“Together it is possible” was the theme for the World Cancer Day 2012 – however, cancer kills millions of people every year and up to a third of cases can be prevented by a healthy lifestyle, according to statistics released by the World Health Organization. Let us then, together, declare war on this scourge.

How many families are there in the world who have experienced at least one death through cancer; how many people have been silenced by the mention of the C word in the hushed ambience of the doctor’s consulting rooms, how many have not broken down in tears shortly afterwards?

While it is true that Cancer need no longer be a death sentence, and while it is true that the number of cures are growing yearly as new therapies are found, this disease continues to kill 7.6 million people a year (figures refer to 2008), around 70% of these in low- and middle-income countries. Thirty per cent of these cases could be prevented.

February 4 is the day chosen by the WHO to celebrate World Cancer Day. The theme for this year was “Together it is possible” and together, the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer support the International Union Against Cancer to find ways to combat this disease. Prevention is the keyword and in 2012, the focus will be on screening and vaccination, effective against the Human Papilloma Virus which causes cervical cancer and the Hepatitis B Virus which can cause liver cancer.

According to the WHO, cervical cancer is the second most common form of this disease among women worldwide, with 500,000 new cases being diagnosed yearly. 70% of cases are caused by types 16 and 18 and these can largely be prevented by vaccinating girls aged between 9 and 13. Hepatitis B and C are responsible for 78% of liver cancer cases, which caused 700,000 deaths in 2008. A vaccine for Hepatitis B has been available since 1982.

Early diagnosis can reduce cancer mortality

Early diagnosis can reduce mortality rates and the WHO relies on public awareness programmes, educating populations about the first symptoms and also screening programmes testing people to detest early signs of cancer, which caused 7.6 million deaths in 2008 – thirteen per cent of all deaths worldwide and the number is predicted to escalate to 13.1 million by 2030. The following breakdown is provided by the WHO:

lung (1.37 million deaths)

stomach (736 000 deaths)

liver (695 000 deaths)

colorectal (608 000 deaths)

breast (458 000 deaths)

cervical cancer (275 000 deaths)

Cancer occurs when a cell undergoes changes into a pre-cancerous lesion which develops into malignant tumours, due to an interaction between the genetic factors a person’s body possesses with physical, chemical or biological carcinogens.

Up to 30% of cancers are caused by the use of tobacco and excessive use of alcohol, an unhealthy diet (low fruit and vegetable intake), a lack of physical exercise, being overweight or obese, urban air pollution, inhalation of smoke on an ongoing basis (tobacco or fumes from fuels), sexually transmitted HPV.

Key facts*

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for 7.6 million deaths (around 13% of all deaths) in 2008.

Lung, stomach, liver, colon and breast cancer cause the most cancer deaths each year.

The most frequent types of cancer differ between men and women.

About 30% of cancer deaths are due to the five leading behavioral and dietary risks: high body mass index, low fruit and vegetable intake, lack of physical activity, tobacco use, alcohol use.

Tobacco use is the most important risk factor for cancer causing 22% of global cancer deaths and 71% of global lung cancer deaths.

Cancer causing viral infections such as HBV/HCV and HPV are responsible for up to 20% of cancer deaths in low- and middle-income countries.

About 70% of all cancer deaths in 2008 occurred in low- and middle-income countries.

Deaths from cancer worldwide are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 13.1 million deaths in 2030.

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Advocating: Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, appeared in a commercial supporting same-sex marriage for the Human Rights Campaign

Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, one of Wall Street’s most powerful figures, has become the first major business leader to join a national media campaign in support of same-sex marriage.

Gay rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign published a video on Sunday in which Mr Blankfein, who has headed investment bank Goldman Sachs since 2006, asks viewers to join a ‘majority of Americans who support marriage equality.’

‘America’s corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and it’s the right thing to do,’ Mr Blankfein, 57, said in the video, which was posted on popular video website YouTube.

Mr Blankfein, who is married to Laura Jacobs Blankfein and has three children, had already made his views on the issue known.

Last year he was one of the financial industry executives to sign an open letter calling on New York state lawmakers to legalize same-sex marriage.

‘Our campaign is all about recruiting unexpected spokespeople so Americans can connect the dots and realize that on an issue like this there can be agreement,’ Human Rights Campaign spokesman Fred Sainz said.

