In
October 2007, sources close to the pop star confirmed to FOXNews.com that he was suffering from lupus.
“Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease where the immune system is unable to
detect foreign invaders — like viruses – in the body, ” Dr. Cynara Coomer, FOX News medical contributor
and assistant professor of surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center told FOXNews.com. “So the body creates autoantibodies – or antibodies that attack the body’s own healthy cells, causing
inflammation.”
The inflammation caused by lupus can affect the joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, heart, lungs
and brain.
“Several studies have shown that this inflammatory process can occur in the arteries of the heart
leading to the formation of fatty plaques, also known as atherosclerosis. This can result in cardiovascular disease and may
lead to heart attack, ” Coomer said.
Research estimates that at least 1.5 million Americans have lupus, the Lupus
Foundation of America said on its Web site.
There are four different types of lupus, but the most common — and
serious — form is systemic lupus erythematosus.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the signs and symptoms of lupus
can come on suddenly or develop slowly over time and can include:
— Fatigue
— Fever
—
Weight loss or gain
— Joint pain, stiffness and swelling
— Butterfly-shaped rash on the face that
covers the cheeks and bridge of the nose
— Skin lesions that appear or worsen with sun exposure
—
Mouth sores
— Hair loss
— Anxiety
— Depression
— Memory loss
“There’s
no real known cause, but the most common type of patients afflicted are African Americans, American Indians and Asians, ”
Coomer said. “Certain antibiotics or infections, stress and some medications may lead to lupus.”
Not talked
about much anymore, but I wanted to remind everyone that June 30, 2009 at the end of this month ALL US troops will be out
of ALL Iraqi cities.
We still hear
about bombings on a weekly basis sometimes daily over there, but Gen. Ray Odierno said that the Iraqi security forces are
able to handle their own security but can always ask for our support on missions. And we can’t go into any Iraqi City
now without approval from Iraq.
This past week
in a Fox News interview, Odierno said: “The continued improvement in overall stability and security makes this the right
time for us to turn this over to the Iraqi security forces”.
The pull out
of Iraqi cities is part of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that was signed last year by President Bush. The SOFA also
states that all US forces must be out of Iraq by December 31, 2011.
As of the posting
of this story:
U.S. Confirmed Deaths Reported
Deaths: 4316 Confirmed Deaths: 4316 Pending Confirmation: 0 DoD Confirmation List
U.S. Wounded
37,512
Personally
I think it's good, it will help force the Iraqi's to shoulder the burden of the security of their country and it’s long
overdue. I would much rather see our troops used for support as opposed to being the spear head.
Recession's toll: Most recent college grads working low-skill jobs Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The tough economy and tight labor market have tarnished
the luster of a bachelor's degree for young college graduates seeking employment.
New monthly survey data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston finds that during
the first four months of 2009, less than half of the nation's 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in
jobs that required a college degree. That's down from 54 percent for same period last year.
''I've never seen it this low and we've been analyzing this stuff for over 20 years," said center director Andrew Sum.
The problem is most acute in the 25-and-under age group among Asian female graduates and black and Hispanic male graduates.
The survey, of 60,000 households, found less than 30 percent of Asian female grads, 32 percent of Hispanic male grads and
just over 35 percent of young black male grads working in jobs that require a bachelor's degree.
Research has shown that college graduates who take jobs below their education level not only earn less, but also can take
years to match the earnings of graduates who land career-track employment upon graduation.
These so called "mal-employed" workers also compound the unemployment problem by taking jobs that non-college graduates
and even high school students are often qualified to hold.
The problem of "mal-employment" — working outside one's field of education, training and choice — has increased
sharply for young college grads since the recession began and all signs suggest the trend will continue for the foreseeable
future.
Democracy For America
Last week, Governor Dean joined local DFA (Democracy for America) members on stage at one of the largest healthcare rallies
in Washington D.C. this decade.
Together, they presented over 400,000 petition signatures calling for the choice of a public healthcare option. Afterwards
thousands of Americans -- nurses, doctors, small business owners, people of all walks of life stormed the halls of Congress
to advocate for real healthcare reform.
At the same time, DFA members nationwide have already started making local deliveries of signatures to their members of
Congress too. This one-two punch of in-district action backed up by thousands of activists storming the capital is having
a powerful effect.
We can't stop now. We have the momentum. We need to make sure every single one of America's leaders in Congress gets the
message.
Iran arrests British embassy staff over riots By Agence France-Presse June 28, 2009
TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran has arrested eight local British embassy staff,
media reports said on Sunday, a move that will further exacerbate strained ties with the West over the post-election turmoil
in the Islamic republic.
