Technology Helps Severely Disabled People Use Their Noses to Drive Electric Wheelchairs, Write Text Messages

July 26, 2010 — Israeli scientists have developed a device that allows severely disabled people to sniff to precisely control objects such as wheelchairs and personal digital assistants, a new study says.

The nasal-mask device works so well that disabled people who can’t move at all can learn to write text messages and drive electric wheelchairs by sniffing, researchers report in the July issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Noam Sobel, PhD, of the department of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and colleagues set out to find a way to allow people with disabilities ranging from quadriplegia to “locked-in syndrome” to learn how to control devices with their noses just as they would using a joystick or computer mouse.

The Weizmann Institute has filed for a patent on sniff-controlled technology, which the researchers report as a possible conflict of interest.

The researchers built a “sniff controller” that measures changes in nasal pressure, which occur when the soft palate (the soft area at the back of the roof of the mouth) is repositioned. The device was tested on healthy and disabled people. The researchers report that sniffing can be done with precision, and that it requires precise movements of the soft palate, which receives signals from cranial nerves that often are not affected by paralytic injury and other disorders.   

‘Sniffing’ Study

The study involved 96 healthy and 15 severely disabled people who were taught to sniff in different ways to send various electrical signals to a controller. For example, two in-sniffs meant forward, and two out-sniffs backward. Various sniffing sequences allowed participants to turn and steer a wheelchair.

In the end, a quadriplegic person could use the sniff controller to drive an electric wheelchair with precision after only 15 minutes of practice, the study says.

The researchers report that healthy people played computer games with the device as adeptly as they might with a mouse, joystick, or other controller.

Quadriplegic patients managed to use computers to write text messages and learned to control electric wheelchairs as well as the healthy people taking part in the research, the study says.

People who are “locked in” — completely paralyzed but cognitively intact — also were able to use the device to produce text messages.

One woman communicated for the first time in seven months, and another wrote for the first time in a decade, the researchers say.

Researchers say the device now awaits testing in disorders of consciousness, including the vegetative state.

View Article Sources

SOURCES:

News release, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Plotkin, A. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2010.

© 2010 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.

What money can’t buy: Third of a six-part series on the challenges facing the Israeli economy.

By Nathan Lipson, Haaretz, July 14, 2010

Joining the OECD was a feather in Israel’s cap. Yet with the opportunity to pat ourselves on the back for Israel’s economic achievements, there is another opportunity we must not cringe from grasping – to compare the state of our school system with that of the other members in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. We do not fare well from the comparison.

Based on a chart published in The State of the Nation report by Dan Ben-David, professor of economics and executive director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, there are grounds for concern.

Ben-David collated data on the results of Israeli junior high school pupils who participated in two international tests: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS ) and OECD PISA – Program for International Student Assessment. The tests were conducted five times over the past 10 years.

Israelis scored much lower than the OECD average on all five exams. In all the tests but one, Israel’s pupils came in last place among a comparative sample of 25 OECD countries. In that one exception, they were nearly last.

Similar results are found when comparing Israel’s weakest students with the weakest students in the OECD nations, and the strongest with the strongest as well.

Does the problem lie in fewer teaching hours? Is it necessarily true that more instructional hours result in better achievement?

Evidence points to the contrary. The graph shows there is no direct relationship between the number of instructional hours and achievement across countries.

The graph shows each of the OECD nations in comparison with Israel. All but the bottom two, Italy and Greece, have fewer instructional hours than Israel. But all except Turkey have better achievements than Israel.

Sweden, for instance, provides much fewer instructional hours than Israel, yet its achievements are far higher. South Korea provides much the same amount of instruction as Israel, yet there, too, its pupils outstrip Sweden’s, let alone Israel’s.

The problem with Israel’s pupils does not lie, therefore, in the number of instructional hours. They get more than almost all the other pupils in OECD nations. Therefore, the problem must lie in content. Israeli pupils spend less instructional time learning science and reading. In mathematics, Israel also lags, but by less.

The root of the problem is clearly not budget – the hours are there. It is what the hours are spent on. In other words, the root cause is priorities. Clearly the achievement gap can be narrowed without adding extra budgets. It is a question of what and how our children are taught.

By Jeremy P. Meyer, July 12, 2010
The Denver Post

Federal authorities are encouraging school districts to spend education stimulus money to save jobs and blunt the effects of statewide budget cuts, but districts have been slow to draw their share of the funds.

"We really hope that you’ll do your best to see how these funds can help alleviate the layoffs and budget crises that your districts or states are facing," Maura Policelli, a senior adviser with the U.S. Department of Education, said in an online seminar, or webinar, last month.

"That does require some courage, and it does involve the possible risk of investing in staff that you may not be able to retain in the 2011-12 school year," she said.

Districts across the nation have been slow to tap stimulus money that is targeted for specific programs — particularly the money intended to bolster programs for students with disabilities or those who come from low-income households.  

At the halfway point before the Sept. 30, 2011, deadline for the money to be distributed, Colorado districts have used 25 percent of the $110 million available in Title 1 funds for low-income students and 28 percent of the $149 million in Individuals With Disabilities Education Act money for special education.

The same thing is happening nationwide. On average, 39 percent of the $11.3 billion in special-education money for states has been claimed.

Midpoint for spending

"We would have expected to see a higher rate of obligation at this midpoint," said Candace Cortiella, director of the Advocacy Institute and who created a website called IDEA Money Watch (ideamoneywatch.com) to track the spending.

"We do this report at the end of every month, and I have been surprised how little it changes," Cortiella said.

Federal, state and local officials say there is nothing to worry about. The money will be spent. The slow drawdown is a matter of process. And stimulus funds are saving or creating tens of thousands of jobs.

This past quarter, the stimulus funding for special education and Title 1 saved or created more than 100,000 jobs, Cathy Solomon, adviser for Recovery Act Implementation for the Education Department, said in a webinar discussion last month.

The special-education stimulus money was responsible for 9 percent of all federal jobs in the last quarter, Solomon said.

"These programs have had a huge impact on the entire recovery effort, in addition to keeping public education intact," she said.

In Colorado, stimulus money has created or saved on average 5,119 education jobs every quarter — including math and literacy coaches, paraprofessionals and full- and part-time teachers.

Still, districts across the nation are trying to get an understanding of the spending guidelines and are figuring out ways to allocate the one-time funds without affecting budgets over the long term.

Because the money runs out Sept. 30, 2011, districts are being careful to spend the money on programs that won’t need funding after 2011.

There are also restrictions on how the money can be spent.

One metro-Denver district wanted to spend its special-education stimulus money for full-day kindergarten programs. But that did not fit requirements under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, and the district was denied.

