Alarmed by instances of Marines imperiling their health by eating liquid laundry detergent, top Marine Corps leaders issued a warning to all junior troops to stop participating in the Tide Pod Challenge.

Explanation: Facebook and Google (which owns YouTube) announced on 18 January that they are deleting Tide Pod Challenge videos from their platforms because they encourage dangerous activities, a violation of community guidelines.

Junk News, duffel blog, duffelblog.com, fake news

The so-called Tide Pod Challenge, a bizarre viral social media phenomenon involving teens sharing videos of themselves consuming liquid laundry detergent pods, crossed over into fake news territory in mid-January 2018 with the publication of an article stating that members of the Marine Corps have taken up the fad. An 18 January post on the satirical Duffel Blog said that the Corps’ top leaders had issued a warning to junior troops to stop eating the pods after an unspecified number were hospitalized as a result of doing so: WASHINGTON — The Marine Corps’ top leaders have warned junior troops to stop eating Tide Pods after a number of Marines have been hospitalized due to poisoning, sources confirmed today. “I don’t care what you guys do. Hell, you can even go back to drunken driving. Just stop eating laundry detergent, for Christ’s sake,” said Gen. Robert Neller, the Marine Commandant. Top officials have expressed concern in recent days over a number of incidents involving enlisted troops taking part in the “Tide Pod Challenge,” a viral internet campaign that challenges people to put laundry detergent in their mouth in order to raise awareness for Charles Darwin. While we do not doubt that youthful military personnel are as susceptible as anyone else to idiotic fads, we’ve found no reports in reliable news sources of U.S. troops hospitalized for laundry detergent poisoning. A disclaimer on the Duffel Blog web site describes its content as entirely fictitious: We are in no way, shape, or form, a real news outlet. Everything on this website is satirical and the content of this site is a parody of a news organization. No composition should be regarded as truthful, and no reference of an individual, company, or military unit seeks to inflict malice or emotional harm. All characters, groups, and military units appearing in these works are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual military units and companies is purely coincidental. Just days before the Duffel Blog article appeared, the American Association of Poison Control Centers issued an alert warning that the health consequences of ingesting detergent pods can be severe, possibly leading to seizures, respiratory arrest, and even coma. It also reported that the rate of self-inflicted poisonings by this means had increased dramatically during the first two weeks of 2018: According to AAPCC data, in 2016 and 2017, poison control centers handled thirty-nine and fifty-three cases of intentional exposures, respectively, among thirteen to nineteen year olds. In the first fifteen days of 2018 alone, centers have already handled thirty-nine such intentional cases among the same age demographic. Ingestion accounted for ninety-one percent of these reported exposures.


Virus delay, early ice melt challenge Arctic science mission.

Explanation: They prepared for icy cold and trained to be on the watch for polar bears, but a pandemic just wasn’t part of the program.

Climate, AP Top News, Climate change, International News, General News, Lifestyle, Health, Science, Asia Pacific, Europe

Now dozens of scientists are waiting in quarantine for the all-clear to join a year-long Arctic research mission aimed at improving the models used for forecasting climate change, just as the expedition reaches a crucial phase. For a while, the international mission looked like it might have to be called off, as country after country went into lockdown because of the virus, scuppering plans to bring fresh supplies and crew to the German research vessel Polarstern that’s been moored in the high Arctic since last year. News of the pandemic caused jitters among those already on board, said Matthew Shupe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado and co-leader of the MOSAiC expedition. “Some people just wanted to be home with their families,” he told The Associated Press in a video interview from the German port of Bremerhaven, where he and about 90 other scientists and crew have been kept in isolation to ensure they’re virus-free. Organizers at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Ocean Research managed to fly out a handful of people via Canada last month. The rest of the crew will be exchanged with the help of two other German research ships that will meet the Polarstern on the sea ice edge. That upcoming rendezvous will force the Polarstern to abandon its current position for three weeks at a critical time in the Arctic cycle. “We are on the cusp right now of the onset of the sea ice melt season and that’s a really important transition,” said Shupe. “That could happen when the ship is gone,” he said. “It’s a distinct risk we face.” To avoid missing out on key data, researchers will leave some instruments behind, including an 11-meter (36-foot) tower used for atmospheric measurements, and hope that it’s still there when they return. “The ice could just come together and destroy everything,” said Shupe. “Hopefully that doesn’t happen.” Adding to the problem is the fact that the sea ice is cracking up and moving about earlier than anticipated, a sign of possible future changes to the Arctic if global warming continues. “It’s challenging,” said Shupe. “But we need to face that challenge in order to get these kind of measurements.” Scientists on the 140-million-euro ($158 million) expedition have already gathered valuable data since setting out last September with 100 researchers and crew from 17 nations including the United States, France, China and Britain. Shupe said the measurements that scientists were able to perform during the long Arctic winter will improve the models they use to calculate how snow insulates sea ice and affects the movement of energy. “Conceptually we know that, of course, but we actually have observations now that will tell us how that’s working,” he said. Measurements of tiny airborne particles can also help shed light on the role they play in trapping heat or reflecting sunlight, especially if there’s less ice and more open ocean as temperatures in the Arctic continue to rise. The intense interest into research about the coronavirus could have a positive knock-on effect for fields such as climate science, said Shupe. “Everybody is now looking at the new for models of how this (virus) spreads,” he said. “Perhaps this actually opens the door to more people to understand the climate problem.” Still, the researchers on MOSAiC are hoping to deal with one problem at a time, hence the strict quarantine to avoid any chance of carrying the coronavirus into the Arctic. “We definitely don’t want anybody getting sick and we don’t want to take that out to the ship,” said Shupe. “Realistically, it’s actually one of the safest places on Earth right now.” ___ Follow AP pandemic coverage at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak ___ Follow AP coverage of climate change issues at http://apnews.com/Climate.


Rick Santorum Says Howard Zinn, "an anti-American Marxist," wrote "the most popular textbook that's taught in our high schools in America.