Besides Mr Blankfein, the Americans for Marriage Equality campaign has attracted a dozen personalities on similar videos, including Senator Al Franken, Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita and Oscar-winning actress Mo’Nique.

‘The fact that we have Mo’Nique and Lloyd Blankfein campaigning on this should show that we can have commonality on the issue,’ Mr Sainz said.

‘We approached Lloyd Blankfein and literally within hours he had said yes, he would do it.’

Gay marriage remains outlawed in more than 40 of the 50 U.S. states and the issue promises to surface in the 2012 presidential election even as economic woes seem to take priority in the minds of voters.

President Barack Obama has supported rights for same sex couples but has stopped short of endorsing marriage, while most of the Republicans seeking to challenge him in November have come out against it.

Mr Blankfein has long been a supporter of the Democratic party, and before Mr Obama was elected to office, he contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Clearly the two have overcome their differences as Mr Blankfein has made at least 10 visits to the Obama White House, a number of which were to discuss possible solutions to the country’s economic crisis.

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US President Barack Obama

US President Barack Obama has warned against the serious risks of a military campaign against the Islamic Republic and underlined diplomacy as the favored solution to the impasse over Iran’s nuclear issue.

Speaking in an interview with the NBC television network on Sunday, Obama said he did not believe Tehran had the intentions to attack the United States, dismissing Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s earlier claim that Iran is developing an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) that could reach the US East Coast.

“Any kind of additional military activity inside the Persian Gulf is disruptive and has a big effect on us. It could have a big effect on oil prices. We’ve still got troops in Afghanistan, which borders Iran. And so our preferred solution here is diplomatic,” Obama said.

The remarks come as Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu urged Western powers to make greater efforts to negotiate a solution to Iran’s nuclear case, warning that a military strike would result in a “disaster.”

“A military option will create a disaster in our region. So before that disaster, everybody must be serious in negotiations. We hope soon both sides will meet again, but this time there will be a complete result,” Davutoglu said during a speech at the 48 Munich Security Conference in Germany on Sunday.

“If there is strong political will and mutual confidence being established, this issue could be resolved in a few days,” he said, adding that, “The technical disputes are not so big. The problem is mutual confidence and strong political will.”

Qatar’s Foreign Minister Khalid Mohamed al-Attiyah also urged the West to refrain from launching an attack on Iran, stressing that the Iranian nuclear dispute should be settled through dialogue and negotiations.

“[An attack] is not a solution; and tightening the embargo on Iran will make the scenario worse. I believe we should have dialogue,” al-Attiyah said.

“I believe that with our allies and friend in the West we should open a serious dialogue with the Iranians to get out of this dilemma. This is what we feel in our region,” he added.

Despite the widely publicized claims by the US, Israel and some of their European allies that Iran’s nuclear program may include a military aspect, Iran insists on its civilian nature, arguing that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

The IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence indicating that Tehran’s civilian nuclear program has diverted towards nuclear weapons production.

This is while the Israeli regime is widely known to possess between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads. Furthermore, Tel Aviv refuses to allow its nuclear facilities to come under international regulatory inspectors and rejects any international nuclear regulatory agreements.

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Federal agency would be forced to consider applications to remove TSA screeners.

Following House approval of the measure on Friday, the Senate is set to vote today on legislation that would allow U.S. airports to replace TSA workers with screeners from private companies, a move that could spell the beginning of the end for the highly unpopular federal agency’s role in airport security.

“The U.S. agency must allow airports to switch to private companies for screeners unless it can show the move wouldn’t be cost-effective and would be detrimental to security, according to the legislation, which if passed will go to President Barack Obama for his signature,” reports Businessweek.

“They’ve been trying to force the door open for several years,” Jeff Price, a Denver-based consultant who has written a textbook on aviation security, said of U.S. lawmakers. “It reverses the burden of proof. It is definitely trying to checkmate the TSA.”

At the height of the anti-TSA drive in late 2010, which coincided with a national full body scanner opt out day, a growing number of airports such as Orlando Sanford International began to exercise their right to replace TSA workers with private screeners.

The TSA soon put a stop to this in January 2011 by freezing the number of airports that could use private screeners, a figure that had climbed to 16. Orlando Sanford is one of the airports whose vetoed application to remove TSA screeners will have to be reconsidered under the new legislation.

More private security companies are expected to start up if the legislation passes, providing the additional benefit of adding tens of thousands of private sector jobs to the economy.