Where the money goes

Districts are spending the money on salaries, teacher training and contracting for services, as well as buying materials and even paying for construction. Denver Public Schools has been allocated $16 million in IDEA stimulus money but had used $4.7 million as of June 1, or 29 percent.

"We anticipate spending all of the money that is due to us," said John Simmons, Denver’s executive director of student services.

"Structures are very strict in terms of how you spend that money. We will be slightly behind spending half of our funds this year," Simmons said.

DPS has used the funds to add teachers, including "disability-access teachers" in high schools and middle schools to help develop systems to ensure that students with disabilities can access the general education curriculum. The lag is occurring because the district had to get approval, identify the positions, post the jobs and hire the personnel.

Boulder Valley has used 31 percent of its $5.1 million allocation for special education. Much of the spending will be on professional- development sessions over the summer as the district looks to overhaul its special-education program over the next few years.

Each teacher is getting paid for two days of work for attending the training sessions.

"We have used it to be able to keep teachers on staff," said Kim Bane, director of the district’s special-education department. "We have used it to purchase equipment and assessments, and to hire two teachers on special assignment who are helping us this year and next year."

Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367    or jpmeyer@denverpost.com

Integrative Management of ADHD: What the Evidence Suggests

By Geoff Adams-Spink , April 23, 2010
Age & disability correspondent, BBC News website

The father of a child with severe autism has developed technology to help him communicate.

Stephen Lodge said the idea for his Speaks4Me system came to him years ago but has been waiting for technology to catch up in order to make it a reality.

His eleven-year-old son, Callum, is non-verbal and uses his father’s invention to speak.

Speaks4Me was on show at Naidex 2010 – the annual disability exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham.

Mr Lodge’s system runs on any device that can run the Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 operating system.

It uses the concept of dragging and dropping images from one area of the screen to another to form sentences.

The user then presses a speech button to "verbalise" the sentence.

"Callum has been using Speaks4Me for some time now and he has already been able to create some very expressive sentences," Mr Lodge told the BBC.

Examples include, "I want a drink of juice", "I want to go outside", and "I feel tired".

Mr Lodge – who lives in South Yorkshire – has 20 years’ experience in technology and developed Speaks4Me after deciding that other products on the market were unsatisfactory for Callum.

He cashed in his savings and raised money on his property in order to finance the venture.

Speaks4Me is currently sold on a portable, touch screen media player imported from the Far East.

But the company is finalising a "software only" price which will mean that it can run on any Windows laptop, desktop or even an interactive plasma white board in schools.

Mr Lodge says that several people have already tried the system.

"It’s fabulous to see how such an exciting but simple concept is well understood by the children that have been introduced to it," he said.

Mr Lodge estimates it takes half an hour or less to be able to understand and use the system.

He is also hoping that it will prove useful to stroke survivors – about a third of whom lose the ability to speak, either temporarily or permanently.

"Imagine waking up in hospital, not being able to speak: how would you ask for the toilet?" he said.

Speaks4Me currently retails for about £2,000.

Mr Lodge says his future plans include being able to put his software on other portable devices such as mobile phones and gaming handsets.

On call

Also having its UK launch at Naidex was a French product called the Minifone.

It is being sold in the UK by Essex-based PivoTell which describes the product as the world’s smallest digital cordless phone.

Designed with older and disabled people in mind, the Minifone is worn like a wrist watch.

It can be used to summon help from three pre-programmed numbers and has the additional option of being connected to a call centre.

Provided that the landline has caller line identification (CLI) enabled, the Minifone will also display the date and time and the name or number of an incoming caller.

The Minifone uses a built-in speaker and microphone.

"The experience in France has been that – unlike alarm pendants which have a certain stigma attached – people find these quite attractive and so are more likely to be wearing them," said Adrian Milne of PivoTell.

The device costs £150 and a subscription to the call centre is £10 per month.

Naidex 2010 was at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham from 20 – 22 April.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/8634607.stm
Published: 2010/04/23 10:05:02 GMT

Since the Jan. 14 death of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old in South Hadley, Mass., who committed suicide after being bullied by fellow students, many onlookers have meditated on whether the circumstances that led to her after-school hanging might have been avoided.

Could teachers have stepped in and stopped the bullying? Could parents have done more to curtail bad behavior? Or could preventive measures have been started years ago, in early childhood, long before bullies emerged and started heaping abuse on their peers? (Read what can be done about bullying in school.)

Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes — has suggested that it is key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality.

Without empathy, we would have no cohesive society, no trust and no reason not to murder, cheat, steal or lie. At best, we would act only out of self-interest; at worst, we would be a collection of sociopaths.

Although human nature has historically been seen as essentially selfish, recent science suggests that it is not. The capacity for empathy is believed to be innate in most humans, as well as some other species — chimps, for instance, will protest unfair treatment of others, refusing to accept a treat they have rightfully earned if another chimp doing the same work fails to get the same reward.       

The first stirrings of human empathy typically appear in babyhood: newborns cry when hearing another infant’s cry, and studies have shown that children as young as 14 months offer unsolicited help to adults who appear to be struggling to reach something. Babies have also shown a distinct preference for adults who help rather than hinder others. (Read about the link between bullying and suicides.)

But, like language, the development of this inherent tendency may be affected by early experience. As evidence, look no further than ancient Greece — at the millennia-old child-rearing practices of Sparta and Athens. Spartans, who were celebrated almost exclusively as warriors, raised their ruling-class boys in an environment of uncompromising brutality — enlisting them in boot camp at age 7, and starving them to encourage enough deviousness and cunning to steal food — which skillfully bred yet more generations of ruthless killers.

In Athens, future leaders were brought up in a more nurturing and peaceful way, at home with their mothers and nurses, starting education in music and poetry at 6. They became pioneers of democracy, art, theater and culture. “Just like we can train people to kill, the same is true with empathy. You can be taught to be a Spartan or an Athenian — and you can taught to be both,” says Teny Gross, executive director of the outreach group Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, R.I., and a former sergeant in the Israeli army.

What the ancient Greeks intuited is supported by research today. Childhood — as early as infancy — is now known to be a critical time for the development of empathy. And although children can be astonishingly resilient, surviving and sometimes thriving despite abuse and neglect, studies show that those who experience such early trauma are at much greater risk of becoming aggressive or even psychopathic later on, bullying other children or being victimized by bullies themselves.

Simple neglect can be surprisingly damaging. In 2007, researchers published the first randomized, controlled study of the effect of being raised in an orphanage; that study, and subsequent research on the same sample of Romanian orphans, found that compared with babies placed with a foster family, those who were sent to institutions had lower IQs, slower physical growth, problems with human attachment and differences in functioning in brain areas related to emotional development.