National, Education, History, Rick Santorum,

A debate over high school history books doesn’t seem like the most obvious point to bring up during a speech to members of the National Rifle Association. But potential presidential candidate Rick Santorum did just that during the group’s annual convention last week. In addition to touching on gun rights issues in his speech, Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, criticized teachers for assigning works by the late Howard Zinn, including A People’s History of the United States, that cast a critical -- and often sharply negative -- light on the past actions of the U.S. government. "Do you know the most popular textbook that's taught in our high schools in America is written by a man named Howard Zinn, who is an anti-American Marxist, and that is the most common textbook?" Santorum said in the April 10, 2015, speech. (It’s around the 10:15 mark.) We wondered whether Santorum was correct, so we took a closer look. Who was Howard Zinn? First, some background on Zinn. Zinn was born in 1922 to Eastern European immigrants and grew up in working-class Brooklyn. "By his late teens, his reading had veered into politics, especially Marxism," wrote Rutgers University historian David Greenberg. Greenberg noted that historians have divided over the question of whether Zinn ever officially joined the Communist Party, but there is no doubt that his politics were -- and remained -- left-wing until his death in 2010. Zinn earned a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, taught for more than two decades at Boston University, and went on to write a number of books and plays, but A People’s History became his most famous work, selling more than 2 million copies since its publication in 1980, including various updated editions, according to Amazon.com. Zinn intended it as history from the bottom-up -- "the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish ... ." It’s a black-and-white, heroes-and-villains history of the United States in which the United States is almost always in the wrong. The book clearly hit a nerve: It became a cultural icon, name-checked on such television shows as The Sopranos and The Simpsons and receiving a prominent endorsement by Matt Damon’s character in the movie Good Will Hunting. The book also informed a number of historical documentaries and has inspired a national effort to promote his approach to history called the Zinn Education Project. So Zinn clearly has his admirers. But he also has detractors -- and they are not just conservatives. Some of Zinn’s fiercest critics have been liberals. Greenberg, writing in the liberal magazine The New Republic in 2013, called it a "pretty lousy piece of work" and said Zinn’s scholarly contributions were "meager." Zinn "renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses," Greenberg wrote. Even a publication of the American Federation of Teachers -- one of the nation’s two leading teachers’ unions -- ran a piece critical of Zinn by Stanford education and history professor Sam Wineburg. "It seems that once (Zinn) made up his mind, nothing—not new evidence, not new scholarship, not the discovery of previously unknown documents, not the revelations of historical actors on their deathbeds—could shake it," Wineburg wrote. He added that "history as truth, issued from the left or from the right, abhors shades of gray. It seeks to stamp out the democratic insight that people of good will can see the same thing and come to different conclusions." What’s the evidence? We won’t take a position on the merits of Zinn’s historiography, but we will look at the evidence for whether Santorum is correct that Zinn is the author of "the most popular textbook that's taught in our high schools in America." We’ll start by noting that, contrary to Santorum’s wording, A People’s History is "not a textbook but a trade book," said Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the New York City-based American Textbook Council. While A People’s History might serve as supplementary material in a high school history class, "its choices are highly idiosyncratic and it really wouldn’t do as your main text for a U.S. history survey class," Greenberg of Rutgers told PolitiFact. Beyond this, though, is there hard evidence that Zinn is the "most popular" book in high-school history classes? The short answer is no. When we asked Matt Beynon, a spokesman for Santorum, for supporting evidence, he referred us to two articles that mentioned the book but didn’t provide any hard evidence that it was the "most popular." Other experts also came up empty in the search for hard data. "I have never heard anyone in our organization suggest that it is the most popular by any stretch of the definition of ‘most,’ " said Susan Griffin, executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, which represents high school history teachers. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, said that while he believes anecdotally that Zinn’s books are "widely used" in American high schools, he is unaware "of any hard data on how often it is assigned relative to other textbooks or how popular it is compared to other historical surveys." Sewall, of the American Textbook Council, concurred. While Zinn’s impact on social studies teachers "is prodigious and possibly unparalleled," he said, "there is no way to determine the most popular base history instructional materials used in U.S. high schools." In an interview, Wineburg of Stanford added that "not a single state in the union" has put Zinn’s books on an "approved adoption list for middle or high school. Three big companies, including the biggest, Holt-McDougal, control about 90 percent of the market. They issue conventional, 1,000-page behemoths. … Find me one instance in which Zinn appears on any one of 50 state adoption lists, and I'll find you a unicorn." Not even Zinn’s supporters agree with the claims that his influence in high school classrooms is unmatched. Alison Kysia, who has taught history at Northern Virginia Community College and has served as a fellow with the group that co-sponsors the Zinn Education Project, has written that "for as much as I wish" it were true that A People’s History was the most popular history textbook used in classrooms today, "it isn’t." Not only is there no comprehensive study, she wrote, but the evidence of the volume’s use in college classes shows that it’s not used especially widely. Specifically, a study by Dan Cohen, the founding executive director of the Digital Public Library of America and a former historian at George Mason University, found that of 258 undergraduate U.S. history survey courses in spring 2004, only three assigned Zinn’s book. The most commonly assigned volumes were The American Promise, by Roark, Johnson, Cohen, Stage and Hartmann, and The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, by Nash, Jeffrey, Howe Frederick, Davis, Winkler, Mires and Pestana. "I doubt that high school is much different," Cohen told PolitiFact. "There are a lot of textbooks out there, and Zinn's is a tiny fraction of the assigned books." Anecdotal evidence So we find no evidence to support the statistical claim that Zinn’s is "the most popular textbook that's taught in our high schools in America." But we do think it’s worth paying at least some attention to the broader question of whether Zinn remains influential. For starters, Zinn’s sales are still strong, even five years after his death. He ranks about 30th on Amazon.com’s list of best-selling history authors. (The ranking changes constantly based on new sales, so it’s impossible to pinpoint a specific number.) While this bit of evidence should be taken with a grain of salt -- Fox News host Bill O’Reilly ranks about 10th on the same list -- it does suggest a continuing interest in his works. Indeed, Wood of the National Association of Scholars said it’s possible to interpret Santorum’s use of the word "popular" as meaning best-liked, rather than most widely used. While he acknowledges that this would be impossible to test empirically, he said it’s not implausible to think that Zinn’s supporters have an unmatched level of passion for his writings. "There really is no other history textbook that enjoys the level of enthusiasm among students as Zinn’s book enjoys," he said. There’s anecdotal evidence for this. Wineburg of Stanford noted in his article that "in 2008, the National Council for the Social Studies invited Zinn to address its annual conference—the largest gathering of social studies teachers in the country. Zinn's speech met with raucous applause." Greenberg of Rutgers, while he called Santorum’s claim "hyperbole," agreed that Zinn’s works are "influential." "It’s very simplistic and appeals to the high school mind," he said. "I think there is a germ of truth in the conservative complaint that the academy is captive to left-wing ideas." Our ruling Santorum said that Zinn wrote "the most popular textbook that's taught in our high schools in America." While there is anecdotal evidence that Zinn’s work is popular among some high-school teachers, there is zero hard evidence to support Santorum’s core statistical claim -- that Zinn’s volume is taught in more high-school history classes than any other book. The claim contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.


30 years on, AIDS fight may tilt more to treatment.

Explanation: After 30 years of AIDS prevention efforts, global leaders may now need to shift their focus to spending more on drugs used to treat the disease as new data show this is also the best way to prevent the virus from spreading.

People light candles for AIDS victims during an AIDS awareness event marking the World AIDS Day at Sergels Torg square in Stockholm December 1, 2010. REUTERS/Janerik Henriksson/Scanpix The U.N. General Assembly will take up the issue next week as it assesses progress in fighting the disease — first reported on June 5, 1981 — that has infected more than 60 million people and claimed nearly 30 million lives. Guiding the meeting is groundbreaking new data that shows early treatment of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, can cut its transmission to a sexual partner by 96 percent. “There had been for a long time this artificial dichotomy or artificial tension between treatment versus prevention. Now it is very clear that treatment is prevention and treatment is an important part of a multifaceted combination strategy,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told Reuters. Fauci, who has made AIDS research his life’s work, has a big role to play in the discussion of the NIH-funded study made public on May 12. “A month ago, we didn’t have that data. People were still arguing. ‘Well, we are not so sure if you treat people you are really going to prevent infection,’” Fauci said. “The policy makers need to sit down and say, ‘Now that we know this, is this going to be enough incentive to change around our policy?’”   That could mean redirecting, or adding to, global spending on fighting AIDS, particularly how much is spent on education or other research versus antiretroviral drugs that allow patients to live with the suppressed disease for many years. In 2010, nearly $16 billion was spent on HIV response in low and middle-income countries, according to the U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS. UNAIDS says at least $22 billion will be needed to combat the disease by 2015, helping avert 12 million new infections and 7.4 million more deaths in the next decade. Globally, the number of people living with HIV rose to 34 million by the end of 2010, from 33.3 million a year earlier. But in poorer countries, a majority of eligible patients were not receiving antiretroviral treatment, according to UNAIDS. Fauci says he has already discussed this with policymakers and may make public his views on needed policy changes at the International AIDS Society meeting in Rome. “I don’t think it’s going to be one-size-fits all,” Fauci said of the policy approach. “There is going to be certainly a difference between how things are looked at in the developing world and the developed world. And within the developed world, I think it will be a country-by-country issue.”   UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe noted that AIDS remained “a metaphor for inequality” as the vast majority of patients live in Africa, where every year nearly 400,000 babies are born with HIV. “If you’re privileged to be born in the North, you will not die from HIV. It you’re privileged to be born in the North, you will not have a baby born with HIV,” Sidibe said. “Countries need to start looking at innovative financing. We need to have drugs which are not just for the rich market.”


Mother's stand-off with British authorities over medicinal cannabis stirs debate.

Explanation: The mother of an epileptic boy who journeyed to Canada to buy cannabis-based medication she says is keeping her son alive had her supplies confiscated by British customs officials upon her return on Monday.

The case has ignited a debate about the medicinal use of cannabis, a drug which is illegal in Britain and which the British authorities do not recognize as having any medicinal benefits. Billy Caldwell, 12, had been receiving medicinal cannabis oil on prescription by his doctor for just over a year, but supplies ran out after the Home Office (interior ministry) ordered the doctor to stop prescribing it. Billy’s mother, Charlotte Caldwell, says that without the cannabis oil her son has up to 100 seizures a day, each of which is potentially fatal. Mother and son, who live in the British province of Northern Ireland, flew to Canada over the weekend to get some more of the medication, but it was seized when they arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport on Monday morning. “I’m just going to turn around and go get some more, and keep doing so until the UK authorities see sense,” Charlotte Caldwell said in a statement. “I take the view that I’d rather have my son illegally alive than legally dead. This is the scenario that the phrase ‘no brainer’ was invented for.”  The Home Office said it was sympathetic to what it called the difficult and rare situation of Billy Caldwell and his family, but the border force had a duty to stop banned substances from entering Britain. Under British law, cannabis is listed as a schedule 1 drug, meaning that it is not recognized as having a therapeutic value. Schedule 1 drugs can be used for research purposes and clinical trials, but only under a Home Office license. The Home Office invited Charlotte Caldwell to meet Nick Hurd, a junior minister in charge of policing, to discuss the issue. Caldwell has received support from Dan Poulter, a member of parliament from the ruling Conservative Party. “The current law is ridiculous; there is growing evidence that cannabis products used medically can be helpful in treating a number of conditions, but yet it is still seen through the prism of illegality here in the UK,” Poulter was quoted as saying in a statement from Caldwell’s representatives. “It is simply inhumane that Billy’s medication, which is legal in many other countries across the world, has been confiscated.”


