked the first time that Chinese forces were seen actively searching for foreign national criminal suspects outside of China?s borders.
Task force
The importance Beijing placed on the search was underscored by a report last month by Chinese state media that revealed a task force set up to capture Naw Kham had at one point considered a controversial plan to use an unmanned drone to bomb a suspected hideout of Naw Kham?s gang in northeastern Myanmar. ??
The scheme was scrapped after the order to capture Naw Kham alive and bring him to trial was reiterated from senior leaders.
Naw Kham?s capture and subsequent trial was given significant coverage in Chinese state media. In the run up to Friday?s execution, long reports detailing the gang?s crimes, celebrating the diligent work of China?s security forces and explaining the method of execution were repeatedly played on Chinese broadcaster CCTV.
CCTV also ran two hours of live coverage leading up to the executions, showing the men?s final moments as they were led from their prison cells to execution facility. Despite rampant rumors and speculation that the state broadcaster was planning on showing the execution live, it ended its live coverage after the men were driven away.??
The magnitude of Naw Kham?s capture and execution was never underplayed, with one CCTV reporter noting that officials there were comparing Naw Kham?s case to the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
The comparison carries an undeniable message from the country?s ruling Communist Party to its people: China can and will look out for its nationals both at home and abroad.
But many in China found the live broadcast of the men?s final moments in poor taste and an uncomfortable reminder of show executions from China?s turbulent period during the Cultural Revolution.
?Even though they are deserved to die, these criminals have dignity too,? wrote one user on China?s Twitter-like service, Weibo, ?The Cultural Revolution is back.?
?China is a country without humanity,? lamented another.
?CCTV is as cruel as these criminals,? one user bluntly noted.?
Mo Shaoping, a prominent criminal lawyer and advisor at the Central University of Finance and Economics Law School, argued that Beijing?s decision to broadcast the prisoners? final moments was less about striking a nationalist chord and more about showing how the country has improved its handling of the death penalty ? a sensitive topic for China?s leadership.
?China has made progress in how it deals with the death penalty,? Mo said. ?showing everything live helps people see that prisoners are being treated humanely in their final moments.?
Indeed, much of the commentary on CCTV as cameras rolled on Naw Kham in his cell discussed how he had been given a full doctor?s inspection and that officers in the room had made small chat and offered cigarettes to the kingpin to help him relax.
They also noted that Naw had actually gained weight and looked healthier after months under Chinese supervision.
Mo also noted that the use of lethal injection mean that potential donor organs could not be harvested from the men, addressing another common criticism of China?s previous handling of state executions.
NBC News Le Li contributed to this report.
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DENVER (AP) ? A snowstorm moving across the Midwest forced about 60 students to spend the night at their Colorado school when a state highway was closed due to dangerous conditions that left some drivers stranded in their cars, as winter weather continued to cause problems for a wide swath of the country.
Tens of thousands remained without power in Michigan, while adverse conditions continued to disrupt flights at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. In eastern Wisconsin, hundreds of vehicles were stranded or ended up in crashes as a winter storm made travel dangerous. And in Kansas, the latest snowstorm to hit the state was being blamed for six deaths.
According to the air traffic tracking website FlightAware.com, about 100 flights in and out of Chicago's airports have been canceled for Wednesday. Flights into O'Hare International Airport are being delayed an average of about an hour.
On the plains in the eastern half of Colorado, wind and snow created whiteout conditions Tuesday afternoon just as buses began taking students home from the Miami-Yoder school district school about 40 miles east of Colorado Springs. The buses turned back to the school and about 60 students, ranging from preschoolers to 12th graders, watched movies, played basketball, ate concession-stand pizza and talked to their parents before bedtime.
The older kids slept on wrestling and gym mats covered with coats, while the younger ones curled up on preschool napping mats, Principal Sharon Webb said.
The school is a large version of a one-room schoolhouse. The students all know each other, and many are related, which Webb said gave it the feel of a sleepover. She said parents were understanding.
"When you live out here in this wide-open country, you know they're where it's the safest," she said of the school.
Daylight showed how powerful the wind had been. Outside, there were drifts up to 4 feet high, but the grass was still visible on the football field.
