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STAF, Inc - until every family is doing well©
We at STAF, Inc. want to know how this advice website has improved your & your family's life
Let us know in your donation letter
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Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.
- not-for-profit -
- the leading new organization in all family & life success topics -
* Nationwide - Worldwide *
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World's # 1 free advice website Successo-Pedia©
for all family matters, success, health, wealth
& for the good life
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with
Free Question & Answer service
STAF, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization & needs your donations - donation instructions, see: Home page
As its name indicates, SAVE THE AMERICAN FAMILY - STAF, Inc. is helping families in all their challenges nationwide in The U.S. and in addition, STAF Inc.'s services are worldwide.
As a not-for-profit we do need your donations as cash funds and/or as your volunteer services.
For cash funds donations see the contact information in the home page.
Volunteering your time to serve people together with us communicate via email (info in home page).
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- not-for-profit -
- the leading new organization in all family & life success topics -
* Nationwide - Worldwide *
__________________
World's # 1 free advice website Successo-Pedia©
for all family matters, success, health, wealth
& for the good life
____________________
with
Free Question & Answer service
STAF, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization & needs your donations - donation instructions, see: Home page
As its name indicates, SAVE THE AMERICAN FAMILY - STAF, Inc. is helping families in all their challenges nationwide in The U.S. and in addition, STAF Inc.'s services are worldwide.
As a not-for-profit we do need your donations as cash funds and/or as your volunteer services.
For cash funds donations see the contact information in the home page.
Volunteering your time to serve people together with us communicate via email (info in home page).
________________________
STAF, Inc.'s mission for your family's best:
Less suffering - more life™
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To inspect STAF, Inc.'s first 4 pages in its original founding acceptance documents provided by the State of NewYork:
click: mission - STAF, Inc.'s purpose and its mission statements are in those 4 pages.
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"STAF, Inc. is your STAFF for your NEW life"
* health * family happiness * financial freedom
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Facts about the Pledge of Allegiance
At the end of this article: (1) web links - (2) words explained
The Pledge of Allegiance
I pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.
The original Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy (1855 - 1931), a Baptist minister, in August 1892. The Pledge was published in the September 8th issue of The Youth's Companion, the leading family magazine and the Reader's Digest of its day. In 1892, Francis Bellamy was also a chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education in the National Education Association. As its chairman, he prepared the program for the public schools' quadricentennial celebration for Columbus Day in 1892. He structured this public school program around a flag raising ceremony and a flag salute - his Pledge of Allegiance.
Other Translations
Spanish:
"Yo prometo lealtad a la bandera de los estados Unidos de America, y a la Republica que representa, una Nacion bajo Dios, entera, con libertad y justicia para todos."
German:
"Ich gelobe Treue auf die Fahne der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, auf die Republik, die eine Nation unter Gott ist, vereinigt durch Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit fur alle."
French:
"J´engage ma fidelité au drapeau des États-Unis d´Amérique et à la République qu'il répresente, une nation sous Dieu, indivisible, avec liberté et justice pour tous."
WEB LINKS
click: Francis Bellamy - Wikipedia Francis Julius Bellamy (May 18, 1855 – August 28, 1931) was an American ... of the First Baptist Church; which his father was minister of until his death in 1864.
Personal life - The Pledge - Political views - References
Words explained (for speakers of English as a second language and for anyone):
pledge = a solemn promise or undertaking - e.g., "The conference ended with a joint pledge to limit pollution."
synonyms: promise, undertaking, vow, word, word of honor, commitment, assurance, oath, guarantee
allegiance = loyalty or commitment of a subordinate to a superior or of an individual to a group or cause - e.g. "Those wishing to receive citizenship must swear allegiance to the republic." synonyms: loyalty, faithfulness, fidelity, obedience, homage, devotion
Click green for further info
Source: D.C. Fed. Archives
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STAF, Inc. saves lives
Introduction to the endorsement letter below
Every business or organization, including yours, is only as good as its staff is.
Also your family is an organization of people and the same techniques apply to running your family successfully as running any business in a superior, result-bringing manner. The "staff" of your family is made of the members of your family - all performing their tasks and duties to your common good. The same is the case in any business - the staff of a business works for the best of the company - thus, for the best of every individual in the business .
This introduction fits any organization - also yours.
Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D. (referred below as Dr. C.), is an internationally leading expert, an experienced specialist, to guide & train your whole staff, no matter what size, to function more effectively, yet happier & more content, and to produce results on a higher scale. Improving your staff's satisfaction level, raising the sales results & your income, or developing better or new services & have the public responding and co-operating, is always a human relationship & motivational skill. They are in many ways the same methods & techniques as used in any effective emotional, mental, or behavioral counseling and therapy.
Dr. C. has developed several techniques and methods for world wide use to raise the overall success level and to ease the human suffering. He has also developed more effective and enjoyable learning & training techniques.
Dr. Christian is the founder of Successology (Reg.U.S.Pat.Off. 1991) - the new science for success.
The endorsement letter below, given to Dr. C. by one of his counseling clients proves that Dr. C. is a professional who does not give up before the desired results are developed. The client testifies that, in his case, several other well-known specialists, during several years, could not get any results for him. Dr. C. did and gave the client his life back.
In the same manner, Dr. C. will in your organization be the one who will find the answers and the solutions for you.
Dr. C. is described as the specialist in "Missions Impossible".
He believes that to any human situation and challenge there is always a positive solution - and he will find it for you.
Your organization will benefit from Dr. C's presence in a grand manner.
The client's opinion below is truly an exceptionally positive and effective endorsement.
His endorsement strongly proves that when others may fail, Dr. C. still competently succeeds.
With the same principles, also in your organization, Dr. C. will bring the desired results you truly want.
Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D., D.D. will bring new success for you.
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(To save YOUR time, STAF, Inc. has posted in this tab only one endorsement letter - it is an exceptionally powerful letter and tells briefly "it all".)
The client giving the endorsement letter below has also agreed to be available by phone to discuss further his experiences relating to Dr. Christian's result-bringing counseling. To connect with the client, call STAF, Inc.
at 203-788-1876. The referred client endorsement letter is such a powerful statement that it shows the point.
See the letter and you will agree.
at 203-788-1876. The referred client endorsement letter is such a powerful statement that it shows the point.
See the letter and you will agree.
To Whom It May Concern:
* Printed with the Client’s Permission
I have known Dr. Christian over many years. In every way he always finds ways to create harmony and balance for the human race.
With his incredible abilities he has been able to assist me with undeniable Healing! Regardless of how much he has on his table he always manages to come through for me.
Dr. Christian amazed me with his Purity of intent, he is by far the most talented therapist I have ever known. I truly feel that everyone should take advantage of any opportunity to meet or talk with him as it is rare to come in contact with a master of his level.
I have worked with only the best and Dr. Christian clearly reflects the highest gifts.
Joel Fertakos
Baltimore, Md.
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* Printed with the Client’s Permission
I have known Dr. Christian over many years. In every way he always finds ways to create harmony and balance for the human race.
With his incredible abilities he has been able to assist me with undeniable Healing! Regardless of how much he has on his table he always manages to come through for me.
Dr. Christian amazed me with his Purity of intent, he is by far the most talented therapist I have ever known. I truly feel that everyone should take advantage of any opportunity to meet or talk with him as it is rare to come in contact with a master of his level.
I have worked with only the best and Dr. Christian clearly reflects the highest gifts.
Joel Fertakos
Baltimore, Md.
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Brief background details to a client’s endorsement statement above (additional info below):
This client had gone to different leading doctors and therapists and no one could solve his problems. The client had steep problems in several areas of life. The problems paralyzed him for a long time, years after years. According to the Client, Dr. Christian was the first and only one who finally gave him his life back.
"We’ll Give you a NEW life"
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This client had gone to different leading doctors and therapists and no one could solve his problems. The client had steep problems in several areas of life. The problems paralyzed him for a long time, years after years. According to the Client, Dr. Christian was the first and only one who finally gave him his life back.
"We’ll Give you a NEW life"
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Additional
Background details to a client’s endorsement statement above:
STAF, Inc. covers a wider area of services than any other US organization - all areas of life. Health, Wealth, Success, and Happiness are some of those attributes. Dr. Christian, the founder of STAF, Inc. - a leading not-for-profit organization- has developed over 25 different methods and techniques that are now in world wide use. STAF, Inc's Life Coaching, Counseling, and Success training department is recognized as a global leader in getting lasting results and finding solutions even in the most complicated cases. Our specialties are "Mission Impossibles" - even when any other method or technique fails and brings only temporary results, or in some cases, no results at all thus wasting the client's time and money and leaving the client, after all effort and hardship in "no man's land", in emptiness, and in the same status quo as at the starting point, even then our highly specialized professionals, Dr. Christian among them with the longest experience and proven track record getting results, will realistically bring to the client a solution and a real relief from the toughest situation or challenge. The client's letter on this page is a strong testimonial and "tells it all" - it tells you more than thousand endorsement letters. Dr. Christian and the most modern, unique and totally exclusive methods he is applying will bring the results in any situation and every case. The client whose endorsement letter is on this page, worked with several experienced professionals without ever getting any results. Finally this client found the lasting results in STAF's Counseling office with Dr. Christian's extraordinary methods.
Call: Domestic & International: 212-946-1234
(toll free) 1-888-DIAL=DR-1 (= 342-5371)
and connect with Dr. Christian and his other professionals.
"We’ll Give you a NEW life"
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Call: Domestic & International: 212-946-1234
(toll free) 1-888-DIAL=DR-1 (= 342-5371)
and connect with Dr. Christian and his other professionals.
"We’ll Give you a NEW life"
__________
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For info click the green title below
Foods that have nearly zero calories
One salad green is just four calories per serving, and may even boost your love life.Another is a hangover remedy
Related links (click each green title) _______________________________________________
Foods that have nearly zero calories
One salad green is just four calories per serving, and may even boost your love life.Another is a hangover remedy
Related links (click each green title) _______________________________________________
- Click green for a video info: Secrets of eye color ______________________________________________________________________
A simple, easy template
for a brief resume
(title, if any) name, title (if any)
P.O. Box xxx
New York, NY 10001
(Cell) xxx-yyy-zzz
SUMMARY: Experienced sales professional with specialization in site selection, new lease negotiation, lease termination and restructure, acquisition and disposition of real estate. Independent, self-starter with strong organizational, management and interpersonal skills.
EXPERIENCE:
(name) XXXXX Realty Advisors, Inc, February 2010– Present
Principal/Sole Proprietor, town/city/village, NY zip.
- Advise corporate clients in all aspects of their real estate needs.
- Develop and implement tailored solutions for owners and end-user of office space.
- Negotiate, on behalf of landlords, end-users and investors, the acquisition and disposition of commercial real estate.
- Provide due diligence for private equity investors seeking distressed properties.
- Work with established client base from relationships developed over 20+ years in commercial and residential real estate field.
- New business development.
Cushman & Wakefield, Inc, October 1990 – February 2008
Associate Director-Brokerage, New York, 10019.
- Represented Fortune 500/1000 companies in the acquisition and disposition of their global real estate.
- Represented Landlords in the repositioning/lease-up of office property in the New York Tri-State area (NY/NJ/CT). Closed more than 2,000,000 square feet of office/in all asset classes.
- Developed partnerships with senior level executives to provide clients with the full complement of the services of Cushman & Wakefield. Services provided included transactional brokerage- agency and tenant representation, appraisal, and advisory/consulting.
New York Institute of Technology New York Campus. BA degree in Finance/Economics. Estimated Completion 2013.
SKILLS:
Proficient in Microsoft Office Suite and Windows 7. Real Estate specific software includes Argus, ProCalc, PROJECT, LseMod, ACT Contact Management, planEase.
LICENSES:
NY State Real Estate Broker
CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS:
1997 – Present: Volunteer – God’s Love We Deliver – Office Services, Kitchen Prep, Van Assistant
2003 – Present: Volunteer – Ovarian Cancer Research Fund - Annual fund raising.
2009 - Present: Volunteer - Save The American Family, STAF, Inc., -not-for-profit-, New York, NY - web manager
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A heartbreaking story out of Kazakhstan & other stories of a dog's love
Dog killed while saving owner from train
Click colored areas for further information
According to reports, a dog was killed while trying to save its owner from an oncoming train.
The suicidal owner had passed out on the train tracks after drinking a bottle of alcohol. According to Russian news site Ria Novosti, the man told authorities that his dog dragged him to safety. The dog wasn't able to avoid being hit.
"Upon seeing the train, the dog started pulling its owner away," said Aida Muldashevam, who investigated the incident. "When train drivers saw the dog on the rail tracks, they used the emergency brake."
Unfortunately, it was too late. The dog was killed instantly, while the owner was taken to the hospital. He had two broken ribs and an injury to his shoulder.
Dogs have a well-deserved reputation for loyalty. At a funeral for a Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan in 2011, dog Hawkeye lay by the casket during the memorial service. And in a small village in China last year, a dog remained at its owner's grave for weeks. When villagers took the dog back to town, the dog returned to the grave. Villagers eventually decided to build the dog a kennel near its departed friend.
Source:
By Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo! News
This is for your private use, only
Read the article just below - also cats can save human lives
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Dog killed while saving owner from train
Click colored areas for further information
According to reports, a dog was killed while trying to save its owner from an oncoming train.
The suicidal owner had passed out on the train tracks after drinking a bottle of alcohol. According to Russian news site Ria Novosti, the man told authorities that his dog dragged him to safety. The dog wasn't able to avoid being hit.
"Upon seeing the train, the dog started pulling its owner away," said Aida Muldashevam, who investigated the incident. "When train drivers saw the dog on the rail tracks, they used the emergency brake."
Unfortunately, it was too late. The dog was killed instantly, while the owner was taken to the hospital. He had two broken ribs and an injury to his shoulder.
Dogs have a well-deserved reputation for loyalty. At a funeral for a Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan in 2011, dog Hawkeye lay by the casket during the memorial service. And in a small village in China last year, a dog remained at its owner's grave for weeks. When villagers took the dog back to town, the dog returned to the grave. Villagers eventually decided to build the dog a kennel near its departed friend.
Source:
By Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo! News
This is for your private use, only
Read the article just below - also cats can save human lives
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Buddy, the cat, is a stray cat the Chaps Family rescued
never knowing that he'd save them right back
click the green title below for a video of the cat
Cat's quick thinking saves owner's life
Buddy is a stray cat the Chaps rescued never knowing that he'd save them right back.
Jennifer Chap was working in her Orlando, Florida home office, when the family cat and former stray, Buddy, started acting strangely. She suspected something odd, grabbed Buddy and walked to the kitchen where she found her husband, Rick Chap going into a sudden cardiac arrest.
Ms. Chap proceeded to administer CPR until paramedics arrived and they were able to get a heart beat.
After receiving a heart procedure and six months of rehab, Rick Chap is doing well and says, "I really really owe my life to Buddy because without him, (my wife) would have never come out of that office."
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World's Worst Airline Food Goes Digital
Click the green areas for further information
If you've ever been on a plane, you've more than likely eaten airline food. Although the march of technology has made flying cheaper and faster for travelers, on the issue of cuisine it seems as if many airlines have stood still.
Rock solid meatloaf, slimy salmon, freeze dried eggs-terrible airline food has often been the stuff of legend. Before the Internet, dissatisfied travelers were forced to satiate their food fury with angry complaints to friends, family, and, in the most extreme cases the airlines themselves.
Thanks to some websites however, in-flight meals are now being held to a higher degree of accountability. Sites like AirlineMeals allow users to take pictures of their inflight dinners,and post them along with a rating of 1 to 10 and a description of the meal. The site, which was set up ten years ago, now has meals from over 600 airlines from all over the world ranging from the best to the worst.
For more of the most disgusting in-flight meals ever, check out our slideshow.
Click the green areas for further information
If you've ever been on a plane, you've more than likely eaten airline food. Although the march of technology has made flying cheaper and faster for travelers, on the issue of cuisine it seems as if many airlines have stood still.
Rock solid meatloaf, slimy salmon, freeze dried eggs-terrible airline food has often been the stuff of legend. Before the Internet, dissatisfied travelers were forced to satiate their food fury with angry complaints to friends, family, and, in the most extreme cases the airlines themselves.
Thanks to some websites however, in-flight meals are now being held to a higher degree of accountability. Sites like AirlineMeals allow users to take pictures of their inflight dinners,and post them along with a rating of 1 to 10 and a description of the meal. The site, which was set up ten years ago, now has meals from over 600 airlines from all over the world ranging from the best to the worst.
For more of the most disgusting in-flight meals ever, check out our slideshow.
Is showing middle finger protected by the Constitution?
Click green for further info
By Amy E. Feldman
Source:
Amy E. Feldman is the Legal Education Consultant to the National Constitution Center. She is the General Counsel of The Judge Group, Inc., a leading global professional services based in Philadelphia.
A New York man, angry about a speed trap, extended his middle finger to the police officer to express his displeasure, and was subsequently arrested.
So how is the man protected by the Constitution?
The police officer, who apparently has never visited a playground, or watched television, or had any human interaction, said that he interpreted the gesture as a sign that perhaps there might be a domestic dispute in the car and went to see if he could provide help.
And by “help”, the police officer meant “arrest the man for disorderly conduct.” The motorist sued, claiming that arresting him for expressing his displeasure was a violation of his civil rights (Swartz, et al v. Insogna, et al.).
So is it your constitutional right to extend a middle finger to a police officer in a gesture meant (as most would understand) as an insult, and a rude one at that?
The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” The spoken word is not the only form of “speech” that the Supreme Court has determined the First Amendment protects. In fact, the First Amendment protects a wide range of symbolic speech, including marching, wearing armbands, and even making expressive gestures.
But that doesn’t mean that the First Amendment gives people the right to say or express anything at any time. There are limits.
It is well-known that a person cannot yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater because of the danger that the speech would cause a panic (Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 1919).
Similarly, the Supreme Court has found that the First Amendment doesn’t protect the right to expression used to incite violence–those are called “fighting words” (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 1942).
But the Supreme Court said that to be considered “fighting words,” the speech would “tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” by provoking a fight, provided that the speech or expression, “when addressed to the ordinary citizen, is, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction.” (Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 1971).
If coupled with aggressive movement (like a move to jump someone), the extended middle finger could lead to arrest. Unless there is an additional aggressive action along with the middle finger gesture, (and the New York motorist showed no additional aggression), simply raising the middle finger would not count as “fighting words.”
But an obscene expression is also not protected by the First Amendment.
Isn’t the middle finger gesture obscene? Nope. Rude and obnoxious, undoubtedly. But to be classified as “obscene” under constitutional law, the speech has to “appeal to a prurient interest” (Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 1973)—in other words, it has to be sexual in nature.
Even though the police officer said he “misinterpreted” the middle finger as a potential cry for help in a domestic dispute, even he did not try to argue that the middle finger was, in fact, meant to be a sexual gesture.
So it’s not obscene by legal standards. As a result, the appeals court that heard the motorist’s claim found that he was within his protected First Amendment rights to make the gesture without arrest. Whether it was a courteous, pleasant, or well-considered gesture is a different debate entirely.
Source:
Amy E. Feldman is the Legal Education Consultant to the National Constitution Center. She is the General Counsel of The Judge Group, Inc., a leading global professional services based in Philadelphia.
Recent Constitution Daily Stories
Obama says he won’t prosecute pot smokers in two states
How Alexander Hamilton would view the debt ceiling
Checkers, the dog who helped save Richard Nixon’s career
Click green for further info
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The Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.'s writers decided to place this following article
Healthy Habits and Long Life in this tab: testimonials.
This article shows that healthy habits and long, happy, successful life are linked.
STAF, Inc. has developed the totally new Healthy Lifestyle & Correct Nutritional Program introduced in this website in its home page and more widely in tab: University & College.
As the lead author of the new program, Dr. Christian von Christophers, the CEO of STAF, Inc. will introduce the program in D.C. to the U.S. Congress, The W.H., The President, all related federal agencies, and to the whole nation as the first real solution to our enormous health challenges and sickness expenses. When applied nationwide, this new program will save millions of human lives and save billions of dollars for the U.S. government.
