Alternative News

The Nazca Lines are located in the arid Peruvian coastal plain some 250 miles south of Lima. They have attracted a host of theories purporting to explain them ever since they were discovered during the 1920s – notably the bizarre ideas of Erich Von Daniken who supposed they were made by visiting extra-terrestrials. British archaeologists Dr Nicholas Saunders of the University of Bristol and Prof Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester combined the experience and knowledge gained by walking the lines (they walked more than 900 miles of desert in southern Peru, tracing the lines and geometric figures), studying the layers of superimposed designs, photographing the associated pottery and using satellite digital mapping into the most detailed such study to date. The results have been published in the journal Antiquity. In the midst of the study area is a unique labyrinth originally discovered by Prof Ruggles when he spent a few days …

(NaturalNews) Drug companies have gotten so greedy, and the American public so financially distressed, that nearly half of all Americans under the age of 65 who normally take prescription drugs are no longer doing so because they allegedly cannot afford it. This is according to a new report compiled by the Consumer Reports National Research Center (CRNRC), which also found that 63 percent of those in need of medical care are skipping trips to the doctor because of the high costs involved. Based on a poll that included 1,158 adults over the age of 18, CRNRC found that 62 percent of Americans under the age of 65 avoided getting recommended medical tests in 2012 because of high costs, while just over half avoided getting a recommended medical procedure. In total, more than 80 percent of those polled indicated that they skipped either a medically-related procedure, medical test, doctor visit, or …

US academics’ report says drones kill large numbers of civilians and increase recruitment by militant groups The CIA’s programme of “targeted” drone killings in Pakistan‘s tribal heartlands is politically counterproductive, kills large numbers of civilians and undermines respect for international law, according to a report by US academics. The study by Stanford and New York universities’ law schools, based on interviews with victims, witnesses and experts, blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of “signature strikes” in which groups are selected merely through remote “pattern of life” analysis. Families are afraid to attend weddings or funerals, it says, in case US ground operators guiding drones misinterpret them as gatherings of Taliban or al-Qaida militants. “The dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling ‘targeted killings’ of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is …

The billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen and his hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, are again in the spotlight over insider trading crimes committed by former employees. Jon Horvath, a onetime technology industry analyst at SAC, pleaded guilty on Friday to insider trading a month before his scheduled trial. He is the fourth former SAC employee to admit to illegal trading while employed at the fund, which manages $14 billion. SAC has been a focus of federal authorities since the government began its crackdown on insider trading at hedge funds five years ago. The admission by Mr. Horvath, who entered his guilty plea in Federal District Court in Manhattan, increases the pressure on the co-defendants in his case: Anthony Chiasson, who was a co-founder of Level Global Investors, and Todd Newman, a portfolio manager at Diamondback Capital Management. Federal prosecutors contend they were part of a seven-person conspiracy — a “circle …

  By Claudia Ehrenstein DIE WELT/Worldcrunch   BERLIN – Dr. Manfred Spitzer knows that people find his arguments provocative. In his first book, he warned parents of the very real dangers of letting their children spend too much time in front of the TV. Now, in a second book called Digitale Demenz [Digital Dementia], he’s telling them that teaching young kids finger-counting games is much better for them than letting them explore on a laptop. Spitzer, 54, may be a member of the slide-rule generation that learned multiplication tables by heart, but his work as a neuropsychiatrist has shown him that when young children spend too much time using a computer, their brain development suffers and that the deficits are irreversible and cannot be made up for later in life. South Korean doctors were the first to describe this phenomenon, and dubbed it digital dementia – whence the title of Spitzer’s book. Simplistically, the …

The doctors prescribing the drugs don’t know they don’t do what they’re meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they’re not telling. Reboxetine is a drug I have prescribed. Other drugs had done nothing for my patient, so we wanted to try something new. I’d read the trial data before I wrote the prescription, and found only well-designed, fair tests, with overwhelmingly positive results. Reboxetine was better than a placebo, and as good as any other antidepressant in head-to-head comparisons. It’s approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), which governs all drugs in the UK. Millions of doses are prescribed every year, around the world. Reboxetine was clearly a safe and effective treatment. The patient and I discussed the evidence briefly, and agreed it was the right treatment to try next. I signed a prescription. But we had both …

Childhood obesity is a growing health concern in the public sphere, but for many of us, it also hits close to home. But while public health campaigns have singled in on parents providing children with unhealthy nutrition options and with poor examples of healthy eating, new research indicates that some of the problem may lie with fast food companies and their overly effective marketing campaigns. A study has found that fast-food logos are branded into the minds of children from an early age. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity has more than tripled over the past 30 years. And perhaps more damning, the government bureau reports that “[the] percentage of children aged 6-11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 20% in 2008. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12-19 years who were obese increased from 5% …