NEWS From Around The World

Study Suggests Caffeine Can Help Liver
Coffee and tea may reduce the risk of serious liver damage in people who drink too much alcohol, are overweight or have too much iron in the blood, researchers reported yesterday.
   The study of nearly 10,000 people showed that those who drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day developed chronic liver disease at half the rate of those who drank less than one cup each day.
   The study, conducted by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and Social & Scientific Systems Inc., found that coffee provided no protection to people at risk of liver disease from other causes, such as viral infections.
   "While it is too soon to encourage patients to increase their coffee and tea intake, the findings of our study potentially offer people at high-risk for developing chronic liver disease a practical way to decrease that risk," said Constance E. Ruhl, who helped lead the study.
   Writing in the American Gastroenterological Association journal Gastroenterology, Ruhl and colleagues said caffeine seemed to hold the key.
  They analyzed the records of 9,849 participants in a government survey whose coffee and tea intake was evaluated and who were followed for about 19 years.

12/05/05 washingtonpost.com

Pope Becomes First Citizen Of Bethlehem
Pope Benedict XVI has become the first new citizen of Bethlehem after the town of Jesus' birth was declared an `open city.'
The Pope accepted a Bethlehem passport from the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the weekend.
   He becomes the first new citizen of Bethlehem following the launch of `Open Bethlehem,' an international campaign to save the city.
   Bethlehem faces a state of emergency following the completion of an 8 meter high illegal cement wall at the entrance to the city that separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem and other Palestinian towns.
   With the Israeli wall and other closures, including militarized fences and illegal Jewish settlements, Bethlehem has been reduced to its urban core, a modern-day ghetto town.
   In issuing a passport, Bethlehem is granting citizenship to those who "uphold the values of a just and open society (and) remain a true friend of Bethlehem, through its imprisonment," according to the passport's citation.
   The Open Bethlehem project aims to encourage trade partnerships, investment, tourism, events, and to attract creative opportunities to the city. The core of its message is that Bethlehem is a city of openness and diversity, with a centuries old tradition of welcoming travellers, refugees, and pilgrims from across the world.

ekklesia.co.uk

Grandma Gets Her Game On
Senior Finds Celebrity Taking Electronic Fun Very Seriously
Grandma won't let go of the controller.
   For more than a week, Barbara St. Hilaire has been logging heavy leather recliner time, snacking on a big Tupperware bowl of jalapeno-flavored popcorn, yelling grossly unprintable words at her 35-inch TV — all the while trying to kill ghosts in the horror video game Fatal Frame 3. The 69-year-old grandmother is a gamer, no joke.
   Like many gamers, she owns a PlayStation 2, a GameCube and an Xbox, and subscribes to Electronic Gaming Monthly, Computer Gaming World and Game Informer. She drives her red 1997 Pontiac Grand Am to a nearby GameStop, where she buys and exchanges her games, and also to Hollywood Video, where she rents them. But unlike many gamers, she's been gaming since the early 1970s. Even with her hearing aids, she turns up the volume on games so loud that, one of her grandkids says, "her room literally starts to shake." Her treasured strategy guides — the Cliffs Notes of tough-to-beat games — are tucked next to her equally treasured cookbooks.
   There is an AARP generation of gamers, a group that logs on to Gamegeezers.com and would qualify for a senior citizen discount if game stores offered them. In fact 19 percent of all computer and console gamers are over the age of 50, says the Entertainment Software Association, the industry's trade group. They play a variety of games — from laid-back, relaxing fare such as solitaire and mah-jongg, to first-person shooters (military-themed titles are hits).
   Still, a 69-year-old who spends a Saturday afternoon in Wal-Mart test-playing Xbox 360s is no ordinary gamer. "I'd kill for one of those," St. Hilaire says.
   St. Hilaire lives with her daughter, Linda, 44, an office manager, and Linda's four kids, ages 12 to 22. The eldest, Tim, started a blog last June, chronicling the goings-on in a one-story, five-bedroom abode where everyone is a gamer — there are no fewer than 17 game consoles in the house, from a Nintendo 64 to a GameBoy SP to a Dreamcast — and Grandma, the matriarch of the family, the one on Social Security, is the most addicted of them all.
   She's been playing since the early years of Pogo, Asteroids and Space Invaders, when she was a member of a bowling league and spent countless coins hitting the arcade games in the bowling alleys. She'd play games before and after work; she was first a bookkeeper at a bank, then a machinist at Black & Decker.
   Two very good things have come out of all this gaming, her family says: One, she's always busy. Two, they always know what to get her for Christmas and her birthday. She'll be 70 in February.