See the brief analysis of the program in the tab: College & University, with Dr. Christian's resume as its own page titled "Recent Project". The new program took 25 years to create. During the past 7 years the internationally developed program was modified for the U.S. government's use as the new solution for our suffering nation.
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Source: The New York Times
April 14, 2012
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Lester Breslow, Who Linked Healthy Habits and Long Life, Dies at 97
Dr. Lester Breslow, a public health leader whose research gave mathematical proof to the notion that people can live longer and healthier by changing habits like smoking, diet and sleep, died Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 97.
The University of California, Los Angeles, where Dr. Breslow was a former dean of the Fielding School of Public Health, announced the death.
Dr. Breslow’s most lauded accomplishment was a study of 6,928 people in Alameda County, Calif., that examined their behavior over intervals of up to 20 years. It used quantitative analysis to prove that a 45-year-old with at least six of the seven healthy habits Dr. Breslow chose as important had a life expectancy 11 years longer than someone with three or fewer.
Over a 70-year career, Dr. Breslow helped expand the very definition of public health, from the historical concentration on communicable disease to a new concern with individual behavior and the effects of community and environment. As people lived longer and had more cancer and heart attacks, he was a leader in emphasizing the mounting importance of chronic disease.
“He changed the way we thought of public health,” said Dr. Linda Rosenstock, the current dean of the Fielding School. His message, she said, was that “the root causes of our health problems are broader than our own biology.”
In 1952, President Harry S. Truman appointed Dr. Breslow director of a commission to assess the nation’s health care. The panel’s report emphasized that people make their own health choices but “exercise them mainly under social influences.”
In 1969, as president of the American Public Health Association, he said the public health profession must go beyond issuing scientific reports and suggest social actions to improve people’s lives. “In the long run, housing may be more important than hospitals to health,” he said.
He advised a half-dozen presidential administrations and was director of the California Public Health Department in the mid-1960s. Gov. Ronald Reagan fired him in 1967, citing “philosophical differences” over state cuts in medical care for the poor.
As an official of the California department in the 1940s and ’50s, he did some of the early definitive studies on the harmful effects of smoking. Three of these studies were cited in the United States surgeon general’s landmark report in 1964 linking cigarettes to lung diseases, particularly cancer.
But it was the Alameda County study that rocked the public health world, because it proved with numbers that behavior indisputably affected longevity. Its recommendations: do not smoke; drink in moderation; sleep seven to eight hours; exercise at least moderately; eat regular meals; maintain a moderate weight; eat breakfast.
A follow-up study showed that those who followed better habits were less likely to become disabled. Of those with four or more good health habits, 12.2 percent were likely to be disabled 10 years after the study began; those with two or three, 14.1 percent; and those with only one or no positive health habits at all, 18.7 percent.
Dr. Breslow found that a 60-year-old who followed the seven recommended behaviors would be as healthy as a 30-year-old who followed fewer than three.
Lester Breslow was born March 17, 1915, in Bismarck, N.D., where his parents had moved to escape the teeming poverty of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father, a pharmacist, opened a drugstore in Bismarck. Lester devoured socialist books and newspapers as a teenager, he wrote in his autobiography, “A Life in Public Health: An Insider’s Retrospective” (2004). He overcame a stutter to speak at his high school graduation.
He graduated from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1938 with the intention of being a psychiatrist, but he soured on the field while working at a psychiatric hospital in the summer because he doubted much could be done to help the patients.
He shifted to public health, he said, because he thought it suited his ideology as “a political activist for disadvantaged people.” After a public health internship at a hospital in Staten Island, he applied to the United States Public Health Service Corps but was rejected — “I assume because of my political orientation,” he wrote.
Dr. Breslow returned to the University of Minnesota and earned a master’s in public health in 1941. He joined the Minnesota Department of Public Health as an epidemiologist, handling six rural counties.
In 1943 he joined the Army, even though his job and having a young child both exempted him from the World War II draft. He wrote that he felt guilty because he had not earlier joined the “antifascist struggle” by volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He served in the Pacific as a captain.
After his discharge, he approached the California health department about a job, making the case that it needed a chronic-disease specialist. The director told him to go back to Minnesota, but a subordinate quietly brought him on board.
After 21 years at the agency, Dr. Breslow was hired by U.C.L.A. as dean of the public health school, a post he held for eight years. He wrote more than 200 scientific publications, and was founding editor of The Annual Review of Public Health and The Encyclopedia of Public Health. In addition to serving as president of the public health association, he was president of the International Epidemiological Association and the Association of Schools of Public Health.
Dr. Breslow’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Devra J. R. Miller; three sons from his first marriage, Norman, Jack and Stephen; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In 2010, Dr. Breslow, then 95, joined with Prof. James E. Enstrom of U.C.L.A. to publish a paper about a group of California Mormons whom they had studied over 25 years. The life expectancy of the Mormon males was 9.8 years greater than that of the general population of white American males; female Mormons lived 5.6 years longer than their general-population counterparts. The authors credited the Mormons’ healthy lifestyle.
Dr. Breslow himself did not smoke or drink. He walked regularly, practiced moderation in all things and enjoyed tending his vegetable garden.
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To respect Dr. Breslow's work - Study the articles below relating to how to stay in good health and live a long life
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Article 1 of 2 Information for any age, including the seniors
The Tools of Fitness - Seasoned personal trainer designs engaging workouts for seniors
Click green for further info
The 70-year-old woman donned the clunky, black urban rebound shoes. They looked like rollerblades with springboards instead of wheels. After a wobbly start, mediated by careful coaching, she was hopping and laughing.
The rebound shoes are just one of the many props that personal trainer Damon Hawkins uses to help his mature clients get fit and improve their balance.
Loss of balance is the No. 1 cause of fractures in older people, Hawkins said. “When people reach a certain age that’s one of the most important things to train.”
A personal trainer since the early ’90s—before most people had even heard of personal training—he focuses on helping people in their golden years who are extremely busy (often doing charitable work) squeeze in high-intensity but low-impact workouts that are safe for aging joints.
The goal of his workouts, Hawkins said, is to set the groundwork for overall health by making the workout experience enjoyable.
To add to the fun element, Hawkins carries with him a very full backpack with a variety of high- and low-tech props to help his clients exercise.
And he does it all through home and office visits, a huge point of convenience for busy people.
When he visited the Epoch Times office, his bag included boxing gloves, the rebound shoes, a yoga mat, a machine that pumps small electrical pulses into your muscles, and plastic cups, which are extremely useful for learning to regain balance if you try to pick up three while standing on one leg.
Hawkins has had some of his clients for over a decade and is always bringing new workout toys for them to try. The rebound shoes are his latest favorite and are good for burning calories, increasing circulation, and improving mood.
They are “euphoric—very euphoric. This is the most important thing,” Hawkins said. “When I get people on them … they start smiling and laughing.”
Once people feel good, they’re much less likely to regress into unhealthy habits.
“When your stomach is sore and you’re going to be like, ‘You know, I don’t want to eat that pizza, I’m feeling really sore, I worked [hard], I’m going to try to do the right thing today.”
High-Intensity, Low-Impact, and PlayfulHawkins’s clients range from their mid-50s to their 80s. They want to train but have never worked out and feel very uncomfortable or intimidated by big sports clubs with “young people running around in their spandex.”
He specializes in helping them get fit at their level, lose weight, and maintain functional movements, like picking things up off the floor by bending at the knees instead of at the hips to reduce stress on their lower backs.
“I try to give them a high intensity workout without impact to their joints, knees, and lower back. Most of these people at that age they have problems from arthritis … some of them have old injuries like fractures or knee problems,” Hawkins said.
Firsthand ExperienceHelping people recover their dignity and ability to carry out daily tasks after an illness or accident is also one of his skills. He has a unique insight into post-rehab specialization, from a childhood experience.
Hawkins began gymnastics when he was 11 but became ill two years later. He had to stop all formal sports because he was frequently too sick to attend regular practices. On the many days when he was bed-bound and too weak to even get up, Hawkins would invent exercises to work specific muscles that didn’t add extra stress to his body.
This period of invalidism gave Hawkins firsthand insight into what it’s like to cope with a weak, unstable body, an experience, which now helps him understand what his clients are feeling.
He was eventually diagnosed with kidney disease and has been well since having one kidney removed. After surgery, a friend who was a fitness trainer got him his first job at a club. After years working for different clubs and spas, Hawkins’s roster of clients allowed him to start his own business, Home Fit Pro, with two partners in 2006, working with clients throughout the New York City and the tri-state area.
He still encourages clients to branch out from his training and helps get them enrolled at health clubs so they can try new classes.
“[I want to] change their lives so they can enjoy doing something every week besides just me because you have to if you want to really get fit,” he said.
Home WorkoutsHawkins uses his wealth of training experience to create efficient and versatile workouts that you would normally get only if you bought a punching bag, leg press, and took an aerobics class, or did a parkour route.
(And even then there’s the question of motivation, we all know how easy it is to ignore those expensive workout machines).
About 5 minutes into a 25-minute workout session, which started with cardio boxing followed by jumps in the rebound shoes and ended with core work on a mat, my heart rate was well up but I hardly noticed because I was so focused on kicking with the correct leg and punching with the correct arm, all while Hawkins encouraged me to give it more oomph.
Over the next 20 minutes I poured sweat and pushed my core muscles to their limit (which didn’t take long, given their usual nonaction). I put on the rebound shoes and felt like I was walking on the moon. They really do give you a euphoric feeling once you find your feet, so to speak.
Amid the toughest activity, a series of crunches targeting my obliques, Hawkins entertained me with stories from his profession, making me forget how many repetitions I had left to go. It made the crunches go much faster, and luckily, he was able to keep track while conversing.
Overall, it was a faster and more efficient workout than I could do on my own or with a machine, because Hawkins used his own body as a target and for balance support. He applied just the right amount of resistance to a crunch to make it feel like an achievement.
Personalized Service and Spa TreatmentsHawkins tailors his training to fitness levels and personal learning styles.
“Everybody has their own things to get them going. Some people want to fail and some people have to do well,” he said,
The key, he said, is to “pay attention to what people need.”
In addition to offering personal training and classes, years of working in different clubs and spas have given Hawkins and his partners a network of specialists that they can connect clients to, from nutrition to massage therapy, as well as spa services.
The Personal Trainer in this article:
Mr. Damon Hawkins
Ph: 800-768-2153
E: [email protected]
W: http://homefitpro.com/
______________________
Article 2 of 2 The famous Magnets
Relating to the magnet information below, provided by Mr. Damon Hawkins, The Personal Trainer in article 1 of 2 above:
STAF, Inc. is NOT endorsing the use of magnets for the reason, that at the moment of editing this interesting information in article 1 of 2 and this article 2 of 2, the "official" research does not, at least not, yet, confirm the beneficial information. This does not mean that the magnets do not provide the benefits the seller states. Test use the magnet on your own risk and let us, via an email, know what your opinion is based on your experience. (Contact info, see: home page) - We at STAF, Inc. are going to do our own research and use the magnets the way Mr. Damon Hawkins teaches. Later on we will publish our research results.
Playing With Magnets
By Mr. Damon Hawkins, The Personal Trainer in article 1 of 2 above
Many people may not realize that walking on concrete is more draining on the body than walking on bare earth, Hawkins said. This is because the Earth has a magnetic field, which energizes the human body but is also partly blocked by layers of concrete.
“The earth is a magnet itself, and the more concrete and steel between the earth and peoples’ feet, the less magnetic energy they receive. That’s why a lot of people have become weaker from a biological standpoint.
“Back in the day, people had more energy because there was nothing between the earth, the magnetic force, and people’s bodies.”
Wearing magnets can help people be more stable on their feet, improve circulation, and in some cases reduce pain.
Hawkins said his first “wow” product experience occurred when a friend at a gym showed him a stick with a couple spinning magnetic balls with short spikes (kind of like a medieval mace). The friend started spinning the balls and waving the stick around Hawkins’s body. After a short time, Hawkins felt the pain he’d been experiencing in his chest disappear.
Hawkins has been working with magnets for years and said while it’s still not known exactly how they work, he has seen them really improve the health of his clients. One client was experiencing the pins and needles, and numbness in her feet due to diabetes. Those symptoms disappeared after she started wearing magnetic insoles.
“I’ve seen such improvements in my clients because of these magnets. … Once it [a magnet] is on your body, [its energy] travels all around.”
He demonstrated the grounding power of the magnets by having me overlap my hands and hold them out at chest level. As soon as he pushed on them I became unbalanced, but when I either stepped on some magnetic insoles or wore a magnetic bracelet, my feet seemed like they were stuck to the ground. Even though my upper body swayed forward, my heels stayed planted.
After he waved the magnetic ball wand around me, I was able to easily twist my upper body about 10 degrees further than I could before he waved the wand.
Hawkins helps his clients choose from a variety of magnetic products from bracelets and necklaces, knee, elbow, and shoulder braces, insoles, shower heads that remove chlorine from water, and even a magnetic bed pad, which Hawkins and his family have used for years. He said that it helps deepen their sleep and wick toxins away from their bodies.
Click green for further info
Source: By Mr. Damon Hawkins, The Personal Trainer in article 1 of 2 above
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: http://homefitpro.com/
_________________________________________
============================================================================
Meta-Medicine USA founder explains:
How to Heal the Body Using the Mind
Jon Robson gets to the root of symptoms of illness—the patient’s state of mind.
Robson began studying an integrative system of healthcare called “meta-medicine” in 2008 and founded Meta-Medicine USA in 2012. Compelled and inspired by his mother’s passing at an early age, and having a family history of chronic diseases, Robson set out to find a way to help people with chronic diseases.
He wanted to find a healthcare system that went beyond just managing symptoms and medicating patients for life.
Robson said in an interview with Epoch Times: “Disease is not a natural state the human body should be in. I believe that health and vitality are the natural states of the body.”
How a Patient Healed Heart Disease With His MindRobson had a client who had heart disease. After this client had a heart attack, Jon guided him with meta-medicine, and was able to help him understand the stresses in his life that manifested in his body as heart disease.
“[The client was able] to dissolve those stresses he was experiencing. He resolved his life stresses and his heart healed.”
Manifestation of Self-Loathing: Body Literally Attacks ItselfRobson also had a client who had Systemic lupus erythematosis. Systemic lupus is an autoimmune disease that causes the body to essentially attack itself.
It’s underlying cause is not fully known. MedLine Plus explains: “It is where the immune system believes that certain tissues and organs in the body are cancerous and it then attacks itself.”
Robson helped this client by asking deeper questions: “Why is this body attacking itself? What deeper resentment do they have for themselves?”
After careful analysis, he discovered that this client devalued herself. She had put her mother on a pedestal, and felt she was herself unworthy.
Robson explained, “[The client] grew into systemic lupus. [This] systematically broke down her body because she didn’t feel worthy of love and had deeper anger toward herself.”
Jon taught the client to love and appreciate herself. He helped the client see that the positive characteristics she attributed to her mother she actually had in her own unique form and style within her own personality. This client’s disease went into remission. Her body healed.
“Their outer world changed, purely because they changed from within,” Robson said.
Ancient Wisdom When asked how Meta-medicine relates to Buddhism or spiritual disciplines that teach looking within one’s mind and heart to find the root of problems, Robson said his treatment is similar in that, “[it] lets you see the specific moments which are taking you out of truth, and through that coaching process that brings you back to truth, transformation occurs.”
He said: “Your physical body is a perfect reflection of your mind.”
Click green for further info
Source:
Additional information Click green below
META-Medicine USAwww.meta-medicineusa.com/
Jon Robson is an integrative health specialist who specializes in Meta Medicine.
He is a META-Medicine Trainer and META-Medicine Health Coach.
STAF, Inc. is providing the META-Medicine link for informational reasons, only
STAF, Inc. is NOT endorsing their services - contact them at your own risk
_______________________________________________________
==========================================================================================================================================================
Therapists have a wide variety of techniques, training, and experience so it is important to find the best therapeutic fit for your needs
Tips for Finding the Right Therapist
Start your search on the Psychology Today website click: Psychology Today website
When most people are looking for a therapist, whether it is for themselves or a family member, they do not realize the wide variety of techniques, training, and experience that different therapists have. They also don’t really have a good idea about what to look for or what to ask in order to find a good therapeutic fit. I am going to break down some different things to compare and questions to ask to give you a better chance of finding someone who will best fit your needs.
1. Ask them if they are licensed or registered by their state and what their license number is.
Most states require at least a Master’s degree to register as a therapist and most states have additional post-graduate training and experience requirements for therapists to be considered licensed. States will also revoke the license or registration of therapists who are found to have engaged in serious misconduct.
2. Look up their state registration number.
Looking up their number can verify their credentials, how long they have been registered, and may list any complaints that have been filed against their license.
3. Observe if the therapist seems willing to be straightforward with you.
Therapists are often communication experts and many of us are experts at saying a lot without revealing very much or giving information that is not directly related to the questions being asked. There are times when that is useful, but not when you are interviewing them. Watch carefully and ask yourself: Did they answer my question directly? Did they seem genuine? Did they try to subtly shift the focus of question to another topic?
4. Ask them about their experience with your problem.
Some people assume that an experienced, effective, professionally-trained therapist can help with any mental health issue. There may be some very special therapists who can do that, but most of us specialize in particular types of problems with particular types of clients. At the minimum, the therapist should be able to demonstrate a great deal of insight into your problem. If not, a better idea would be to find a therapist who does specialize in your type of problem. You would not ask a pediatrician to perform your open heart surgery. But don’t just stop at asking if they have experience. Ask them how much experience they have with this specific problem, how successful they have been at resolving it, and pay attention to how directly they reply to your questions.
5. Ask them what methods and techniques they use.
Some people think that all psychotherapists have similar training and use similar techniques and ideas. They don’t. There are an almost endless variety of therapeutic techniques and modalities and the theories that drive these techniques are often completely opposed to each other. However, all of them can work when the right therapist uses them for the right person. The key is that the therapist should be able to explain to you specifically how what they do is going to work for you. Then you can see if they if their explanation makes sense and if it might work for you.
6. Give it a try and see how it goes.
If you think you found a good fit try two or three sessions and see how it goes. Discuss with them what is and is not working for you and don’t be afraid to move on if you don’t think you found the right fit.
7. Start your search on the Psychology Today website.
The Psychology Today website is a good place to start looking for a therapist. Their listings include a short bio and description of specialties, experience, training, and modalities. But these should only be used as a starting point. If they list a dozen different specialties then are they really a specialist? One person may claim that they know how to use a certain modality because they read about it. Another person might have obtained a post-graduate certification and have 10 years of experience with it so you have to dig further and ask more questions!
Click green for further info
Source: The Epoch Times
___________________________________________________________________
The Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.'s writers decided to place this following article
Healthy Habits and Long Life in this tab: testimonials.
This article shows that healthy habits and long, happy, successful life are linked.
STAF, Inc. has developed the totally new Healthy Lifestyle & Correct Nutritional Program introduced in this website in its home page and more widely in tab: University & College.
As the lead author of the new program, Dr. Christian von Christophers, the CEO of STAF, Inc. will introduce the program in D.C. to the U.S. Congress, The W.H., The President, all related federal agencies, and to the whole nation as the first real solution to our enormous health challenges and sickness expenses. When applied nationwide, this new program will save millions of human lives and save billions of dollars for the U.S. government.
See the brief analysis of the program in the tab: College & University, with Dr. Christian's resume as its own page titled "Recent Project". The new program took 25 years to create. During the past 7 years the internationally developed program was modified for the U.S. government's use as the new solution for our suffering nation.
_________
Source: The New York Times
April 14, 2012
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Lester Breslow, Who Linked Healthy Habits and Long Life, Dies at 97
Dr. Lester Breslow, a public health leader whose research gave mathematical proof to the notion that people can live longer and healthier by changing habits like smoking, diet and sleep, died Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 97.