The blowing snow also temporarily closed a 150-mile stretch of Interstate 70 from just outside Denver to the Kansas line, along with other smaller highways in eastern Colorado, including the one leading to the school. Deputies in surrounding El Paso County responded to about 40 calls for help from stranded drivers or reports of vehicles off the road that might still have people inside. No injuries were reported.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said Wednesday the latest winter storm to hit his state caused six deaths.
The governor said two people died in traffic crashes, two siblings died from carbon monoxide poisoning in Kansas City, Kan., a woman died in southwest Kansas while shoveling snow, and another Kansas City resident was killed while walking in the snow.
The storms that crossed Kansas last Thursday and again this week dropped more than 2 feet of snow in some places and knocked out power to thousands of customers, mostly in eastern counties.
In Michigan, utilities said Wednesday roughly 50,600 homes and businesses lost electrical service after a storm that hit the state starting Tuesday knocked down power lines and tree branches.
Detroit-based DTE Energy Co. said about 40,000 of its customers were without power in the morning, and that Washtenaw County was the hardest hit.
Consumers Energy reported about 10,600 of its customers were without power in Wednesday afternoon. The subsidiary of Jackson-based CMS Energy Corp. said those outages include about 2,624 customers in Jackson County and 2,086 in Calhoun County.
The utilities said crews would work around the clock to restore power.
The National Weather Service said 9 inches of snow were reported in Muskegon, Mich., as of Wednesday morning. Authorities said weather might be a factor in crashes that killed motorists in Sanilac and Monroe counties.
In Wisconsin, there were more than 340 stranded vehicles and crashes in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Ozaukee and Washington counties after heavy snowfall that started Tuesday and continued into Wednesday.
The storm dumped 14 inches in Sheboygan County, where sheriff's Lt. Mark Rupnik said they've had at least 100 calls for stranded vehicles, vehicles in ditches or accidents. He said the main highways were drivable as of Wednesday afternoon but expected the secondary roads to be a problem for the next day.
Several area school districts canceled classes Wednesday, and there were power outages in the Milwaukee area.
Elsewhere, authorities said no one was injured after a train collided with a car that was stuck in snow on railroad tracks in Woodward, Okla., where at least 15 inches of snow fell.
The car's driver tried to drive over the train tracks Wednesday morning but became trapped on the snow-covered road, Oklahoma City television station KWTV reported.
Authorities say the driver was able to exit the car safely but couldn't push the vehicle from the tracks before the train smashed into it. The car was totaled in the collision.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/colo-kids-stranded-school-overnight-snow-162605660.html
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who take a certain type of diabetes drug to lower blood sugar levels may be at an increased risk of developing an inflamed pancreas, according to a new study.
Glucagonlike peptide 1(GLP-1) therapies that include exenatide - marketed as Byetta by an alliance between Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca - and sitagliptin - marketed as Januvia by Merck - have been linked to pancreatitis before in studies on animals and small groups of patients, said the study's lead author.
"New therapies and risks are only evaluated when studies are done. We need to know (the drugs) are effective in lowering blood sugar, but we also need to know about risks," said Dr. Sonal Singh, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Pancreatitis, which can cause life-threatening complications, is rare but more common in people with type 2 diabetes. Singh said pancreatitis occurs in about three of every 1,000 diabetes patients.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are about 19 million Americans diagnosed with diabetes, and another 7 million who have the disease but don't know it yet.
In people with type 2 diabetes, the body doesn't produce enough insulin or is resistant to what it does produce.
For the new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers used data on 1,269 diabetes patients between the ages of 18 and 64 years old, who were admitted to U.S. hospitals with pancreatitis in 2005 through 2008.
They compared those to 1,269 other diabetes patients who were similar, but were not hospitalized with pancreatitis.
Overall, they found 87 of the diabetes patients with pancreatitis were taking GLP-1 therapies, compared to 58 of the diabetes patients without pancreatitis.
Singh told Reuters Health that the findings show the drugs are linked to a doubling of the risk of pancreatitis - about six cases per 1,000 diabetics.
"I won't say you should be alarmed about the findings, but it's something you should consider," he said.
?CHANGING TREATMENT'
Dr. Aaron Cypess, a staff endocrinologist in the clinic of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, said the new study will not change how he treats patients, but it may influence him to go over his patients' risk factors for pancreatitis.