Institutionalized infants do not experience being the center of a loving family’s attention; instead, they are cared for a rotating staff of shift workers, which is inherently neglectful. Such children miss out on intensive, one-on-one affection and attachment with a parental figure, which babies need at that vulnerable age. Without that experience, they learn early on that the world is a cold, insecure and untrustworthy place. Their emotional needs having gone unmet, they frequently have trouble understanding or appreciating the feelings of others.

Nearly 90% of brain growth takes place in the first five years of life, and the minds of young children who have been neglected or traumatized often fail to make the connection between people and pleasure. That deficit can make it difficult for them to feel or demonstrate love later on. “You can enhance empathy by the way you treat children,” says Martin Hoffman, an emeritus professor of psychology at New York University and a pioneer of empathy research, “or you can kill it by providing a harsh punitive environment.”

See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.

See The Wellness Blog.

Discipline, but Don’t Punish?

The cold environment of an orphanage can be considered on a spectrum of punishment, at the other end of which is simple child discipline — an issue that sometimes confounds even the most mindful parents. How do you teach a child right from wrong without being too tough, or slipping into abuse? Who among us has not raised our voice — O.K., screamed — while disciplining our children? (Read about what makes us moral.)

But shouting at or, worse, hitting a child results in fear, rather than an understanding on the child’s part of why he or she is being punished, say researchers. Over the long term, the routine use of corporal punishment, such as spanking, not only fails to change behavior for the better, but has also been shown to increase aggression in children.

“Instead of starting from the assumption that you have to beat the badness out of a child, turn on that empathy and compassion switch,” says Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.

In other words, start by teaching children to understand their own behavior and feelings — it provides the basic tools for understanding the behavior and feelings of others. For instance, when dealing with a child who has hurt another person, help him or her “anchor how they felt in the moment,” says Mary Gordon, founder of Roots of Empathy, a school-based program designed to foster compassion. “We always think we should start with, ‘How do you think so-and-so felt?’ But you will be more successful if you start with, ‘You must have felt very upset.’ The trick is to help children describe how they felt, so that the next time this happens, they’ve got language. Now, they can say ‘I’m feeling like I did when I bit Johnny.’”

When children are able to understand their own feelings, they are closer to being able to understand that Johnny was also hurt and upset by being bitten — that “switch” is the spark for a change in behavior.

But understanding suffering alone does not teach empathy, says Gordon, which helps explain why children who suffer more — enduring abuse at home, for instance — are more likely to become bullies. It’s not that they don’t know what it feels like to be hurt; it’s that they have learned that violence is the way to express anger or assert power.

In Gordon’s Roots of Empathy program, which is currently being used in about 3,000 kindergartens, elementary schools and middle schools in Canada, and 40 schools in Seattle, children get to see a visiting parent and infant interact in the classroom about once a month, and watch the foundations of empathy being built. When the baby cries, the Roots of Empathy instructor helps the mother and students think about what might be bothering the baby and how to make things better.

Students are taught that a crying baby isn’t a bad baby, but a baby with a problem. By trying to figure out what’s going on, the children learn to see the world through the infant’s eyes, and to understand what it might be like to have needs but not be able to express them clearly.

“We love when we get a colicky baby,” says Gordon, because then the mother usually tells the class how frustrating and annoying it is when the baby won’t stop crying. That gives children insight into the parent’s perspective — and how children’s behavior can affect adults — something they have often never thought about. “If you look at the development of empathy, one of the key features is perspective-taking,” says Gordon. “In coaching that skill, we help them [take the perspective of] their classmates.”

To date, nine separate studies have shown that Roots of Empathy has helped reduce bullying at school, and increased supportive behavior among students. Many school districts in the U.S., including New York City’s, have recently expressed interest in using Gordon’s approach. (See “The Year in Health 2009.”)

Setting an Empathetic Example

A child’s individual capacity for empathy can further be encouraged when parents model empathetic behavior themselves. When parents treat other people with compassion, selflessness and a lack of judgment, children copy those behaviors. “Empathy can’t be taught, but it can be caught,” says Gordon.

Her own family was a shining example. As a young girl in Newfoundland, Gordon says she grew up in a large, multigenerational family — including four siblings, two grandparents and a mentally disabled uncle — that also often included “strays.” Her parents liked to take in people in need: unmarried pregnant women who had no place to go, recently released prisoners who would stop by for a free meal. Gordon also tagged along with her mother, an artist (Gordon’s father was the Canadian minister of labor), as she visited poor families in the community, bringing them food, clothing and coal for heat.

When young Mary sneered and asked why a woman stored coal in her bathtub instead of bathing in it, her mother admonished her — but in private. “My mom would never embarrass anyone, so she wouldn’t embarrass me as a child either. She saw the dignity in everybody,” Gordon says. “In the car, she said, ‘You judged that woman when you made that face.’ She would say, ‘She’s made the best decisions she could with the challenges she has, and you don’t know her challenges.’”

Not every child is raised by a Mother Gordon. But even children who have survived rough environments — like the gang members Teny Gross of the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence works with in Providence — can be helped to “catch” empathy.

Gross has found that his outreach workers are most successful when they build relationships based on caring and fairness. “People have a sense of justice,” Gross says, explaining why even troubled teens respond well when counselors, with whom they have an ongoing relationship, take a firm stance with them regarding their behavior. “[Our kids are] used to injustice; they’re used to abuse at school and from the police. But when constraints come from a place of love and caring, people don’t think it violates their sense of justice.” (Read “Are Humans Selfish?”)

Gross’s program focuses on introducing young men and boys in gangs to a new network of people who not only care about them, but do so dependably — providing the kind of secure environment that many of them missed in childhood. By employing former gang members to mentor the troubled boys, Gross makes it easier for them to foster relationships of mutual understanding and connection with one another. Mentors show up consistently at the boys’ important events — court dates, funerals — demonstrating care and concern. They also organize social outings for the boys, like a trip to a local beach last summer for a day of surfing. That excursion purposefully included boys from rival gangs, in the hopes that the introductions could help reduce violence later on.

Indeed, research shows that simple exposure to other kinds of people in a friendly setting can increase your empathy toward them. Although some gangsters and sociopaths may never be reachable, Gross holds out hope. He points to statistics such as the near halving of the U.S. murder rate over the last 20 years that suggest a “different life is possible. It’s not easy, but a lot of it is common sense,” he says.

Szalavitz is the co-author of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered (Morrow, April 2010).

What if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants? Evolutionary thinking is having a revolution . . .

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, Friday 19 March 2010

The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There’s a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.

The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for . . . "about a full day!" Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the "myth" of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong – according to another creationist rumour, he’d recanted on his deathbed, anyway – and here, at last, is scientific evidence!