The University of California, Los Angeles, where Dr. Breslow was a former dean of the Fielding School of Public Health, announced the death.
Dr. Breslow’s most lauded accomplishment was a study of 6,928 people in Alameda County, Calif., that examined their behavior over intervals of up to 20 years. It used quantitative analysis to prove that a 45-year-old with at least six of the seven healthy habits Dr. Breslow chose as important had a life expectancy 11 years longer than someone with three or fewer.
Over a 70-year career, Dr. Breslow helped expand the very definition of public health, from the historical concentration on communicable disease to a new concern with individual behavior and the effects of community and environment. As people lived longer and had more cancer and heart attacks, he was a leader in emphasizing the mounting importance of chronic disease.
“He changed the way we thought of public health,” said Dr. Linda Rosenstock, the current dean of the Fielding School. His message, she said, was that “the root causes of our health problems are broader than our own biology.”
In 1952, President Harry S. Truman appointed Dr. Breslow director of a commission to assess the nation’s health care. The panel’s report emphasized that people make their own health choices but “exercise them mainly under social influences.”
In 1969, as president of the American Public Health Association, he said the public health profession must go beyond issuing scientific reports and suggest social actions to improve people’s lives. “In the long run, housing may be more important than hospitals to health,” he said.
He advised a half-dozen presidential administrations and was director of the California Public Health Department in the mid-1960s. Gov. Ronald Reagan fired him in 1967, citing “philosophical differences” over state cuts in medical care for the poor.
As an official of the California department in the 1940s and ’50s, he did some of the early definitive studies on the harmful effects of smoking. Three of these studies were cited in the United States surgeon general’s landmark report in 1964 linking cigarettes to lung diseases, particularly cancer.
But it was the Alameda County study that rocked the public health world, because it proved with numbers that behavior indisputably affected longevity. Its recommendations: do not smoke; drink in moderation; sleep seven to eight hours; exercise at least moderately; eat regular meals; maintain a moderate weight; eat breakfast.
A follow-up study showed that those who followed better habits were less likely to become disabled. Of those with four or more good health habits, 12.2 percent were likely to be disabled 10 years after the study began; those with two or three, 14.1 percent; and those with only one or no positive health habits at all, 18.7 percent.
Dr. Breslow found that a 60-year-old who followed the seven recommended behaviors would be as healthy as a 30-year-old who followed fewer than three.
Lester Breslow was born March 17, 1915, in Bismarck, N.D., where his parents had moved to escape the teeming poverty of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father, a pharmacist, opened a drugstore in Bismarck. Lester devoured socialist books and newspapers as a teenager, he wrote in his autobiography, “A Life in Public Health: An Insider’s Retrospective” (2004). He overcame a stutter to speak at his high school graduation.
He graduated from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1938 with the intention of being a psychiatrist, but he soured on the field while working at a psychiatric hospital in the summer because he doubted much could be done to help the patients.
He shifted to public health, he said, because he thought it suited his ideology as “a political activist for disadvantaged people.” After a public health internship at a hospital in Staten Island, he applied to the United States Public Health Service Corps but was rejected — “I assume because of my political orientation,” he wrote.
Dr. Breslow returned to the University of Minnesota and earned a master’s in public health in 1941. He joined the Minnesota Department of Public Health as an epidemiologist, handling six rural counties.
In 1943 he joined the Army, even though his job and having a young child both exempted him from the World War II draft. He wrote that he felt guilty because he had not earlier joined the “antifascist struggle” by volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He served in the Pacific as a captain.
After his discharge, he approached the California health department about a job, making the case that it needed a chronic-disease specialist. The director told him to go back to Minnesota, but a subordinate quietly brought him on board.
After 21 years at the agency, Dr. Breslow was hired by U.C.L.A. as dean of the public health school, a post he held for eight years. He wrote more than 200 scientific publications, and was founding editor of The Annual Review of Public Health and The Encyclopedia of Public Health. In addition to serving as president of the public health association, he was president of the International Epidemiological Association and the Association of Schools of Public Health.
Dr. Breslow’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Devra J. R. Miller; three sons from his first marriage, Norman, Jack and Stephen; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In 2010, Dr. Breslow, then 95, joined with Prof. James E. Enstrom of U.C.L.A. to publish a paper about a group of California Mormons whom they had studied over 25 years. The life expectancy of the Mormon males was 9.8 years greater than that of the general population of white American males; female Mormons lived 5.6 years longer than their general-population counterparts. The authors credited the Mormons’ healthy lifestyle.
Dr. Breslow himself did not smoke or drink. He walked regularly, practiced moderation in all things and enjoyed tending his vegetable garden.
__________________________________
To respect Dr. Breslow's work - Study the articles below relating to how to stay in good health and live a long life
__________________________________
=============================================================================
Article 1 of 2 Information for any age, including the seniors
The Tools of Fitness - Seasoned personal trainer designs engaging workouts for seniors
Click green for further info
The 70-year-old woman donned the clunky, black urban rebound shoes. They looked like rollerblades with springboards instead of wheels. After a wobbly start, mediated by careful coaching, she was hopping and laughing.
The rebound shoes are just one of the many props that personal trainer Damon Hawkins uses to help his mature clients get fit and improve their balance.
Loss of balance is the No. 1 cause of fractures in older people, Hawkins said. “When people reach a certain age that’s one of the most important things to train.”
A personal trainer since the early ’90s—before most people had even heard of personal training—he focuses on helping people in their golden years who are extremely busy (often doing charitable work) squeeze in high-intensity but low-impact workouts that are safe for aging joints.
The goal of his workouts, Hawkins said, is to set the groundwork for overall health by making the workout experience enjoyable.
To add to the fun element, Hawkins carries with him a very full backpack with a variety of high- and low-tech props to help his clients exercise.
And he does it all through home and office visits, a huge point of convenience for busy people.
When he visited the Epoch Times office, his bag included boxing gloves, the rebound shoes, a yoga mat, a machine that pumps small electrical pulses into your muscles, and plastic cups, which are extremely useful for learning to regain balance if you try to pick up three while standing on one leg.
Hawkins has had some of his clients for over a decade and is always bringing new workout toys for them to try. The rebound shoes are his latest favorite and are good for burning calories, increasing circulation, and improving mood.
They are “euphoric—very euphoric. This is the most important thing,” Hawkins said. “When I get people on them … they start smiling and laughing.”
Once people feel good, they’re much less likely to regress into unhealthy habits.
“When your stomach is sore and you’re going to be like, ‘You know, I don’t want to eat that pizza, I’m feeling really sore, I worked [hard], I’m going to try to do the right thing today.”
High-Intensity, Low-Impact, and PlayfulHawkins’s clients range from their mid-50s to their 80s. They want to train but have never worked out and feel very uncomfortable or intimidated by big sports clubs with “young people running around in their spandex.”
He specializes in helping them get fit at their level, lose weight, and maintain functional movements, like picking things up off the floor by bending at the knees instead of at the hips to reduce stress on their lower backs.
“I try to give them a high intensity workout without impact to their joints, knees, and lower back. Most of these people at that age they have problems from arthritis … some of them have old injuries like fractures or knee problems,” Hawkins said.
Firsthand ExperienceHelping people recover their dignity and ability to carry out daily tasks after an illness or accident is also one of his skills. He has a unique insight into post-rehab specialization, from a childhood experience.
Hawkins began gymnastics when he was 11 but became ill two years later. He had to stop all formal sports because he was frequently too sick to attend regular practices. On the many days when he was bed-bound and too weak to even get up, Hawkins would invent exercises to work specific muscles that didn’t add extra stress to his body.
This period of invalidism gave Hawkins firsthand insight into what it’s like to cope with a weak, unstable body, an experience, which now helps him understand what his clients are feeling.
He was eventually diagnosed with kidney disease and has been well since having one kidney removed. After surgery, a friend who was a fitness trainer got him his first job at a club. After years working for different clubs and spas, Hawkins’s roster of clients allowed him to start his own business, Home Fit Pro, with two partners in 2006, working with clients throughout the New York City and the tri-state area.
He still encourages clients to branch out from his training and helps get them enrolled at health clubs so they can try new classes.
“[I want to] change their lives so they can enjoy doing something every week besides just me because you have to if you want to really get fit,” he said.
Home WorkoutsHawkins uses his wealth of training experience to create efficient and versatile workouts that you would normally get only if you bought a punching bag, leg press, and took an aerobics class, or did a parkour route.
(And even then there’s the question of motivation, we all know how easy it is to ignore those expensive workout machines).
About 5 minutes into a 25-minute workout session, which started with cardio boxing followed by jumps in the rebound shoes and ended with core work on a mat, my heart rate was well up but I hardly noticed because I was so focused on kicking with the correct leg and punching with the correct arm, all while Hawkins encouraged me to give it more oomph.
Over the next 20 minutes I poured sweat and pushed my core muscles to their limit (which didn’t take long, given their usual nonaction). I put on the rebound shoes and felt like I was walking on the moon. They really do give you a euphoric feeling once you find your feet, so to speak.
Amid the toughest activity, a series of crunches targeting my obliques, Hawkins entertained me with stories from his profession, making me forget how many repetitions I had left to go. It made the crunches go much faster, and luckily, he was able to keep track while conversing.
Overall, it was a faster and more efficient workout than I could do on my own or with a machine, because Hawkins used his own body as a target and for balance support. He applied just the right amount of resistance to a crunch to make it feel like an achievement.
Personalized Service and Spa TreatmentsHawkins tailors his training to fitness levels and personal learning styles.
“Everybody has their own things to get them going. Some people want to fail and some people have to do well,” he said,
The key, he said, is to “pay attention to what people need.”
In addition to offering personal training and classes, years of working in different clubs and spas have given Hawkins and his partners a network of specialists that they can connect clients to, from nutrition to massage therapy, as well as spa services.
The Personal Trainer in this article:
Mr. Damon Hawkins
Ph: 800-768-2153
E: [email protected]
W: http://homefitpro.com/
______________________
Article 2 of 2 The famous Magnets
Relating to the magnet information below, provided by Mr. Damon Hawkins, The Personal Trainer in article 1 of 2 above:
STAF, Inc. is NOT endorsing the use of magnets for the reason, that at the moment of editing this interesting information in article 1 of 2 and this article 2 of 2, the "official" research does not, at least not, yet, confirm the beneficial information. This does not mean that the magnets do not provide the benefits the seller states. Test use the magnet on your own risk and let us, via an email, know what your opinion is based on your experience. (Contact info, see: home page) - We at STAF, Inc. are going to do our own research and use the magnets the way Mr. Damon Hawkins teaches. Later on we will publish our research results.
Playing With Magnets
By Mr. Damon Hawkins, The Personal Trainer in article 1 of 2 above
Many people may not realize that walking on concrete is more draining on the body than walking on bare earth, Hawkins said. This is because the Earth has a magnetic field, which energizes the human body but is also partly blocked by layers of concrete.
“The earth is a magnet itself, and the more concrete and steel between the earth and peoples’ feet, the less magnetic energy they receive. That’s why a lot of people have become weaker from a biological standpoint.
“Back in the day, people had more energy because there was nothing between the earth, the magnetic force, and people’s bodies.”
Wearing magnets can help people be more stable on their feet, improve circulation, and in some cases reduce pain.
Hawkins said his first “wow” product experience occurred when a friend at a gym showed him a stick with a couple spinning magnetic balls with short spikes (kind of like a medieval mace). The friend started spinning the balls and waving the stick around Hawkins’s body. After a short time, Hawkins felt the pain he’d been experiencing in his chest disappear.
Hawkins has been working with magnets for years and said while it’s still not known exactly how they work, he has seen them really improve the health of his clients. One client was experiencing the pins and needles, and numbness in her feet due to diabetes. Those symptoms disappeared after she started wearing magnetic insoles.
“I’ve seen such improvements in my clients because of these magnets. … Once it [a magnet] is on your body, [its energy] travels all around.”
He demonstrated the grounding power of the magnets by having me overlap my hands and hold them out at chest level. As soon as he pushed on them I became unbalanced, but when I either stepped on some magnetic insoles or wore a magnetic bracelet, my feet seemed like they were stuck to the ground. Even though my upper body swayed forward, my heels stayed planted.
After he waved the magnetic ball wand around me, I was able to easily twist my upper body about 10 degrees further than I could before he waved the wand.
Hawkins helps his clients choose from a variety of magnetic products from bracelets and necklaces, knee, elbow, and shoulder braces, insoles, shower heads that remove chlorine from water, and even a magnetic bed pad, which Hawkins and his family have used for years. He said that it helps deepen their sleep and wick toxins away from their bodies.
Click green for further info
Source: By Mr. Damon Hawkins, The Personal Trainer in article 1 of 2 above
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: http://homefitpro.com/
_________________________________________
============================================================================
Meta-Medicine USA founder explains:
How to Heal the Body Using the Mind
Jon Robson gets to the root of symptoms of illness—the patient’s state of mind.
Robson began studying an integrative system of healthcare called “meta-medicine” in 2008 and founded Meta-Medicine USA in 2012. Compelled and inspired by his mother’s passing at an early age, and having a family history of chronic diseases, Robson set out to find a way to help people with chronic diseases.
He wanted to find a healthcare system that went beyond just managing symptoms and medicating patients for life.
Robson said in an interview with Epoch Times: “Disease is not a natural state the human body should be in. I believe that health and vitality are the natural states of the body.”
How a Patient Healed Heart Disease With His MindRobson had a client who had heart disease. After this client had a heart attack, Jon guided him with meta-medicine, and was able to help him understand the stresses in his life that manifested in his body as heart disease.
“[The client was able] to dissolve those stresses he was experiencing. He resolved his life stresses and his heart healed.”
Manifestation of Self-Loathing: Body Literally Attacks ItselfRobson also had a client who had Systemic lupus erythematosis. Systemic lupus is an autoimmune disease that causes the body to essentially attack itself.
It’s underlying cause is not fully known. MedLine Plus explains: “It is where the immune system believes that certain tissues and organs in the body are cancerous and it then attacks itself.”
Robson helped this client by asking deeper questions: “Why is this body attacking itself? What deeper resentment do they have for themselves?”
After careful analysis, he discovered that this client devalued herself. She had put her mother on a pedestal, and felt she was herself unworthy.
Robson explained, “[The client] grew into systemic lupus. [This] systematically broke down her body because she didn’t feel worthy of love and had deeper anger toward herself.”
Jon taught the client to love and appreciate herself. He helped the client see that the positive characteristics she attributed to her mother she actually had in her own unique form and style within her own personality. This client’s disease went into remission. Her body healed.
“Their outer world changed, purely because they changed from within,” Robson said.
Ancient Wisdom When asked how Meta-medicine relates to Buddhism or spiritual disciplines that teach looking within one’s mind and heart to find the root of problems, Robson said his treatment is similar in that, “[it] lets you see the specific moments which are taking you out of truth, and through that coaching process that brings you back to truth, transformation occurs.”
He said: “Your physical body is a perfect reflection of your mind.”
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Source:
Additional information Click green below
META-Medicine USAwww.meta-medicineusa.com/
Jon Robson is an integrative health specialist who specializes in Meta Medicine.
He is a META-Medicine Trainer and META-Medicine Health Coach.
STAF, Inc. is providing the META-Medicine link for informational reasons, only
STAF, Inc. is NOT endorsing their services - contact them at your own risk
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Therapists have a wide variety of techniques, training, and experience so it is important to find the best therapeutic fit for your needs
Tips for Finding the Right Therapist
Start your search on the Psychology Today website click: Psychology Today website
When most people are looking for a therapist, whether it is for themselves or a family member, they do not realize the wide variety of techniques, training, and experience that different therapists have. They also don’t really have a good idea about what to look for or what to ask in order to find a good therapeutic fit. I am going to break down some different things to compare and questions to ask to give you a better chance of finding someone who will best fit your needs.
1. Ask them if they are licensed or registered by their state and what their license number is.
Most states require at least a Master’s degree to register as a therapist and most states have additional post-graduate training and experience requirements for therapists to be considered licensed. States will also revoke the license or registration of therapists who are found to have engaged in serious misconduct.
2. Look up their state registration number.
Looking up their number can verify their credentials, how long they have been registered, and may list any complaints that have been filed against their license.
3. Observe if the therapist seems willing to be straightforward with you.
Therapists are often communication experts and many of us are experts at saying a lot without revealing very much or giving information that is not directly related to the questions being asked. There are times when that is useful, but not when you are interviewing them. Watch carefully and ask yourself: Did they answer my question directly? Did they seem genuine? Did they try to subtly shift the focus of question to another topic?
4. Ask them about their experience with your problem.
Some people assume that an experienced, effective, professionally-trained therapist can help with any mental health issue. There may be some very special therapists who can do that, but most of us specialize in particular types of problems with particular types of clients. At the minimum, the therapist should be able to demonstrate a great deal of insight into your problem. If not, a better idea would be to find a therapist who does specialize in your type of problem. You would not ask a pediatrician to perform your open heart surgery. But don’t just stop at asking if they have experience. Ask them how much experience they have with this specific problem, how successful they have been at resolving it, and pay attention to how directly they reply to your questions.
5. Ask them what methods and techniques they use.
Some people think that all psychotherapists have similar training and use similar techniques and ideas. They don’t. There are an almost endless variety of therapeutic techniques and modalities and the theories that drive these techniques are often completely opposed to each other. However, all of them can work when the right therapist uses them for the right person. The key is that the therapist should be able to explain to you specifically how what they do is going to work for you. Then you can see if they if their explanation makes sense and if it might work for you.
6. Give it a try and see how it goes.
If you think you found a good fit try two or three sessions and see how it goes. Discuss with them what is and is not working for you and don’t be afraid to move on if you don’t think you found the right fit.
7. Start your search on the Psychology Today website.
The Psychology Today website is a good place to start looking for a therapist. Their listings include a short bio and description of specialties, experience, training, and modalities. But these should only be used as a starting point. If they list a dozen different specialties then are they really a specialist? One person may claim that they know how to use a certain modality because they read about it. Another person might have obtained a post-graduate certification and have 10 years of experience with it so you have to dig further and ask more questions!
Click green for further info
Source: The Epoch Times
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Non-Medical Vaccination Opt-Outs on the Rise
An increasing number of parents are getting state approval to allow their children to opt out of school-mandated vaccinations for non-medical reasons, according to a new analysis published Wednesday.
Dr. Saad Omer, author of the correspondence published in the New England Journal of Medicine, warned that this trend is leaving large populations of children at risk for developing potentially deadly illnesses that haven't been seen in the United States in many years.
"Rates of exemption are substantially higher today than several years ago," said Omer, assistant professor of global health, epidemiology and pediatrics at Emory University in Atlanta. "Previously, rates were only rising in states with easy exemption policies, but now they are even rising in states that make it more difficult."
Exemption policies vary from state to state and can range from not allowing any non-medical exemptions to allowing opt-outs for religious or philosophical reasons.
Some states make it very difficult to get approval for exemptions by requiring notarized letters from clergymen, letters written by parents with specific wording, or completion of standardized forms that can only be obtained from special locations such as health departments.
Others make it very simple to skip vaccinations: Parents need only check a box on a short, standardized form.
Dr. Omer and his colleagues analyzed data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccination exemption rates for school years 2005 to 2011. They compared vaccine opt-out rates in each state to the ease with which exemptions could be obtained.
They found that parents were 2.5 times more likely to opt out in states that permit philosophical reasons compared with states that require religious objections. They were also more than two times more likely to opt out in states with easy exemption processes.
In most cases, fears among parents over vaccines -- many of them unfounded -- may be at play.
"The CDC *) and health departments are doing a good job of increasing vaccine coverage," Dr. Omer said. "Therefore, rates of vaccine-preventable disease are going down substantially. Parents aren't seeing the actual diseases, so when they hear about real or perceived adverse effects of vaccines, their perception of the risks versus benefits is shifted."
Dr. William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, agreed.