It is the latest retaliatory action against Britain, which Iran has accused of stoking the unrest that swept the country
after the disputed election that returned hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
“Eight members of the local staff at the British embassy who had a considerable role in the recent riots have been
arrested,” the Fars news agency said without quoting a source.
Last week, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned that Iran may downgrade ties with Britain, after the two governments
expelled diplomats in a tit-for-tat move.
Iran has also expelled the BBC correspondent in Tehran and arrested a British-Greek journalist, as well as a number of
other British passport-holders it says were involved in rioting.
Honduran troops ousted President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday and flew him
out of the country, ending a bitter power struggle with the military as parliament swiftly voted in a new leader.
Zelaya insisted as he arrived in regional neighbour Costa Rica that he remained the president of his Central American nation,
but just hours later the Congress voted in the parliamentary speaker as the country's new leader.
The first such major upheaval in several decades in the impoverished country was triggered by a tense political stand-off
between Zelaya and the country's military and legal institutions over his bid to secure a second term.
"I will never give up since I was elected the president by the people,'' Zelaya said from San Jose, accusing Honduran troops
of kidnapping, and denouncing what he called a "political conspiracy'' against him.
But Congress said it voted unanimously to remove him from office for his "apparent misconduct'' and for "repeated violations
of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgements of the institutions''.
In his place they appointed speaker Roberto Micheletti as the new leader to serve out the rest of the term of office, which
ends in January.
New general elections are planned for November 29.
Sanford says he won't resign
He says he wants to restore public's trust; some lawmakers may insist he step down.
By Gina Smith gnsmith@thestate.com
Posted: Monday, Jun. 29, 2009
Some Republican state lawmakers are privately saying they want Republican Gov. Mark Sanford to step down – of his
own volition – this week.
They do not want to call for his resignation, according to sources close to the situation.
Meanwhile, Sanford has spent portions of the last few days phoning key lawmakers and Republican Party activists, apologizing,
for his affair with an Argentinean woman that left him out of touch with his staff and other state leaders for the better
part of a week.
Lawmakers “have given (Sanford) 72 hours of breathing room,” said Katon Dawson, immediate past chairman of
the state Republican Party, who said he has spent the last few days playing referee between lawmakers who want the governor
out and those who want to give him another chance. “But I think… their patience will run out.”
That could mean a press conference of lawmakers and party activists, calling for the governor's resignation, is in the
making.
Sanford considered resigning after admitting to the affair, he revealed Sunday in an exclusive interview with The Associated
Press.
But Sanford said he spoke with close spiritual and political associates who advised him to fight to restore the public's
– and his family's – trust in him.
“Resigning would be the easiest thing to do,” he said.
Also on Sunday, a 41-year-old Argentine woman acknowledged having a relationship with Sanford, saying that published e-mails
between the two was obtained from her account without permission.
In a statement sent to news network C5n of Buenos Aires, Maria Belen Chapur said she will not talk about her private life.
“I have decided to send this statement to clear up certain incorrect things that are being reported, and put an end
to a matter that… is very painful to me, my two children, my entire family and close friends.”
Chapur said someone accessed her Hotmail account without permission late last year and leaked e-mail correspondence that
described a relationship with Sanford to the S.C. newspaper The State.
But she denied the hacker is a friend of hers – as has been widely reported – saying he is as much a victim
of the media frenzy as she.
Sanford, who hadn't spoken publicly since Friday, talked to AP outside his coastal home on Sullivans Island. He talked
about “walking into the legislative term with a humble spirit.”
“I have to go through that voyage over the next 18 months,” he said, referring to the number of months he has
left in his second term. He is barred by state law from seeking a third term. Some lawmakers are calling for him to resign
because he used public money to see the woman during one trip, and because he was out of touch with his staff during his weeklong
trip to Argentina.
Strange Fruit: The Billie Holiday Story
Google thought deluge of Jackson searches was an attack By Agence France-Presse
A deluge of search queries for Michael Jackson led Google News, the
news aggregator of Web search engine Google, to initially believe it was under attack, the Internet giant said on Friday.
Google, in a blog post on the company website, said that “millions and millions” of people around the world
begin searching for news about the pop star on Thursday as reports emerged about his hospitalization and death.
It rated the “hotness” of Jackson-related searches as “volcanic.”
“The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated
attack,” Google said.
“As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a ‘We’re
sorry’ page before finding the articles they were looking for,” it said.
The “We’re sorry” page tells users their query “looks similar to automated requests from a computer
virus or spyware application” and forces them to type in a series of squiggly characters before it will process their
request.