Inevitably, those of us who aren’t professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn’t waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin’s theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin’s theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Such talk, naturally, is liable to drive evolutionary biologists into a rage, or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, into even more of a rage than usual. They have a point: nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism or "intelligent design", and it’s true that few of the studies now coming to public prominence are all that revolutionary to the experts. But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is. As the science writer David Shenk puts it in his new book, The Genius in All of Us, "This is big, big stuff – perhaps the most important [discoveries] in the science of heredity since the gene."

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks’ "gene expression" – the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature’s traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn’t news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what’s news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn’t, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country’s northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man’s grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren’s lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody’s eye.

It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution. In the way it’s generally understood, the whole point of natural selection – the so-called "modern synthesis" of Darwin’s theories with subsequent discoveries about genes – is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism’s abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.

As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we’ve come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection – frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science – lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life. From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain.

Yet epigenetics suggests this isn’t the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were "obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them". As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn’t right about how giraffes’ necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. "Today," notes David Shenk, "any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . ."

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it’s not the only one. We’ve learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that’s introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment.

To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life. Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? "It’s natural to wonder," Goldenfield told New Scientist recently, "if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level." In natural selection, we all know, the fittest win out over their rivals. But what if you can’t establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place?

It is a decade since the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published The Natural History of Rape. In the book, they made an argument that – however obnoxious at first glance – seemed, to many, to follow straightforwardly from the logic of natural selection. Evolution tells us that the traits that flourish down the generations are the ones that help organisms reproduce. Evolutionary psychology argues that there’s no reason to exclude psychological traits. And since rape is indeed a trait that occurs all too frequently in human society, it follows that a desire to commit rape must be adaptive. There must be a genetic basis for it – a "rape gene", in the words of some media stories following the book’s publication – because, in prehistoric times, those men who possessed the tendency would reproduce more successfully than those who didn’t. Therefore, the authors concluded, rape was – to use a loaded term that has been getting Darwinians in trouble since Darwin – "natural".

Understandably, the book was hugely controversial. But by the time it was published, there was nothing all that radical about the idea that natural selection might be able to illuminate any and every aspect of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychology, in the hands of various practitioners, sought to explain why militarism is so prevalent in human societies, or why men tend to dominate women in so many hierarchical organisations. If the field seems less politically charged these days, that is only because it has permeated our consciousness so deeply that it has become less questioned.

For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 because of natural selection. It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices (because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah). Leftwing and feminist critics did frequently misinterpret evolutionary psychology, imagining that when scholars described some trait as adaptive, they meant it was morally justifiable. But that was how many such findings – often better described as speculations – came to be believed. We’re not exactly saying it’s right for, say, men to sleep around, evolutionary psychologists would observe with a knowing sigh, but . . . well, good luck trying to change millennia of evolved behaviour.

Far more than biologists, evolutionary psychologists bought in to the ultra-simple version of natural selection, and so they stand to lose far more from advances in our understanding of what’s really been going on. They were always prone to telling "just-so stories" – spinning plausible tales about why some trait might be adaptive, instead of demonstrating that it was – and numerous recent studies have begun to chip away at what evidence there was. (That waist-to-hip ratio finding, for example, doesn’t seem to hold up in the face of international and historical research.) And now, if epigenetics and other developments are coming to suggest that environment can alter heredity, the very terms of the debate – of nature versus nurture – suddenly become shaky. It’s not even a matter of settling on a compromise, a "mixture" of nature and nurture. Rather, the concepts of "nature" and "nurture" seem to be growing meaningless. What does "nature" even mean if you can nurture the nature of your descendants?

This is one central argument of Shenk’s new book, subheaded Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong. All our popular notions about talent and "genetic gifts", he points out, start to collapse if the eating habits of Tiger Woods’s ancestors, for example, might have played a role in Woods’s golfing abilities. (Woods always crops up in discussions on the origins of genius; more recently, he has started cropping up in evolutionary psychology discussions about whether promiscuity is inevitable.)

"What all this evidence shows is that we need a much more subtle and nuanced understanding of Darwinism and natural selection," Shenk says. "I think that’s inevitably going to happen among scientists. The question is how much nuance will carry over into the public sphere . . . it’s really funny how difficult it is to have this conversation, even with a lot of people who understand the science. We’re stuck with a pretty limited way of viewing all this, and I think part of that comes from the terms" – such as nature and nurture – "that we have."

Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk’s disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems. As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention. Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses.

"If a geneticist had suggested as recently as the 1990s that a 12-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now," writes Shenk, "that scientist would have been laughed right out of the hall." Not so now.

And then there is Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher. I started reading What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book he has co-authored with the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, one morning, along with that day’s first coffee. A few pages later, as the coffee kicked in, I grasped with astonishment what Fodor had done. He hadn’t just identified evidence that natural selection was more complicated than previously thought – he’d uncovered a glaring flaw in the whole notion! Natural selection, he explains, simply "cannot be the primary engine of evolution". I got up and refilled my cup. But by the time I returned, his argument had slipped from my grasp. Suddenly, he seemed obviously wrong, tied up in philosophical knots of his own creation. I alternated between these two convictions. Was Fodor’s critique so devastatingly correct that his critics – Dawkins, Dennett, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, and many others – simply couldn’t see it? Had he actually managed to . . . but then it slipped away again, vanishing into mental fog.

I called Fodor and asked him to explain his point in language an infant school pupil could understand. "Can’t be done," he shot back. "These issues really are complicated. If we’re right that Darwin and Darwinists have missed the point we’ve been making for 150 years, that’s not because it’s a simple point and Darwin was stupid. It’s a really complicated issue."

Fodor’s objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn’t "survival of the fittest" just mean "survival of those that survive", since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce? The American rightwing noisemaker Ann Coulter makes the point in her 2006 pro-creationist tirade Godless: The Church of American Liberalism. "Through the process of natural selection, the ‘fittest’ survive, [but] who are the ‘fittest’? The ones who survive!" she sneers. "Why, look – it happens every time! The ‘survival of the fittest’ would be a joke if it weren’t part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community."

This argument, perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive, not least because it is a reasonable criticism of some pop-Darwinism. In fact, though, it’s entirely possible for scientists to measure fitness using criteria other than survival, and thus to avoid circular logic. For example, you might hypothesise that speed is a helpful thing to have if you’re an antelope, then hypothesise the kind of leg structure you’d want to have, as an antelope, in order to run fast; then you’d examine antelopes to see if they do indeed have something approximating this kind of leg structure, and you’d examine the fossil record, to see if other kinds of leg died out.