"Parents are just more skeptical about benefits of vaccines," he said. "Most young parents today have never seen a case of polio or measles, and they didn't learn about the seriousness of these diseases and importance of the vaccinations in school."
Dr. Schaffner added that he finds it interesting that some states do not allow exemptions while others "really oblige parents wishing to opt out". " to oblige" means: to make (an action, policy, etc.) necessary or obligatory)
Past research has shown, though, that in states with a substantial proportion of unimmunized or incompletely immunized children, many kids are susceptible to these classic diseases.
A 2006 study showed a 50 percent higher incidence of pertussis -- commonly known as whooping cough -- in states where it is easier to get exemptions. There have been similar findings with respect to measles.
Dr. Schaffner said he is very concerned that unvaccinated children who go abroad will bring back diseases, such as measles, that are still a major problem in other parts of the world. Not only will they suffer, but they will spread the illnesses to children who are unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons.
Dr. Schaffner said that part of the solution to the problem is that "states with easier process need to tighten up." However, he said, this is not a fool-proof approach. He said some research has shown an increase in medical exemptions in states that have tightened up their policies -- suggesting that parents are pressuring doctors to give medical exemptions.
He encourages doctors to not let themselves be "brow-beaten into providing dubious excuses."
*) CDC = Center of Disease Control and Prevention, a Federal Agency
Click: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - www.cdc.gov/
The CDC maintains several departments concerned with occupational safety and health, such as the Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the National ... CLICK above the green to connect to CDC website
Source:
New England Journal of Medicine
Dr. Saad Omer
This is for your personal use, only
Notice: STAF, Inc. does not give medical information. STAF, Inc. material is for inspirational and education purposes.
For medical advice contact your health care provider who knows your medical need situation better than anyone else.
STAF, Inc.'s opinion is in this paragraph:
Past research has shown, though, that in states with a substantial proportion of unimmunized or incompletely immunized children, many kids are susceptible to these classic diseases. A 2006 study showed a 50 percent higher incidence of pertussis -- commonly known as whooping cough -- in states where it is easier to get exemptions. There have been similar findings with respect to measles.
Study the article below about providing the "earthly" medical care to a sick person vs. faith healing.
Our affiliate Church, Global Church of God - GCG teaches:
"God provides the secrets of healing step-by-step to humans - thus it is correct to use medical services"
Visit GCG website: (click) www.gcg1org.weebly.com
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Study the article just above: " to opt out or not to opt out" of school-mandated vaccinations for non-medical reasons
Oregon Faith Healer Parents Get Probation in Son's Death
The "faith healer" parents of an Oregon teenager who died due to a lack of medical care will be required to contact a doctor when any of their other six children are sick for more than one day, according to the terms of their probation.
Russel and Brandi Bellew were sentenced to five years of probation on Tuesday after they pleaded guilty to negligent homicide in the death of Brandi's biological son, Austin Sprout, 16.
An autopsy found Austin died of an infection caused by a burst appendix.
The couple, along with their six surviving children, belongs to the General Assembly and Church of the First Born, which eschews modern medicine. The group takes its belief from a New Testament passage in the Gospel of James that says the sick should be prayed over and anointed with oil, according to Rick Ross, an expert on cults.
"They take this verse out of context and take it to mean this is the only thing you can do while sick," Ross said. "In their mind they see it as a choice not between the church and saving the life of their child, they see it as a choice between God and me."
Bob Schrank, an attorney for Brandi Bellew, said despite the couple's beliefs, they are "committed to complying with their conditions of probation."
In December, Sprout became ill with cold and flu-like symptoms. Instead of getting him medical attention, the couple chose to pray. Sprout died five days before Christmas.
"According to the group and its leaders, if someone goes to the doctor for medical care, they have gone against God," said Ross.
After an autopsy, the Bellews were arrested in February and were barred from speaking to each other since they were co-defendants in the case, Schrank said.
"[Russel] was allowed to come to the home to visit the kids but [Brandi] couldn't be there. The rule was they couldn't have contact," Schrank said.
Schrank said the Bellews, who did not offer a statement in court, are "great parents" and "at least 20" people sent letters vouching for them.
In August, prosecutors met with members of the Bellews' church to discuss state child neglect laws and to let them know choosing not to seek medical care for a child would not be tolerated, the (click: Eugene Register Guard reported.
Prosecutor Erik Hasselman told the newspaper congregants seemed to be receptive.
"This is not a denomination that feels that its faith is at odds with the laws of the community," he said.
The case is one of many in which parents have been held criminally responsible for neglecting to seek medical attention for their children.
Earlier this year, an Oklahoma woman was found guilty of second degree manslaughter and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.
Prosecutors said Susan Grady, who belongs to the Church of the First Born, chose to treat her 9-year-old son's diabetes complications with prayer. He died days later.
Last year, Dale and Shannon Hickman, an Oregon couple who belonged to the church, were sentenced to 75 months in prison after they failed to seek medical care following the birth of their premature son at home. The baby died nine hours later.
This is for your private use, only
Our affiliate Church, Global Church of God - GCG teaches:
"God provides the secrets of healing step-by-step to humans - thus it is correct to use medical services"
Visit GCG website: (click) www.gcg1org.weebly.com
______________________________________________
Eloquent Youth Wins Toastmasters Title
By Shar Adams On August 21, 2012 - In National News
Finalists at the Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking (L to R): second-place winner Palaniappa Subramaniam, first-place winner Ryan Avery, and third-place winner Stuart Pink. (Toastmasters)
It is hardly surprising that an American won this year’s Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking—Americans make up nearly three-quarters of the roughly 280,000 Toastmaster members worldwide.
The winner this year, however, was the youngest person to win the championship in the contest’s history. Twenty-five-year-old Ryan Avery from Portland, Ore., took away top honors in a grueling six-month contest.
Avery out spoke 30,000 participants from 116 countries, including eight other finalists at the championship event in Florida on Aug. 15–18.
A member of Gen Y, the generation born after the ’70s who grew up communicating electronically, text messaging, emailing, twittering, and uploading to Facebook to make a point, Avery believes the win is significant for his age group.
“I am part of the ‘like’ generation where I used to say ‘like’ every other word,” he told The Epoch Times by phone.
He says it was not nerves that drove him to take up Toastmasters.
It was not until he saw a video of himself, recorded as part of his job, that he realized he had the Gen Y affliction of communicating badly and using fillers every couple of words, which he now describes as “extremely distracting.”
“I showed it to my Dad and he said, ‘Man you need to join Toastmasters,’” Avery explained, a move for which his Dad stumped up the first six months and now reckons it was the best $50 he has ever spent.
There are fears that Gen Y is losing the ability to communicate face to face, Avery said, describing the sorts of comments that are made about his generation: “Hey, pull out a handwritten letter and write a thank you note, or communicate without saying ‘you know’ every five words!”
As director of Marketing for the Special Olympics in Oregon, Avery took up the challenge to win the international competition, not only to upgrade communication skills for his job but also to make a point about his peers.
“I am part of the ‘like’ generation where I used to say ‘like’ every other word.”-Ryan Avery, 2012 Toastmasters world champion public speaker
“I wanted to make sure that I was representing Special Olympics in an eloquent and professional way, and I also wanted to position myself as a younger professional employee, to show people that my generation is looking to improve,” he said.
“We are going to be the next political leaders, lawyers, and doctors and teachers, so I wanted to be a type of representative or ambassador for that.”
Trust Is ImportantGen Y, as much as they are disparaged for being overconfident and opportunistic, are a values-based, well connected, and loyal generation, says Australian social commentator Hugh Mackay who has conducted extensive research on the age group.
In keeping with that assessment, Avery won the event with a seven-minute speech, titled “Trust is a Must,” about the importance of keeping one’s promises.
“A promise is only as good as the person who gives it,” he asserts in his winning speech, which took the audience through a series of humorous but heartfelt life lessons.
According Dr. Michael Telch, an anxiety specialist at the University of Texas, fear of public speaking is the most common phobia in the United States.
Toastmasters, a world leader in communication and leadership development, began in California in 1924 and now has 13,500 clubs around the world. Asia constitutes 16.6 percent of the membership, Australia and Oceania 6.4 percent, and Europe 4.9 percent.
Avery’s win marks a generational shift for the nonprofit educational and mentoring institution whose average age, according to its website, is 45.8 years.
His win also marks an awakening for the verbally challenged Gen Y, said Avery, who expects to see an explosion in numbers of Gen Y joining Toastmasters in the coming years.
He speaks highly of his experience at Toastmasters, its wealth of training materials, the many years’ experience in leadership and communication among members, and its tried and true method of appointing a mentor for each new member, providing an accessible and much needed service.
“The reason why I was the world champion this year is because I found myself with the best communicators who were phenomenal,” he said, noting that his mentor was a past world champion public speaker.
Related Articles
Along with the expertise and wisdom inherent within the institution, Avery believes being part of a larger, supportive network like Toastmasters, albeit different to the Internet, will resonate with his peers.
“Our mission is to be supportive of each other,” he said, “That is one of our key words, ‘support,’ and when you walk into any Toastmaster club around the world, and I have walked into many, you get that same feeling of you are welcome,” he said.
The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 19 languages. Subscribe to our e-newsletter.
Source:By Shar Adams On August 21, 2012 In National News
This is for your private use, only
URL to article: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/united-states/youth-learning-to-communicate-the-old-way-282327.html
Click here to print. Related Articles
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An inspirational article for everyone with the acne & being bullied for it
Winston Churchill said: The key to success is: "Never, never, never, never, never give up."
Acne-Plagued Teen Lands Spot on Fashion Week Runway
Click the green areas for further information
Cassandra Bankson, the teen whose makeup routine to cover up her acne-plagued skin made her into a YouTube sensation, started the next chapter of her life, landing a spot on the runway during New York Fashion Week.
A confident Bankson walked the runway at the Stacey Igel's "Boy Meets Girl" show in New York City Wednesday night, proudly putting a past of being bullied for her acne-ridden skin behind her.
"I'm a small town girl who sits in her living room and films videos all day and now…I'm in New YorkFashion Week," Bankson said backstage. "It's still a dream. I am so thankful."
The 19-year-old first achieved Internet stardom after posting makeup tutorials on YouTube with her concealing tips, revealing how she covered her acne-ridden skin before heading out to face the world. In the videos, Bankson talks to her 45 million viewers, first in full makeup, but then strips off the layers of foundation, concealer and powder to reveal pimples and blemishes.
"I had no idea so many people faced similar problems," she said. "My videos and definitely my 'GMA' appearance allowed me to connect with them."
Click for the video: WATCH: Acne-Scarred Teen Model Undergoes Amazing Daily Makeup Transformation
Bankson appeared on "Good Morning America" back in December 2011 and told co-anchor Robin Roberts about the bullies who tormented her and how she dreaded leaving her house. Instead she would stay in, researching makeup techniques and practicing on herself. To get out of the misery she felt in high school, she also devoted herself to her studies and managed to graduate two years early.
"I was a total recluse. I didn't want to talk to or see anyone because of my skin," Bankson said. Now, she said those same bullies that tormented her in school and are friending her on Facebook.
Today, Bankson says her skin condition is 70 percent improved. She continues to pay regular visits to the dermatologist.
The young California native, now in her second year of college, says her journey has made want to pursue a career in dermatology so she can continue to help others with acne and other skin conditions. Until then, she plans to keep modeling. In addition to last night's runway show, through Explore Modeling, she has already shot ads with Bebe and Range Rover.
Although she's modeling, Bankson's message continues to be one of inner-beauty.
"Models shouldn't be modeling perfection because there is no such thing," she said. "We should be modeling our imperfections."
Click the green areas for further information
Also Read
Source:
By Katie Conway | ABC News Blogs – Thu, Sep 13, 2012
This is for your private use, only
______________________________
Read the next article just below - the oldest Runway Model - 81 years
_________
Carmen Dell'Orefice, 81, is Fashion Week's Oldest Runway Model
She's Also the Best
Age is just a number - only your willingness & actions count
Winston Churchill said: The key to success is: "Never, never, never, never, never give up."
Click the green areas for further information
Carmen Dell'Orefice was born before Fashion Week even existed.
The 81-year-old, who walked the runway for both Marimekko and Norisol Ferrari at NYFW on Monday, 9/10/12, is the oldest working supermodel in the industry and proud of it.
"It's what I enjoy doing, and I'm able to do it," she told the Today Show before stepping on to the runway in a mocha-colored floor-length gown.
Discovered at 13, while riding a New York City bus with her mom, she landed the cover of Vogue only three years later. That was back in 1947, when $7.50 an hour was the going rate for the gig.
PHOTOS: The Worst Fashion Trends of All Time
"It meant nothing to me," she recalls of seeing her first cover, "except that I thought I looked like a little boy."
The octogenarian beauty has long shed any hint of tomboyish-ness. Her iconic white hair, which she's left dye-free for decades, has set the highest bar for aging gracefully.
She's had a little help, according to Today show correspondent and interviewer Jenna Bush Hager (yes that, Jenna). Dell'Orefice admits to using fillers for "cracks in the ceiling," but it takes a lot more than an injection to be one of the most in-demand models after 66 years in the business. Her shoulders thrust back in triumph, projecting a couture-worthy regality uncommon on the runway these days.
PHOTOS: New York Fashion Week's Stunning Makeup Looks
It's the kind of peacocking pride only a veteran of the business can pull off. It's also a throwback to the days before slump-shouldered models, minimalism and Kate Moss made high fashion more bone-dry.
Vogue, Today ShowThat may be why Dell'Orefice still works so much. When a designer or advertiser wants to convey true luxury, they call Dell'Orefice. In recent years, she's been the face of Rolex and Issac Mizrahi's Target line, between runway shows for Heart Truth, Adrienne Vittadini and Qasimi, among others.
"I think America may be growing up and accepting the fact that the bulk of life exists beyond 50. Because demographically ... the vast population is over 50," says Dell'Orefice.
PHOTOS: Fashion Week's Most Ubiquitous Fashionistas
She's onto something: Older women with cash to spare have become a coveted demographic for marketers of luxury products. As a result, fashion has started is taking cues from women once considered past their prime.
At 71, supermodel Veruschka stole the spotlight at Giles' runway show during London Fashion Week in 2010. That same year 45-year-old model Kristen McMenamy let her long hair go totally gray, and nubile style commentators like Tavi Gevinson and Kelly Osbourne followed suit (with the help of gray hair dye.)
Even outside fashion's tiny bubble, women, not girls, have taken the reigns of style. The most powerful cross-generational trendsetter in America today is a 48-year-old mother of two. That would be Michelle Obama, as if you couldn't guess.
Still in the world of modeling, youth is remains the beauty standard. While models as young as teenagers still share the stage with the likes of Dell'Orefice, there isn't much competition. She's already been the teen model and done the 'it' girl thing. She's also posed for Salvador Dali, married and divorced multiple times, had a child, quit modeling, raked in millions, and lost it all to Ponzi con-man Bernie Madoff, her ex-boyfriend's best friend.
Dell'Orefice has personally intersected with some of modern history's most famous & infamous cultural touchstones
- she isn't slowing down at 81.
At a Fashion Week event on Friday, 9/14/12, she was photographed linking arms with 28-year-old Olympian
Ryan Lochte, looking every bit the model of the moment.
Source:
Yahoo news
____________________________
She's Also the Best
Age is just a number - only your willingness & actions count
Winston Churchill said: The key to success is: "Never, never, never, never, never give up."
Click the green areas for further information
Carmen Dell'Orefice was born before Fashion Week even existed.
The 81-year-old, who walked the runway for both Marimekko and Norisol Ferrari at NYFW on Monday, 9/10/12, is the oldest working supermodel in the industry and proud of it.
"It's what I enjoy doing, and I'm able to do it," she told the Today Show before stepping on to the runway in a mocha-colored floor-length gown.
Discovered at 13, while riding a New York City bus with her mom, she landed the cover of Vogue only three years later. That was back in 1947, when $7.50 an hour was the going rate for the gig.
PHOTOS: The Worst Fashion Trends of All Time
"It meant nothing to me," she recalls of seeing her first cover, "except that I thought I looked like a little boy."
The octogenarian beauty has long shed any hint of tomboyish-ness. Her iconic white hair, which she's left dye-free for decades, has set the highest bar for aging gracefully.
She's had a little help, according to Today show correspondent and interviewer Jenna Bush Hager (yes that, Jenna). Dell'Orefice admits to using fillers for "cracks in the ceiling," but it takes a lot more than an injection to be one of the most in-demand models after 66 years in the business. Her shoulders thrust back in triumph, projecting a couture-worthy regality uncommon on the runway these days.
PHOTOS: New York Fashion Week's Stunning Makeup Looks
It's the kind of peacocking pride only a veteran of the business can pull off. It's also a throwback to the days before slump-shouldered models, minimalism and Kate Moss made high fashion more bone-dry.
Vogue, Today ShowThat may be why Dell'Orefice still works so much. When a designer or advertiser wants to convey true luxury, they call Dell'Orefice. In recent years, she's been the face of Rolex and Issac Mizrahi's Target line, between runway shows for Heart Truth, Adrienne Vittadini and Qasimi, among others.
"I think America may be growing up and accepting the fact that the bulk of life exists beyond 50. Because demographically ... the vast population is over 50," says Dell'Orefice.
PHOTOS: Fashion Week's Most Ubiquitous Fashionistas
She's onto something: Older women with cash to spare have become a coveted demographic for marketers of luxury products. As a result, fashion has started is taking cues from women once considered past their prime.
At 71, supermodel Veruschka stole the spotlight at Giles' runway show during London Fashion Week in 2010. That same year 45-year-old model Kristen McMenamy let her long hair go totally gray, and nubile style commentators like Tavi Gevinson and Kelly Osbourne followed suit (with the help of gray hair dye.)
Even outside fashion's tiny bubble, women, not girls, have taken the reigns of style. The most powerful cross-generational trendsetter in America today is a 48-year-old mother of two. That would be Michelle Obama, as if you couldn't guess.
Still in the world of modeling, youth is remains the beauty standard. While models as young as teenagers still share the stage with the likes of Dell'Orefice, there isn't much competition. She's already been the teen model and done the 'it' girl thing. She's also posed for Salvador Dali, married and divorced multiple times, had a child, quit modeling, raked in millions, and lost it all to Ponzi con-man Bernie Madoff, her ex-boyfriend's best friend.
Dell'Orefice has personally intersected with some of modern history's most famous & infamous cultural touchstones
- she isn't slowing down at 81.
At a Fashion Week event on Friday, 9/14/12, she was photographed linking arms with 28-year-old Olympian
Ryan Lochte, looking every bit the model of the moment.
Source:
Yahoo news
____________________________
Insight - Neuroscience in court: My brain made me do it
By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent | Reuters LONDON (Reuters) - He was once a respected pediatrician, loved by patients and their parents for over 30 years. Now Domenico Mattiello faces trial for pedophilia, accused of making sexual advances towards little girls in his care.
Scientific experts will argue in court that his damaged brain made him do it, and his lawyers will ask for leniency.
It's the latest example of how neuroscience - the science of the brain and how it works - is taking the stand and beginning to challenge society's notions of crime and punishment.
The issue has been thrown into the spotlight by new technologies, like structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) scans and DNA analysis, that can help pinpoint the biological basis of mental disorders.
A series of recent studies has established that psychopathic rapists and murderers have distinct brain structures that show up when their heads are scanned using MRI.
And in the United States, two companies, one called No Lie MRI and another called Cephos Corp, are advertising lie-detection services using fMRI to lawyers and prosecutors.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
While structural MRI scans show the structure of a brain and can highlight differences between one brain and another, PET and fMRI scans can also show the brain in action, lighting up at particular points when the brain engages in certain tasks.
But the dazzling new technologies and detailed genetic data leave unanswered the issue of whether criminal courts are the right place to use this new information.
"The worry is that the law, or at least some judges, might be so overawed by the technology that they start essentially delegating the decision about guilt to a particular form of test," says Colin Blakemore, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University.