Those who go swimming less than one hour after eating will be taken by a cramp and drown.

Explanation: Sightings:   Reference to this belief appears in the 1968 film Star! when one of the characters remarks that “It hasn’t been an hour since lunch” as she passes on a swimming invitation. We mention this sighting in particular solely because of its age: it shows the belief was widespread even in 1968. Also, in a episode of television sitcom Cybill (“Cybill Sheridan’s Day Off,” original air date 18 March 1998), the lead character commands a hunky pool boy whom she loves to see strip down and dive into the pool, “You know, it’s been over an hour since I ate. You can swim again.”

One of the greatest bogeymen needlessly inflicted upon countless youngsters is the unshakable belief that if they go swimming too soon after eating, they will be seized by cramps and drown. Unless that hour is waited out — all sixty minutes of it, and no cheating — they will surely sink like stones, leaving barely a ripple on the surface. Example:  I was a kid in the 1960s, and I used to hear the “Don’t go swimming for an hour after you eat or you’ll get cramps” exhortation from my mother. I had no idea what these “cramps” were, but they sounded bad. Being literal-minded even as a kid, I was puzzled by the whole idea. I understood “cramps” to be something that would afflict a person who entered the water too soon after eating (rather than who swam too soon after eating); that somehow this bad thing happened if water came in contact with your skin within an hour of your last meal. This raised all sorts of questions in my young mind — How did the “cramps” know you were in a swimming pool? (You could get wet from a hose, for example, but nobody’s parent ever warned us about running through sprinklers after eating.) How did the “cramps” know when the hour was up? (What would happen if you waded into the pool only fifty minutes after eating lunch, for example?) Did the “cramps” know the difference between someone who had eaten a full meal and someone who had merely snacked on a Slurpee? The whole thing was very mysterious. No other outcome was possible, according to this caution. The warning made no allowance for those who would develop cramps but would manage to unkink themselves in time or who would make it to safety in a still-cramped state, let alone for those who wouldn’t develop cramps in the first place. If you dared go into the water less than an hour after eating, you would — with 100% certainty — get cramps, and you would then — also with 100% certainty — drown. Kids who had eaten so little as a sandwich and a popsicle were routinely forced to sit out the full hour by the water’s side, forlornly watching their friends splash about. No doting mother would have sentenced her young’un to the certain death that awaited those fool enough to ignore this time-tested truism, and some went so far as to forbid wading. One hour was the rule, so one hour it was. And never mind that an hour to a kid is approximately as long as four are to an adult. Caution is a good thing when it comes to youngsters and water, because drowning is a leading cause of accidental death for infants and children nationwide. Yet in this case, the caution was far from warranted. No one knows how long the belief about the dangers of swimming after eating has been with us, but it does appear in Scouting for Boys, which was published in 1908:  First, there is the danger of cramp. If you bathe within an hour and a half after taking a meal, that is, before your food is digested, you are very likely to get cramp. Cramp doubles you up in extreme pain so that you cannot move your arms or legs — and down you go. You may drown — and it will be your own fault. In 1961 exercise physiologist Arthur Steinhaus took a position against this belief in the Journal of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation. He labeled the very idea of stomach cramps “questionable.”  Although muscle cramps in the calves, feet, and hands while swimming are not unknown, they are certainly not life threatening provided the swimmer does not panic. The sharpest charley horse can be tamed by tensing and relaxing the afflicted muscle, a treatment any swimmer can manage to perform. Even if the cramp is left untreated, it will not cause the swimmer to slip beneath the waves. One can simply float until help arrives. All of the above applies to ordinary muscle cramps of the sort brought on by overexertion, not the dread stomach cramps this admonition warns against. Many believe this fearsome condition does not exist, although those who tout the dangers of premature swimming will go into great detail when describing the presumed mechanics behind the threat:  [Engel & Malloy, 1993] A form of muscle cramp, stitches are caused by the blood supply to the diaphragm being shut off by pressure from the lungs above and the abdomen below, like a bomb and a submarine attack at the same time. So what does this have to do with food? Well, if you have food in your stomach you are likely to develop stomach cramps. Here’s why: To aid digestion the heart pumps a large volume of blood to the stomach. During exercise, the heart pumps blood to the muscles, and the flow of the blood to the stomach is greatly diminished. Without the blood supply, the stomach muscles suffer from lack of oxygen and, like any muscle without oxygen, develop cramps. Whether oxygen-deprivation stomach cramps are real or not is open to debate, as is whether they can be brought on by eating right before engaging in strenuous activity. What’s not in doubt, however, are the lack of deaths associated with swimming right after eating — there hasn’t been so much as one drowning attributed to this, not even a near drowning. For something that was supposed to be fatal if you so much as dipped a toe, this particular old wives’ tale proved to be a dud. So what to do with this information? Those who are very careful about not taking any risks that are avoidable might want to put off striking out for the other side of the lake right after having tucked into a large meal. However, ordinary levels of swimming or just general horsing around in the water need not be eschewed, even if a whole turkey has just been consumed, feathers and all. Likewise, strenuous sidestroking can still be safely undertaken after a snack or a light to moderate-sized meal. As for those kids who will continue to be sidelined for an hour after eating (deeply internalized cautions are very hard to dislodge, especially those inculcated into the legions of moms and dads already convinced everything their youngsters get up to will end in disaster), they can at least take comfort in the knowledge that they’re not being raised in Cuba where the parental belief runs to three hours.


Paralyzed California man recounts re-learning to walk via computer.

Explanation: For paraplegic Adam Fritz, the thrill of the computer-assisted first steps he took five years after being paralyzed in a motorcycle crash came only after he was unhooked from the system that enabled him to walk briefly in a bioengineering lab.

During the experiment itself, Fritz recounted, he had to keep his mind focused entirely on placing one foot in front of the other as his brain waves were translated by a computer algorithm into impulses that bypassed his severed spinal cord and activated his legs. “If you break your concentration, it wouldn’t work anymore,” he told Reuters shortly after scientists from the University of California, Irvine, reported the feat in the British open-access Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation. “Once I finished, I had that ‘Oh my God, this thing worked,’ kind of a moment,” the 28-year-old religious studies graduate said. “It was very exhilarating.”  The “proof-of-concept” study published late Wednesday documented how brain-to-computer technology, which converts thoughts to body motion, enabled Fritz to become the first person paralyzed from the waist down by spinal cord injury to walk without the use of robotics. As captured in a YouTube video of that pioneering moment last October, it was hardly a casual stroll. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBAeR-Z0EHg)  Fritz is seen slowly shuffling with painstaking effort across the floor of UC Irvine’s iMove Lab. His weight was partially supported by an overhead suspension harness and a walker he grasped to keep his body upright. But researchers said he propelled himself entirely by his own leg muscles, controlled by his own brain, over a distance of 12 feet (3.66 meters). The weight support was necessary because he lacks sensation in his legs or feet, said Dr. An Do, a neurologist and study co-author. The outcome marked a promising though incremental achievement in the development of brain-computer interfaces that may in the future help stroke and spinal injury patients regain day-to-day mobility, but clinical applications remain years away, Do said. Fritz, who now works full time as a disability claims administrator, recounted that his computer-assisted walk posed a rather unexpected challenge. “The hardest part, honestly, wasn’t taking the steps - it was stopping, because at that point, you’re focusing so hard on getting yourself to walk that to instantly stop, that was actually difficult to do,” he said. Fritz said it took nearly a year of rigorous physical and mental training to prepare for the experiment, using a specially designed virtual-reality simulator where he learned to control a video-animated character using his own brain waves. “I spent months sitting in front of a computer just trying to make that little avatar move, and there were times I felt like, ‘What’s the point? I’m never going to get it.’”  But he eventually caught on. Once ready to take computer-assisted steps of his own, he did so initially suspended a few inches off the ground and ultimately with his feet on the floor. Neural signals produced as he concentrated on moving his legs were detected by an electroencephalogram (EEG) worn over his head, processed through a computer algorithm and relayed to electrodes placed around his knees to stimulate his muscles. Fritz said he already has volunteered to take part in later research stages in which scientists hope to miniaturize the system with brain implants allowing greater control and perhaps even to deliver the sensation of foot pressure back to the brain for balance and weight support. “Seeing this experiment and what this research has done, I think within my lifetime we will see a cure for spinal cord injury, or a treatment to fix it,” Fritz said.


2nd Ebola vaccine to be used in Congo, as UN efforts slammed.

Explanation: The World Health Organization on Monday announced Congo will start using a second experimental Ebola vaccine, as efforts to stop the deadly outbreak are stalled and Doctors Without Borders criticizes vaccination efforts to date.