Fodor’s point is more complex than this, although it’s also possible that it is not really a point at all: several reviews of the book by professional evolutionary theorists and philosophers have concluded that it is, indeed, nonsense. As far as I can make out, it can be summarised in three steps. Step one: Fodor notes – undeniably correctly – that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive. Some just come along for the ride: for example, genes that express as tameness in domesticated foxes and dogs also seem to express as floppy ears, for no evident reason. Other traits are, as logicians say, "coextensive": a polar bear, for example, has the trait of "whiteness" and also the trait of "being the same colour as its environment". (Yes, that’s a brain-stretching, possibly insanity-inducing statement. Take a deep breath.) Step two: natural selection, according to its theorists, is a force that "selects for" certain traits. (Floppy ears appear to serve no purpose, so while they may have been "selected", as a matter of fact, they weren’t "selected for". And polar bears, we’d surely all agree, were "selected for" being the same colour as their environment, not for being white per se: being white is no use as camouflage if snow is, say, orange.)

Step three is Fodor’s coup de grace: how, he says, can that possibly be? The whole point of Darwinian evolution is that it has no mind, no intelligence. But to "select for" certain traits – as opposed to just "selecting" them by not having them die out – wouldn’t natural selection have to have some kind of mind? It might be obvious to you that being the same colour as your environment is more important than being white, if you’re a polar bear, but that’s because you just ran a thought-experiment about a hypothetical situation involving orange snow. Evolution can’t run thought experiments, because it can’t think. "Darwin has a theory that centrally turns on the notion of ‘selection-for’," says Fodor. "And yet he can’t give an account – nobody could give an account – of how natural selection could distinguish between correlated traits. He waffles."

Those of us baffled by this argument can take solace in the fact that we’re not alone. The general response to Fodor among evolutionary thinkers has been a mixture of derision and awkwardness, as if one of their previously esteemed colleagues had entered the senior common room naked. Says Dennett, via email: "Jerry Fodor’s book is a stunning demonstration of how abhorrence of an idea (Jerry’s visceral dislike of evolutionary thinking) can derange an otherwise clever thinker . . . a responsible academic is supposed to be able to control irrational impulses, [but] Fodor has simply collapsed in the face of his dread and composed some dreadfully bad arguments." What Darwin Got Wrong, Dennett concludes, is "a book that so transparently misconstrues its target that it would be laughable were it not such dangerous mischief".

It would be jawdroppingly surprising, to say the least, were Fodor to be right. A safer, if mealy-mouthed, conclusion to draw is that his work acts as an important warning to those of us who think we understand natural selection. It’s probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it’s self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was. He went to his deathbed protesting that he’d been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution. Darwin, writing before the discovery of DNA, knew very well that his work heralded the beginning of a journey to understand the origins and development of life. All we may be discovering now is that we remain closer to the beginning of that journey than we’ve come to think.

Further reading
• From Time magazine, an excellent piece on epigenetics: http://bit.ly/5Kyj5q
• The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, by David Shenk, is published by Doubleday. What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is published by Profile, price £20
• For more on "horizontal evolution" see New Scientist: http://bit.ly/4zzAsr
• Also from New Scientist, more on the role of viruses in evolution: http://bit.ly/bD4NLC

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Today, the “epidemic” of ADHD has grown to about seven million young people in the U.S. Most of these children are on medication. And if you add in the numbers that are on antidepressants and other psychotropic medications, the number is over 10 million. That is larger than the entire population of New York City!

By Jon Herring, Total Health Breakthroughs, March 10, 2010 

“Hey, Phillip… do you mind if I sit here and eat with you?” I asked.

“Sure, whatever…”

“How’s school going? Are you doing well?”

“Not really. I just want it to be summer.”

“Yeah, I remember how that used to feel,” I told him.

Phillip is eleven years old. He’s the son of some family friends and I was at a small party when I saw him sitting by himself. I hadn’t seen him for a few years, so I wanted to remind him who I was and get to know him a little better.

As he became comfortable, he opened up a bit more. He told me his plans for the summer. He told me about his friends and the girl he likes at school. And he also told me that he didn’t care for school all that much.

“It’s hard,” he said. “Plus, I have ADHD, so I don’t pay attention very well.”

“Really? How do you know you have ADHD?” I asked.

“That’s what my doctor said. He said I’ve had it since I was born. That’s why I have to take medicine.”

“Well, I think you’re just fine. How does that medicine make you feel?”

“It used to make me kinda nervous,” he said. “And I couldn’t go to sleep when I took it. Now, it just makes me not want to eat.”

After complimenting Phillip on his manners and intelligence, I changed the subject back to his plans for the summer. But what he said bothered me. Here was a bright young boy who was bored and frustrated in school… who probably had a few behavioral problems… and who had now been labeled as having a “disease” and put on medication.

And, unfortunately, Phillip is just one of millions…

I was bothered by his story because I could only imagine what that would do to the psyche and development of a child to be handed a lifelong sentence like that from a doctor. You are broken. You are defective. Your brain doesn’t work right. You are not acceptable in your natural state, but taking these drugs every day can help you.

It might be one thing if ADHD was actually a “disease”… but it’s not.

In 1987, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was voted into existence by the American Psychiatric Association and inserted in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Yes, that’s right… the “disease” was “voted” into existence.

Can you imagine if we had to take a “vote” to determine whether cancer is a disease… or diabetes… or heart disease? That would be patently ludicrous. But every year, more and more disorders are voted into the DSM.

In the case of ADHD, psychiatrists made a list of the most common behaviors among children that parents and teachers object to — and then termed them a disease. Within one year, more than half a million children were “diagnosed.”

Since then, the number of behaviors that constitute the disorder has continued to grow. There are now 18 of them. That opens the door for even more children to be labeled and then put on drugs.

Today, most ADHD “testing” consists of parents, teachers, school administrators, or social workers checking off these behaviors as observed at home and in the classroom. A doctor reviews the checklist, and if six or more of these behaviors are exhibited, then the child is “diagnosed” with ADHD. In almost every case, the treatment is pharmaceutical.

Today, the “epidemic” of ADHD has grown to about seven million young people in the U.S. Most of these children are on medication. And if you add in the numbers that are on antidepressants and other psychotropic medications, the number is over 10 million. That is larger than the entire population of New York City!

You might ask, where were these kids when I was growing up?

Dr. Russell Barkley, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts, has the answer for that. They were there, he says. “They were the class clowns. […] Back then, we didn’t have a professional label for them.