“You’ll see companies make themselves known,” said Price. “They’ll make sure every airport operator knows the rules have changed.”

The TSA’s involvement in airport security has become highly unpopular over the last two years, with the federal agency mired in one controversy after another, from its agents constantly caught stealing from travelers, to its mistreatment of children and the elderly, to its habitual lies about the safety of naked body scanners.

In September last year, a petition on the White House website that called for abolishing the TSA received almost 32,000 signatures, forcing TSA chief John Pistole to issue a response.

When Texas lawmakers attempted to pass a bill that would have outlawed the TSA’s “advanced pat down” procedures last year, the feds threatened to impose a no fly zone over the state and the measure was ultimately defeated.

Congress recently gave the green light for $24 million dollars in extra funding for the TSA’s VIPR program, which was responsible for conducting 9,300 unannounced checkpoints last year alone.

For anti-TSA activists, kicking the federal agency out of the nation’s airports will merely be the first step given that TSA workers have now been deployed to staff a network of internal checkpoints. The TSA is now conducting searches of Americans at train stations, bus depots, ferry ports, on highways and even at high school prom nights.

The federal agency was also responsible for training hot dog sellers and other vendors to spot terrorists at the recent Super Bowl, a story that attracted yet more derision from the national media.

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Electrodes distributed over the brain of a volunteer

A new study conducted in the University of California has enabled scientists to find a way to decipher actual words from human brain waves.

A team of neuroscientists worked with a group of epileptic patients who were under the treatment for difficult curable seizures.

They placed electrodes in a part of brain which is involved in understanding speech.

They recorded brain waves while the participants were listening to a series of words and then created computer programs that could recognize sounds encoded in the waves.

The brain break sounds down into their constituent acoustic frequencies and analyzes each part in a different region, scientists explained in the journal Public Library of Science Biology.

“There is some evidence that perception and imagery may be pretty similar in the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device,” said study leader Brian Pasley of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Researchers are still a long way from actually reading people’s minds, but it may be possible one day,” he added.

Although the new research may sound like scary science fiction, it can have enormous positive uses for patients who have lost their speaking ability.

“This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig’s disease and can’t speak,” co-author Robert Knight. “If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit.”

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An artist's impression of the orbital position of planets in systems discovered by NASA's Kepler mission

NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered eleven new planetary systems confirming the existence of 26 new planets outside our solar system.

The newly found planets range in size from 1.5 to five times the diameter of Earth and are closer to their host star than Venus is to the Sun.

None of the newly detected planetary systems are like our solar system with the exception of the one with Kepler-33 as its core star.

Kepler-33 is older and bigger than our sun and has five planets but they all orbit closer to their parent star than Mercury orbits the Sun.

The discoveries increase the number of confirmed extra-solar planets to 729, 60 of which are credited to the Kepler team.

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said NASA Kepler program scientist Doug Hudgins.

“Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates,” he added.

“This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

Scientists say further observations are needed to determine which of the planets are rocky and which are filled with gas.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in 2009, is a satellite telescope on a mission to survey our Milky Way galaxy in search of Earth-like planets.

Astronomers of NASA’s Kepler mission are hopeful that the new discovery could help them better understand how planets are formed.

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It has been proven to drastically decrease the chances of contracting HIV before one is even exposed to the virus: Truvada is considered a medical breakthrough by some, yet others fear the once-a-day prevention pill could spur a deadly AIDS epidemic.

The drug — a small, blue pill ingested orally — is currently awaiting FDA approval. Its manufacturer, Gilead, argues that Truvada would reduce the risk of risk of contracting HIV in as many as three-quarters of cases and has been proven so in tests already. AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein is weary of how people will use the pill, however, and warns, “I believe that this could be catastrophic in terms of HIV prevention.”

The argument against approving the pill, says Weinstein, is that it will encourage partners to engage in unprotected sex. While the pill is proven to work in many cases, it is not 100-percent guaranteed. The result, he says, could only make things worse for AIDS and HIV.

It’s a “fabulous drug – it’s one pill once a day, and it has a low side-effect burden,” says Weinstein. Unless the user is aware that the success rate of Truvada is limited and takes extra precautions such as traditional prophylactics though, that ignorance might trigger an AIDS epidemic that could destroy America.

When tested on gay men in four countries, the success rate for the drug was only around 44 percent. When tested by heterosexual couples in two African nations, Truvada proved to be 73 percent successful. Weinstein and other critics are concerned that unless users know the facts, they will learn to rely on the drug and only spread the virus.