Matshidiso Moeti, Health, General News, Africa, United Nations, Ebola virus

Since this outbreak was declared in August 2018, more than 200,000 people have received doses of a vaccine made by Merck which will continue to be used in Congo. The U.N. health agency in a statement said the second vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson, will be used from October in areas where Ebola is not actively spreading. Using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “will ensure that we have potentially an additional tool to prevent the expansion of the outbreak,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa director. So far, more than 3,030 people have been sickened by the Ebola virus in this outbreak, the second-worst in history, and more than 1,990 have died. The question of whether the Johnson & Johnson experimental vaccine should be used was at the center of a dispute between Congo’s former health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga and global health officials. Ilunga had insisted Congo would not use the vaccine because he said it wasn’t sufficiently tested and would create confusion. He resigned as the health minister in July after the president replaced him as the head of Congo’s Ebola response team. In his resignation letter, Ilunga criticized the “strong pressure exercised in recent months” to use the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Separately, Doctors Without Borders is seeking an independent committee to oversee Ebola vaccination efforts, similar to those that have been formed internationally to respond to outbreaks of meningitis, yellow fever and cholera. The medical charity said greater transparency is needed and alleged that WHO is “restricting the availability” of the Merck vaccine in the field. Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym, MSF, said the approximately 225,000 people vaccinated so far is “largely insufficient” and that between 450,000 and 600,000 people should have been immunized by now. “Not enough people are getting the vaccine because of some arbitrary rules that haven’t been made clear,” Dr. Natalie Roberts, emergency coordinator for MSF, told The Associated Press. She said restricting the vaccine to people who are known contacts of Ebola cases is problematic. “It comes down to very local control, when every morning it’s someone from WHO who decides who is going to be vaccinated and how many vials to open,” she said. “Trying to restrict eligibility for a vaccine for a disease that everybody is afraid of is just not going to work.” MSF has described WHO’s strategy as “like giving firefighters a bucket of water to put out a fire, but only allowing them to use one cup of water a day.” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said in an email that the limited number of Ebola vaccines needs to be used sparingly. “If all doses were sent to (Congo), there would be no reserves available to respond should cases emerge in any of the high-risk neighboring countries,” he said. “That would jeopardize an effective, speedy response in those high-risk countries.” Beyond Congo, cases have been confirmed in Uganda and some health workers in Rwanda and South Sudan have been vaccinated preventively. Jasarevic said an international committee like the one called for by MSF is only used for licensed vaccines; both Ebola vaccines remain experimental and have not been approved by any regulatory agencies. “When the vaccine is licensed, this would be an appropriate mechanism for managing supply of the vaccine,” he said. Roberts said the number of people vaccinated so far is ultimately a damning assessment of response efforts. “If you had said at the beginning of the outbreak that we were going to vaccinate this many people, you would assume the outbreak would be over by now,” she said. “But clearly the right people were not vaccinated.”


Under U.S. President Donald Trump, federal authorities are confiscating orders of personal protective equipment (PPE) from local governments amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Explanation: What's true: Numerous health care officials and state leaders have reported instances in which federal authorities have intervened on local agencies' agreements with PPE vendors. In several cases, state officials reported the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) confiscated supplies within the last minute of deals with no explanation, while others reported the agency outbid them for the equipment. What's false: However, FEMA does not appear to have an organized effort for commandeering equipment at the local level. Agency representatives said they are working under a broad distribution plan to get supplies to areas in highest need.

As the U.S. federal government and states clashed over how to respond to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, workers on the frontlines of helping virus patients reported widespread shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), including N95 masks and gowns. Hospital and state leaders described a chaotic and highly competitive market for securing supplies from vendors — disarray that critics of President Donald Trump blamed on his ad-hoc approach to addressing the shortfall. Meanwhile, several news reports surfaced, claiming federal officials seized PPE shipments from local agencies or stopped the deals between vendors and states by offering higher bids. Snopes received numerous inquiries from readers about the validity of the assertion. To get to the root of the claim, we first researched from where the news reports originated. From The New York Times to the Boston Globe to The Intelligencer (a blog within New York magazine), several media outlets highlighted the experience of Dr. Andrew W. Artenstein, an infectious disease physician in Springfield, Massachusetts, who said the pandemic has forced him into PPE supply-chain work. On April 17, 2020, he published a letter in a peer-reviewed medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, about his apparent travails of getting a large shipment of face masks and respirators from a warehouse in a mid-Atlantic state. (He told The New York Times he would not publicize the location of the transaction out of fear of jeopardizing his relationship with the supply vendor.) The letter read: Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. It is unclear why federal officials may have targeted the Massachusetts delivery or where they would have allegedly redirected the supplies. Citing a policy of not confirming or denying specific investigations, the FBI declined to comment on Artenstein’s account in an April 20 New York Times story, saying only that the agency had been working to ensure that PPE “is not being unlawfully distributed or hoarded” during the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, the Boston Globe could not reach the Department of Homeland Security, which encompasses FEMA, to comment on the doctor’s story. Though widely circulated online, Artenstein’s story was not the only report of federal interference in the procurement of PPE in spring 2020. On April 7, the Los Angeles Times reported health care officials in seven states said the federal government seized their shipments and did not give guidance on how or if the local agencies would someday get the supplies they ordered. “Are they stockpiling this stuff? Are they distributing it? We don’t know,” one unidentified official told the LA Times. “And are we going to ever get any of it back if we need supplies? It would be nice to know these things.” Additionally, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told The New York Times that FEMA stepped in at the last minute of a deal the city had with “one of its usual suppliers” to buy 1 million masks; a New Jersey county official told local media an order of 35,000 N95 and other masks were “commandeered” by the federal government; and a leader of the private health care company Kaiser Permanente told staff members that the company had found 20 million masks to purchase, “but the feds actually seized that shipment before we were able to acquire it,” the Times reported. The same news story said: In Massachusetts, state leaders said they had confirmed a vast order of personal protective equipment for their health workers; then the Trump administration took control of the shipments. In Kentucky, the head of a hospital system told members of Congress that his broker had pulled out of an agreement to deliver four shipments of desperately needed medical gear after the supplies were commandeered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado thought his state had secured 500 ventilators before they were “swept up by FEMA.” Adding to those reports are worries by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker that if he publicly discusses how he’s obtaining masks and gloves for his state, federal officials may catch wind and seize the materials, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “The supply chain has been likened to the wild West, and once you have purchased supplies, ensuring they get to the state is another herculean feat,” a spokesperson for the governor told the news outlet.


Gene trawl shows curing cancer harder than thought.

Explanation: Cancer experts who probed every gene in tumors from two of the hardest-to-treat cancers found that cancer is much more complicated than anyone thought — and say they found why a cure is so unlikely after a tumor has spread.

A strand of DNA is seen in an undated handout image. REUTERS/National Institutes of Health/Handout But they also discovered a potential new way to treat a common and fatal form of brain cancer, and opened the door to finding cancer before it has spread, when it can still be cured surgically, they reported on Thursday in the journal Science. “Cancer is very complex — more complex than we had believed. It is not going to be easy to develop therapies,” said Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “If you have 100 patients, you have 100 different diseases.”   The findings suggest that popular new targeted therapies such as Novartis’s Gleevec may not work broadly, because they affect only one mutated gene, while cancer is caused by dozens. A better approach would be to find the pathways — networks of genes — that control a tumor’s uncontrolled growth and spread, they told reporters in a telephone briefing. The international team sequenced the more than 20,000 genes in cells from 24 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer and from 22 patients with glioblastoma multiforme. The typical pancreatic tumor had 63 genetic mutations, while the average brain tumor had 60, they found. The good news is they found just 12 pathways that were abnormal in most of the tumors. Some were in expected areas, such as the regulation of programmed cell suicide, or apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. “Often what appeared to be mutations in disparate genes turned out to be working in common pathways,” said Dr. Kenneth Kinzler of Johns Hopkins, who worked on the study. One surprising discovery was a new gene called IDH1 found in glioblastoma multiforme, the most common type of brain tumor and one that usually kills patients within a year, said Dr. Victor Velculescu, also of Hopkins. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, 76, was diagnosed in May with this type of brain tumor. The patients with these mutations were younger and lived longer than the typical brain tumor patient. “Glioblastoma multiformes used to be thought of as one disease. It is now clear they are two,” Velculescu told the briefing. Vogelstein said the findings suggest that pharmaceutical companies should change their approach to developing new cancer drugs. While Gleevec, a pill, transformed the treatment of a blood cancer called chronic myeloid leukemia, “our work suggests that most solid tumors are really nothing like CML,” Vogelstein said. “It is extremely unlikely that drugs which target a single gene like Gleevec will be active against a major fraction of solid tumors. Instead of screening for drugs against single proteins, our work suggests that it may be more productive to screen for drugs that act against core pathways,” Vogelstein said. The findings also suggest better ways to screen for cancers, Vogelstein said. “Our group as well as others have found that you can detect mutations outside of cells, just floating in the plasma, in virtually all patients with advanced colorectal cancer and about two-thirds of those with relatively early tumors,” he said. “It will be possible soon to detect them in many other samples from patients, say in their blood, even when the tumors are early. Almost all tumors and even those of the brain and pancreas would be curable if they are caught early.”