“They were the lazy kids, the no-good kids, the dropouts, the delinquents, the lay-about ne’er-do-wells who were doing nothing with their lives. Now we know better. Now we know that it is a real disability, that it is a valid condition…”

They were the dropouts, huh? The kids who didn’t fit in? The kids who found traditional schooling to be hostile, boring, and unacceptable? I wonder if Barkley was referring to “dropouts” like:

• Bill Gates & Paul Allen (college dropouts, cofounders of Microsoft)
• Sir Richard Branson (high school dropout, founder of the Virgin Group)
• Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs (college dropouts, computer company founders)
• Kirk Kerkorian (eighth-grade dropout, billionaire)
• William Faulkner (high school and college dropout, Nobel Prize-winning novelist)
• Ray Kroc (high school dropout, founder of McDonald’s)
• Dave Thomas (high school dropout, founder of Wendy’s)

Almost certainly, if many of these men were in school today, they would be “labeled” with a mental disorder.

The pharmaceutical companies and modern psychiatry represent ADHD to be a biological abnormality of the brain. Along with many other “mental illnesses,” it is often said to be caused by that catch-all phrase — “a chemical imbalance.”

The problem is that psychiatry has never validated ADHD as a biological entity. They have never shown even the slightest bit of proof of a “chemical imbalance” or that this is an actual brain disease. And yet, millions of children and parents are told fraudulently that this is the case.

Dr. Fred Baughman is a respected pediatric neurologist who has been in practice for 35 years. He knows what a real disease is. So, from 1993 to 1997, he doggedly pursued correspondence with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Ciba-Geigy (the original manufacturers of Ritalin), and top ADHD researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health. He asked them to show him ANY peer-reviewed scientific literature proving a physical or chemical aberration that would qualify ADHD as a disease or a medical syndrome.

After years of persistence, Dr. Baughman finally got these groups to admit that there is NO objective validation for ADHD. Today, the National Institutes of Health state that, “We do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there is no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction.”

And yet, hundreds of thousands of doctors still “label” children as diseased and prescribe powerful and dangerous drugs for something that they have admitted they can’t prove. That is not medicine. It is fraud.

And many doctors and social workers push these drugs forcefully and manipulatively. I heard of one doctor who asked a parent, “If your child had diabetes, you would give him insulin, wouldn’t you?”

Unfortunately, that parent probably didn’t know enough to tell the doctor that diabetes can be measured — either by blood sugar abnormalities or pancreatic malfunction — while ADHD cannot.

When you go to a doctor, they take blood, they do X-rays. They don’t ask how you behave. And yet, that is how the “disease” of ADHD (along with depression and many other “mental illnesses”) is diagnosed.

Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York, says, “No behavior or misbehavior can be a disease. That is not what diseases are.”

Diseases are malfunctions of the human body. For example, typhoid fever is a disease. Spring fever? Not so much. Spring fever is a metaphor. It is a figure of speech… just like most mental illnesses. And yet, the treatment for this figure of speech is now worth billions of dollars a year.

Though there are now many drugs used to treat ADHD, Ritalin (methylphenidate) is one of the most common. In 1970, there were an estimated 150,000 U.S. children taking Ritalin. Today, the number is estimated to be higher than five million. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, the production of methylphenidate increased 700% between 1990 and 1997!

And the trend is to “diagnose” children at younger and younger ages. According a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, prescriptions for two- to four-year-olds increased by almost 300% between 1991 and 1995. I didn’t search for more recent statistics, but you can be sure the trend has continued.

And despite what those who promote them might say… these are NOT safe and harmless medications.

Ritalin, for example, is classified by the FDA and the DEA as a Schedule II Controlled Substance. It is listed in the same category as methamphetamines, cocaine, morphine, and Dilaudid (among other powerful illegal and prescription drugs). These drugs are powerful. They can cause harm. And they carry a significant risk of abuse.

Most ADHD drugs are a class of amphetamine. On the street, these stimulants are commonly known as “speed.” And while “speed” can increase alertness and productivity, the trajectory is crash and burn.

But what are the risks of long-term use of these drugs, especially by developing children?

These drugs have been known to cause depression and psychotic states. And they can be the cause of real neurological disorders like epilepsy and seizures. They can also lead to physical dependence and have been shown to precipitate illegal drug abuse.

Studies have also shown that ADHD drugs stunt the physical growth of children and cause the brain to atrophy and shrink.

But of course, the biggest risk is death. In fact, research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health showed that children and teens on drugs such as Ritalin have a 500% higher risk of sudden death than would be typical for children of a similar age and health status.

Not surprisingly, long-term use can increase the risk of heart attack.

And cancer is a known risk, too. In one study, researchers identified twelve children who met the criteria for ADHD in the DSM-IV and were to begin taking methylphenidate in daily doses between 20 and 54 mg. Because the test group was small, each child was used as his or her own control.

Chromosomal abnormalities in blood cells were measured before starting the treatment. Then these same tests were performed after three months of taking the medication. Three separate chromosomal abnormalities were evaluated. In every single child, significant increases in chromosomal aberrations were measured. On average, the aberrations increased by 323% following treatment. Researchers believe that greater frequencies of these aberrations equate to an increased risk of cancer.

And to balance out these significant risks… there are absolutely NO long-term studies that show positive effects from these drugs on learning, academic standards, or social behavior.

Certainly there are children who are misbehaving at school and at home. There are kids who are unable to achieve self-control. There are those who are unusually hyperactive.

But in the vast majority of cases, these kids do not need medication. They certainly do not need to be exposed to the dangers of these drugs. But do their doctors ever ask what kind of foods, preservatives, and additives these children are exposed to? Do they inquire about nutrition or give advice about the many ways that the foods children eat, the toxins they are exposed to, and the nutrients they are missing can affect mood and behavior? Of course, most doctors do not. That would require too much effort and follow-up. It is much easier (and more profitable) to write a quick prescription and usher in a new patient.

Today, we are constantly told to protect our children from drug abuse. And yet, there are some disturbing exceptions to that rule. Thomas Szasz put it well when he said, “Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.”

To Your Health,

Jon Herring
Total Health Breakthroughs

Longer Saudi Arabia Is Left to Exist, Closer A Nuclear Terrorist Act Comes

Authorities continue to systematically suppress, or fail to protect, the rights of fourteen million Saudi women and girls, eight million foreign workers, and some two million Shia. Thousands of people have received unfair trials or were subject to arbitrary detention. Curbs on freedom of association, expression, and movement, as well as a pervasive lack of official accountability, remain serious concerns. In May the government cancelled scheduled municipal elections.- HRW

Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

American Chronicle, February 14, 2010

Saudi Arabia is not a state; it is a factory of inhuman hatred, evil rancor, vulgar behaviour, deep ignorance, compact inanity, and utter bestialization of the human beings who happen to live there. Never ever in the World History has the Humankind testified to such an ulcerous enmity of the Knowledge, Science, Art and Philosophy. Yet, the territory presently occupied by Saudi Arabia was not always the realm of the utmost barbarism. Degradation and decay came with the gradual rise and prevalence of the Hanbal pseudo-Muslim school of jurisprudence, the pathetic theological system of Ibn Taimiya, and the Satanic cult of Abdel Wahhab – a long historical development that took almost 10 centuries to be completed.