Popular micro-blogging service Twitter also suffered a slowdown in performance on Thursday as users exchanged thousands
of messages per minute about Jackson’s death at the age of 50.
Web portal AOL said its AIM instant messaging service was down for about 40 minutes.
Yahoo! said the news area on its front page received five times its normal traffic and its front page story “Michael
Jackson rushed to hospital” was its “highest clicking story” ever with 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes.
At least 1 million swine flu cases in US: official AFP
At least one million people in the United States have had swine flu,
or around 50 times more than the number of cases reported to health authorities, US health authorities said Friday.
"We're saying that there have been at least a million cases of the new H1N1 virus so far this year in the United States,"
said Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"Reported cases are really just the tip of the iceberg," said Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization
and Respiratory Diseases, of the roughly 28,000 confirmed cases of A(H1N1) flu in the United States.
Around 3,000 people infected with swine flu in the United States have had to be hospitalized and 127 people are reported
to have died.
The CDC arrived at its figure of one million cases based on computer models and surveys of communities known to have been
hard hit by the new flu strain.
"There have been community surveys in a couple of areas looking at influenza-like illness in areas where we know there's
a lot of the strain circulating and in many of those communities, they're reporting proportions of about 6 percent of community
members having had an illness that's consistent with the new virus," Schuchat told reporters.
A community survey conducted in New York City, where the CDC believes there have been half a million cases of A(H1N1),
showed 6.9 percent of residents experienced flu-like illness during a three-week period in May, Schuchat said.
"From their virologic testing, they knew that most of that influenza-like illness was based on this new H1N1 strain, and
from that, they estimated that around half a million New York City residents may have been infected with this new virus and
had flu-like illness without necessarily seeking care," Schuchat said.
Although an infection rate of around six percent is low compared with seasonal influenza, said the CDC official, "the survey
in New York looked at a several-week attack rate while seasonal flu usually happens over weeks to months."
Schuchat said the actual figure of infected people in the United States was probably higher than one million and warned
that swine flu might see higher infection rates than seasonal influenza.
"We believe the attack rates of this new virus, particularly in young people, may exceed the kind of attack rates we see
with seasonal influenza," she said.
The highest rates of illness due to A(H1N1) flu are in people under the age of 25. The median age of people who have been
hospitalized in the United States after being infected with the virus is 19, and the median age of those who have died is
37.
Schuchat repeated a warning that the new strain of swine flu could come back in a more virulent form with the return of
flu season in the autumn and urged communities to begin mapping out a vaccination campaign.
Five companies are working to develop a vaccine against A(H1N1) flu, said Schuchat, without naming them.
The U.S. House narrowly passed a sweeping climate change
bill that's a top item on President Obama's agenda. The measure would put gradually stricter caps on the total national output
of heat-trapping gases, based on a system of permits that can be bought and sold.
Republicans broadly oppose that cap and trade program, and many Democrats have qualms as well. Proponents say
it's key to curbing global warming.
It was high drama in the House chamber Friday night as the roll call vote on the climate change bill came to
an end and the results were announced — the measure passed 219-212.
Only eight Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with most Democrats for the bill; 44 Democrats joined most
Republicans in voting against it. For Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, who chairs the Energy Independence and Global Warming
Committee, the vote marked a key turning point:
"This is a revolution. This is a moment in history. This is what the American people were calling for in the
election of 2008, a fundamental change," Markey said.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), speaking to Washington, D.C.
publication The Hill, called the recently-passed climate change legislation a pile of shit according to an exclusive report.
Boehner, during Friday’s vote which passed the legislation by a narrow margin, attempted something of a filibuster
by reading aloud from the bill’s cap and trade section for over an hour, then presenting a colorful yet visually complicated
chart.
Hey, people deserve to know what’s in this pile of shit, he told The Hill.
THIS WEEKS FEATURED MUSIC VIDEO
Jeff Goldblum demands an apology from Obama for killing a fly...Colbert
show
PETA Says No More Fly-Killing, Sends Obama a Humane Fly Catcher ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports:
PETA has a few words for President Obama: Brush, don’t kill.
After the President very publically swatted and then killed a fly during
an interview with CNBC yesterday, the outspoken animal rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) said
they wished Obama had served a better example.
“We support compassion for the even the smallest animals," says Bruce Friedrich, VP for Policy at PETA. “We
support giving insects the benefit of the doubt."
Friedrich says PETA supports "brushing flies away rather than killing them" and was disappointed that the President had
gone ahead and squashed the pesky fly.