“There’s a whole issue of people who aren’t educated on the biology of HIV, who will think that because they’d be taking the pill, they will not become infected,” Cynthia Davis of the College of Medicine and College of Science and Health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles tells The Final Call.

“You will have groups of people who think, because they’re on this pill and it has this protective factor, that they don’t have to practice safer sex anymore … Because they’re on this medication, they’ll have this false sense of security,” Davis adds.

“Although some of the trial results have been very impressive, the protection with pre-exposure prophylaxis is unlikely to be 100 percent,” writes British medical journal The Lancet. “And making drugs available as prophylaxis could encourage high-risk sexual behavior among those who believe themselves to be protected.”

In America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that men and women might abstain from using condoms if taking Truvada, based on “the false belief that they are protected” by the pill. Currently all medical options in dealing with HIV are available only after contracting the virus. Truvada, on the other hand, is administered as a precautionary measure — what physicians consider a “pre-exposure prophylaxis.” While test trials have shown substantial success in the effectiveness of Truvada, there is still plenty of room for the pill to go awry.

In the test labs of the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s HIV Research clinic, Dr. Albert Liu is conducting studies of his own to see if high-risk behavior could emerge if people learn to rely on the pill’s only limited success. “We don’t know the answer, and that’s why it’s important to study it,” he tells Huffington Post.

Elsewhere the medical community has acknowledged that the development of the drug could be considered a breakthrough, but with a window of contracting HIV still better than one-out-of-two odds, it only does so much to stop the spread.

In California, where Weinstein’s AIDS Healthcare Foundation is based, nearly 42,000 residents were living with HIV as of June 2011. So concerning is the issue that the Los Angeles Council voted only this month to make condom use mandatory in most adult films. In LA, it is believed that 90 percent of the nation’s porn is produced. Nationally, the US saw around 50,000 new cases of HIV outbreaks in patients each year between 2007 and 2009.

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Barely a month after the last US combat troops walked out of Iraq, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday that they would be altering already established plans in Afghanistan and doing the same there in a matter of months.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Wednesday announced that American combat troops will plan to vacate the nation of Afghanistan in 2013, a decision that contradicts a long-standing schedule that would have left the US military on an offensive role there through at least 2014.

“Our goal is to complete all of that transition in 2013, and hopefully by mid- to the latter part of 2013, we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role,” Secretary Panetta told reporters aboard a plane on Wednesday. Prior to the breaking announcement, US combat troops were expected to stay in Afghanistan until the end of 2014. Although they may stay stationed there for just as long still, Panetta wants offensive operations from American personnel winding down sometime during the next year.

The news of the decision comes almost immediately after a recent report that found US intelligence believes the Taliban will be able to successfully regain control even after American forces leave Afghanistan. The US and Taliban were believed to be initiating peace talks in order to negotiate a safe return of Afghanistan to Taliban rule, but more than ten years into a war that has provided few successes and massive casualties and disappointment, Panetta’s new plan seems to speed up the withdrawal process before matters worsen anymore.

Since entering Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attack more than a decade ago, US forces have seen casualties amounting to a total of 1,808, according to the latest statistics from the iCasualties website. Insurgent deaths are estimated to be roughly 40 times that figure.

Combined with the recently ended war in Iraq, American casualties in both operations come to more than 6,000.

Despite such a tremendous number of deaths and ten years of fighting, victories for American forces have been few and far between in Afghanistan. It has been nearly a year since former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was executed in neighboring Pakistan, and as the Taliban still has a hold in Afghanistan — and is expected to continue it for the unforeseeable future — furthering operations seems futile.

As American deaths continue to pile up while Operating Enduring Freedom fails to secure a win for the US, the losses seem to overpower any successes American troops have had. The Obama administration has called one of its biggest victories in the War on Terror aside from the bin Laden assassination the execution of two men with alleged al-Qaeda ties late last year. Both men, however, were also American citizens that were killed by drone strikes without ever being brought to trial. Instead of being proven to pose a problem for American forces, the White House reported that the two Americans were merely threats. The actions were viewed by some as a victory for the American military, but as the capabilities of the commander-in-chief were made public, many US citizens called it a loss for freedom.

“Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat? What’s going to happen when they come to the media?” Republican presidential candidate and Texas Congressman Ron Paul reacted to the news.