"For me personally it's not going to change my practice pattern in terms of stopping the drugs, but we may revisit whether you're showing any of the risk factors," said Cypess, who was not involved with the new study.
In a joint statement, the American Diabetes Association and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists also said the new findings should not change how doctors treat diabetes patients.
"The analysis is a retrospective study using data from an administrative database. This type of analysis is not considered as robust as a prospective randomized controlled clinical trial, the gold standard for evaluating treatments," the organizations wrote in the statement.
They continue that there are nine of those "gold standard" trials in the works that should provide answers soon.
The current study also had limitations, including that the diabetes patients hospitalized with pancreatitis tended to lead a less healthy lifestyle than those who did not have the condition.
In a commentary, Belinda Gier and Dr. Peter Butler from the University of California, Los Angeles, write supporters say the drugs are safe and offer some advantages over older medications.
Currently, the labels for Januvia and Byetta carry warnings that there have been reports of pancreatitis in people taking the drugs.
Other side effects of Byetta include nausea and other stomach issues. For Januvia side effects also include respiratory infections and headaches. Cypess told Reuters Health both drugs are still protected by patents and can be expensive.
Representatives from Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb said they - along with drug regulators - actively monitor reports of adverse events in users of their drugs, and have not found evidence showing the drugs cause pancreatitis.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/YJFiEm JAMA Internal Medicine, online February 25, 2013.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/diabetes-drugs-tied-pancreatitis-study-210504575.html
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NBA legend Michael Jordan is best known for scoring on the basketball court, but these days he's netting a lot more than three-pointers. Jordan's a pro in real estate, too, it seems -- because he's just gotten a huge deal on his second home in the Charlotte, N.C., area. The b-ball star and Charlotte Bobcats owner bought a 12,310-square-foot home on North Carolina's Lake Norman for $2.8 million, the Charlotte Observer reported.
The waterfront mansion was a foreclosure that the bank repossessed last August, according to Zillow. It was listed for $3.49 million, so Jordan must have some negotiating skills. The six-bedroom, eight-bathroom home sits on the seventh hole of The Peninsula Club. We're not sure whether that's a good thing, since Jordan has a knack for getting kicked out of swanky country clubs for violating dress codes.
The three-level home has a fitness center and a two-story great room that opens to a terraced patio. There's a large pool and spa in the backyard, as well as a boat slip and unparalleled panoramic lake views. "It's fantastic," Dave Gilroy, commissioner of the town of Cornelius, where Jordan's new home is, told the Observer. "He got a great buy on that house."
Find homes for sale in Charlotte, N.C., or search listings in your area.
Follow us on Twitter at @AOLRealEstate or connect with AOL Real Estate on Facebook.
Source: http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2013/02/28/michael-jordan-home-charlotte-north-carolina/
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Dwarf galaxies dancing around the spiral galaxy Andromeda have boosted a controversial alternative to the idea of dark matter ? the invisible stuff that most astronomers think makes up about 80 per cent of the matter in the universe.
Researchers looking at the speeds of stars in Andromeda's satellite galaxies have found that their motion is a near-perfect fit with what is predicted by modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. According to MOND, alterations to Newton's laws of motion and gravity can explain at least some of the observed effects that have been attributed to dark matter.
The speed of visible matter in rotating galaxies had been one of the strongest arguments for dark matter. Stuff on the edges of galaxies is zooming around much too fast to be consistent with the gravitational pull of the mass we can see, and should therefore be flung off. Something must be adding enough gravity to hold galaxies together ? and that's where unseen dark matter comes in. The effect is particularly strong in tiny dwarf spheroidal galaxies, which are traditionally thought to be 99 per cent dark matter.
In the 1980s Mordehai Milgrom, then at Princeton University, tweaked Newton's laws so that an object in a very weak gravitational field experiences a slightly stronger pull than Newton would have predicted. He showed that this revised version of gravity, now called MOND, can neatly describe the observed rotation of material in giant spiral galaxies without the need for dark matter.
Milgrom, now at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, and Stacy McGaugh of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, have just shown that the formula works equally well for predicting the speeds of stars in dwarf spheroidal galaxies. They matched their computer models with new, independent observations of 17 Andromeda satellite galaxies.