12/03/05 washingtonpost.com

The Prophetic Word 2-2006

Colorado Mom Sentenced to 30 Years
GOLDEN, Colo. (AP)—A woman who authorities said has sex with high school boys during alcohol- and drug-fueled parties has been sentenced to 30 years in prison, officials said.
  Silvia Johnson, 41, of Arvada, described herself to investigators as a "cool mom" who "was never popular with classmates in high school" and who was beginning to feel like one of the group.
   She pleaded guilty in July to two misdemeanor counts of sexual assault and nine felony counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
   She also was sentenced for additional charges of third-degree assault, violation of a restraining order and harassment for unrelated cases involving her husband and children, prosecution spokesman Carl Blesch said.
   Authorities said Johnson held parties for the boys almost weekly between October 2003 and October 2004. They said Johnson provided drugs and alcohol to eight boys and had sex with five of them.

Associated Press

Warning Label on Darwin Sows Division in Suburbia
Parents in Cobb County, Ga., Clash Over Sticker in Textbooks
MARIETTA, Ga.—The evolution controversy in this comfortable Atlanta suburb began with one boy's fascination with dinosaurs.
   "He was really into `Jurassic Park,'" his mother recalled. The trouble was, "we kept reading over and over that `millions and millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth,'" Marjorie Rogers continued. "And that's where I said, `Hmm — wait a second.'"
   Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that Earth is several thousand years old, while most scientists, basing their estimates on the radioactive decay of rock samples, say the planet is billions of years old.
   Rogers soon began a quest to challenge what she sees as educators' blind faith in evolution. It evoked a groundswell of support from other residents of this affluent suburb of high-tech office parks and shopping malls, and it pushed the county school board to put warning labels on biology textbooks saying that evolution "is a theory, not a fact."
   The measure effectively made Cobb a battleground in the national debate on evolution because the textbook stickers, in turn, prompted a lawsuit in federal court from other parents who see the labels as an unwelcome intrusion of religious thought into public life.
   The fast-growing suburb of about 650,000 people northwest of Atlanta—in many ways similar to Loudoun and Fairfax counties in Virginia—has long shown a remarkable flair for high-profile social controversy.
   While elsewhere these sorts of social controversies often play out as a clash between urban and rural cultures, what interests political scientists and other onlookers is that the debates in Cobb County pit suburbanites against suburbanites.

washingtonpost.com 12/11/05

First-ever Face Transplant Surgery Is Completed
Surgeons in France claim to have performed the world's first face transplant, although not of a whole face. A 38-year-old woman severely disfigured in May by a dog attack received a "partial" triangular graft, consisting of the chin, lips and nose from a dead woman donor.
   The operation was performed on Sunday 27 November at the University Hospital Center (CHU) in Amiens, northern France, and the surgical team says further details of the procedure will be issued on 2 December. The woman's injuries were so severe that she could scarcely speak or chew.
   The breakthrough ends a race between teams in France, the US and Britain to perform the procedure first. "Now they've done it, I can breathe a sigh of relief," says Peter Butler, head of a team hoping to perform a similar procedure, but with a whole face, at the Royal Free Hospital in London, UK.
   Butler said the woman's graft will consist of skin, fat and muscle tissue, including veins, arteries and nerves. "Right now, she will be very swollen, and it will take 14 days or so for that to disappear," he told a briefing in London. "Within 24 hours they'll know if the graft will survive and, beyond that, failure is unusual." Surgeons will monitor the transplanted flap every 2 hours to ensure it's perfused with blood. They will also monitor for tissue rejection, which will be a risk during the first two weeks.
   Even if the graft takes, the patient will need to take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of her life. This raises the risk of viral-induced cancers by decreasing the patient's ability to keep dormant viruses in check.
   The patient and her family must also confront psychological consequences of the procedure, including possible crises of personal identity.
   "Facial appearance is very closely associated with an individual's sense of personal identity, so the recipient must adapt to this new `identity,' as well as other people's responses to it," says Stephen Wigmore, chair of the ethics committee of the British Transplantation Society.
   Likewise, families of the donor must adjust to the possibility that they may see a living person resembling their dead relative, although computer simulations suggest that a transplanted face will have a "hybrid" appearance in which the facial features of the donor are altered by the bone structure of the recipient.
   Other teams vying to perform the procedure are at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, and at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky, both in the US.