The lawyers for American serial killer Brian Dugan, who was facing execution in Illinois after pleading guilty to raping and killing a 10-year-old girl, used scans of his brain activity to argue he had mental malfunctions and should be spared the death penalty. In the event, Illinois abolished capital punishment while he was on death row.
In a court in the Indian city of Mumbai, a woman was convicted of murder based only oncircumstantial evidence and a so-called brain electrical oscillations signature profiling (BEOS) test, the results of which prosecutors said suggested she was guilty.
The days when mental capacity for crime is argued over by psychiatrists unaided by sophisticated machinery - such as Friday's verdict that Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was sane when he killed 77 people - look numbered.
"All sorts of types of neuroscience evidence are being used for all sorts of types of claims," says Teneille Brown, a professor of law at the University of Utah. "The question is, is this technology really ready for prime time, or is it being abused?"
"ACQUIRED PAEDOPHILIA"
In Mattiello's case, the neuroscientific evidence will come in the form of a full psychiatric and biological analysis including an MRI brain scan that shows a roughly 4 centimeter tumor growing at the base of his brain.
This created pressure inside his skull and "altered his behavior", says Pietro Pietrini, a molecular geneticist and psychiatrist at Italy's University of Pisa who is compiling an expert report on the 65-year-old.
"His previous behavior was completely normal," Pietrini told Reuters. "He was a pediatrician for 30 something years and he saw tens of thousands of children and never had any problem. The question is why, at some point, did someone who has always behaved properly suddenly change so drastically?"
The doctor was arrested in Vicenza, northern Italy, more than a year ago and is undergoing cancer treatment after having the tumor removed. Pietrini is due to see him again next month to continue his assessment and see the effects of the treatment.
The case, which has yet go to court, is strikingly similar to another of "acquired pedophilia" dating back to 2002, in which a 40-year-old married American schoolteacher suddenly became obsessed with sex and began secretly to collect child pornography.
He was eventually removed from the family home for making sexual advances towards his step-daughter and convicted of pedophilia. But later medical examinations found he had an egg-sized tumor in a part of the brain involved in decision-making.
When the tumor was removed, the man recovered from his pedophilic tendencies and was able to return to his family.
Experts are generally agreed that conditions like psychopathy and pedophilia can't be "cured", but in this groundbreaking case it appeared that removing the tumor, and hence the pressure in the brain, may have re-established his ability to control impulses.
As in that case, Pietrini said he and colleague Giuseppe Sartori of Padua University believed Mattiello's tumor "may well have played a role in altering his behavior".
"This is what we will be arguing," Pietrini said. "But of course it will be for the judge to determine to what extent he believes this medical condition played a role."
Oxford's Blakemore, one of the world's leading thinkers in this field, says such cases are "startling".
"It makes one wonder about the notion of responsibility," he said in an interview.
IS "MY BRAIN MADE ME DO IT" A DEFENCE?
And when it comes to prison, should pedophiles, psychopaths and other violent criminals be punished less severely if their behavior can be blamed on biology? Is "my brain made me do it" a defense that warrants recognition with lighter sentences, or even no jail time at all?
"(It) raises the whole issue of what you think sentencing is for," says Blakemore. "Is it about punishment? Is it about retribution? Is it about remediation and rehabilitation? Is it about protecting society? Well, to some extent it's about all of those things."
Recent evidence - from both real and hypothetical cases - suggests judges are sympathetic to neurobiological evidence as mitigation.
A study published in the journal Science this month showed that criminal psychopaths in the United States whose lawyers provide biological evidence for their brain condition are more likely to be sentenced to shorter jail terms than those who are simply said to be psychopaths.
For the study, researchers at the University of Utah tweaked the real-life case of Stephen Mobley, a 39-year-old American who was sentenced to death in 1994 after robbing a Domino's pizza place in Georgia and shooting dead the restaurant's manager.
At his trial, Mobley's lawyer presented evidence in mitigation showing the accused had a variant of a gene called MAO-A that has been dubbed the "warrior" gene after scientists found it was linked to violent behavior.
AGGRESSIVE GENES
In the Science study, judges were given a hypothetical case loosely based on Mobley's, where the crime was a savage beating with a gun, rather than a fatal shooting.
All the judges were told the defendant was a psychopath, but only half were given expert testimony on the genetic and neurobiological causes of his psychopathy. Those who got the neuroscientific evidence were more likely to give a shorter sentence - generally about a year less, the study found.
Pietrini worked on a similar real-life case in Italy in 2009 - thought to be one of the first criminal cases in Europe to use this type of neuroscientific evidence.
It involved Abdelmalek Bayout, an Algerian living in Italy, who was tried and convicted for fatally stabbing a man who teased him in the street.
After conducting a series of tests on the Algerian, Pietrini and colleagues said they had found abnormalities in imaging scans of his brain, and in five genes that have been linked to violent behavior — including MAO-A.
A 2002 study led by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London linked low levels of MAO-A with aggressiveness and criminal behavior in boys who were raised in abusive environments.
Bayout's lawyers got his sentence reduced by arguing that this and other bad genes had affected his brain and were partly to blame for the attack.
WHERE WILL IT END?
Experts say it's almost inevitable that neuroscience and law will become yet more intertwined. After all, while neuroscience seeks to find out how the brain functions and affects behavior, the law's main concern is with regulating behavior.
Yet many are uneasy about the use in courts of law - and in matters of life and death - of basic science that is only just creeping out of the lab.
Observers such as Hank Greely, a professor of law at Stanford University, point out that no scientific peer-reviewed studies have been published demonstrating that BEOS - the brain test used in the Mumbai case - actually works.
Others stress that while genes like MAO-A have been associated with violence, there are also plenty of people with similar genotypes who don't go out and kill, rape or abuse.
"Neuroscience is being used by serious scientists in real labs, but the people trying to apply it in courts are not those same people," says Utah's Brown. "So they're taking something that looks very objective, that looks like gold standard science, but then morphing it into a forensic use it wasn't developed for.
"This isn't snake-oil science. It's real science. But it's being misapplied."
Seena Fazel, a clinical senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry at Oxford University, says he's uncomfortable with the long-term implications and wonders where it will end.
There are already known biological bases for many brain disorders criminals suffer from, including drug addiction, alcoholism and antisocial personality disorder, which is thought to affect up to half of all those in prison.
"If psychopathy reduces your sentence because it has a biological basis, why shouldn't these other more common conditions also result in reduced sentences? The problem here is where do we draw the line?"
(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by David Stamp and Will Waterman)
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By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent | Reuters LONDON (Reuters) - He was once a respected pediatrician, loved by patients and their parents for over 30 years. Now Domenico Mattiello faces trial for pedophilia, accused of making sexual advances towards little girls in his care.
Scientific experts will argue in court that his damaged brain made him do it, and his lawyers will ask for leniency.
It's the latest example of how neuroscience - the science of the brain and how it works - is taking the stand and beginning to challenge society's notions of crime and punishment.
The issue has been thrown into the spotlight by new technologies, like structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) scans and DNA analysis, that can help pinpoint the biological basis of mental disorders.
A series of recent studies has established that psychopathic rapists and murderers have distinct brain structures that show up when their heads are scanned using MRI.
And in the United States, two companies, one called No Lie MRI and another called Cephos Corp, are advertising lie-detection services using fMRI to lawyers and prosecutors.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
While structural MRI scans show the structure of a brain and can highlight differences between one brain and another, PET and fMRI scans can also show the brain in action, lighting up at particular points when the brain engages in certain tasks.
But the dazzling new technologies and detailed genetic data leave unanswered the issue of whether criminal courts are the right place to use this new information.
"The worry is that the law, or at least some judges, might be so overawed by the technology that they start essentially delegating the decision about guilt to a particular form of test," says Colin Blakemore, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University.
The lawyers for American serial killer Brian Dugan, who was facing execution in Illinois after pleading guilty to raping and killing a 10-year-old girl, used scans of his brain activity to argue he had mental malfunctions and should be spared the death penalty. In the event, Illinois abolished capital punishment while he was on death row.
In a court in the Indian city of Mumbai, a woman was convicted of murder based only oncircumstantial evidence and a so-called brain electrical oscillations signature profiling (BEOS) test, the results of which prosecutors said suggested she was guilty.
The days when mental capacity for crime is argued over by psychiatrists unaided by sophisticated machinery - such as Friday's verdict that Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was sane when he killed 77 people - look numbered.
"All sorts of types of neuroscience evidence are being used for all sorts of types of claims," says Teneille Brown, a professor of law at the University of Utah. "The question is, is this technology really ready for prime time, or is it being abused?"
"ACQUIRED PAEDOPHILIA"
In Mattiello's case, the neuroscientific evidence will come in the form of a full psychiatric and biological analysis including an MRI brain scan that shows a roughly 4 centimeter tumor growing at the base of his brain.
This created pressure inside his skull and "altered his behavior", says Pietro Pietrini, a molecular geneticist and psychiatrist at Italy's University of Pisa who is compiling an expert report on the 65-year-old.
"His previous behavior was completely normal," Pietrini told Reuters. "He was a pediatrician for 30 something years and he saw tens of thousands of children and never had any problem. The question is why, at some point, did someone who has always behaved properly suddenly change so drastically?"
The doctor was arrested in Vicenza, northern Italy, more than a year ago and is undergoing cancer treatment after having the tumor removed. Pietrini is due to see him again next month to continue his assessment and see the effects of the treatment.
The case, which has yet go to court, is strikingly similar to another of "acquired pedophilia" dating back to 2002, in which a 40-year-old married American schoolteacher suddenly became obsessed with sex and began secretly to collect child pornography.
He was eventually removed from the family home for making sexual advances towards his step-daughter and convicted of pedophilia. But later medical examinations found he had an egg-sized tumor in a part of the brain involved in decision-making.
When the tumor was removed, the man recovered from his pedophilic tendencies and was able to return to his family.
Experts are generally agreed that conditions like psychopathy and pedophilia can't be "cured", but in this groundbreaking case it appeared that removing the tumor, and hence the pressure in the brain, may have re-established his ability to control impulses.
As in that case, Pietrini said he and colleague Giuseppe Sartori of Padua University believed Mattiello's tumor "may well have played a role in altering his behavior".
"This is what we will be arguing," Pietrini said. "But of course it will be for the judge to determine to what extent he believes this medical condition played a role."
Oxford's Blakemore, one of the world's leading thinkers in this field, says such cases are "startling".
"It makes one wonder about the notion of responsibility," he said in an interview.
IS "MY BRAIN MADE ME DO IT" A DEFENCE?
And when it comes to prison, should pedophiles, psychopaths and other violent criminals be punished less severely if their behavior can be blamed on biology? Is "my brain made me do it" a defense that warrants recognition with lighter sentences, or even no jail time at all?
"(It) raises the whole issue of what you think sentencing is for," says Blakemore. "Is it about punishment? Is it about retribution? Is it about remediation and rehabilitation? Is it about protecting society? Well, to some extent it's about all of those things."
Recent evidence - from both real and hypothetical cases - suggests judges are sympathetic to neurobiological evidence as mitigation.
A study published in the journal Science this month showed that criminal psychopaths in the United States whose lawyers provide biological evidence for their brain condition are more likely to be sentenced to shorter jail terms than those who are simply said to be psychopaths.
For the study, researchers at the University of Utah tweaked the real-life case of Stephen Mobley, a 39-year-old American who was sentenced to death in 1994 after robbing a Domino's pizza place in Georgia and shooting dead the restaurant's manager.
At his trial, Mobley's lawyer presented evidence in mitigation showing the accused had a variant of a gene called MAO-A that has been dubbed the "warrior" gene after scientists found it was linked to violent behavior.
AGGRESSIVE GENES
In the Science study, judges were given a hypothetical case loosely based on Mobley's, where the crime was a savage beating with a gun, rather than a fatal shooting.
All the judges were told the defendant was a psychopath, but only half were given expert testimony on the genetic and neurobiological causes of his psychopathy. Those who got the neuroscientific evidence were more likely to give a shorter sentence - generally about a year less, the study found.
Pietrini worked on a similar real-life case in Italy in 2009 - thought to be one of the first criminal cases in Europe to use this type of neuroscientific evidence.
It involved Abdelmalek Bayout, an Algerian living in Italy, who was tried and convicted for fatally stabbing a man who teased him in the street.
After conducting a series of tests on the Algerian, Pietrini and colleagues said they had found abnormalities in imaging scans of his brain, and in five genes that have been linked to violent behavior — including MAO-A.
A 2002 study led by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London linked low levels of MAO-A with aggressiveness and criminal behavior in boys who were raised in abusive environments.
Bayout's lawyers got his sentence reduced by arguing that this and other bad genes had affected his brain and were partly to blame for the attack.
WHERE WILL IT END?
Experts say it's almost inevitable that neuroscience and law will become yet more intertwined. After all, while neuroscience seeks to find out how the brain functions and affects behavior, the law's main concern is with regulating behavior.
Yet many are uneasy about the use in courts of law - and in matters of life and death - of basic science that is only just creeping out of the lab.
Observers such as Hank Greely, a professor of law at Stanford University, point out that no scientific peer-reviewed studies have been published demonstrating that BEOS - the brain test used in the Mumbai case - actually works.
Others stress that while genes like MAO-A have been associated with violence, there are also plenty of people with similar genotypes who don't go out and kill, rape or abuse.
"Neuroscience is being used by serious scientists in real labs, but the people trying to apply it in courts are not those same people," says Utah's Brown. "So they're taking something that looks very objective, that looks like gold standard science, but then morphing it into a forensic use it wasn't developed for.
"This isn't snake-oil science. It's real science. But it's being misapplied."
Seena Fazel, a clinical senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry at Oxford University, says he's uncomfortable with the long-term implications and wonders where it will end.
There are already known biological bases for many brain disorders criminals suffer from, including drug addiction, alcoholism and antisocial personality disorder, which is thought to affect up to half of all those in prison.
"If psychopathy reduces your sentence because it has a biological basis, why shouldn't these other more common conditions also result in reduced sentences? The problem here is where do we draw the line?"
(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by David Stamp and Will Waterman)
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- A brain scan shows areas of reduced …
- Biology gives American psychopaths a …
- LONDON (Reuters) - Criminal psychopaths in the United States whose lawyers provide biological evidence …Full Story »Biology gives American psychopaths a legal break
Reuters Plaster phrenological models of head
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See the interesting article above relating to court cases:
Insight - Neuroscience in court: My brain made me do it
Stay up to date with the information how our society changes and develops - for the better or for the worse.
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Next below 2 articles of public interest:
(1) Reckless Drivers Who Hit People Face Few Penalties in New York State
(2) Video of Police encounter shows how the police involved are making false reports knowingly just to cover their own lies and put the wrong man to prison for several years.
Fight back. Demand honest justice. Contact STAF, Inc. to help the innocent man.
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STAF, Inc.'s comment, by Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D.
The article below, Reckless Drivers Who Hit People Face Few Penalties in New York State,
in STAF, Inc.'s scale 0-10, is 9 - it shows how thing should not be - the driver might have been intoxicated while driving, sometimes nothing is done even though the proof shows the driver is guilty.
Sometimes the big organizations, companies, cities, states - as employers of the drivers, protect them to avoid big number compensation lawsuits - even though human lives were lost. Sometimes, if the test somehow was done in an "improper manner" (= read: was done right, the results are correct), but the lawyers want to make their defense case money and be celebrating their victory - yet, human lives were lost.
_________
Sad, Sad, Sad stories - Shame, Shame, Shame on the injustice
Human lives were lost by drunken drivers, by red light ignorers, by texters while driving,
by cell speakers while driving, by falling a sleep, by hit and drivers, etc.
Read this article - raise your voice - demand a change in legislation protecting the big money - human lives were lost.
Help STAF, Inc. fight through the necessary improvement in the justice system.
STAF, Inc.'s contact info in Home page at the top
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Reckless Drivers Who Hit People Face Few Penalties in New York State
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Roxana Sorina Buta, dark-eyed and lithe, hurried home from work as a waitress on May 24, scurrying through rain and 1:30 a.m. darkness toward the subway. She got to Broadway and stepped into the crosswalk when the light turned green.
At the same time a New York City dump truck rumbled eastbound on 14th Street and turned south on Broadway. On the video taken in a Citibank on that corner, you can see the truck making a fast, seamless turn. If you look very closely, you will also see a shadow flicker in front of the truck’s right headlight.
That was Ms. Buta, and the truck hit her square.
Ms. Buta, 21, an aspiring actress, the only child of immigrants from Romania, was no more.
Even at that hour, in the rain, witnesses screamed and yelled, and within a minute a police car pulled up. But the driver, who worked for the city’s Transportation Department, never stopped his truck; nor did he respond to pleas in subsequent days to step forward. Police investigators found him anyway. But to this day no one has been charged, or even gotten a ticket.
It is as though Roxana were collateral damage, a human fender bender in the movement of huge trucks and vans and cars through the streets of New York.
“How can you go through a crosswalk and not see a 5-7 woman in front of you?” asks Stephanie Iscovitz, one of many friends who have made a cause of her death. “Someone took Roxy’s life as if with no consequences.”
Technically, this is not so. Technically, the police continue to investigate and the Manhattan district attorney examines a possible case. But Ms. Iscovitz is not far from the mark. In this city of walkers, where we take pride in hoofing it with such a manic intensity that researchers often find us moving faster than crosstown buses, striking a pedestrian — or a biker — and driving away carries few consequences.
The State Department of Motor Vehicles recorded about 3,000 serious nonfatal accidents last year in New York City. The city Police Department’s Accident Investigation Squad investigated only 63, or 2 percent of these nonfatal serious crashes, according to the state. Squad members chalk crosswalks, measure tire tracks, and analyze video. Their expertise is unquestioned. This unit, however, numbers just 20 or so.
They investigate only when a victim is “considered likely to die.” (State law, too, remains a problem; it is difficult to criminally charge reckless drivers. As the writers of the indispensable StreetsBlog.org note, “under New York State code ‘I didn’t see her’ is a credible defense.”
The City Council, of late, has examined this closely. There are proposals to double the size of the traffic investigation squad and to ensure that each precinct has officers expert in such matters.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, characteristically, claims to see no problem. His department is state of the art; the streets get safer all the time; pedestrian fatalities have dropped 30 percent in the past decade.
An interagency task force, he wrote to Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. in July, would not be “beneficial or necessary.”
There is an “Alice in Wonderland” quality to this defense. Departmental procedure also prohibits officers from writing even a ticket unless they personally witnessed the accident. And few precincts appear equipped to handle investigations.
Just in the past year, officers examining the death of Clara Heyworth, a young woman who was killed crossing a street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, used improperly calibrated breath-testing equipment; as a result, the district attorney had to toss out the results, which showed the driver had been drinking.
In October 2010, a car struck Michelle Matson on her bike. Her neck was broken, her left leg was shattered and skin was scraped off her hands and wrists. The driver, who appeared to have been intoxicated, was not charged.
I conducted my own anecdotal study. This Monday morning I stood by the lamppost on Broadway and 14th Street that has become a de facto altar for Ms. Buta. In 25 minutes I watched three trucks, including an 18-wheeler, narrowly miss pedestrians walking the intersection. I counted 17 cars, trucks and a “New York Waterway” bus running red lights.
Ms. Buta’s mother has returned to Romania for several months and has hired the lawyer Joseph Tacopina to sue on her daughter’s behalf. “She is quite insistent that this not get treated like ‘Hey, that’s life in the big city,’ ” he said.
Like Ms. Iscovitz, Andrea Kristinsdottir took acting classes with Ms. Ruta, a woman of boundless energy. “It was impossible for men to watch her enter a room and not fall in love with her,” Ms. Kristindottir says. “She had such empathy. It can’t be possible that we just forget about her in death.”
Source:
NYT
By MICHAEL POWELL
Click green The Appraisal: Stoops Grow in Value, And Not Just as Seating
_______________________________
See just above also the article and additional STAF, Inc. comments
by Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., STAF, Inc.'s President
________
Video of Police encounter shows how the police involved are making false reports knowingly just to cover their own lies and put the wrong man to prison for several years.