"Our predictions are spot on. Just looking at the numbers for each dwarf, it is hard to distinguish the theory from the data," McGaugh says. The pair also used MOND to predict the speeds of stars in ten more faint dwarfs that have yet to be measured.
However, MOND is not widely accepted because it is not clear why gravity should change in weaker fields, whereas multiple theories can provide candidate particles for dark matter, and dark matter helps explain the large-scale structure of the universe. In addition, although MOND works well for stars circling around in a galaxy, for over a decade it has failed to predict the speeds at which whole galaxies orbit around each other in clusters ? something McGaugh himself describes as frustrating. To reproduce those observations requires unseen matter of some form to provide the gravity needed.
While clearly not a triumph for MOND, the cluster problem is not a disaster either, says James Binney, an astrophysicist from the University of Oxford. He believes that some sort of MOND-like behaviour may manifest itself on small scales, where dark matter is too rarefied to have an appreciable influence. On larger scales, like in galaxy clusters, dark matter would still hold sway.
For Avi Loeb of Harvard University, MOND is weakened by the continuing need for extra matter to account for the motion of orbiting galaxies. "It is not elegant any more because it leads to two speculations: first that you need to modify gravity, second that you still need some dark matter," he says. But that doesn't mean he wants to simply junk MOND. "The theory deserves a lot of respect."
Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1301.0822
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For small businesses, buying and managing health insurance is a ?pain in the buns,? to quote my new favorite ad. Not only are its complicated terms, lack of transparency, slow quoting and on-boarding process and paper trail a pain in your buns, but health insurance can be a massive pain in your wallet, to boot. Hidden costs are everywhere.
Y Combinator-backed SimplyInsured is launching today with a solution. Founders Vivek Shah and George Huo, who were also both early employees at YC startup Cardpool (which sold to Blackhawk Network in late 2011), have built a simple, online health insurance manager and quote engine for small businesses, which aims to explain in plain English what is or isn?t working about your current plan and help you identify hidden costs and cost-savings.
SimplyInsured analyzes thousands of insurance policies in an attempt to find small business owners the best coverage, price and value for their unique needs, in turn, handling all the forms and paperwork automatically and paperlessly that help you get a new plan up and running quickly. Of course, if the concept behind SimplyInsured sounds at all familiar, that?s because the startup shares a similar mission with another recently-launched Y Combinator company, Zenefits, which we covered last week.
Sure, that makes for a potentially awkward situation for Y Combinator and for both startups, and, honestly, it?s surprising that this doesn?t happen more often. YC founder Paul Graham says of the situation:
We?ve had this happen before, though not to this degree in the same batch. Companies evolve, so unless you dictate their ideas to them there is always some chance that two companies you fund will compete. E.g. Google and Apple have become competitors, and few would have expected that. But while this is an awkward situation, we have procedures for dealing with it, and we know from office hours that they ended up in the same spot by evolution and not because one copied the other.
While there is most definitely overlap, both startups have taken it in stride thus far, welcome the competition and the opportunity to learn from the success (or slip-ups) of the other, as they set out to build differentiated health insurance managers. When asked to describe how SimplyInsured is looking to set itself apart from its fellow Y Combinator startup, Huo and Shah say that they?ve opted to approach health insurance from the consumer?s perspective ? in other words, the driving questions they want to help small businesses answer are, for example, what medical issues are you worried about and how much will they cost?
Rather than offering a one-stop shop for managing a wide range of employee benefits (as Zenefits has sought out to do), the startup?s software estimates the cost of having a baby or going to the emergency room, the particular procedures and scenarios, which the founders believe are ignored by the majority of health insurance brokers. By providing deep comparisons ? not just premiums and maximums ? SimplyInsured wants to eliminate the fear (and FUD) around the hidden costs inherent to health insurance purchasing, while actively guiding companies to the best, personalized coverage and plan(s).
Of course, Zenefits and SimplyInsured are not the only startups tackling this long-standing problem, nor are they the only ones looking to bring the process online. Both Cake Health and Simplee share similar mission statements (to a degree), but the SimplyInsured co-founders are of the mindset that Cake Health and Simplee are targeting the latter half of the problem. That is to say: The startups help individuals and small businesses save money once they?re already struggling with bloated, cost-heavy plans.