“What if the media becomes a threat? … This is the way this works. It’s incrementalism.”

Although the decision to end the war soon would add to the number of ended offensive operations under President Barack Obama’s belt if he secures a second term in the White House, critics are already attacking the administration for the new plan. Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney wasted no time responding to the news on Wednesday, offering some harsh words for the White House if they seriously want to end attacks on the Taliban ahead of plan.

“The president’s mistakes, some of them are calculated on a philosophy that’s hard to understand and, sometimes, you scratch you head and say: How can he be so misguided and so naive?” Romney asked a room of warehouse workers while campaigning in Las Vegas, Nevada on Wednesday.

“Today, his secretary of defense unleashed such a policy,” added Romney. “The secretary of defense said that on a day certain, the middle of 2013, we’re going to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan. He announced that. He announced that. So the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it,” said Romney. “Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with and tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops? It makes absolutely no sense.”

“His naiveté is putting in jeopardy the mission of the United States of America and our commitments to freedom,” he said. “He is wrong. We need new leadership in Washington.”

The US is expected under Secretary Panetta to have only 68,000 troops remaining in Afghanistan by this autumn. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center published in October revealed that a third of American veterans who have served since 9/11 agreed that the Afghan and Iraq wars were “not worth it.”

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It was on a live television morning show where the GOP frontrunner made this comment.

After which it took little time for Americans to react. Message boards were flooded with criticism about the Republican candidates’ remark.

Romney initially was making his victory rounds after winning the GOP Florida primary just the day before, now he is spending time clarifying his statement, which he says his words are being taken out of context.

Meanwhile, Romney’s opponents immediately took advantage of his live mishap. Today conservatives and liberals are criticizing the frontrunner all while Romney is back on the campaign trail hoping to put it all behind.

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A large number of US-based organizations plan to hold a national day of action to demand "No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations against Iran."

A large number of US-based anti-war organizations have planned a nation-wide demonstration to demand Washington stop its warmongerings against Iran.

According to the StopWarOnIran website, “No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations against Iran” will be the demand of the coordinated demonstrations which will be held across the US on February 4, 2012.

The ad hoc group organizing the demonstrations has agreed “on the need to stop US imperialism and/or Israel from launching a military attack on Iran.”

They all believed that the new sanctions imposed against Iran by the United States “were themselves an act of war aimed at the Iranian people.”

On December 31, 2011, President Barack Obama signed into law fresh economic sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) in an apparent bid to punish foreign companies and banks that do business with the Iranian financial institution.

The bill requires foreign financial firms to make a choice between doing business with the CBI and oil sector or with the US financial sector.

The organizations that called for the demonstration or endorsed the action include the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC), the International Action Center (IAC), SI! Solidarity with Iran, Refugee Apostolic Catholic Church, Workers World Party, World Can’t Wait, American Iranian Friendship Committee, ANSWER Coalition, Antiwar.com, Peace of the Action, ComeHomeAmerica.us, St. Pete for Peace, Women Against Military Madness (WAMM), Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality-Virginia, WESPAC Foundation, Peace Action Maine, Occupy Myrtle Beach, Minnesota Peace Action Coalition, Twin Cities Peace Campaign and Bail Out the People Movement (BOPM).

The US, Israel and their allies accuse Iran of pursuing a military nuclear program and have used this allegation as a pretext to sway the UN Security Council to impose four rounds of sanctions on Iran.

Iran has refuted the allegations, arguing that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the IAEA, it has the right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

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US Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul making a speech during one of his campaign stops for the US presidential race, Tuesday 31 Jan. 2012.

US Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has criticized America’s ‘unwinnable, undeclared’ wars overseas, which have led to the nation’s ‘bankruptcy.’

“In the last 10 years fighting these unwinnable, undeclared wars we have spent over 4 trillion dollars,” said Paul on Tuesday in a speech during one of his campaign stops for the US presidential race.

“There is a cost of life and limb, but there is an economic cost as well and the American people are tired of it because they know this country is bankrupt. All great nations go down because they overextend themselves overseas,” the Texas Congressman said.

“I would say it’s time for us to wake up, not wait for an economic crisis to hit… We ought to just wise up, spend our money wisely, defend this country and don’t pretend that we can tell other people how to live,” the presidential candidate said to a cheering crowd.

Paul also said the US cannot be the policeman of the world, adding that American governments should protect the individual liberties of US citizens.