Fight back. Demand honest justice. Contact STAF, Inc. to help the innocent man.
Video of Police Encounter May Play Lead Role in Lawsuit
Click the green doe further information
The shaky and frenetic video, lasting less than a minute, appears to show two New York police officers holding a man on the floor, with one repeatedly slamming his right fist into the man’s face.
The man, Luis Solivan, 19, was later charged with assaulting an officer, but his case was dismissed after a grand jury watched the video, which an acquaintance shot through an apartment window in the Bronx, his lawyers say. Now, that same footage may emerge as crucial evidence in a civil rights lawsuit that Mr. Solivan’s lawyers filed on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The lawsuit charges that the officers, after chasing Mr. Solivan into his family’s apartment on University Avenue on Nov. 14, engaged in a “brutal and sadistic” beating beyond what the video captured, also using pepper spray and slamming his head against a wall after he was handcuffed.
The officers have provided a different account. In a criminal complaint against Mr. Solivan, they charged that he attacked both officers and tried to take one of their guns. But a Bronx grand jury declined to indict Mr. Solivan on any of the charges.
Ilann M. Maazel, a lawyer representing Mr. Solivan, said that but for the video, “I think there’s a real likelihood that the grand jury would have indicted him.”
“What it shows is shocking,” Mr. Maazel added. “It revealed that the police did not tell the truth and they wanted to put an innocent man in jail, potentially for many years.”
A police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said in a brief statement that Mr. Solivan, as the officers had claimed, tried to grab one of their guns. He added, without elaborating, that Mr. Solivan “would not cooperate” with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
A city lawyer said the Law Department was awaiting formal receipt of the suit and would “evaluate the claims thoroughly.”
The lawsuit names the officers as Thomas Dekoker and Brian R. O’Keeffe. In an unrelated case, Officer Dekoker was one of three police defendants found liable this summer in a jury trial over allegations of using excessive force against a man after responding to a call in the Bronx in 2008.
The jury awarded $500,000 in punitive damages and $1 in compensatory damages against the three; the city has asked that the verdict be overturned.
In the episode on the evening of Nov. 14, the lawsuit says, Mr. Solivan was returning home after buying cigarettes at a store near the apartment on University Avenue, when a police cruiser made a sudden U-turn toward him. He was unarmed and not engaged in unlawful activity, the suit says.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Solivan said that after being asked by officers to stop, he “got paranoid” and ran toward the building.
Part of that chase was also captured on video, said Mr. Maazel, of the firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, who provided copies of both videos to The New York Times.
The chase video, taken by a security camera positioned above a door, shows a man running into the building; a police cruiser pulls onto the sidewalk and two officers go in after him.
At the time of the episode, Mr. Solivan was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a charge of attempted murder, which stemmed from a 2010 stabbing that involved a fight with other young men, his defense lawyer, Karen Smolar, said. Mr. Solivan was later sentenced to probation and afforded youthful offender status, she added.
Mr. Solivan said the police followed him into his mother’s apartment, where his two younger brothers also were. “They just started grabbing me, started hitting me,” he said, adding that the officers accused him of resisting arrest. “I was not resisting arrest.”
The apartment’s windows, covered with metal grating, are about a foot and a half above the sidewalk. At one point, the acquaintance outside, using some kind of hand-held device, began recording through the window, Mr. Solivan said.
Mr. Solivan was eventually taken handcuffed into the hallway, where the officers banged his head against the wall, an act that was not recorded, Mr. Maazel said; he added that damage to the wall could be seen in photographs taken later.
Mr. Solivan was held for about an hour at the 46th Precinct station house, where the lawsuit alleges that he was taken into the bathroom by the officers and punched and kicked. He was later found, at St. Barnabas Hospital, to have “blunt head injury,” the suit says, including injuries to his nose and face.
The officers prepared the criminal complaint against Mr. Solivan, who was jailed for about two weeks, his lawyers said.
The criminal complaint accuses Mr. Solivan of punching both officers, and says when each officer tried to call for backup, Mr. Solivan grabbed their radios. He tried unsuccessfully to remove one officer’s holstered gun, the complaint says, adding that the altercation left both officers’ arms bruised.
Ms. Smolar, trial chief with the Bronx Defenders, a public defender organization, said she obtained the video and offered it, along with Mr. Solivan’s medical records, to the grand jury that considered the charges against him.
She said she was told that the grand jury, after viewing the video and hearing testimony from Mr. Solivan, voted against an indictment.
Ms. Smolar, who watched the beating footage again last week, recalled: “I was again moved by my reaction to his helplessness, vulnerability, his powerlessness. I wanted to reach into the video and stop them.”
Source:
NYT
Click the green
By BENJAMIN WEISER and RANDY LEONARDT
This article is for your private use, only
______________
Click below the green to go to The New York Times original article in the web:
Video of Police Encounter May Play Lead Role in Lawsuit1 day ago ... Luis Solivan, 19, of the Morris Heights neighborhood in New York City, says he was beaten by police officers in an arrest at his family's ...
September 10, 2012 - By BENJAMIN WEISER and RANDY LEONARD - N.Y. / Region - Article -Print Headline: "Video of Police Encounter May Play Lead Role in Lawsuit"
________________________
by Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., STAF, Inc.'s President
________
Video of Police encounter shows how the police involved are making false reports knowingly just to cover their own lies and put the wrong man to prison for several years.
Fight back. Demand honest justice. Contact STAF, Inc. to help the innocent man.
Video of Police Encounter May Play Lead Role in Lawsuit
Click the green doe further information
The shaky and frenetic video, lasting less than a minute, appears to show two New York police officers holding a man on the floor, with one repeatedly slamming his right fist into the man’s face.
The man, Luis Solivan, 19, was later charged with assaulting an officer, but his case was dismissed after a grand jury watched the video, which an acquaintance shot through an apartment window in the Bronx, his lawyers say. Now, that same footage may emerge as crucial evidence in a civil rights lawsuit that Mr. Solivan’s lawyers filed on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The lawsuit charges that the officers, after chasing Mr. Solivan into his family’s apartment on University Avenue on Nov. 14, engaged in a “brutal and sadistic” beating beyond what the video captured, also using pepper spray and slamming his head against a wall after he was handcuffed.
The officers have provided a different account. In a criminal complaint against Mr. Solivan, they charged that he attacked both officers and tried to take one of their guns. But a Bronx grand jury declined to indict Mr. Solivan on any of the charges.
Ilann M. Maazel, a lawyer representing Mr. Solivan, said that but for the video, “I think there’s a real likelihood that the grand jury would have indicted him.”
“What it shows is shocking,” Mr. Maazel added. “It revealed that the police did not tell the truth and they wanted to put an innocent man in jail, potentially for many years.”
A police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said in a brief statement that Mr. Solivan, as the officers had claimed, tried to grab one of their guns. He added, without elaborating, that Mr. Solivan “would not cooperate” with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
A city lawyer said the Law Department was awaiting formal receipt of the suit and would “evaluate the claims thoroughly.”
The lawsuit names the officers as Thomas Dekoker and Brian R. O’Keeffe. In an unrelated case, Officer Dekoker was one of three police defendants found liable this summer in a jury trial over allegations of using excessive force against a man after responding to a call in the Bronx in 2008.
The jury awarded $500,000 in punitive damages and $1 in compensatory damages against the three; the city has asked that the verdict be overturned.
In the episode on the evening of Nov. 14, the lawsuit says, Mr. Solivan was returning home after buying cigarettes at a store near the apartment on University Avenue, when a police cruiser made a sudden U-turn toward him. He was unarmed and not engaged in unlawful activity, the suit says.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Solivan said that after being asked by officers to stop, he “got paranoid” and ran toward the building.
Part of that chase was also captured on video, said Mr. Maazel, of the firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, who provided copies of both videos to The New York Times.
The chase video, taken by a security camera positioned above a door, shows a man running into the building; a police cruiser pulls onto the sidewalk and two officers go in after him.
At the time of the episode, Mr. Solivan was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a charge of attempted murder, which stemmed from a 2010 stabbing that involved a fight with other young men, his defense lawyer, Karen Smolar, said. Mr. Solivan was later sentenced to probation and afforded youthful offender status, she added.
Mr. Solivan said the police followed him into his mother’s apartment, where his two younger brothers also were. “They just started grabbing me, started hitting me,” he said, adding that the officers accused him of resisting arrest. “I was not resisting arrest.”
The apartment’s windows, covered with metal grating, are about a foot and a half above the sidewalk. At one point, the acquaintance outside, using some kind of hand-held device, began recording through the window, Mr. Solivan said.
Mr. Solivan was eventually taken handcuffed into the hallway, where the officers banged his head against the wall, an act that was not recorded, Mr. Maazel said; he added that damage to the wall could be seen in photographs taken later.
Mr. Solivan was held for about an hour at the 46th Precinct station house, where the lawsuit alleges that he was taken into the bathroom by the officers and punched and kicked. He was later found, at St. Barnabas Hospital, to have “blunt head injury,” the suit says, including injuries to his nose and face.
The officers prepared the criminal complaint against Mr. Solivan, who was jailed for about two weeks, his lawyers said.
The criminal complaint accuses Mr. Solivan of punching both officers, and says when each officer tried to call for backup, Mr. Solivan grabbed their radios. He tried unsuccessfully to remove one officer’s holstered gun, the complaint says, adding that the altercation left both officers’ arms bruised.
Ms. Smolar, trial chief with the Bronx Defenders, a public defender organization, said she obtained the video and offered it, along with Mr. Solivan’s medical records, to the grand jury that considered the charges against him.
She said she was told that the grand jury, after viewing the video and hearing testimony from Mr. Solivan, voted against an indictment.
Ms. Smolar, who watched the beating footage again last week, recalled: “I was again moved by my reaction to his helplessness, vulnerability, his powerlessness. I wanted to reach into the video and stop them.”
Source:
NYT
Click the green
By BENJAMIN WEISER and RANDY LEONARDT
This article is for your private use, only
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Click below the green to go to The New York Times original article in the web:
Video of Police Encounter May Play Lead Role in Lawsuit1 day ago ... Luis Solivan, 19, of the Morris Heights neighborhood in New York City, says he was beaten by police officers in an arrest at his family's ...
September 10, 2012 - By BENJAMIN WEISER and RANDY LEONARD - N.Y. / Region - Article -Print Headline: "Video of Police Encounter May Play Lead Role in Lawsuit"
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Rare - interesting article
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Meet the brothers who are aging backward
Diagnosed with a terminal form of leukodystrophy*), one of a group of extremely rare genetic
disorders that attack the Myelin**), or white matter, in the nervous system, spinal cord & brain.
In the Clarks' case, the condition has not only eroded their physical capacities,
but their emotional and mental states as well.
**) Leukodystrophy refers to a group of disorders characterized by dysfunction of the white matter of the brain.[1] The leukodystrophies are caused by imperfect growth or development of the myelin sheath, the fatty covering that acts as an insulator around nerve fibers. Myelin, from which the white matter of the brain takes its colour, is a complex substance made up of at least ten different chemicals. Each of the leukodystrophies is the result of a defect in the gene that controls the production or metabolism of one (and only one) of the component molecules of myelin.
The word leukodystrophy comes from the Greek roots leuko, white, dys, lack of, and troph, growth. Thus leukodystrophy describes a set of diseases that affect the growth or maintenance of the white matter.
**) Myelin is an insulating layer that forms around nerves, including those in the brain and spinal cord. It is made up of protein and fatty substances
An unrelated research project:
STAF, Inc. President, Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., has a test year after year: as his oldest child (born in NYC 2001) gets one year older, his father, Dr. Christian gets at the same day one year younger. The father and his first son were born the same month and the same day - what a birthday gift he was. This test is interesting because it is medically followed to see how mind will affect the body. The results will be revealed after certain amount of years (now the 11th year) and published worldwide. The article below has a different reason for getting "younger".
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Michael, 42, and Matthew Clark, 39, have a disorder that's turned them into kids trapped in adult bodies. Details
By the looks of their home, Tony and Christine Clark are raising two rambunctious 7-year-old boys. Model train tracks and Monopoly pieces are scattered on tables and cartoons flicker on the TV set.
But the Clarks' two sons are grown men who share only the same interests and emotional fluctuations of little boys. Like the character portrayed by Brad Pitt in the 2008 film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons," Matthew, 39, and Michael, 42, are aging backwards.
Diagnosed with a terminal form of leukodystrophy, one of a group of extremely rare genetic disorders that attack the Myelin, or white matter, in the nervous system, spinal cord, and brain. In the Clarks' case, the condition has not only eroded their physical capacities, but their emotional and mental states as well.
Only six years ago, both brothers were holding down jobs and growing their families. Today, they spend their days in the care of their parents, both in their sixties, playing with Mr. Potato Head, fighting over Monopoly, and in rare lucid moments, struggling to understand why their lives have changed so dramatically.
Before the Clark Brothers were diagnosed, they were living independent lives. Michael served in the Royal Air Force and later became a cabinet maker. Matthew worked in a factory and was raising a teenage daughter. Tony and Christine, meanwhile, had retired and moved from the UK to Spain. Then in 2007, both of their sons fell off the radar. They stopped returning their parents' calls and texts, and as the Clark brothers' conditions developed, their lives fell apart.
Should parents get their kids' genome sequenced?
Michael surfaced in a soup kitchen, and was referred to medical experts by social workers. After an MRI scan, he was diagnosed with the incurable degenerative disorder. Soon after Matthew received the same news. In the U.S. alone, about 1 in 40,000 children are born with a form of the neurodegenerative disease, according to Dr. William Kintner, President of the United Leukodystrophy Foundation. While some forms of the disorder are potentially treatable if discovered in the earliest stages and not all cause an emotional regression, the brothers are unlikely to be cured. "It's very difficult to do anything once progression has occurred," Dr. Kintner tells Yahoo! Shine.
With their train set.(Courtesy of Channel4)
As of April, when the Clarks were first written about in the British press, their mental age was 10.
"We will be out walking and things which might interest a toddler interest them, the other day we were walking home when Michael saw a balloon and pointed it out to us," father Tony Clark, told The Telegraph last spring.
Today, the brothers are even younger mentally.
"Just like small children, they wake up a lot during the night," mom Christine said in an interview published in The Independent this week. "I was up seven times with them last night."
After learning of their diagnoses, Tony and Christine returned to the UK and moved in with their sons. Their daily struggles as a family have been chronicled in a British documentary, "The Curious Case of the Clark Brothers," airing Monday in the UK.
Earlier this year, Matthew became a grandfather, when his daughter had a son. But the news for the family was bittersweet, as the Clark brothers' mental age continued to creep backwards.
"There's no return to them being cute little boys," said Christine, who regularly manages their tantrums and fights over Monopoly. "They're big strong men—and that presents a quite different set of problems."
More recently, even their physical strength began deteriorating.
"A few weeks ago, they could still manage with a knife and fork, but now that's getting too difficult for them—they get the food onto their forks, but somehow it all falls off before it reaches their mouths," she said.
Donors and genetic disorders: how much do you know?
Now walking is the next hurdle; Matthew is already confined to a wheelchair.
"The likelihood that they're on a terminal course is fairly certain, but who knows?" says Dr. Kintner, who is familiar with the Clark case but didn't meet the brothers. "If they were citizens of U.S., we'd try to get them to the National Institute of Health for diagnostic work, but in the UK the system is different. There is no comparable organization with genetic diseases, so it's a little more difficult there."
Dr. Kintner estimates there are several million cases of one of the estimated 40 types of leukodystrophies in the U.S., but an exact number is hard to pinpoint. The different forms of the disorder are still being identified and tests for each known type are still being developed. "It's going to take a long time," says Dr. Kintner. "I hope in my lifetime I see a cure for some of them."
A preview for the British documentary on the Clark Brothers airing on the UK's Channel 4.
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Woman's 'brain on fire
Autoimmune Disease
Autoimmune Disease forces Ms. Venus William out of the U.S. Open because of Sjogren's Syndrome
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In 2009, a rare autoimmune disease grabbed writer Susannah Cahalan and plunged her into a nightmare world of paranoia, psychosis, and ultimately, catatonia. In another era, it’s likely she would have been permanently institutionalized or given a lobotomy; in another culture, she might have been exorcised for demonic possession.
Autoimmune Disease
With taut, horror-movie plotting, Cahalan’s new memoir, ‘Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness’ pieces together her utter physical and mental breakdown, her terrifying lost month in the hospital, and the grueling year it took to recover.
Related: Homes Featured in Amityville Horror for Sale
Before she mysteriously contracted the disease, Cahalan was a bright, outgoing, and ambitious 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post. After exhibiting flu-like symptoms that were initially diagnosed as mono, she suddenly began experiencing delusions and behaving erratically. Within a few weeks, she became increasingly abusive, moody, and paranoid. Her doctors brushed off her condition as a result of too much partying and stress, but her first violent seizure signaled there was something critically askew.
Late one night, her guttural moans and grating squeaks woke up her boyfriend, Stephen. “My arms suddenly whipped out in front of me like, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened,” she writes. “I was gasping for air. My body continued to stiffen as I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt through clenched teeth. Terrified, [he] stifled a panicked cry and for a second he stared, frozen, at my shaking body.” She now describes her seizures as eerily similar to the character Regan’s outbursts in ‘The Exorcist.’
VIDEO: Three-Minute Test Screens for Mental Illness
Susannah Cahalan todayCahalan says that this moment “marked the line between sanity and insanity.” She was admitted to the New York University Medical Center, and spent a month that was forever erased from her memory as her brain short-circuited. Only later, by cobbling together physician’s notes and her father’s journal, and viewing chilling hospital videos would she fully understand the extent of her disintegration. Her frontal lobe function was almost at zero and the medical staff couldn’t be sure the right hemisphere of her brain would be salvageable. Although $1 million worth of medical tests provided few clues to her illness, her parents never gave up. “They were completely focused on finding an answer,” Cahalan tells Shine.
Related: Pig Parasite May Help Treat Autoimmune Disorders
Her savior, who she lovingly refers to as Dr. House, was Souhel Najjar, a Syrian immigrant who was deemed “stupid” as a child, and told he would never amount to anything. “His life experience shaped who he is as a doctor, and he also happens to be brilliant,” says Cahalan. “He’s so adamant about getting the full sense of you as a person…he was told that he was too slow for his elementary school. He’s made it his life’s mission to not let people fall through the cracks.”
While her other doctors had all but given up on finding a diagnosis, Najjar swiftly ordered a brain biopsy that would confirm his hunch that she was suffering from an autoimmune disease that had only been identified two years earlier. Cahalan was the 217th person in the world to be diagnosed with anti-NDMA-receptor encephalitis, a relatively treatable illness that causes swelling in the right lobe of the brain. Untreated, she may have sunk into coma and eventually died.
Najjar also provided the title to her book. “At a pivotal moment in my disease, he pulled my parents out of the hospital room and literally said to them, ‘Her brain is on fire,’” Cahalan tells Shine. “At that point, they felt it was a relief to hear that. Describing it in layman’s terms gave them some hope.”
Cahalan wants her story to help people who might “otherwise get lost in the system.” She tells Shine, “We don’t understand how neurological autoimmune disorders work. They are so under diagnosed. About 75% occur in women who may get told they are just stressed. Or they are hysterical. My disease was only discovered in 2007—how many more diseases haven’t been identified yet?”
The Book: ‘Brain on Fire’ is available November, 2012
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New Information Relating to Alzheimer's disease
November 2012
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Scientists working on two unrelated studies have reported a link between Alzheimer's disease and a rare gene that affects a person's immune system. They add credibility to recent thinking about the role of the immune system in the development of this form of dementia.
According to Medical News Today, research teams from University College London (UCL) and the Iceland-based company deCode Genetics concluded that a rare mutation in the gene known as TREM2 increases the risk of getting Alzheimer's. This gene helps signal the immune system to mount responses to inflammation.