This afternoon PETA sent a Katcha Bug, a device which traps bugs and allows their safe release back into nature to the
White House.
PETA hopes the President will use the catcher but has no far not received communication back from the White House, although
they did not ask for specific correspondence.
Friedrich admits that despite his fly-swatting ways, the President has been a champion for animal rights in the past. PETA
claims to be pleased by Obama’s denouncement of factory farming, Canadian seal hunting andMichelle Obama’s stance
against wearing fur.
VARIOUS LATE NIGHT QUOTES
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 'The Late Show.' My name is Dave, or as
the governor of South Carolina would say, gracias!" --David Letterman
"Hey, you know what is going on over in Iran with the election? Have you been following
that? Oh, it's crazy. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared himself a winner. Had a victory party. And he came out at the victory
party and he thanked the 148% of the people who voted for him." --David Letterman
"This Ahmadinejad guy, during all those protests, keeping a very low profile in Iran. His
staff said he was hiking." --David Letterman
"President Obama was so upset about the Iranian crackdown that he told the Iranian diplomats
that they would not be invited to the Fourth of July party. And I said, well, by God, that will teach them right there." --David
Letterman
"And it's a darn shame because Ahmadinejad makes wonderful potato salad." --David Letterman
"Anybody here from South Carolina? You're here but you don't want to admit it." --David
Letterman
"Well, it's the latest political scandal. Mr. And Mrs. Sanford, you know, the Jon and Kate
of politics." --David Letterman
"Turned out the governor disappears, for like, the weekend. Finally, his staff said, 'Don't
worry about the Governor, he is on the Appalachian Trail hiking.' But it turns out he was in South America. And it turned
out he was down there because he was with a woman from Argentina. Seeing a woman from Argentina named Maria. And I was thinking
Judge Sotomayor was apparently wrong because Latina woman don't necessarily have better judgment than white men." --David
Letterman
"What if there is trouble and you can't find the governor. Well, how does that make you
feel? Horrible, doesn't it? And I'm thinking, South Carolina, what if they get the call that North Carolina is invading."
--David Letterman
"It's a disaster for everybody down there in South Carolina. Although I have to say, yesterday,
it was nice to see somebody else apologize on TV." --David Letterman
"But in this sense, Gov. Sanford is a little like President Obama. He has Friday night date
night, it's just not with his wife." --David Letterman
"Let's run this down, it was last week, Senator Ensign, Republican, he comes on the television
and admits he has an affair. And this week, Governor Sanford of South Carolina, Republican, gets on the television and admits
he had an affair. And I was thinking, why do the Republicans have this problem? And it finally came to me. The trouble started
with Bob Dole when he was doing those commercials for Viagra." --David Letterman
"At a press conference yesterday, in case you don't know, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford
admitted to having a mistress from Argentina. That's right. Yeah, then there was an awkward moment as he waited for someone
to give him a high five." --Conan O'Brien
"Governor Sanford may have broken the law, that's the latest. Yeah, they say he may have
broken the law because he left the country without transferring power to his lieutenant governor. Yeah, he didn't transfer
power. Yeah, apparently Sanford violated South Carolina's sacred bros before hoes law." --Conan O'Brien
"A British furniture company was caught trying to slip advertisements into Twitter by linking
them to the Iranian election crisis. Isn't that the lowest? Yeah, probably the most shameless had to be, 'Tired of all the
unrest? Try our Serta Perfect Sleeper.'" --Conan O'Brien
"There's another new development in the Mark Sanford story. His wife, Jenny, kicked him
out of their home when she heard about the affair. In response, Hillary Clinton said, 'Wait. You can do that? No one told
me that.'" --Jimmy Kimmel
"The governor of South Carolina, yesterday, his name is Mark Sanford, he had been missing
for four days. He admitted he was visiting his mistress in Argentina, which I think is outrageous. How dare this man, a married
man, in this economy, outsource to a foreign country when there are plenty of slutty women living right here in the United
States. Am I right, fellow Americans?" --Jimmy Kimmel
This Week in God!!!
Catholics Are Effective Outdoor Advertisers FITSNEWS.COM
Nothing gives us greater pleasure than making fun of Catholics, who
as far as we can tell need to “lighten up” across the board … although not as much as Episcopalians, obviously.
Because that would make them too light … in the loafers (ba-doom-ching)!
Anyway, in spite of our ongoing beef with the Vatican, we can’t fault the Padres in San Jose County for their expert
placement of this billboard.
Seriously, if that’s not reaching your “target demographic,” we don’t know what is.
Wait … a couple “Hail Mary’s” later all is forgiven, right?
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