The American politician called for revoking the Patriot Act, which restricts civil liberties of the American citizens and was signed into law by former President George W. Bush.

Paul, who spent much of the speech emphasizing a non-interventionist foreign policy, which he believes can be done by ending wars, has strongly criticized his country’s politics during his campaign for candidacy in the US presidential election this year.

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San Onofre nuclear plant, California

A leak at a Southern California nuclear facility that regularly provides power to roughly 1.4 million households has caused the plant to shut down a reactor.

Despite officials insisting that everything will be perfectly alright at the San Onofre nuclear site, this is not the first time as of late that power plants have raised serious questions about their safety in America.

A reactor at the San Onofre nuclear power station was halted Tuesday afternoon after personnel at the plant identified a leak in a steam generator tube. Gil Alexander, a spokesman for Southern California Edison, explains to Reuters that the reactor will remain offline for at least a couple of days.

“We don’t expect any impact on our customers tomorrow,” Alexander adds, yet notes that the reactor in question usually churns out around 1,100 megawatts of electricity to one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country.

The shutdown is forcing officials to halt operations in Unit 3 of the plant. Unit 2 of the station was already offline at the time of the incident, of which officials say was the result of routine maintenance and upgrades.

Speaking of the alleged minuteness of the leak, Alexander tells the Los Angeles times that “it wouldn’t even qualify as the least severe” infraction under guidelines set up by the United States’ Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Regardless, the plant, located south of San Clemente, California, reported the incident to them anyway.

As it would be, the regulations in place for American facilities are actually more lax than one would expect.

“While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about – that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan – it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure,” Edwin Lyman, a Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear expert, explained to Reuters last year. Even after the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima plant in early 2011 raised questions internationally over safety regulations, the United States has done little to improve conditions since.

The reason, some say, is that the regulations in place don’t call for them. In a report conducted by the Associated Press last year, it was revealed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has repeatedly weakened safety requirements for facilities, regularly allowing antiquated plants to continue operating by making it easier to pass tests in lieu of actually upgrading the facility. The AP found that of the 104 nuclear plants operating in America last year, 66 of them had been re-licensed for an additional 20 years of service. The vast majority of plants in the US, however, are already older than a quarter of a century.

San Onofre, located around 70 miles south of Los Angeles, is one of those.

“I think we need nuclear power, but we can’t compromise on safety. I think the vulnerability is on these older plants,” engineer Richard T. Lahey Jr., formerly with General Electric Co, told the AP last year. Although one-fifth of the nation’s power comes from nuclear plants — and much of Southern California relies on the San Onofre, loosened regulations are repeatedly putting much of America and the world at risk.

The San Onofre facility was opened in the late 1960s and has been upgraded since then, although not without incident. Engineers at the Bechtel Group Inc. of San Francisco installed a 420-ton nuclear reactor vessel at the facility in 1977, only to be publically humiliated when it was realized that the plant was constructed backwards.

Authorities at San Onofre say that the leak has yet to spread outside of the plant, but should that happen the consequences could be catastrophic. The San Onofre facility is only a stone’s throw away from the Pacific Ocean.

The AP adds in their analysis that roughly 113 alerts at the nation’s nuclear facilities since 2005 can be blamed in part on aging. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself reported in 2008 that 70 percent of potentially serious safety problems stem from “degraded conditions.”

Within the last year, a nuclear plant outside of Washington, DC was shut-down after concern of damage to reactors. In August 2011, officials questioned authorities at Vermont’s Yankee nuclear plant after water samples in a nearby stream tested positive for a carcinogenic chemical.

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A grim report just issued by the Finance Ministry that is circulating in the Kremlin today says the United States Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) has ground to a virtual halt signaling that a major global economic collapse is currently underway and could very well likely enter into the dreaded “freefall zone.”

Virtually unknown to all but the global financial elite, CHIPS is the main privately held clearing house for large-value transactions in the United States, settling well over $1 trillion a day in around 250,000 interbank payments that together with the Fedwire Funds Service, which is operated by the Federal Reserve Banks, forms the primary US network for large-value domestic and international US dollar payments where it has a market share of around 96%.

The cause underlying the collapse of CHIPS, this report says, is due to the “unprecedented” demand for immediate liquidity relief being sought by the largest banks in the US and EU that are being crushed under of the combined debt of both the United States and Europe said to total near $39 trillion.