Newscientist.com 11/30/05

Virgin Mary Crying Blood?
Outside Sacramento, at the small Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs Church, a statue of the Virgin Mary appears to be crying, reports The Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman.
    It is a sign that could mean something different to everyone who has traveled here to see it.
Parishioners first noticed the tears almost two weeks ago. A priest was cleaning the statue and wiped away the stains only to see them reappear.
    Marlene Larkin traveled from Las Vegas, believing the Virgin Mary will help her battle breast cancer.
But Father James Murphy of the Sacramento Diocese shies away from calling this a miracle.
    "These kinds of phenomena are fairly common," he said. "But the number that turns out to be miraculous are very, very rare."
    However, it does bring more people to the church.
   "I think we need to respect people's experience through the eyes of faith," he said. "And God does use these things to bring us closer to him."
   Church officials say they will investigate if the phenomenon continues. But for believers, or those seeking guidance, healing or inspiration, there is no need for proof.

cbsnews.com 11/29/05

S. Africa's Top Court Blesses Gay Marriage
Parliament Given One Year to Amend Law
JOHANNESBURG—South Africa's highest court on Thursday recognized the marriage of two Pretoria women and gave Parliament a year to extend legal marital rights to all same-sex couples.
   The ruling, greeted with jubilation by gay men and lesbians but with frustration by some church leaders, will make South Africa the first country to allow marriages between gay people on a continent where homosexual activity is widely condemned and often outlawed.
   Only four countries in the world—the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Canada— currently allow same-sex marriages nationwide. Several others, mostly in Europe, recognize civil unions between gay partners.
   "I'm ecstatic," said Marie Fourie, 54, speaking by phone from Pretoria after the ruling by South Africa's Constitutional Court. "It is wonderful for the gay society."
   Fourie married Cecelia Bonthuys, 44, on Dec. 11, 2004, a decade after they began living together and several weeks after they won the right to wed from the nation's second-highest court. But after the ceremony, officials in the government's Department of Home Affairs refused to recognize their union and appealed the decision to the Constitutional Court, the nation's highest.
   That appeal resulted in Thursday's 111-page opinion giving the government a year to begin treating such unions in the same way as those between men and women.
    Fourie predicted the change would lead to declines in what many gay leaders said was persistent discrimination, while also giving same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples, such as the right to open joint bank accounts and visit each other as family members in hospitals.
   The court's judges unanimously agreed that South Africa's 1996 constitution, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, guarantees the right of gay men and lesbians to marry. One justice, in a limited dissent, argued that the law should be overturned immediately rather than within a year.
   That delay upset some activists, but both supporters and opponents of the ruling agreed there would be no way for Parliament to avoid approving the required amendments to the law.