The Newfoundland town of Gander played host to thousands of airline passengers stranded there when American airspace was closed after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Explanation: The Newfoundland town of Gander played host to thousands of airline passengers stranded there after 9/11.

Gander, a town of about 10,000 people (and 550 hotel rooms) in Newfoundland, Canada, lies in the northeastern tip of North America and has long served as a refueling stop for trans-Atlantic flights and a temporary haven for flights diverted from their destinations. Shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the town become famous through a widely shared message extolling the hospitality of the town’s residents in helping stranded travelers: My Mom, who, as most of you know, works for Air Canada, got this from a pal. It is written by a member of a Delta Flight crew called Nazim:         We were about 5 hours out of Frankfurt flying over the North Atlantic and I was in my crew rest seat taking my scheduled rest break. All of a sudden the curtains parted violently and I was told to go to the cockpit, right now, to see the captain. As soon as I got there I noticed  the crew had one of those “All Business” looks on their faces. The captain handed me a printed message. I quickly read the message and realized the importance of it. The message was from Atlanta, addressed to our flight, and simply said, “All airways over the Continental US are closed. Land ASAP at the nearest airport, advise your destination.” Now, when a dispatcher tells you to land immediately without suggesting which airport, one can assume that the dispatcher has reluctantly given up control of the flight to the captain. We knew it was a serious situation and we needed to find terra firma quickly. It was quickly decided that the nearest airport was 400 miles away, behind our right shoulder, in Gander, on the island of New Foundland. A quick request was made to the Canadian traffic controller and a right turn, directly to Gander, was approved immediately. We found out later why there was no hesitation by the Canadian controller approving our request. We, the in-flight crew, were told to get the airplane ready for an immediate landing. While this was going on another message arrived from Atlanta telling us about some terrorist activity in the New York area. We briefed the in-flight crew about going to Gander and we went about our business ‘closing down’ the airplane for a landing. A few minutes later I went back to the cockpit to find out that some airplanes had been hijacked and were being flown into buildings all over the US. We decided to make an announcement and LIE to the passengers for the time being. We told them that an instrument problem had arisen on the airplane and that we needed to land at Gander, to have it checked. We promised to give more information after landing in Gander. There were many unhappy passengers but that is par for the course. We landed in Gander about 40 minutes after the start of this episode. There were already about 20 other airplanes on the ground from all over the world. After we parked on the ramp the captain made the following announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, you must be wondering if all these airplanes around us have the same instrument problem as we have. But the reality is that we are here for a good reason.”  Then he went on to explain the little bit we knew about the situation in the US. There were loud gasps and stares of disbelief. Local time at Gander was 12:30 pm. (11:00 AM EST)     Gander control told us to stay put. No one was allowed to get off the aircraft. No one on the ground was allowed to come near the aircrafts. Only a car from the airport police would come around once in a while, look us over and go on to the next airplane. In the next hour or so all the airways over the North Atlantic were vacated and Gander alone ended up with 53 airplanes from all over the world, out of which 27 were flying US flags. We were told that each and every plane was to be offloaded, one at a time, with the foreign carriers given the priority. We were No. 14 in the US category. We were further told that we would be given a tentative time to deplane at 6 pm. Meanwhile bits of news started to come in over the aircraft radio and for the first time we learned that airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon in DC. People were trying to use their cell phones but were unable to connect due to a different cell system in Canada. Some did get through but were only able to get to the Canadian operator who would tell them that the lines to the US were either blocked or jammed and to try again. Some time late in the evening the news filtered to us that the World Trade Center buildings had collapsed and that a fourth hijacking had resulted in a crash. Now the passengers were totally bewildered and emotionally exhausted but stayed calm as we kept reminding them to look around to see that we were not the only ones in this predicament. There were 52 other planes with people on them in the same situation. We also told them that the Canadian Government was in charge and we were at their mercy. True to their word, at 6 PM, Gander airport told us that our turn to deplane would come at 11 AM, the next morning. That took the last wind out of the passengers and they simply resigned and accepted this news without much noise and really started to get into a mode of spending the night on the airplane. Gander had promised us any and all medical attention if needed; medicine, water, and lavatory servicing. And they were true to their word. Fortunately we had no medical situation during the night. We did have a young lady who was 33 weeks into her pregnancy. We took REALLY good care of her. The night passed without any further complications on our airplane despite the uncomfortable sleeping arrangements. About 10:30 on the morning of the 12th we were told to get ready to leave the aircraft. A convoy of school buses showed up at the side of the airplane, the stairway was hooked up and the passengers were taken to the terminal for “processing” We, the crew, were taken to the same terminal but were told to go to a different section, where we were processed through Immigration and customs and then had to register with the Red Cross. After that we were isolated from our passengers and were taken in a caravan of vans to a very small hotel in the town of Gander. We had no idea where our passengers were going. The town of Gander has a population of 10,400 people. Red Cross told us that they were going to process about 10,500 passengers from all the airplanes that were forced into Gander. We were told to just relax at the hotel and wait for a call to go back to the airport, but not to expect that call for a while. We found out the total scope of the terror back home only after getting to our hotel and turning on the TV, 24 hours after it all started. Meanwhile we enjoyed ourselves going around town discovering things and enjoying the hospitality. The people were so friendly and they just knew that we were the “Plane people”. We all had a great time until we got that call, 2 days later, on the 14th at 7 AM. We made it to the airport by 8:30 AM and left for Atlanta at 12:30 PM arriving in Atlanta at about 4:30 PM. (Gander is 1 hour and 30 minutes ahead of EST, yes!, 1 hour and 30 minutes.) But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. What passengers told us was so uplifting and incredible and the timing couldn’t have been better. We found out that Gander and the surrounding small communities, within a 75 Kilometer radius, had closed all the high schools, meeting halls, lodges, and any other large gathering places. They converted all these facilities to a mass lodging area. Some had cots set up, some had mats with sleeping bags and pillows set up. ALL the high school students HAD to volunteer taking care of the “GUESTS”. Our 218 passengers ended up in a town called Lewisporte, about 45 Kilometers from Gander. There they were put in a high school. If any women wanted to be in a women only facility, that was arranged. Families were kept together. All the elderly passengers were given no choice and were taken to private homes. Remember that young pregnant lady, she was put up in a private home right across the street from a 24 hour Urgent Care type facility. There were DDS on call and they had both male and female nurses available and stayed with the crowd for the duration. Phone calls and emails to US and Europe were available for every one once a day. During the days the passengers were given a choice of “Excursion” trips. Some people went on boat cruises of the lakes and harbors. Some went to see the local forests. Local bakeries stayed open to make fresh bread for the guests. Food was prepared by all the residents and brought to the school for those who elected to stay put. Others were driven to the eatery of their choice and fed. They were given tokens to go to the local Laundromat to wash their clothes, since their luggage was still on the aircraft. In other words every single need was met for those unfortunate travelers. Passengers were crying while telling us these stories. After all that, they were delivered to the airport right on time and without a single one missing or late. All because the local Red Cross had all the information about the goings on back at Gander and knew which group needed to leave for the airport at what time. Absolutely incredible. When passengers came on board, it was like they had been on a cruise. Everybody knew everybody else by their name. They were swapping stories of their stay, impressing each other with who had the better time. It was mind boggling. Our flight back to Atlanta looked like a party flight. We simply stayed out of their way. The passengers had totally bonded and they were calling each other by their first names, exchanging phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. And then a strange thing happened. One of our business class passengers approached me and asked if he could speak over the PA to his fellow passengers. We never, never, allow that. But something told me to get out of his way. I said “of course”. The gentleman picked up the PA and reminded everyone about what they had just gone through in the last few days. He reminded them of the hospitality they had received at the hands of total strangers. He further stated that he would like to do something in return for the good folks of the town of Lewisporte. He said he was going to set up a Trust Fund under the name of DELTA 15 (our flight number). The purpose of the trust fund is to provide a scholarship for high school student(s) of Lewisporte to help them go to college. He asked for donations of any amount from his fellow travelers. When the paper with donations got back to us with the amounts, names, phone numbers and addresses, it totaled to $14.5K or about $20K Canadian. The gentleman who started all this turned out to be an MD from Virginia. He promised to match the donations and to start the administrative work on the scholarship. He also said that he would forward this proposal to Delta Corporate and ask them to donate as well. Why, all of this? Just because some people in far away places were kind to some strangers, who happened to literally drop in among them? WHY NOT? On 11 September  2001, a total of 240 flights were rerouted to Canada when American airspace was closed after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and 39 of those flights ended up in Gander. The townspeople of Gander (and surrounding areas) came through magnificently in the crisis, as 6,579 marooned passengers and crew members swelled their population by two-thirds:  Responding to radio announcements, the residents and businesses of Gander and other towns supplied toothbrushes, deodorant, soap, blankets and even spare underwear, along with offers of hot showers and guest rooms. Newtel Communications, the telephone company, set up phone banks for passengers to call home. Local television cable companies wired schools and church halls, where passengers watched events unfolding in New York and realized how lucky they were. There were some with special needs. Carl and Ethna Smith found kosher food through an airport caterer and a new set of kitchenware for an orthodox Jewish family from New York. At the Gander Baptist Church, Gary and Donna House dealt with the needs of four Moldovan refugee families, members of a religious sect who spoke no English and were bewildered by events. Plenty of grateful Americans who passed through Gander that day took the opportunity to pen appreciative letters similar to the one quoted above when they returned home, such as the following letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:   We’re writing to express our appreciation for the people in Canada who so generously assisted the people on US Airways Flight 3 returning to the United States on Sept. 11. We were grounded in Gander, Newfoundland, at 1:30 p.m. on that day and then informed of the events that had taken place in New York, at the Pentagon and “outside of Pittsburgh.”  We spent the next 23 hours locked on the plane until we could be safely cleared to leave the plane, and then we were transported to the Salvation Army in Lewisporte, 45 minutes away. The people of Lewisporte and the Salvation Army fed us three meals a day and provided countless blankets, toothbrushes and toiletries for the passengers on that flight. The elementary school next to the Salvation Army building canceled classes for its children to provide us with access to the much-needed shower stall and the computer classroom for us to e-mail home. During that time when all of us were frantic to find out what had happened, make sure our loved ones were safe and contact those who would be missing us in the next few days, our hosts were endlessly cheerful, giving and kind. They dropped everything to cook for us and make us feel less isolated and abandoned during those five days of uncertainty. When we finally received word of the plane’s clearance for leaving, we said goodbye with bittersweet memories of a group of people of unlimited generosity. This experience will stay with us during this time and continue to remind us that we have more friends than enemies in this world, and we are grateful for the proximity to our country of some of them. And this letter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:  We were flying home from a wonderful vacation in Paris and were about an hour from Newark when an announcement was made that terrorists had attacked New York and Washington and our flight was being diverted to Gander, Newfoundland. We were the fourth of 37 planes to land in Gander and were kept on the plane for seven hours. Then we proceeded to immigration, where many compassionate people met us. An unidentified woman approached and put her arm around us and wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help us. At this point we were greatly concerned about our two sons who work in Manhattan. She took us to a phone, where we called our oldest son, who assured us that he and his brother were safe. From there we were put on school buses and taken to the College of the North Atlantic. Many ordinary, caring people met us and made all 300 passengers feel welcome. We were given blankets and pillows from their homes. We stayed for two nights and three days. We slept on the floor, as cots could not be rounded up fast enough. We shared our classroom with 18 others and a dog. Everyone was extraordinarily thoughtful of each other. One woman must have put her life on hold and was constantly checking on us. She even came to the airport when we finally left to make sure we all were fine. I never saw her without a smile. The lady who ran the cafeteria along with many neighbors made hot meals and brought in casseroles each day. Students helped us to use e-mail, and we were able to use the phone to call our family. No organization with financial backing was behind this – this was a call to neighbors and friends to come and help those of us in need. We will never be able to think of Gander, Newfoundland, without remembering all the goodness and kindness that was showered upon us by our neighbors and friends from Canada. And yes, a Gander Flight 15 college scholarship fund was established for high school students in Lewisporte, Newfoundland, by passengers, crew members and friends of Delta Flight 15. Other towns in Newfoundland and Labrador (and across Canada) also took in temporarily displaced passengers with hospitality that day and are equally deserving of our gratitude. A variant of this item circulated in 2012 identified Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as the Delta Flight 15 passenger who established a scholarship trust fund for Lewisporte high school students. Romney was not a passenger on that flight, nor did he establish a scholarship trust fund for Lewisporte students.