Acting against the interests of their own citizens in the long run, the calamitous Freemasonic regimes of England and France early realized the decadence of the Ottoman Empire and its reasons, namely the predominance of the aforementioned layers of Islamic alteration. With their premeditated, anti-Ottoman and anti-Turkish acts, they averted the possibility of an Islamic Renaissance that would sweep away the aforementioned ignorance and barbarism. And with their intentional detachment of the territory presently occupied by Saudi Arabia from Turkey, they promoted to local power the main factor of this barbarism: the incestuous family of the Wahhabi Saudi tribe.

They further facilitated the expansion and the diffusion of this barbaric pseudo-version of Islam throughout the vast lands inhabited by Muslims that the colonial powers had taken good care to first occupy and then terrorize.

Their plan is evil and easy to understand: by imposing a debilitated, demented, barbaric and idiotic doctrine as Islam, and by eliminating all forms of authentic Islam preserved down to our times from Mali to Yemen and from Somalia to Indonesia, they create a fake and virtually impotent adversary that they plan to effectively eliminate. And they imagine that in this way they will eliminate Islam once and forever.

The result is the Islamic Terrorism phenomenon that the Freemasonic and Zionist Evangelicals of the West take good care to immediately publicize as identical with the real Islam, thus becoming the real – but Satanic – brethren of the Saudi Wahhabists.

It is not strange that Saudi Arabia has the world´s poorest record of Human Rights; it has been geared for this purpose, and for much more. The second, nuclear, phase of “Islamic” Terrorism is being programmed there through the well known cooperation of the Saudi secret services with the CIA and the English Intelligence service. Even worse, the third stage of the well orchestrated and pre-arranged escalation is also being undertaken on Saudi soil: the Islamic revolution of Europe. And a critical part of the entire project is the ongoing colonization – islamization of Turkey, a development which is greatly promoted by the Freemasonic regimes of London, Paris and Washington and by the world´s Freemasonic and Zionist mass media. More than 25 million pseudo-Muslim Jihadists, prepared by Saudi Arabian underground networks (either on Saudi territory or in many neighboring countries of Africa and Asia irrespective of their current, seemingly pro-Western, regimes) are ready to cross Turkey and reach Vienna and Berlin, Paris and London.

To prevent the forthcoming Islamic revolution of Europe, there is only one measure to take: immediately destroy and totally occupy the Saudi territory now. This territory should be administered by the Turkish army exclusively, if extremism and radicalism is to be irreversibly uprooted.

To illuminate the nightmarish situation that prevails in Saudi Arabia and to offer a brief taste of the calmly and unrepentantly performed violations of Human Rights throughout that evil realm, I republish herewith the chapter ;Saudi Arabia´ of the HRW World report 2009.

Saudi Arabia – Events of 2009

http://www.hrw.org/en/node/87732

Human rights conditions remain poor in Saudi Arabia. In February 2009 King Abdullah replaced conservatives in the religious establishment, judiciary, and education system with more progressive-minded officials, but domestic and international pressure to improve human rights practices is feeble.

Authorities continue to systematically suppress, or fail to protect, the rights of fourteen million Saudi women and girls, eight million foreign workers, and some two million Shia. Thousands of people have received unfair trials or were subject to arbitrary detention. Curbs on freedom of association, expression, and movement, as well as a pervasive lack of official accountability, remain serious concerns. In May the government cancelled scheduled municipal elections.

Women’s and Girls’ Rights

The government told the United Nations Human Rights Council in June that it would dismantle the system of male legal guardianship over women, but it continues to treat women as legal minors by allowing male guardians to determine a woman’s right to work, study, marry, travel, and even receive a national identification card. Officials refused to let Heba Neguib, a 27-year-old Egyptian living with her family in Saudi Arabia, travel back to Egypt without permission from her father, who initially refused. Women who are victims of domestic violence face societal and governmental obstacles in obtaining redress.

In February, Norah al-Fayez was appointed deputy minister of education, the highest post attained by a woman in Saudi Arabia. In September the first coeducational facility, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, was inaugurated. Yet sex segregation is strictly enforced throughout the kingdom and impedes women’s full participation in public life. Women are prohibited from working in offices or entering government buildings without female sections, or pursuing degrees in disciplines not taught in women’s colleges. Women cannot work as judges, prosecutors, or court-accredited lawyers. In March a court in Ha’il convicted a 75-year-old woman for “illegal mingling” with her nephew and his friend who had delivered food to her.

The government has not yet set a minimum age for marriage, against a recommendation by the governmental Human Rights Commission. In April a court in ´Unaiza reaffirmed its earlier verdict, overturned on appeal, refusing to annul the marriage of a girl age 8 to a middle-age man. In March a 70-year-old man demanded US$130,000 to divorce his new 13-year-old bride, who had run away from him. In May a girl age 10 in the Eastern Province was betrothed to a man 15 years her senior.

Migrant Worker Rights

An estimated eight million largely Asian and Arab foreign workers fill manual, clerical, and service jobs. Many suffer multiple abuses and labor exploitation, sometimes rising to slavery-like conditions. A new anti-trafficking law passed in July set prison sentences of up to 15 years for forced labor. However, Saudi Arabia made little progress reforming the restrictive kafala (sponsorship) system that ties migrant workers’ residency permits to their employers, fueling abuses such as employers confiscating passports, withholding wages, and forcing migrants to work against their will.

In July 2009 the advisory Shura Council extended some labor protections to the 1.5 million migrant domestic workers, but excluded the right of workers to leave the house or keep their passports, and obliges them to obey the employers. Asian embassies report thousands of complaints each year from domestic workers forced to work 15-20 hours a day, seven days a week, and denied their salaries. Domestic workers frequently endure forced confinement, food deprivation, and severe psychological, physical, and sexual abuse.

Migrants sometimes face severe delays in the immigration and justice systems, and obstacles such as lack of access to interpreters, legal aid, or their consulates. Few migrants successfully pursue criminal cases against abusive employers. Following a dispute with his sponsor, officials on October 26 detained pending deportation Usama Hijazi, an Egyptian legal adviser living in Saudi Arabia for 16 years. Hijazi had just won a court ruling in his favor against his sponsor, granting him 155,000 riyal (US$41,000) and allowing him to transfer his sponsorship. Authorities repatriated Keni binti Carda, an Indonesian domestic worker, in late 2008 before she could formally complain about her employers causing her severe burns and prying out her teeth. She returned to Riyadh to press charges, but as of November 2009 criminal proceedings had yet to begin. In August Saudi morality police raided a shelter run by a Filipino support group, though prosecutors later dropped charges against 18 persons present.