Important to note is that what is currently happening is a virtual repeat of the 2008 Financial Crisis that the United States Senate’s Levin–Coburn Report found “was not a natural disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.”

Grimly echoing this Ministry report is the latest data [see chart 2nd photo, or click on link] from The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) that is a number issued daily by the London-based Baltic Exchange and shows it in freefall dropping 65% in the past 30 days alone, a terrifying amount of loss not seen since the dark days of late 2008.

Not restricted to Baltic Sea countries, the BDI tracks worldwide international shipping prices of various dry bulk cargoes that has collapsed so severely global shipping has all but ceased thus leaving our world’s largest transport ships anchored and empty off the coast of Singapore [photo 3rd right] in what is described as “the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history whose numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined.”

During the 2008 Financial Crisis an outright global economic catastrophe was only averted after the US Federal Reserve secretly gave out to US banks and corporations, and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland, over $16 trillion that was only discovered due to an amendment to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed by the American Congress that called for their being audited for the first time in their 99-year history.

Note: To place that $16 trillion into perspective, remember that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States is only $14.12 trillion, and the entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion.

Curiously, the aforementioned amendment to the Dodd-Frank law only called only for a one-time audit of any emergency lending facility established by the Federal Reserve since 1 December 2007 and ending with the date of enactment of the law when it was signed by President Obama on 21 July 2010 thus keeping hidden from the American people who is getting their money.

To if anyone in the world, even the powerful US Federal Reserve, has the power to avert this coming catastrophe, this Ministry report warns, it is unlikely due to the cascading collapse of the global derivative market due to the mounting gridlock in liquidity that US billionaire and Obama confidant Warren Buffet warned back in 2003 were “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

Though the word “derivatives” sounds complicated and technical, understanding them is really not that hard. A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made. Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Estimates of the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market go from $600 trillion all the way up to $1.4 quadrillion.

$1.4 Quadrillion is roughly: -40 TIMES THE WORLD’S STOCK MARKET. -10 TIMES the value of EVERY STOCK & EVERY BOND ON THE PLANET. -23 TIMES WORLD GDP.

Failing to be noticed by the Western peoples about this global economic collapse is that it has been, in all probability, a “planned event” due to occur so as to initiate a New World Order that has long been sought after by the elites, but was condemned by the ancients who warned that the uniting of our world as an economic dictatorship would lead to every human being having to obtain the Mark of The Beast thus bringing this present age to its end.

In a Western world devoid of morality, and lacking the knowledge of the ancients, it is beyond doubt that this coming economic collapse will take them by complete surprise (as the last one did) as they have been trained like dutiful slaves to only adhere to those voices leading them to their doom.

But for those who know the truth, the time is nearing an end for preparing…it will come much sooner than anyone will believe.

Source

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A safe and effective cure for cancer has been discovered with a drug that was once used for unusual metabolic problems. Yet, the cancer industry shows no interest with following up on dichloroacetate (DCA) research from University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, reported in 2007. That’s because DCA is no longer patented.

That research also confirmed cancer as a metabolic malfunction, not a weird mutation of cells often explained away as a genetic issue. But the medical mafia doesn’t want you to hear about it. But it confirms what most alternative cancer therapists already know.

Since Nixon declared the “war on cancer” in the 1970s, the cancer industry has succeeded with raising money for researching very expensive chemo substances at $50,000 to $100,000 per round or more for toxic therapies that rarely work.

Chemo drugs usually lead to demanding more business with drugs to ease terrible side effects (http://www.naturalnews.com/034761_cancer_drugs_toxicity_Voraxaze.html). Meanwhile, more are getting cancer and more are dying from it, mostly because of the toxic treatments.

Explaining DCA research results

Evangelos Michelakis and the Alberta University research team tested DCA on human cancer cells outside the body and in cancerous mice with profound success. DCA was once used for unusual metabolic disorders. The worst side effects, which rarely occur, include some numbness and an affected gait.

The mice were fed DCA in water, and in weeks they had remarkable tumor shrinkage. This indicates DCA can be taken orally. DCA works by restoring the cells’ mitochondria. Michelakis and his team had discovered that the mitochondria in cancer cells are not permanently damaged and irreparable. This is what mainstream medicine thinks.

With mitochondria malfunctioning, cancer cells use glucose fermentation for survival energy. This fermentation occurs when glycolysis (glucose conversion) occurs in an anaerobic cellular environment, which can be created by benign tumor masses, toxins, and low pH levels.