While downstream cost-savings is a valuable service in and of itself ? and one that SimplyInsured offers at launch ? the company is also looking to help its customers save money during the purchasing process, Shah tells us, which he believes will lead to a larger net savings (and lower bills) down the line.
Differentiation aside, how does SimplyInsured work, you ask? Essentially, the startup?s service works in three steps. First, SimplyInsured helps small businesses find and identify the plan that best fits their particular needs. Traditionally, this process requires business owners or founders to set up in-person meetings or calls with insurance brokers and, while this provides the security blanket of being able to talk to intermediaries face-to-face, it?s inefficient and takes time.
Instead, SimplyInsured has opted to bring this online and automate the process, developing algorithms that surface relevant information based on a company?s needs, while offering a greater degree of price transparency ? or at least that?s the idea. Essentially, it?s similar to the difference one experiences in booking flights by calling a travel agent versus using Hipmunk or Kayak.
Next, once the right plan is identified, the service automates the on-boarding process (like Zenefits) to help streamline how companies sign up and activate each of their employees. Usually, this involves a lot of paperwork, faxing and brokers driving to your offices with a stack of forms to sign. Again, like Zenefits, the startup is making this process completely paper-free, allowing businesses to complete the process online in 10 minutes, rather than two weeks.
Lastly, SimplyInsured attempts to simplify the ongoing administration of the plan through a one-click on-boarding process and by making it easy for companies or employees to switch plans at any point in the future.
Once Obamacare (or the PPACA) goes fully into effect in 2014, there is an expectation that the new state health insurance exchanges will create increased competition among insurers for the average small business customer. The Act requires insurers to offer an online product and also reduces the overall commission brokers can claim from small business clients. Under previous legislature, these commissions were already reduced to seven percent, and while this means increased competition for fewer dollars, the co-founders expect that many traditional, offline brokers will struggle to make the transition and may not survive.
In the post-Obamacare world, Shah says, only the low-cost providers will be able to survive, which means there could be a big reduction in the number of agents in the U.S., which now number around 400K. Built in the new era of the 7-percent-commissions mandate and with a process that is online from the get-go, SimplyInsured (and Zenefits as well) believe they?ll be well-positioned to weather the changes, even if commissions are reduced further. For an online business like SimplyInsured, the margins work in their favor.
The founders tell us that early users of the platform (they currently have several dozen clients) have found they?ve been able to make savings in the range of $500-$1,000 per person on their health insurance, which, if they?re able to maintain an average on the higher end of that spectrum, will put them in a good place. And it will be a boon for small businesses in particular, who tend to be the ones hit hardest by health insurance costs.
Going forward, SimplyInsured plans to integrate with payroll services (something Zenefits already offers) to be able to further automate the process of employee deductions for insurance. The founders also believe that, in focusing on individuals, they can help business owners root out the specific issues they have with their plans (or will need coverage for), and can help them find increased savings.
In building their algorithms, the team found that there are tons of hidden costs in the terms of each specific injury, and, because hospitals don?t share the prices for treatment, this requires them to essentially go through the whole plan step by step. The startup has written its algorithms to automate this process, reading insurance plans one-by-one and step-by-step to tell users what they will be paying if, say they break their leg, under the terms of each plan, allowing them to easily compare the candidates. (You can see the results/examples of that comparative analysis in the images embedded above.)
This is really the key and the biggest value-add that SimplyInsured provides over its competitors; the ability to drill down into each part of a potential plan and compare them to others adds a whole new level of transparency to the process.
And, in the end, because there really isn?t a primary, go-to online insurance platform today that?s well known and widely used, both Zenefits and SimplyInsured stand to benefit handsomely from this dearth of transparency if they play their cards right. Plus, this is a big enough problem that affects enough businesses, that there is plenty of room for both to build sustainable businesses. Of course, that?s easier said than done.
For more on SimplyInsured, find them at home here.
SimplyInsured allows you to estimate your real Out-of-Pocket costs when purchasing health insurance. We turn the 100+ costs/benefits in health insurance into one, simple, easy-to-compare price.
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