Criminal Justice, Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Ill-Treatment

Detainees, including children, are commonly the victims of systematic and multiple violations of due process and fair trial rights, including arbitrary arrest and torture and ill-treatment in detention. Saudi judges routinely sentence defendants to thousands of lashes. The kingdom carried out some 53 executions as of September 2009, including of one woman, slightly fewer than in 2008.

Judges can order arrest and detention of children at their discretion. Children can be tried and sentenced as adults at any age if the defendant is determined to have attained majority, a concept based on puberty. Shaikh Salman al-´Awda, a prominent cleric, in September criticized death sentences for children; no executions of children were reported in 2009.

Authorities rarely inform suspects of the crime with which they are charged, or of the supporting evidence. Saudi Arabia has no penal code, and prosecutors and judges largely define criminal offenses at their discretion. During interrogation detainees are not assisted by lawyers, and they face excessive pretrial delays, and difficulty examining witnesses or presenting evidence at trial. Secret police (mabahith) in 2009 detained or continued to detain without trial or access to lawyers, in many cases for years, around 2,000 persons suspected of sympathies with or involvement in terrorism or for their peaceful political views. Muhammad al-´Utaibi, and Khalid al-´Umair, two human rights activists arrested in January for trying to organize a peaceful Gaza solidarity demonstration, continue to be held in al-Ha’ir prison without trial beyond the six-month limit allowed under Saudi law.

In July Saudi Arabia announced that a specialized criminal court had found 330 persons guilty of terrorism-related offenses, but did not provide further details. Trials were closed and defendants did not have access to lawyers of their choosing. A total of 991 terrorism suspects were referred to court in October 2008.

On August 28, 2009, guards in al-Ha’ir prison severely beat a Yemeni prisoner. In another case, prosecutors began probing whether an al-Ha’ir guard beat prisoner Abd al-Karim al-Dahamshi in July. Detainees reported beatings in Buraiman and Malaz prisons and inhumane conditions in Jeddah’s deportation center.

Freedom of Expression

Saudi authorities brooked little public criticism of officials or government policies in 2009. Print and broadcast media remained heavily censored and internet critics faced arrest. The government tolerated hate speech, including by officials, while courts criminalized free speech.

Interior Minister Prince Nayef in June criticized a reporter for Al-Watan newspaper for asking why there are more religious than ordinary police stations in Riyadh. Jamal Khashoggi, Al-Watan’s chief editor, published a contrite article praising Nayef and promising reflection on its reporting. In September MBC1 television canceled two episodes of the popular Ramadan series Tash Ma Tash, which regularly pokes fun at conservative and liberal Saudi attitudes: one dealt with excessively amplified calls to prayer, and the other imagined Barack Obama growing up in the kingdom. Authorities in August closed local LBC television offices after a Saudi man spoke about his sexual conquests on one show in July; he received a five-year prison sentence with 1,000 lashes for advocating vice. A judge in May filed a libel case that can carry a prison sentence against Hayat al-Ghamdi of Arab News for reporting that at a conference on domestic violence the judge had spoken approvingly of a husband slapping his wife for lavish spending. An Abha court accepted the case, although only the Ministry of Information has jurisdiction over the content of publications.

Saudi domestic intelligence on July 29 arrested Syrian blogger Ra’fat al-Ghanim, who had signed a petition calling for the release of al-´Utaibi and al-´Umair, the two human rights activists arrested in January.

In early 2009 Saudi authorities lifted bans on foreign travel on Muhammad Sa’id Tayyib, Abd al-Rahman al-Lahim, and Najib al-Khunaizi, imposed in 2003 after they advocated constitutional reform, but maintained bans on Ali al-Dumaini, Matrook al-Faleh, Abdullah al-Hamid and Muhammad Bajadi, fellow advocates.

Freedom of Religion

Saudi Arabia systematically discriminates against its religious minorities-in particular, Shia in the Eastern Province and around Medina, and Ismailis (a distinct branch of Shiism) in Najran. Official discrimination against Shia encompasses religious practices, education, and the justice system. Government officials exclude Shia from employment and decision making, and publicly disparage their faith.

Clashes between Shia pilgrims and security guards in Medina in February 2009 led to the worst sectarian tensions in years. Authorities arrested scores of pilgrims and protestors demonstrating in solidarity with them, releasing most without charge by July. That month, authorities in Khobar arrested Shia who hosted communal prayers in their homes, and on September 4 sealed shut the city’s only Ismaili mosque. In al-Ahsa’, authorities by September had arrested at least 42 Shia religious and community leaders in 2009.

In Najran, new governor Prince Mish’al, the king’s son, in June announced land distribution to local residents, and, in August, pardons for the remaining 17 prisoners sentenced after sectarian clashes in April 2000. In September King Abdullah released Ismaili leader Shaikh Ahmad bin Turki Al Sa’b, detained without charge since May 2008 for complaining about discrimination against his community. However, a court in August 2009 sentenced Hadi Al Mutif, an Ismaili on death row since 1994 for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad, to an additional five years in prison for criticizing his imprisonment in a videotaped message broadcast on Al-Hurra television in January 2007.

Key International Actors

Saudi Arabia is a key ally of the United States and the United Kingdom. US pressure for human rights improvements was imperceptible. UK efforts through the Two Kingdoms Dialogue to protect human rights had no tangible effect, if such efforts were made at all.

Note

Picture: Snapshots from the streets of towns and cities of the Saudi Arabian Hell. Public flogging is supported by all the pseudo-Islamic sheikhs and imams of Saudi Arabia and all the pseudo-professors of the local bogus-universities that are financed by that country in order to prepare and declare a false Jihad on the rest of the world. This barbarism did not happen in the streets of Abbasid Baghdad before 1200 years and was unheard in the streets of Istanbul before 500 years. Flogging is however common to see in the streets of the pseudo-state Saudi Arabia which represents nothing, being merely an English Freemasonic fabrication, a technical entity geared only to promote an evil, villainous and bestial, fake Islam and project it among the world´s Muslims. Longer this terrorist state exists, less safe every Western, every Muslim, and every human must feel. From:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-496351/Saudi-rape-VICTIM-sentenced-200-lashes-admits-affair.html

The American Chronicle, California Chronicle, Los Angeles Chronicle, World Sentinel, and affiliates are online magazines for national, international, state, and local news. We also provide opinion and feature articles. We have over 5,000 contributors, over 100,000 articles, and over 11 million visitors annually.

This website and its affiliates have no responsibility for the views, opinions and information communicated here. The contributor(s) and news providers are fully responsible for their content. In addition, the views and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of the American Chronicle or its affiliates. All services and information provided on this website are provided as general information only.