The Alzheimer's Association says this disease is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. Of the top 10 causes, it's the only one that can't be prevented, cured, or slowed. One in every eight U.S. seniors lives with the disorder.
There are two forms of the disease. Early-onset Alzheimer's affects people younger than 60. The late-onset form is far more common, according to PubMed Health.
Scientists from 44 institutions participated in the UCL-led study, which followed 25,000 individuals. They found a set of rare mutations that appeared more frequently in 1,092 Alzheimer's patients than in the 1,107 healthy control-group subjects. The most common mutation was one called R47H, which the researchers learned significantly increases the chance of developing the illness.
The study led by deCode also noted a strong link between the R47H mutation and the disease. The researchers also discovered that older individuals who had the mutation but not Alzheimer's had poorer cognitive function than normal. They identified nearly 41 million markers in individuals from the United States, Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands.
Earlier studies suggested that TREM2 is important in clearing cell debris and amyloid protein, a substance linked to Alzheimer's brain plaques. The gene also helps control the body's response to inflammation.
The results of these studies suggest that a TREM2 mutation raises the risk for developing Alzheimer's between three- and four-fold. However, the researchers acknowledge the need for additional studies to clearly establish R47H as the culprit.
Like many individuals with a parent who suffered from Alzheimer's, my husband has for years worried that each of his own memory lapses signaled the illness. His situation has been complicated by other conditions that cause short-term memory loss.
High-tech methods of studying genes like TREM2 bring with them a dilemma for individuals like him with a family history of certain illnesses. At the extreme, they face a quandary like that of individuals who had a parent with Huntington's disease.
In the case of Alzheimer's, knowing that not everyone with a mutation will develop the disease, should the offspring seek genetic testing? While the linking of a rare gene mutation to Alzheimer's is a step forward, considerably more research is needed before at-risk individuals like my husband feel enthusiastic about the discovery.
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Early Music Lessons Have Longtime Benefits
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By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
When children learn to play a musical instrument, they strengthen a range of auditory skills. Recent studies suggest that these benefits extend all through life, at least for those who continue to be engaged with music.
But a study published last month is the first to show that music lessons in childhood may lead to changes in the brain that persist years after the lessons stop.
Researchers at Northwestern University recorded the auditory brainstem responses of college students - that is to say, their electrical brain waves - in response to complex sounds. The group of students who reported musical training in childhood had more robust responses - their brains were better able to pick out essential elements, like pitch, in the complex sounds when they were tested. And this was true even if the lessons had ended years ago.
Indeed, scientists are puzzling out the connections between musical training in childhood and language-based learning - for instance, reading. Learning to play an instrument may confer some unexpected benefits, recent studies suggest.
We aren't talking here about the "Mozart effect," the claim that listening to classical music can improve people's performance on tests. Instead, these are studies of the effects of active engagement and discipline. This kind of musical training improves the brain's ability to discern the components of sound - the pitch, the timing and the timbre.
"To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sounds, make sound-to-meaning connections," said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. "Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument."
Skill in appreciating the subtle qualities of sound, even against a complicated and noisy background, turns out to be important not just for a child learning to understand speech and written language, but also for an elderly person struggling with hearing loss.
In a study of those who do keep playing, published this summer, researchers found that as musicians age, they experience the same decline in peripheral hearing, the functioning of the nerves in their ears, as nonmusicians. But older musicians preserve the brain functions, the central auditory processing skills that can help you understand speech against the background of a noisy environment.
"We often refer to the 'cocktail party' problem - or imagine going to a restaurant where a lot of people are talking," said Dr. Claude Alain, assistant director of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and one of the authors of the study. "The older adults who are musically trained perform better on speech in noise tests - it involves the brain rather than the peripheral hearing system."
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are approaching the soundscape from a different point of view, studying thegenetics of absolute, or perfect, pitch, that ability to identify any tone. Dr. Jane Gitschier, a professor of medicine and pediatrics who directs the study there, and her colleagues are trying to tease out both the genetics and the effects of early training.
"The immediate question we've been trying to get to is what are the variants in people's genomes that could predispose an individual to have absolute pitch," she said. "The hypothesis, further, is that those variants will then manifest as absolute pitch with the input of early musical training."
Indeed, almost everyone who qualifies as having truly absolute pitch turns out to have had musical training in childhood (you can take the test and volunteer for the study at http://perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/study/).
Alexandra Parbery-Clark, a doctoral candidate in Dr. Kraus's lab and one of the authors of a paper published this year on auditory working memory and music, was originally trained as a concert pianist. Her desire to go back to graduate school and study the brain, she told me, grew out of teaching at a French school for musically talented children, and observing the ways that musical training affected other kinds of learning.
"If you get a kid who is maybe 3 or 4 years old and you're teaching them to attend, they're not only working on their auditory skills but also working on their attention skills and their memory skills - which can translate into scholastic learning," she said.
Now Ms. Parbery-Clark and her colleagues can look at recordings of the brain's electrical detection of sounds, and they can see the musically trained brains producing different - and stronger - responses. "Now I have more proof, tangible proof, music is really doing something," she told me. "One of my lab mates can look at the computer and say, 'Oh, you're recording from a musician!' "
Many of the researchers in this area are themselves musicians interested in the plasticity of the brain and the effects of musical education on brain waves, which mirror the stimulus sounds. "This is a response that actually reflects the acoustic elements of sound that we know carry meaning," Professor Kraus said.
There's a fascination - and even a certain heady delight - in learning what the brain can do, and in drawing out the many effects of the combination of stimulation, application, practice and auditory exercise that musical education provides. But the researchers all caution that there is no one best way to apply these findings.
Different instruments, different teaching methods, different regimens - families need to find what appeals to the individual child and what works for the family, since a big piece of this should be about pleasure and mastery. Children should enjoy themselves, and their lessons. Parents need to care about music, not slot it in as a therapeutic tool.
"We want music to be recognized for what it can be in a person's life, not necessarily, 'Oh, we want you to have better cognitive skills, so we're going to put you in music,' " Ms. Parbery-Clark said. "Music is great, music is fantastic, music is social - let them enjoy it for what it really is."
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By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
Source:
NYT
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Intangible Dividend of Antipoverty Effort: Happiness
September 20, 2012
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When thousands of poor families were given federal housing subsidies in the early 1990s to move out of impoverished neighborhoods, social scientists expected the experience of living in more prosperous communities would pay off in better jobs, higher incomes and more education.
That did not happen. But more than 10 years later, the families’ lives had improved in another way: They reported being much happierthan a comparison group of poor families who were not offered subsidies to move, a finding that was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
And using the gold standard of social surveys — the General Social Survey, in which researchers have questioned thousands of Americans of all income levels going back to the 1970s — researchers even quantified how much happier the families were. The improvement was equal to the level of life satisfaction of someone whose annual income was $13,000 more a year, said Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the study.
This vast social experiment, involving 4,600 families in Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Chicago and Boston, tested a long-held theory that neighborhood is an important determinant of an individual’s success.
But there was little evidence that the new neighborhoods made much of a difference in either income or education, a disappointment for social scientists, who had hoped that the experiment would lead to new ways of combating poverty.
What researchers did find were substantial improvements in the physical and mental health of the people who moved. Researchersreported last year in The New England Journal of Medicine that the participants who moved to new neighborhoods had lower rates ofobesity and diabetes than those not offered the chance to move. Beyond the increase in happiness, the new study found lower levels of depression among those who moved.
“Mental health and subjective well-being are very important,” said William Julius Wilson, a sociology professor at Harvard whose 1987 book “The Truly Disadvantaged” pioneered theory about concentrated poverty. “If you are not feeling well, it’s going to affect everything — your employment, relations with your family.”
The researchers measured quality of life using participants’ reports of their own well-being. Researchers asked: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?”
A year after they entered the program, the families who had made the move were living in neighborhoods where about a third of the residents lived in poverty. In contrast, those who were not offered the chance to move lived in neighborhoods where half of the residents lived in poverty.
Professor Wilson said it was not surprising that education levels did not change significantly because many of the children who moved remained in the same school districts. And Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard and one of the study authors, said that the preference for educated workers was so strong that changing neighborhoods did not do much to improve job options for the participants, who were mostly African-American women without college educations.
Researchers said that though they did not know why people felt happier after moving, it probably had to do with feeling safer and less stressed. Nearly three-quarters of the families who signed up for the program said they had done so to get away from violence in dangerous neighborhoods.
Moving to a neighborhood that was less poor caused families that were making $20,000 a year to feel as happy as families making $33,000 a year, Professor Ludwig said.
Even more startling, researchers said, was the finding that families who moved into new neighborhoods that were just as racially segregated as the ones they came from, but were much less poor, reported much larger gains in feelings of well-being than those who moved to much more racially integrated neighborhoods that were nearly as impoverished.
That finding, Professor Katz said, is troubling for the future because economic segregation has grown steadily in the United States, since the 1970s, while racial segregation has been declining.
“The increased geographic isolation of the poor appears to have a pure adverse effect on health and well-being,” he said.
Improvements in health and well-being caused by moving to areas with less concentrated poverty “is not a magic bullet to eliminate poverty itself,” Professor Katz said. That would require major changes in the American economy. But he said it would improve lives for the families that experience it, and reduce the costs to taxpayers of medical care for them.
Source:
NYT
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Will New York City sink beneath the sea
Dated: N0vember 24, 2012
WE’D seen it before: the Piazza San Marco in Venice submerged by the acqua alta; New Orleans underwater in the aftermath of Katrina; the wreckage-strewn beaches of Indonesia left behind by the tsunami of 2004. We just hadn’t seen it here. (Last summer’s Hurricane Irene did a lot of damage on the East Coast, but New York City was spared the worst.) “Fear death by water,” T. S. Eliot intoned in “The Waste Land.” We do now.
There had been warnings. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change issued a prophetic report. “In the coming decades, our coastal city will most likely face more rapidly rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, as well as potentially more droughts and floods, which will all have impacts on New York City’s critical infrastructure,” said William Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College and a member of the panel. But what good are warnings? Intelligence agents received advance word that terrorists were hoping to hijack commercial jets. Who listened? (Not George W. Bush.) If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?
History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order. We experience it as chronology, with ourselves as the end point — not the end point, but as the culmination of events that leads to the very moment in which we happen to live. “Historical events might be unique, and given pattern by an end,” the critic Frank Kermode proposed in “The Sense of an Ending,” his classic work on literary narrative, “yet there are perpetuities which defy both the uniqueness and the end.” What he’s saying (I think) is that there is no pattern. Flux is all.
Last month’s “weather event” should have taught us that. Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea. But if there are no patterns, it means that nothing is inevitable either. History offers less dire scenarios: the city could move to another island, the way Torcello was moved to Venice, stone by stone, after the lagoon turned into a swamp and its citizens succumbed to a plague of malaria. The city managed to survive, if not where it had begun. Perhaps the day will come when skyscrapers rise out of downtown Scarsdale.
Humans are ingenious. Our species tends to see nature as something of a nuisance, a phenomenon to be outwitted. Consider efforts to save Venice: planners have hatched one scheme after another to prevent the city from sinking. Industrial development has been curtailed. Buildings dating from the Renaissance have been “relocated.”
The most ambitious project, begun a decade ago, is the installation of mobile gates in the lagoons. Known by the acronym MOSE — the Italian name for Moses, who mythically parted the Red Sea — it’s an intricate engineering feat: whenever the tide rises, metal barriers that lie in concrete bunkers on the sea floor are lifted by compressed air pressure and pivoted into place on hinges.
Is the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico — the project’s official name — some engineer’s fantasy? It was scheduled for completion this year, but that has been put off until 2014. Even if, by some miracle, the gates materialize, they will be only a stay against the inevitable. Look at the unfortunate Easter Islanders, who left behind as evidence of their existence a mountainside of huge blank-faced busts, or the Polynesians of Pitcairn Island, who didn’t leave behind much more than a few burial sites and a bunch of stone tools. Every civilization must go.
Yet each goes in its own way. In “Collapse,” Jared Diamond showed how the disappearance of a civilization has multiple causes. A cascade of events with unforeseen consequences invariably brings it to a close. The Norse of Greenland cut down their trees (for firewood and other purposes) until there were no more trees, which made it a challenge to build houses or boats. There were other causes, too: violent clashes with the Inuit, bad weather, ice pileups in the fjords blocking trade routes. But deforestation was the prime factor. By the end, no tree fell in the forest, as there was none; and there would have been no one to hear it if it had.
“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice,” declared Robert Frost. Another alternative would be lava. Pliny the Younger’s letters to Tacitus described the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: A plume of dirt and ash rose in the sky; rocks pelted Pompeii; and then darkness arrived. “It was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but like being in an enclosed place where the light has been doused.” Who did this? It must have been the gods. “Many were raising their hands to implore the gods, but more took the view that no gods now existed anywhere, and that this was an eternal and final darkness hanging over the world.” But of course it wasn’t the end of the world: it was just the end of them.
Contemplating our ephemerality can be a profound experience. To wander the once magnificent Roman cities strung along the Lycian coast of Turkey — now largely reduced to rubble, much still unexcavated — is to realize how extensive, how magisterial this civilization was. Whole cities are underwater; you can snorkel over them and read inscriptions carved into ancient monoliths. Ephesus, pop. 300,000 in the second century A.D., is a vast necropolis. The amphitheater that accommodated nearly 25,000 people sits empty. The Temple of Artemis, said to have been four times larger than the Parthenon, is a handful of slender columns.
YET we return home from our travels intoxicated by beauty, not truth. It doesn’t occur to us that we, too, will one day be described in a guidebook (Fodor’s North America 2212?) as metropolitans who resided in 60-story towers and traveled beneath the waves in metal-sheathed trains.
It’s this willed ignorance, I suspect, that explains why it’s difficult to process the implications of climate change for New York, even in the face of explicit warnings from politicians, not the most future-oriented people. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has been courageous to make global warming a subject of public debate, but will taxpayers support his proposal to build a levee in New York Harbor? Wouldn’t it be easier to think of Sandy as a “once in a lifetime” storm? Even as Lower Manhattan continues to bail itself out — this time in the literal sense — One World Trade Center rises, floor by floor. The governor notes that “we have a 100-year flood every two years now,” which doesn’t stop rents from going up in Battery Park City.
Walking on New York’s Upper East Side, I was reminded by the gargantuan white box atop a busy construction site that the Second Avenue line, first proposed in 1929, remains very much in the works. And why not? Should images of water pouring into the subway tunnels that occupied our newspapers a few weeks back be sufficient to stay us from progress? “I must live till I die,” says the hero of a Joseph Conrad novel. The same could be said of cities.
When, on my way home at night, I climb the steps from the subway by the American Museum of Natural History — itself a monument to transience, with its dinosaurs and its mammoth and its skeleton of a dodo bird, that doomed species whose name has become an idiom for extinction — I feel more keenly than ever the miraculousness, the improbability of New York.
Looking down Central Park West, I’m thrilled by the necklace of green-and-red traffic lights extending toward Columbus Circle and the glittering tower of One57, that vertical paradise for billionaires. And as I walk past the splashing fountain in front of the museum’s south entrance on West 77th Street, I recall a sentence from Edward Gibbon’s ode to evanescence, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in which “the learned Poggius” gazes down at the remains of the city from the Capitoline hill: “The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.”
This is our fate. All the more reason to appreciate what we have while we have it.
James Atlas is a contributing opinion writer and the author of a forthcoming book about biography.
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Faulty Criminal Background Checks
Source: The New York Times, p. A 24 (Editorials)
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The federal government has historically paid little attention to the companies that collect and sell the data used by employers in hiring decisions — including data about an applicant’s criminal history.
But because 9 in 10 employers now use criminal background checks for some applicants, and the data are not always reliable, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which share jurisdiction, need to get a better handle on an industry that has grown so fast over the last 20 years that no one can say how many companies there are.
They must make sure that the reporting companies obey the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires them to strive for accuracy. The law also requires the companies that furnish reports drawn from public records for employment purposes to notify the people named in the reports in a timely manner — so that any inaccuracies in the data can be challenged — or ensure that the public record is complete and up to date.
Sloppy reporting was not a huge problem in the past when there were fewer companies gathering data and the only way to get it was to examine court records in person. But, in recent years, this has become a computer-driven industry, with companies buying often incomplete records in bulk from the courts or from other screening companies and then not updating them. An incomplete report might show, for instance, that a job candidate was charged with a crime but not that he was exonerated. And faulty data can circulate forever.
A study issued in April by the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group, points to many other problems. Background reports often list the same offense many times, making it appear as if the applicant has an extensive record. Worse still, companies sometimes fail to do the basic checking necessary to distinguish among different people who have the same name.
In one particularly startling case that became the subject of a 2011 federal lawsuit in Illinois, a background report on a young white job applicant in his 20s listed several “possible matches” in a nationwide database. According to court documents, three of those “matches” were for a 58-year-old African-American who had been convicted of rape in another state in 1987 — when the applicant was not yet 4 years old.
The federal government clearly needs to step in. It should require companies to be federally registered, outline standards for accuracy, make sure that job applicants have a reasonable time to respond to erroneous reports and seek monetary and other penalties from companies that flout the law.
_____________________________________
Starting December 2012 these articles have been placed in this blog: Testimonials
(1) Will New York City sink beneath the sea - Dated: N0vember 24, 2012
(2)
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The area below is being used for STAF, Inc.'s editing work as a "temporary storage" - it is not meant for the site visitors - THANKS !
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(1) Will New York City sink beneath the sea - Dated: N0vember 24, 2012
(2)
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This STAF comment placed for the article next below: Tue, 4/2/13 Ohio man who sexually assaulted baby seeks mercyComment by Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.,-not-for-profit-
GUNS - RAPES
By Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D.
Sure one can throw up when reading the story.
However, when we look at the background of this monster there is the same underlying reason as all mass shooters have. So who is to blame when the U.S. parents mentally destroy their children. Take this seriously - the facts:
Practically all gang members & mass shooters have two things in common: (1) they are victims of a divorce & (2) they are all males.
A growing boy needs especially his father's continuous presence and guidance, more so than his mother's. The moral in our marriages has gone close to a zero. The children grow up disturbed & misled. In addition, the violent video games & violent movies are replacing the parental love & healthy attention - the children get a wrong picture about being a human being. The young mass killers suffer from the Broken Marriage Syndrome™.
In a family separation & divorce both spouses will experience (1) health challenges leading to a shorter life span and (2) to added financial difficulties. Any traditionally done marriage turned dysfunctional can be healed. Giving up as the first solution is not reasonable for anyone. A separation and a divorce are serious child abuse.
Every child experiencing a parental divorce faces serious life threatening disasters - the most important listed here: (1) overall increased risks to health & welfare; (2) 5 times more likely to commit suicide; (3) 32 times more likely to run away; (4) 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders; (5) 14 times more likely to commit rape; (6) 9 times more likely to drop out of school; (7) 10 times more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs; (8) 20 times more likely to end up in prison; (9) increased learning difficulties; (10) increased risk of divorce when grown; (11) increased out of wedlock pregnancies; (12) Latest discovery by the researchers: highly increased risk of having a stroke during his/her life time.
The long-term solution is to start educating the whole nation how to heal the American Family & our homes where our children are growing up. In the U.S. marriage happiness & child raising education for every family & every teenager in our schools (and colleges) is fully missing today but is present in most other developed countries in their school curricula.
In a happy home with both parents present the children grow up healthy - no Broken Marriage Syndrome™ and no reason to go to punish the world by killing everyone around.
STAF, Inc.'s presence is needed in D.C. in the U.S. Congress (House & Senate). STAF, Inc.'s founding President is planning (1) to seek a seat in D.C. Congress/Senate to provide the necessary information to the D.C. lawmakers and (2) to establish a fully new federal agency, Healthy Lifestyle & Family Success Agency, and to be named its first federal director. New legislation and training for all these matters are needed in a results-bringing manner. Less Suffering - More Life™
Visit STAF,Inc.'s extensive websites. To find the correct website, use STAF, Inc.'s Radio Show title - lower & upper keys as is here: "DrDrCanYouHelpMe" in the internet search. Listen to STAF, Inc.'s popular Radio Show (original recordings in the internet 24/7) - you'll get free CEU & College-University credits.