washingtonpost.com 12/02/05

Toxic Slick Hits Another Major Chinese City
On Tuesday, the toxic chemical slick flowing down a river in China was about to hit a second large Chinese city—Jiamusi, which has two million residents. And Russia is bracing itself for the spill's arrival on about 11 December.
   A spill of about 100 tons of pollutants including benzene and nitrobenzene flooded into the Songhua River on 13 November after an explosion at the chemical plant of the Jilin Petrochemical Company. As the chemicals flowed downstream, the authorities stopped the water supply for five days to nine million people living in and around the city of Harbin.
   Exposure to high benzene and nitrobenzene levels could put people at increased risk of cancer and bone marrow problems. Tests at 0400 local time on Tuesday at a point on the river about two-thirds of the way between Harbin and Jiamusi showed the density of nitrobenzene was about eight times the national safety level according to Xinhua, an official Chinese news agency. But the level of benzene is now within the safety standard.
   In warmer climates, the polluting slick would not have persisted for so long, as benzene and nitrobenzene are highly volatile chemicals. But the freezing temperatures in northeastern China mean that the chemicals might even last the journey to the sea, says Peter Matthiessen, head of environmental chemistry and pollution at the Center for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, UK. The maximum daytime temperature in Harbin this week is _12C.
   As well as being dispersed by evaporation, benzene is also rapidly biodegraded by microorganisms in the environment. "But neither of these processes, to my knowledge, will be happening very fast under these conditions," Matthiessen told New Scientist. "That's why we have still got significant concentrations weeks after the spill, hundreds of kilometers downstream."
   The freezing conditions mean the main way the chemicals will eventually disperse is likely to be through dilution, as tributaries join the river.
   But Matthiessen says the lower temperatures may also decrease the toxic effort of the spill on aquatic life: "At these low temperatures, toxic processes operate slowly as well."
   The noxious slick forced several more downstream towns to stop taking water from the river, but it has now reached another major city. The main water plan in Jiamusi, 350 kilometers downstream of Harbin, shut four of its wells near the river, but is keeping three wells two miles from the Songhua's banks open.

Newscientist.com 12/06/05

Israel President Invites Benedict XVI For A Visit
Katsav Also Says He'll Seek Solution Over Church Properties
VATICAN CITY, Nov. 17, 2005—President Moshe Katsaw, on the first official visit by a head of the state of Israel to the Vatican, invited Benedict XVI to go to the Holy Land.
   Katsav later told; the press that he hopes the papal visit can take place next year. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon already invited the new Pope to visit the country last July.
   Katsav made his statements today at the military airport of Ciampino, after his audience with the Holy Father and a meeting with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano.
   The Israeli president told journalists that his audience with Benedict XVI and his meeting with Cardinal Sodano were "cordial, free and open."
   Katsav gave the Pope some framed photos of mosaics recently discovered in the archaeological site considered the oldest church in the Holy Land.
   According to the president, Benedict XVI said he would like to visit the site of the church, in the northern Israeli town of Megiddo, near the biblical Armageddon, when he visits Israel.
   The audience lasted some 25 minute, at the end of which the president introduced his wife and entourage to the Pope in German.
   Regarding relations with the Church, Katsav told journalists he would do everything possible to "speed up" the solution to controversies over the Church's properties in Israel.
   Eleven years after the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel, the Church continues to wait for the state to put into practice its commitment to recognize the legal personality of the Catholic institutions in the country.
   Father Cio Benedettini, assistant director of the Vatican press office, explained that in the meetings attended today by the Israeli president in the Vatican, "attention as given to the relations that have developed between Israel and the Holy See, since the state of diplomatic ties between the two parties in 1994."
   "On the subject of the current situation in the Holy Land, the Holy See's position in favor of the existence of and collaboration between the two states, Israel and Palestine, was again expounded to the illustrious guest," the Vatican spokesman said.