Jaws, the prequel: Scientists find the 'Model T Ford' of sharks.

Explanation: You’ve heard of the Model T Ford, the famed early 20th-century automobile that was the forerunner of the modern car. But how about the Model T shark?

Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of the impeccably preserved fossilized remains of a shark that lived 325 million years ago in what is now Arkansas, complete with a series of cartilage arches that supported its gills and jaws. Because shark skeletons are made of soft cartilage, not hard bone, finding anything more than scrappy fossilized remains of teeth and vertebrae is rare. Finding a fossil shark in an almost three-dimensional state of preservation, boasting important skeletal structures, is exceptional. This primitive shark, named Ozarcus mapesae, may lead scientists to rethink shark evolution, erasing the notion that these beasts of the deep have remained little changed since they first appeared at least 420 million years ago. “These things have been very successful, among the top predators in the Earth’s oceans, for over 400 million years,” said paleontologist John Maisey of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the researchers. “The best analogy I can come up with is this: It’s like comparing a Model T Ford with a modern automobile. They are both recognizably the same kind of thing. But they are completely different under the hood. We found the Model T of sharks,” added Maisey, whose research was published in the journal Nature. Those cartilage arches, for example, are quite different from those in modern sharks, the scientists said. This suggests that while their general outward appearance has stayed roughly the same, important changes have occurred over time that have helped make sharks the perfect eating machines of the sea. Maisey said Ozarcus mapesae was small by shark standards - about 2 to 3 feet long, with relatively big eyes. It swam in the murky waters of a shallow inland sea teeming with life including other fish and squid-like creatures in shells. It is not the oldest shark fossil, but it is the oldest to reveal all of the anatomy of the skeleton supporting the gill arches, a vitally important element of a fish. Employing sophisticated equipment at the European Synchrotron in France, the scientists used high-resolution X-rays to obtain a detailed view of the shape and organization of the arches and associated structures. They found that the arrangement was unlike that of modern sharks but was very much like that of bony fishes like today’s tuna or swordfish. Maisey said that scientists had viewed today’s sharks as very primitive creatures while seeing bony fish as more advanced. “Modern sharks cannot be considered anymore as living fossils that did not evolve since their origin. They are actually very derived compared to early cartilaginous fishes,” said American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Alan Pradel, another of the researchers. Sharks have undergone many other changes since the time of Ozarcus mapesae, the researchers said. Their jaws are no longer firmly bound to the cranium, giving them greater biting freedom. Specializations in their inner ear enable them to hear very low frequency sounds, improving their hunting ability. They are better at replacing teeth. And there have been changes in their scales, among other things. “There’s lots of ways in which modern sharks are quite highly evolved and different from the Model T,” Maisey said. The shark’s genus name, Ozarcus, comes from the Ozark Mountain region where it was found. Its species name, mapesae, honors Ohio University scientist Gene Mapes, who found it.


We caught (the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) lying to us about the results of air quality studies in the Barnett Shale.

Explanation: Wendy Davis says the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) lied about air quality tests in the Barnett Shale