Respectfully,
Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D.
STAF, Inc.'s founding President
________________________________________________
GUNS - RAPES
By Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D.
Sure one can throw up when reading the story.
However, when we look at the background of this monster there is the same underlying reason as all mass shooters have. So who is to blame when the U.S. parents mentally destroy their children. Take this seriously - the facts:
Practically all gang members & mass shooters have two things in common: (1) they are victims of a divorce & (2) they are all males.
A growing boy needs especially his father's continuous presence and guidance, more so than his mother's. The moral in our marriages has gone close to a zero. The children grow up disturbed & misled. In addition, the violent video games & violent movies are replacing the parental love & healthy attention - the children get a wrong picture about being a human being. The young mass killers suffer from the Broken Marriage Syndrome™.
In a family separation & divorce both spouses will experience (1) health challenges leading to a shorter life span and (2) to added financial difficulties. Any traditionally done marriage turned dysfunctional can be healed. Giving up as the first solution is not reasonable for anyone. A separation and a divorce are serious child abuse.
Every child experiencing a parental divorce faces serious life threatening disasters - the most important listed here: (1) overall increased risks to health & welfare; (2) 5 times more likely to commit suicide; (3) 32 times more likely to run away; (4) 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders; (5) 14 times more likely to commit rape; (6) 9 times more likely to drop out of school; (7) 10 times more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs; (8) 20 times more likely to end up in prison; (9) increased learning difficulties; (10) increased risk of divorce when grown; (11) increased out of wedlock pregnancies; (12) Latest discovery by the researchers: highly increased risk of having a stroke during his/her life time.
The long-term solution is to start educating the whole nation how to heal the American Family & our homes where our children are growing up. In the U.S. marriage happiness & child raising education for every family & every teenager in our schools (and colleges) is fully missing today but is present in most other developed countries in their school curricula.
In a happy home with both parents present the children grow up healthy - no Broken Marriage Syndrome™ and no reason to go to punish the world by killing everyone around.
STAF, Inc.'s presence is needed in D.C. in the U.S. Congress (House & Senate). STAF, Inc.'s founding President is planning (1) to seek a seat in D.C. Congress/Senate to provide the necessary information to the D.C. lawmakers and (2) to establish a fully new federal agency, Healthy Lifestyle & Family Success Agency, and to be named its first federal director. New legislation and training for all these matters are needed in a results-bringing manner. Less Suffering - More Life™
Visit STAF,Inc.'s extensive websites. To find the correct website, use STAF, Inc.'s Radio Show title - lower & upper keys as is here: "DrDrCanYouHelpMe" in the internet search. Listen to STAF, Inc.'s popular Radio Show (original recordings in the internet 24/7) - you'll get free CEU & College-University credits.
Respectfully,
Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D.
STAF, Inc.'s founding President
________________________________________________
This STAF comment placed for the article next below: Sat, 3/30/13 3 dozen indicted in Atlanta school test cheating scandal
Teachers helping student cheat in tests
Comment by Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.,-not-for-profit-
By Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D.
Shame on these educators - their behavioral model is affecting the students' own choices.
As teachers they know it, yet they ignore this badly an innocent child's future.
These "educators" have been abusing the school children for their own financial gain.
Any of these cheating teachers deserve a "felony size" prison sentence not only to show to the children what will happen when committing fraud but also as a real warning to all teachers in our nation.
Another area in our nation is how the moral in our marriages has gone close to a zero. Separation & divorce is done too hastily based on lacking knowledge of how it will affect the couple & their children's future.
Practically all gang members & mass shooters have two things in common: (1) they are victims of a divorce & (2) they are all males.
A growing boy needs especially his father's continuous presence and guidance, more so than his mother's. The children grow up disturbed & misled. In addition, the violent video games & violent movies are replacing the parental love & healthy attention - the children get a wrong picture about being a human being. The young mass killers suffer from the Broken Marriage Syndrome™.
In a family separation & divorce both spouses will experience (1) health challenges leading to a shorter life span and (2) to added financial difficulties. Any traditionally done marriage turned dysfunctional can be healed. Giving up as the first solution is not reasonable for anyone. A separation and a divorce are serious child abuse.
Every child experiencing a parental divorce faces serious life threatening disasters - the most important listed here: (1) overall increased risks to health & welfare; (2) 5 times more likely to commit suicide; (3) 32 times more likely to run away; (4) 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders; (5) 14 times more likely to commit rape; (6) 9 times more likely to drop out of school; (7) 10 times more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs; (8) 20 times more likely to end up in prison; (9) increased learning difficulties; (10) increased risk of divorce when grown; (11) increased out of wedlock pregnancies; (12) Latest discovery by the researchers: highly increased risk of having a stroke during his/her life time.
The long-term solution is to start educating the whole nation how to heal the American Family & our homes where our children are growing up. In the U.S. marriage happiness & child raising education for every family & every teenager in our schools (and colleges) is fully missing today but is present in most other developed countries in their school curricula.
In a happy home with both parents present the children grow up healthy - no Broken Marriage Syndrome™ and no reason to go to punish the world by killing everyone around.
STAF, Inc.'s presence is needed in D.C. in the U.S. Congress (House & Senate). STAF, Inc.'s founding President is planning (1) to seek a seat in D.C. Congress/Senate to provide the necessary information to the D.C. lawmakers and (2) to establish a fully new federal agency, Healthy Lifestyle & Family Success Agency, and to be named its first federal director. New legislation and training for all these matters are needed in a results-bringing manner. Less Suffering - More Life™
Visit STAF, Inc.'s extensive websites. To find the correct website, use STAF, Inc.'s Radio Show title - lower & upper keys as is here: "DrDrCanYouHelpMe" in the internet search. Listen to STAF, Inc.'s popular Radio Show (original recordings in the internet 24/7) - you'll get free CEU & College-University credits.
Respectfully,
Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D.
STAF, Inc.'s founding President
========================
ARTICLE
The Above STAF comment placed on this article Sat 3/30/13
3 dozen indicted in Atlanta school test cheating scandal
ATLANTA (AP) - 3/30/13 — Juwanna Guffie was sitting in her fifth-grade classroom taking a standardized test when, authorities say, the teacher came around offering information and asking the students to rewrite their answers. Juwanna rejected the help.
"I don't want your answers, I want to take my own test," Juwannatold her teacher, according to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard.
On Friday, Juwanna — now 14 — watched as Fulton County prosecutors announced that a grand jury had indicted the Atlanta Public Schools' ex-superintendent and nearly three dozen other former administrators, teachers, principals and other educators of charges arising from a standardized test cheating scandal that rocked the system.
Former Superintendent Beverly Hall faces charges including conspiracy, making false statements and theft because prosecutors said some of the bonuses she received were tied to falsified scores. Hall retired just days before the findings of a state probe were released in mid-2011. A nationally known educator who was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009, Hall has long denied knowing about the cheating or ordering it.
During a news conference Friday, Howard highlighted the case of Juwanna and another student, saying they demonstrated "the plight of many children" in the Atlanta school system.
Their stories were among many that investigators heard in hundreds of interviews with school administrators, staff, parents and students during a 21-month-long investigation.
According to Howard, Juwanna said that when she declined her teacher's offer, the teacher responded that she was just trying to help her students. Her class ended up getting some of the highest scores in the school and won a trophy for their work. Juwanna felt guilty but didn't tell anyone about her class' cheating because she was afraid of retaliation and feared her teacher would lose her job.
She eventually told her sister and later told the district attorney's investigators. Still confident in her ability to take a test on her own, Juwanna got the highest reading score on a standardized test this year.
The other student cited by Howard was a third-grader who failed a benchmark exam and received the worst score in her reading class in 2006. The girl was held back, yet when she took a separate assessment test not long afterward, she passed with flying colors.
Howard said the girl's mother, Justina Collins, knew something was wrong, but was told by school officials that the child simply was a good test-taker. The girl is now in ninth grade, reading at a fifth-grade level.
"I have a 15-year-old now who is behind in achieving her goal of becoming what she wants to be when she graduates. It's been hard trying to help her catch up," Collins said at the news conference.
The allegations date back to 2005. In addition to Hall, 34 other former school system employees were indicted. Four were high-level administrators, six were principals, two were assistant principals, six were testing coordinators and 14 were teachers. A school improvement specialist and a school secretary were also indicted.
Howard didn't directly answer a question about whether prosecutors believe Hall led the conspiracy.
"What we're saying is, is that without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree that it took place. Because as we know, this took place in 58 of the Atlanta Public Schools. And it would not have taken place if her actions had not made that possible," the prosecutor said.
Richard Deane, an attorney for Hall, told The New York Times that Hall continues to deny the charges and expects to be vindicated. Deane said the defense was making arrangements for bond.
"We note that as far as has been disclosed, despite the thousands of interviews that were reportedly done by the governor's investigators and others, not a single person reported that Dr. Hall participated in or directed them to cheat on the C.R.C.T.," he said later in a statement provided to the Times.
The tests were the key measure the state used to determine whether it met the federal No Child Left Behind law. Schools with good test scores get extra federal dollars to spend in the classroom or on teacher bonuses.
It wasn't immediately clear how much bonus money Hall received. Howard did not say and the amount wasn't mentioned in the indictment.
"Those results were caused by cheating. ... And the money that she received, we are alleging that money was ill-gotten," Howard said.
A 2011 state investigation found cheating by nearly 180 educators in 44 Atlanta schools. Educators gave answers to students or changed answers on tests after they were turned in, investigators said. Teachers who tried to report it faced retaliation, creating a culture of "fear and intimidation," the investigation found.
State schools Superintendent John Barge said last year he believed the state's new accountability system would remove the pressure to cheat on standardized tests because it won't be the sole way the state determines student growth. The pressure was part of what some educators in the system blamed for their cheating.
A former top official in the New York City school system who later headed the Newark, N.J. system for three years, Hall served as Atlanta's superintendent for more than a decade, which is rare for an urban schools chief. She was named Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators in 2009 and credited with raising student test scores and graduation rates, particularly among the district's poor and minority students. But the award quickly lost its luster as her district became mired in the scandal.
In a video message to schools staff before she retired in the summer of 2011, Hall warned that the state investigation launched by former Gov. Sonny Perdue would likely reveal "alarming" behavior.
"It's become increasingly clear that a segment of our staff chose to violate the trust that was placed in them," Hall said. "There is simply no excuse for unethical behavior and no room in this district for unethical conduct. I am confident that aggressive, swift action will be taken against anyone who believed so little in our students and in our system of support that they turned to dishonesty as the only option."
The cheating came to light after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some scores were statistically improbable.
Most of the 178 educators named in the special investigators' report in 2011 resigned, retired, did not have their contracts renewed or appealed their dismissals and lost. Twenty-one educators have been reinstated and three await hearings to appeal their dismissals, said Atlanta Public Schools spokesman Stephen Alford.
APS Superintendent Erroll Davis said the district, which has about 50,000 students, is now focused on nurturing an ethical environment, providing quality education and supporting the employees who were not implicated.
"I know that our children will succeed when the adults around them work hard, work together, and do so with integrity," he said in a statement.
The Georgia Professional Standards Commission is responsible for licensing teachers and has been going through the complaints against teachers, said commission executive secretary Kelly Henson. Of the 159 cases the commission has reviewed, 44 resulted in license revocations, 100 got two-year suspensions and nine were suspended for less than two years, Henson said. No action was taken against six of the educators.
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Jury finds George Zimmerman not guilty
Date: July 1, 2013
SANFORD, Fla--George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman whose trial for the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin riveted viewers and sparked a national conversation about race and justice, was found not guilty on all charges Saturday.
Zimmerman, 29, was acquitted on charges of second-degree murder in the death of Martin, a 17 year old whom the defendant shot during a scuffle in a nearby gated community on Feb 26, 2012. The six-woman jury also found Zimmerman not guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
The jury signaled they had reached a verdict 9:45 pm ET and filed into the courtroom around 10 pm. After the verdict was read, Judge Debra Nelson polled the jurors to make sure each agreed with the decision. She then told Zimmerman he was free to go.
Zimmerman showed little emotion as the verdict was announced.
The decision from the jury had been expected to spark outrage from Martin family supporters who say the teen's death was ignored by police and prosecutors for weeks because of his race. Martin was black, and Zimmerman is half white and half Hispanic. But more than an hour after court was adjourned, only a handful of demonstrators were outside the courthouse and they were heavily outnumbered by members of the media trying to interview them.
Estefania Galvez, a protester with the national "Justice for Trayvon" group, said protesters will hold a press conference on Sunday at the courthouse to announce a national day of protest on Monday. There were reports of some demonstrations in other cities sparking late Saturday night. Dozens of people marched in San Francisco holding signs in support of Martin, and another spontaneous rally was reported in Washington D.C.
Martin's parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, were not in the courtroom when the verdict was read. They later tweeted thanks to their supporters.
"Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you. You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in control," Fulton tweeted. "Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!! In the name of Jesus!!!"
Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, tweeted, "Even though I am broken hearted my faith is unshattered I WILL ALWAYS LOVE MY BABY TRAY," he wrote.
The jurors deliberated 12 hours on Saturday--including a one-hour lunch during which they were allowed to discuss the case--before alerting the court that they would like the attorneys to clarify the charge of manslaughter. The attorneys on both sides told the jury that they could not speak about the charge "in general terms" but would be happy to answer a more specific question.
The jury never sent back a more specific inquiry. They only made one other request during their deliberations--for an itemized list of all the evidence presented during the trial on Friday. They reached their verdict after 16 hours of deliberating over two days. The jurors, whose identities are protected by a court order, declined an opportunity to talk to the media after the verdict.
In a televised three-week trial, jurors heard the defense and prosecution each paint very different pictures of the night in question. Zimmerman was an angry “wannabe cop” who was seething with anger at a rash of break-ins in his neighborhood when he pursued and shot Martin, the state has argued. The defense, meanwhile, maintained Zimmerman was within his rights to follow and question Martin, and that it was the teen who became violent, prompting Zimmerman to shoot as a way to save his own life.
Play video
The case ignited a national debate over self-defense laws and race, prompting marches and demonstrations around the country. Local leaders have urged members of the community to remain peaceful no matter what verdict the jury hands down.
The prosecution failed to convince the jury that Zimmerman had “a depraved mind without regard for human life” when he shot Martin, which was required for second-degree murder. A lesser manslaughter conviction could have been handed down if the jury believed Zimmerman had no lawful reason to kill Martin, even if he bore Martin no ill will. The law says if Zimmerman had a “reasonable” belief that his own life was in jeopardy or that he could suffer bodily harm from Martin, he was justified in killing him.
At a press conference following the verdict, prosecutors expressed disappointment with the outcome but urged the community to remain calm.
"We have from the beginning just prayed for the truth to come out and for peace to be the result and that continues to be our prayers," prosecutor John Guy said.
But prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda insisted the fundamentals of the case should have favored the prosecution. "We respect the jury's verdict but really this is about a kid being followed by a stranger," de la Rionda said.
Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney advising the Martin family, echoed that plea. "For Trayvon to rest in peace, we must all be peaceful," Crump said at a press conference.
Zimmerman's defense attorney, Mark O'Mara, told reporters that he believed Zimmerman will now try to return to a normal life. O'Mara said that Zimmerman was used as a "scapegoat" by people who wanted to create a civil rights violation, and was thus overcharged in the crime. "It certainly wouldn't have happened if he was black," O'Mara said of his client being charged with murder.
O'Mara also compared the media to "mad scientists" who had turned his client into a "monster" with shoddy reporting.
O'Mara mentioned that he will vigorously defend any forthcoming civil charges against his client, and that he may seek to recoup some of Zimmerman's defense costs from the state.
Witnesses gave conflicting testimony over who was the aggressor of the fight and both Zimmerman's family and Martin's family have claimed it was their relative who could be heard screaming for help in the background of a 911 call during the fight.
Zimmerman wasn’t arrested in the shooting for weeks, after a public outcry. Bill Lee, then the police chief of Sanford, said Zimmerman was justified under Florida’s stand your ground self defense law. Lee lost his job after the incident, and a special prosecutor was appointed to argue the case.
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COMMENT in blog Su
We at the Save The American Family - STAF, Inc. believe that the verdict is correct and honest. The five lady members of the jury have been every second listening to all testimonials and facts presented by different related parties.
The jury decision came fast - thus, it means that the matter had become clear to all members of the jury and they saw that Mr. George Zimmerman is not guilty.
Would anyone seriously think that the jury played some dishonest, fake game - that is no very believable in this case.
Respectfully yours,
Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D., D.D.
Founding President of STAF, Inc., -n0t-for-profit-
Comment # 2, July 14, 2013
Comment by Save The American Family - STAF, Inc., -not-for-profit-
By Dr. Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D., D.D.
This info will save trillions in health care costs
America must learn the #1 skill: Healthy Lifestyle & Correct Nutrition
Avoid big food bills, big bellies & big sickness costs
Quote: "To stay healthy you need to eat what your body wants, not what you want"
STAF, Inc. has a new Healthy Lifestyle & Correct Nutrition Program for the U.S. government's use - fits every nation worldwide.
Totally it took 26 years to develop, first 19 years worldwide research & the past 7 years to modify it for the U.S. needs. This program covers, for the first time ever, all necessary elements to get the lasting results in all family related challenges & in our rampant obesity, overweight & sickness levels. Its nutritional program leading to health & to a longer life is at the same time an automatic weight loss program: nothing to buy, no calories to count, no unreasonable portion control - eat as needed; just follow the easy instructions.
The biggest news is this: the correct, health-restoring & health-maintaining food with all necessary daily nutrients in the correct combination costs ONLY about $95 per one (adult) person monthly. The new program guides you to buy your food ingredients in your local supermarket & prepare your food in your own kitchen based on the new, delicious recipes. The bigger the family, the less $ per/person. Only a program everyone can afford is a solution to our nation's health challenges.
Your food expenses, time being, are probably many times more than in this new STAF, Inc.'s results bringing program. Everyone can afford this amazing program whether one works on the minimum salary or lives on the social security or similar.
The saved money this new STAF, Inc. program guides you to place in safe investments - STAF, Inc. endorses only a few investment adviser companies as reliable. With the saved money your family can create substantial wealth within time. Also a millionaire?
STAF, Inc.has 10 private services given a unique lifetime result-guarantee with only a one-time fee - see website.
The new Healthy Lifestyle & Correct Nutrition program will, in a televised D.C. event, be introduced to our nation, to The W.H., The President, The U.S. Congress & Senate & to all related federal agencies.
STAF, Inc.'s presence is needed in D.C. in the U.S. Congress (House & Senate). STAF, Inc.'s founding President is planning (1) to seek a seat in D.C. Congress/Senate to provide the necessary information to the D.C. lawmakers and (2) to establish a new federal agency, Healthy Lifestyle & Family Success Agency & to be named its first federal director. New legislation & training for all these matters are needed in a results-bringing manner.
STAF, Inc.'s slogan: Less suffering - more life™
Our website page tops have a link to study the original STAF, Inc.'s founding documents to see its mission statements.
Save The American Family - STAF, Inc., -not-for-profit, needs donations to widen its important work for your & your family's richer, healthier & safer future.
Mail any size of donation in any currency as paper money to: STAF, Inc., GPO 339, New York, NY 10116-0339, USA. In the envelope enclose your name & email address - STAF, Inc. will email you a tax deductible confirmation receipt.100 % of donations will be used for STAF, Inc.'s help operations in reducing sickness & promoting healthy lifestyle.
Listen to STAF, Inc.'s popular Radio Shows - you'll get free CEU & College-University credits nationwide or worldwide. To visit STAF, Inc.'s extensive website, search the internet with: "Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.- Home" - (one 'F' in STAF, Inc.).
Respectfully,
Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D., D.D.
STAF. Inc.'s founding President
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