zenit.org 11/17/05

Human Brain Cells Are Grown In Mice
Success Is Encouraging For Stem Cell Therapies
By injecting human embryonic stem cells into the brains of fetal mice inside the womb, scientists in California have created living mice with working human brain cells inside their skulls.
   The research offers the first proof that human embryonic stem cells—vaunted for their potential to turn into every kind of human cell, at least in laboratory dishes—can become functional human brain cells inside a living animal, reaching out to make connections with surrounding brain cells.
   The human cells had no apparent impact on the animals' behavior. About 100,000 cells were injected into each animal and just a fraction survived in their new hosts. That means the animals' brains were still more than 99 percent mouse—a precaution that helped avoid ethical objections to creating animals that were "too human."
   The finding that the human cells are working in their new environment provides encouragement for those who hope to develop stem-cell-based therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.
   More immediately, mice with humanized brains could be a boon for research, providing a living laboratory where scientists can study human brain diseases and drug companies can test the safety of experimental medicines.
   "Let's say you're in the last stages of research before testing a new drug in humans," said lead researcher Fred Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif. "This could help tell you what effect it will have on human neurons inside a brain."
   The work, published in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the latest in the ethically challenging field of human-animal "chimera" research — a reference to the Chimera of Greek mythology, which had a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail.
   In previous studies, scientists had injected brain cells from aborted human fetuses into the brains of rodents and shown that the human cells could survive and migrate to various brain regions. But because those human brain cells were relatively mature, they were larger than their rodent counterparts and it often was unclear whether they were working.
   The new work, which started with human embryonic stem cells instead of cells that had already become brain cells, showed that those human cells developed into all the major kinds of cells normally found in mammalian brains, namely neurons and nerve-nurturing glial cells. It also showed that the neurons are biologically active and make what appear to be good connections, or synapses, with adjacent mouse cells.
   Reflecting growing concerns about the ethics of making animal-human hybrids, the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year released voluntary guidelines on chimera research that have been adopted by major research institutes and have been made mandatory in California for state grant recipients. The rules aim to limit the extent to which animals—especially primates—get humanized and to prevent the creation of human embryos inside animal wombs through the mating of animals bearing human eggs or sperm.
   Those rules were not yet drawn up when the Salk experiments were conducted, but the protocol had the approval of the institute's ethics board. Moreover, before the results were published, the team asked for a new review, which concluded the work would have been approved even under the new NAS guidelines, Gage said.

washingtonpost.com 12/13/05

Ambassador Says France 'Back To Normal'
The violence that swept predominantly Muslim communities in some 300 cities and towns in France for three weeks has abated and "we are back to normal" French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte said Monday. He said mostly teenagers had acted out of social and economic hardship. "It was not about the role of Islam in France," he said.
"We never saw any link, direct or indirect," the French diplomat said. "Religion played no role."
   "We know that jihadists are recruiting teenagers, but this has nothing to do with the general unrest in those neighborhoods," he said. The teenagers want to be considered 100 percent French, he said. "They want full equality."
   Levitte also suggested "the word `riot' is a bit too strong" to describe the disturbances and that while thousands of automobiles were destroyed and scores of police officers injured, there were only a handful of fatalities, in contrast to the 1992 Los Angeles riots that left 55 people dead and $1 billion in property damage.
   The French have invoked those riots in the past, by way of criticizing U.S. policies. In 1992, then President Francois Mitterrand suggested that France would avoid such strife because of its generous social programs.
   Levitte said that with job programs, scholarships and improved housing, the French government is engaged in trying to improve their living conditions. He spoke at a forum sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
   Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, said the outbreak was a signal that discrimination has to be fought at all levels. He called on the French government to show the young Muslims that "society is with them, not against them."
   Salam al-Marayati, executive director of MPAC, said "people want to live the French dream, the American dream, not the French nightmare."
   But the Muslims in Europe are not regarded as full-fledged Europeans, he said. And while "We agree that this is not a religious conflict," al-Quaida and other groups can exploit these people if their social and political situations are not improved, he said.

sfgate.com 11/21/05

French Lawmakers Approve Anti-Terror Bill
France's lower house of parliament overwhelmingly approved a new anti-terrorism bill Tuesday that would increase the use of video surveillance and allow police more time to question terror suspects. The national Assembly voted 373-27 for the bill, which still needs to clear a Senate vote in January before becoming law.
   The bill would allow mosques, department stores and other potential targets to install surveillance cameras and would lengthen prison terms for terrorists and those supporting them.
   It also would enable police to monitor people who travel to countries known to harbor terror training camps and would extend the detention period for terror suspects from four days to up to six days.
   France already has some of Europe's toughest anti-terrorism laws, enacted after a wave of terror attacks in the 1990s by Algerian Islamic militants. But officials want to fill perceived gaps exposed by the London attacks on July 7 that killed 56 people—including four suicide bombers—and improve prevention.
  The bill would be the fourth addition to France's already substantial anti-terror arsenal since 2001.

yahoo.com 11/29/05