Speaking at the Texas Democratic convention last month, Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, lambasted the state agency responsible for approving permits to pollute the air. "The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — what a joke," she said during a speech to delegates June 26. "In my district, we caught them lying to us about the results of air quality studies in the Barnett Shale. They are playing with the health and safety of our communities, and we are going to tell them that is not acceptable." First, the basics: When we contacted Davis to elaborate on her statement, Davis said that "we" meant the public. But was TCEQ lying? The answer to that question is more complicated. From Dec. 15-17, TCEQ tested air samples collected at 126 natural gas production sites in Fort Worth for toxic pollutants. Natural gas drilling creates pollution from a couple sources, according to the Star-Telegram: the tank batteries that store wastewater and condensate — a light form of crude oil that often vents into the atmosphere — and the motors that drive pipeline compressors. Plus, drillers vent natural gas into the atmosphere when they complete a well. Fort Worth covers about 6 percent of the Barnett Shale, a natural gas field that covers more than 20 counties, according to the Star-Telegram. On Jan. 12, John Sadlier, deputy director of the office of compliance and enforcement at TCEQ, presented the results to the Fort Worth City Council. "Based on this study, the air is safe," he said, reporting that the agency didn't find pollutants at levels that could cause health problems. Eight slides accompanying the presentation had a red disclaimer noting that the samples had not been collected, analyzed or reviewed following specific protocol for quality control. TCEQ spokesman Terry Clawson told us that the city had asked TCEQ to perform tests "as quickly as possible" using the agency's mobile laboratory. (The request came on the heels of testing in DISH, a nearby town, that revealed high levels of benzene and other compounds.) While the mobile lab enables results to be produced within hours after samples are taken, Clawson said, the testing didn't meet national standards. Davis pointed out that the slides shown to the city council clearly said that benzene didn't exceed the levels considered safe for both short-term and long-term health, instead of noting that the data to prove that wasn't available. On Feb. 3, someone filed a fraud complaint with the TCEQ chief auditor's office, alleging the agency's monitoring operation had knowingly reported "inaccurate and misleading" information based on inadequate testing methods for butadiene, isoprene and benzene. The office initiated an audit, reporting the results on March 25. According to the audit memo, shortly after the council presentation, Sadlier questioned the validity of the data and ordered further tests. TCEQ sent the air samples to its lab using a more sensitive analysis. On Jan. 22, those tests showed that several samples measured benzene, a byproduct of gas drilling known to cause cancer in humans, at levels that exceeded those considered safe for people's long-term health. TCEQ did not report the new results to council members. The memo said Sadlier ordered more tests in February. Once more, TCEQ detected benzene, but not at levels that exceeded state standards. Clawson told us those results were published in a report dated April 26. The report was shared with the city of Fort Worth and posted on the agency's website on May 21. Davis said that it was "buried," so that someone visiting the site wouldn't know it was there unless they were looking for it. Still with us? On June 1, TCEQ released results from samples taken at two sites in late April — that would be the fourth round of tests — that again showed levels of benzene exceeding the state's long-term health standard. "State officials have said the level is not enough to cause immediate health problems, but it could make people sick if they were exposed continually for several years. It also serves as an indication that more testing in the area is needed," according to a June 2 Star-Telegram article. Clawson told us that TCEQ later collected more samples at the two facilities and did not find benzene that exceeded short-term or long-term exposure levels. That report was published and distributed to the City of Fort Worth on July 7, he said. Clawson told us that the agency regrets "the failure to communicate the results to the city in a more timely fashion." However, he also said that during presentation to the Fort Worth City Council, "we stated that tests found 'no cause for concern.' This statement was true then, and it is true today." As for the fraud complaint against the agency, the March 25 auditor's report concluded that the information provided to Sadlier from the first round of tests "while technically correct, could be considered to be misleading." It did not find evidence that Monitoring Operation's management knew the information was misleading. Sadlier said he didn't know the equipment couldn't detect lower levels of benzene when he talked to city officials, according to a May 28 Dallas Morning News article. Just a few days after TCEQ posted the toxicology report online May 21, the Texas Observer broke the story about the fraud complaint and audit, prompting Davis to issue a press release blasting the agency for waiting "four months to reveal these disturbing test results. The agency had determined the public had been exposed to elevated levels of benzene, and yet the public and their elected officials were not made aware of these exposures." On May 28 Davis filed a 30-point open-records request, asking for all TCEQ documents and communications related to benzene and other potentially harmful chemicals that may, could be, or are found in the air above the Barnett Shale. In our conversation with Davis last week, she said that Mark Vickery, executive director of the TCEQ, had called her to apologize. "He was very contrite, expressed great apology for not having revealed to me the information before," she said, adding that Vickery told her TCEQ didn't think the January test results posed "a serious health risk and therefore did not disclose it." Where does that leave us? First, TCEQ reported data that backed up the agency's claim that emissions from the Barnett Shale sites in Fort Worth were safe, but those tests could not measure lower levels of toxic chemicals. Subsequently, more sensitive tests have gone back and forth: some showed benzene levels exceeding the standard for long-term health effects and some did not. Until recently, the agency has not reported the results promptly. To Davis' point: TCEQ waited four months to alert officials of the January tests that detected elevated levels of benzene. Did the agency lie, as Davis claimed? Or simply fail to disclose — by TCEQ's own admission — in a timely fashion? "Hiding the truth is lying," Davis said. However, absent proof of an intent to deceive. Should her open-records request yield new information that shows the TCEQ knowingly lied to the public, we'll reconsider our rating.


Republicans are now "taking credit" for provisions of the health care bill "that they had tried to derail.

Explanation: Democrats' op ed accuses Republicans of taking credit for provisions of the health care bill they once tried to derail

National, Health Care, Debbie Wasserman Schultz,

Whoa, talk about a change in tune. Are Republicans now trying to take credit for parts of the health care bill? Are the Yankees rooting for the Red Sox? Are dogs and cats getting along? In an Aug. 12, 2010, op-ed for Politico headlined "GOP touts preventive care it opposed," Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and Rosa DeLauro , D-Conn., touted the benefits of preventive and wellness care. As survivors of breast and ovarian cancer, respectively, they said that preventive care saved their lives. But if Republicans have their way, the Democrats said, they would roll back a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires no co-pay for preventive care — including cancer screenings, health checkups, flu shots, mammograms and immunizations. That's pretty standard fare from Democratic supporters of the health care bill. But here's the part of the op-ed that caught our attention:  "Even Republicans who voted against the health care reform law and went out of their way to prevent its passage have now lauded these reforms. Recently, on the Senate floor, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) actually took credit for the preventive care provision. 'One of the things we did in the health care legislation,' Kyl said, 'was to provide a lot of different incentives for preventive care.'" And, they wrote, "This is not the first time Republicans have taken credit for health care provisions that they had tried to derail. After the act passed, and every Republican attempt to gut the bill had failed, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took credit for provisions that banned the practice of rescissions — dropping people’s health coverage when they get sick — and allowed young adults to continue being covered by their parents’ plans until age 26. "To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, success has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. So we understand why Republicans now like to laud health care reform — particularly when one considers that, after a decade of congressional control with eight years holding the White House as well, they had failed to do anything about the issue." That Republicans are now lauding the health care bill was news to us. So we decided to check out the two examples cited in the op-ed. Kyl's comments about preventive care came from the Senate floor on July 12, 2010. The topic was the White House's controversial recess appointment of Dr. Donald M. Berwick as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Here's what Kyl said:  "Dr. Berwick expressed his disapproval for costly cutting-edge medical technologies and has said prevention services such as 'annual physicals, screening tests, and other measures' are 'over-demanded.' One of the things we did in the health care legislation was provide a lot of different incentives for preventive care, for screening, to try to help people avoid illnesses on the theory that it would be a lot cheaper if we didn’t do a lot of treatment that was unnecessary. If you could identify in advance that an individual had a need for some treatment, maybe you could catch the disease, say, the cancer, early and not have the expensive treatment, the end-of-life kind of care that is frequently very expensive." Kyl's new use of the royal "we" didn't quite mesh with his vocal opposition to the bill. In a health care debate last year -- that ended up a minor hit on YouTube -- Kyl argued against mandating blanket coverages. "I don't need maternity care, and so requiring that to be in my insurance policy is something that I don't need and will make the policy more expensive," Kyl said. So were Kyl's recent comments from the Senate floor an endorsement of the health care bill's preventive care provisions, and was he now taking credit for it? "Sen. Kyl did not, in fact, 'take credit for' anything in his remark," said Andrew Wilder, a spokesman for Kyl. "'We' was a factual reference to Congress, and did not contain a partisan context, as some now assert presumably for political reasons." Still, Democrats note that Kyl's tone appears to have changed, saying "we" instead of the more typical reference to the bill as "the Democrat health care bill." "The way he's talking about it, he's talking about it like it's a good thing," said Brian Cook, press secretary for Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., chair of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. Whether that amounts to taking credit for the idea is getting into a bit of semantics. Certainly Republicans -- and Kyl in particular -- have forcefully opposed the health care bill, and repeatedly spoken of it in terms that liken it to a disaster. And so we can understand Democrats' frustration when a strong opponent of the bill cites a provision of of the bill that "we did" -- especially in light of his earlier comments against requiring insurers to carry preventive services -- like maternity care -- that not everyone would use. But we think it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that Kyl was "taking credit" for that provision. The "taking credit" moniker better fits the comments regarding Boehner. In an April 30, 2010, interview with Boehner on National Public Radio, a reporter said, "As you know, Democrats are already pointing to things that are already changing in America because of this (health care) bill. They will point to the fact that college seniors who would have been kicked off their parents' insurance when they graduated will get to stay on. Insurance companies are now saying they are going to end the practice of rescissions, or at least modify it..."  Boehner interjected, "Both of those ideas, by the way, came from Republicans and are part of the comments and ideas that we ought to have in the law." Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, noted that both provisions -- abolishing rescissions and encouraging extended coverage of young adults on their parents’ insurance through age 25 -- were included in the Republican alternative health care plan proposed by Boehner last November. But the ideas were in the Democrats' health plan long before that. And if they were Republican ideas, asked Cook, the Democratic spokesman for the Ways and Means committee, then why was it never a part of the Republicans' legislative agenda when they held the majority? We weren't able to pinpoint who originated the ideas, but we can say these were two ideas with rare bipartisan support -- as they were both in the Democratic and Republican health care proposals. It's certainly true that Republicans aggressively fought the health care bill, and are now aggressively seeking to overturn it. But it is misleading to suggest Republicans tried to derail the health care bill based on these two provisions. So are Wasserman Schultz and DeLauro correct that Republicans are now "taking credit" for provisions of the health care bill "that they had tried to derail"? In the case of Kyl comments, we think it's a stretch to say he took credit for the preventive care provisions in the health care bill. But Boehner did credit Republicans for provisions to abolish rescissions and allow young adults to continue being covered by their parents’ plans until age 26. Yet those specific provisions were not the target of the GOP opposition, which focused on larger issues of cost and the growth of government. And so we find the claims in the op-ed .