DCA restores mitochondria in cells to make them function properly. Another function of normal mitochondria is signaling apoptosis, or cellular self destruction. Normal cells die and become replaced constantly. But with cancer cells, the apoptosis signal is nullified, making cancer cells “immortal.”

The Alberta University researchers also realized that glycolysis fermentation in cancer cells produces lactic acid. The lactic acid breaks down the collagen holding those cells together in a tumor. This allows cancer cells to easily break away from a tumor shrinking with mainstream therapies.

The researchers reasoned this is why cancer metastasizes or spreads to different parts of the body or reappears after remission from chemo.

Tragic hypocrisy

Alternative cancer therapies have little or no problem with metastatic cancer or even cancer reoccurring after remission. Most alternative cancers simply cure cancers completely.

DCA offers the cancer industry an opportunity to come up with a pharmaceutical cure that is much cheaper and safer than their current standard of care. Yet the cancer industry is ignoring this opportunity. Instead, DCA is a homeless orphan begging for research funds to avoid legal issues with off label use on cancer.

Alternative cancer practitioners have always simply tried out and when they succeeded shared them with others who cared more about healing than money and power.

The medical mafia has created a matrix that demands big bucks to make big bucks for sick care instead of curing. Everyone in on the scam makes out financially. The cancer industry accuses alternative cancer therapists of quackery and taking advantage of the desperately ill for financial gain. Accusing others of your motives and crimes is called projection.

The medical/pharmaceutical complex is crony capitalism that doesn’t want a cure for cancer from anywhere.

Source

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Having considered the toughness of the rock-hidden Iranian nuclear facilities, America’s Nutcracker military command has decided to save jaw and develop a new conventional superbomb, since the US still plans to do the job in Iran without nukes.

­Washington has once again reminded Tehran that it has the military capability to crack Iranian hard-target nuclear sites with conventional weapons, leaking to the Wall Street Journal plans to develop an even more effective bunker-buster bomb.

The American military is no longer in love with the most powerful non-nuclear weapon it possesses, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 13,600-kilogram mammoth capable of penetrating deep underground facilities.

The Pentagon paid around $330 million to Boeing to develop and produce 20 MOP bombs, specially developed to destroy bunkers in countries like Iran and North Korea.

Now, the Defense Department intends to spend another $82 million, to make those bombs even more effective.

An MOP is capable of penetrating 60 meters of reinforced concrete or 38 meters of hard rock, delivering 2,700 kg of explosives deep down, to reliably demolish anything manmade. Yet, in the case of Iran’s Persian mountains, even this doesn’t seem enough.

In hiding its nuclear work, Tehran clearly considered the experience of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad, who lost their research nuclear reactors in 1981 and 2007 respectively.

Iranians really had to turn into fairytale dwarves, digging deep into the mountains but with a very un-fairytale intention: not to find something precious, but to safely hide their nuclear program.

In our times, when bombing a sovereign state into Stone Age is an easy walk, as we see from Libya’s example, such a precautionary measure does not appear superfluous.

But this is exactly what makes American generals nervous – they need 100% guarantees that the targets they cannot destroy do not exist, particularly in Iran.

For example, military experts are not sure an MOP can get to Iran’s Fordo enrichment plant facility that has 60 meters of hard rock mountain above it.

At the moment, only a tactical nuclear weapon of several dozen kilotons could guarantee the site’s elimination.

“Once things go into the mountain, then really you have to have something that takes the mountain off,” an unnamed US military official is reported to have said.

But no, using nukes would set a precedent for all the other proud owners of atomic arms worldwide. Countries like China, North Korea and – God forbid – Russia would get a free hand to blindside America with nukes at the breath of suspicion.

The last time the US used nuclear weapons against a civilian population was in Japan in 1945, and that fact is still well-remembered, and not just in Japan.

That is why today, the American military lays its hopes on conventional explosives with expanded capabilities, putting tactical nukes by for a rainy day.

And just in case you were wondering, none of the abovementioned has anything to do with Israel. Though Tel-Aviv has never tried out its almost proven nuclear arsenal on anybody, they rather like saber-rattling, saying they would protect the Jewish state at any cost – and preemptively.

Their fingers are apparently itching on the trigger switch, in forgetfulness that the country starting a war is not necessarily the one that finishes it.

Source

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