A Fox News guest referred to people injecting marijuana into their systems.

Explanation: What's true: David Avella, a Republican strategist and guest of the Fox News talk show "Outnumbered," referenced people injecting marijuana. What's false: After making the mistake, Avella and the hosts corrected the record immediately.

A Fox News guest on the talk show “Outnumbered” incurred some internet scorn after he accidentally referred to people “shooting up”marijuana, even though he corrected himself moments later. fox news is very worried about homeless people laying “in the street having just shot up with marijuana” people forget that weed is always done intravenously pic.twitter.com/RE9Ag9iLPe — Caleb Ecarma (@calebecarma) August 22, 2019  The Republican strategist did indeed make the comment as a guest on “Outnumbered” on Aug. 22, 2019. Avella and the show’s hosts were discussing new “person first” guidelines adopted by San Francisco legislators, would eliminate words like “felon,” “offender,” “convict,” “addict” and “juvenile delinquent,” per the San Francisco Chronicle. “Going forward, what was once called a convicted felon or an offender released from jail will be a ‘formerly incarcerated person,’ or a ‘justice-involved’ person or simply a ‘returning resident,” the Chronicle reported. Avella wasn’t a fan of that idea. “And the focus ought to be on a society that follows the law, not allowing people to defecate in the streets, not allowing individuals to lay on the street having just shot up with marijuana,” he said. The hosts immediately interjected with the word “heroin,” and Avella quickly corrected his statement. Marijuana is not a substance that is injected. It is either smoked or consumed. The digital media and entertainment publication Mashable explained that the idea of injecting weed “is a long-running joke to refer to those so out of the loop, they have no idea how consuming marijuana works.”


'Sesame Street' to welcome first autistic Muppet.

Explanation: Long-running children’s television show “Sesame Street” is welcoming a new kid to the block - a Muppet with autism called Julia.

A redhead who loves to sing and remembers the words to lots of songs, Julia will debut on the show for preschoolers on April 10 after a five-year outreach effort to families and experts on autism, Sesame Workshop said on Monday. “For years, families of children with autism have asked us to address the issue,” Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president of U.S. social impact at the nonprofit Sesame Workshop, said in a statement. One in 68 American children is currently diagnosed with autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an increase of some 119 percent since 2000. Autism is a developmental disorder present from early childhood, characterized by difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people and in using language and abstract concepts  Stacey Gordon, the puppeteer who will perform the role of Julia, and Christine Ferraro who wrote her part, both have family members who are on the autism spectrum. “It’s important for kids without autism to see what autism can look like,” Gordon told the CBS show “60 Minutes” in a preview on Sunday. “Had my son’s friends been exposed to his behaviors through something that they had seen on TV before they experienced them in the classroom, they might not have been frightened. They might not have been worried when he cried. They would have known that he plays in a different way and that that’s okay,” she added. The show will see Julia interact with favorite characters like Big Bird and Elmo but sometimes get overexcited, or flap her hands. The character will be supported with books and videos in both Spanish and English on the sesamestreet.org website and  costumed character visits to community events. Since its launch in 1969, “Sesame Street” has tackled issues such as divorce, disability, race and death alongside its role in teaching very young children to read, count and learn colors. “Sesame Street” is seen in either the United States on PBS and HBO, or local TV versions in more than 150 nations and has won multiple awards for its educational content and its message of inclusion.


UK confirms two more cases of bird flu on turkey and pheasant farms.

Explanation: British authorities say they have confirmed two more bird flu cases on farms in northern and eastern England, meaning there are now four areas where restrictions are in place across the country to reduce the spread of the disease.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) said it had confirmed a case of H5N8 avian flu in a flock of about 1,000 pheasants at a farm in Wyre, Lancashire, in northern England on Friday. A number of birds had died and the rest were being culled. It was the second outbreak reported at a farm in Wyre this week. Another H5N8 case had been identified on Thursday at a turkey rearing farm which had about 19,500 birds near Boston in Lincolnshire, Defra said. A 3-km (1.9-mile) protection zone and a 10-km surveillance zone have been put in place around both farms, with authorities saying the virus posed a very low risk to humans and no food safety risk. Different strains of bird flu have been spreading across Europe and Asia since late last year, leading to the large-scale slaughter of poultry in certain countries and some human deaths in China. Disease experts say the global spread of bird flu and the number of viral strains circulating and causing infections have reached unprecedented levels, raising the risk of a potential human outbreak.


New genetic links to same-sex sexuality found in huge study.

Explanation: The largest study of its kind found new evidence that genes contribute to same-sex sexual behavior, but it echoes research that says there are no specific genes that make people gay.

The genome-wide research on DNA from nearly half a million U.S. and U.K. adults identified five genetic variants not previously linked with gay or lesbian sexuality. The variants were more common in people who reported ever having had a same-sex sexual partner. That includes people whose partners were exclusively of the same sex and those who mostly reported heterosexual behavior. The researchers said thousands more genetic variants likely are involved and interact with factors that aren’t inherited, but that none of them cause the behavior nor can predict whether someone will be gay. The research “provides the clearest glimpse yet into the genetic underpinnings of same-sex sexual behavior,” said co-author Benjamin Neale, a psychiatric geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We also found that it’s effectively impossible to predict an individual’s sexual behavior from their genome. Genetics is less than half of this story for sexual behavior but it’s still a very important contributing factor,” Neale said. The study was released Thursday by the journal Science. Results are based on genetic testing and survey responses. Some of the genetic variants found were present in both men and women. Two in men were located near genes involved in male-pattern baldness and sense of smell, raising intriguing questions about how regulation of sex hormones and smell may influence same-sex behavior. Importantly, most participants were asked about frequency of same-sex sexual behavior but not if they self-identified as gay or lesbian. Fewer than 5% of U.K. participants and about 19% of U.S. participants reported ever having a same-sex sexual experience. The researchers acknowledged that limitation and emphasized that the study’s focus was on behavior, not sexual identity or orientation. They also note that the study only involved people of European ancestry and can’t answer whether similar results would be found in other groups. Origins of same-sex behavior are uncertain. Some of the strongest evidence of a genetic link comes from studies in identical twins. Many scientists believe that social, cultural, family and other biological factors are also involved, while some religious groups and skeptics consider it a choice or behavior that can be changed. A Science commentary notes that the five identified variants had such a weak effect on behavior that using the results “for prediction, intervention or a supposed ‘cure’ is wholly and unreservedly impossible.” “Future work should investigate how genetic predispositions are altered by environmental factors,” University of Oxford sociologist Melinda Mills said in the commentary. Other experts not involved in the study had varied reactions. Dr. Kenneth Kendler a specialist in psychiatric genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University, called it “a very important paper that advances the study of the genetics of human sexual preference substantially. The results are broadly consistent with those obtained from the earlier technologies of twin and family studies suggesting that sexual orientation runs in families and is moderately heritable.” Former National Institutes of Health geneticist Dean Hamer said the study confirms “that sexuality is complex and there are a lot of genes involved,” but it isn’t really about gay people. “Having just a single same sex experience is completely different than actually being gay or lesbian,” Hamer said. His research in the 1990s linked a marker on the X chromosome with male homosexuality. Some subsequent studies had similar results but the new one found no such link. Doug Vanderlaan, a University of Toronto psychologist who studies sexual orientation, said the absence of information on sexual orientation is a drawback and makes it unclear what the identified genetic links might signify. They “might be links to other traits, like openness to experience,” Vanderlaan said. The study was a collaboration among scientists including psychologists, sociologists and statisticians from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. They did entire human genome scanning, using blood samples from the U.K. Biobank and saliva samples from customers of the U.S.-based ancestry and biotech company 23andMe who had agreed to participate in research. ___ Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner . ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.