The number of people who die each day because of medical errors—physician mistakes, hospital-related illness, and reactions to FDA-approved medications—is the equivalent of six jumbo jets falling out of the sky. More Americans are dying each year at the hands of medicine than all American casualties in WWI and the Civil War combined.

The US national healthcare debate ignores these health statistics, and will not foster the real change necessary to promote safe and natural medical alternatives to toxic prescription drugs and dangerous surgeries. Health insurance costs will continue to rise as long as healthcare reform is manipulated by pharmaceutical companies and other special interests.

The medical environment has become a labyrinth of interlocking corporate, hospital, and governmental boards of directors, infiltrated by the drug companies. Pharmaceutical corporations are paying our legislators, television and radio stations, schools, and news outlets to keep this information from you.

Drug company representatives write about new medicines in glowing articles, which are then signed by physicians who are paid handsomely for their cooperation, though they may not even know the adverse side effects of the drugs they promote. The most toxic substances are often approved first, while milder and more natural alternatives are ignored for financial reasons. And adverse interactions between prescription drugs are largely untested while more Americans take multiple drug combinations, often for medical conditions related to simple vitamin and nutrient deficiencies.

In the United States, 30 million pounds of antibiotics are used each year. In hospitals today, the overprescription of antibiotics has encouraged the emergence of superbugs – MRSA staph infections, Clostridium difficile and others. The CDC reported 94,360 serious MRSA infections in 2005. Deaths from C. difficile alone increased over 300% from 1999 to 2004.

It’s Death by Medicine.

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Four Egyptian nationals were in custody in Milan on Sunday and tension in a heavily immigrant quarter was high after the death of an Egyptian man at the weekend sparked some of the most serious racially motivated violence in the city for years.

Windows were broken and cars overturned in the violence as young, mainly north-African immigrants clashed with police for much of Saturday night following a stabbing incident. Police named the 19-year-old victim as Hamed Mamoud El Fayed Adou and indicated his attackers were South American.

The incident came a month after Italy’s worst ever outbreak of racially motivated rioting, in the southern town of Rosarno. That involved clashes between local people and migrant workers. Although nobody was killed, it added to a swelling and increasingly heated debate in Italy about immigration and racism.

The incident in Milan comes ahead of local elections across Italy next month where immigration is already becoming a hot campaigning issue. Political reaction yesterday suggested a sharp divide between right and left on immigration, the appropriate response to soaring numbers of illegal migrants, and how to respond to the increasing incidents of violence.

The rioting occurred in Via Padova, a boulevard near the central railway station that Riccardo de Corato, Milan’s deputy mayor and a member of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right governing party, described as one of the city’s most multi-ethnic quarters.

He described the area as “like the wild west, divided among gangs of north Africans and South Americans”.

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YAKAGE, Okayama Pref. — Today there are colorful portable gadgets and iPhone applications to cover up the sounds people make when using the toilet, but a museum here has a large bronze urn dating from the 19th century that could be the earliest form of such devices.

Because many Japanese women are embarrassed to have other people hear the sounds of the more private bodily functions, most ladies’ rooms in department stores and office buildings are equipped with a device commonly known as the Otohime — originally the brand name of a product developed by Toto Ltd. — that emits the sound of a toilet flushing.

Toto put on sale its first Otohime product in 1988 to cater to the delicate sensibilities of women and save water at the same time. Before the device was introduced it was customary for women to flush the toilet twice — the extra flush being to mask the bodily sounds.

Toto spokeswoman Akiko Yamasaki said a major drought that hit the city of Fukuoka in 1978 partly motivated the company, based in the nearby city of Kitakyushu, to develop the product.

Several other cities also faced water shortages in the late 1970s due to factory construction, and Toto, known for its high-tech Washlet toilets, came to realize the need to address the female habit of flushing toilets twice.

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He was charming and single, she was bored and stuck in a sterile marriage, and their encounter in the aisles of a local supermarket seemed like a chance for them to change their lives for the better.

But the affair ended in betrayal, recrimination and death after a sequence of events as lurid as the plot of a pulp novel.

Prosecutors in Tokyo called yesterday for a 17-year sentence for Takeshi Kuwabara for murdering his lover, Rie Isohata, last year.

But the most extraordinary thing about the case was not the killing — by strangulation, after a bitter argument last April — but the circumstances in which the couple met.

Although Kuwabara inadvertently fell in love with Mrs Isohata, he had been paid to track her down and seduce her as a professional wakaresaseya — or “splitter upper” — hired by her husband to provide him with grounds for a divorce.

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A plot to smuggle more than £200m of cocaine was foiled when a boat carrying the drugs was shipwrecked off the Irish coast, a court has heard.

John Edney, 57, of Main Road, Sutton-at-Hone, Kent, is accused of providing three 4×4 vehicles used by the drugs gang.

Blackfriars Crown Court heard Mr Edney denied conspiracy to supply a class A drug, namely cocaine.

The court heard a total of 1,554kg (3,425lb) of the drug was discovered.

The court heard that on or before 9 July 2007, he conspired together with Michael Daly, Alan Wells and others to supply the drug.

According to prosecuting counsel Mark Gadsden, Daly, 49, a retired Metropolitan Police detective sergeant who organised the logistics, and Wells, 56, previously pleaded guilty to their part in the conspiracy.

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There was a time, not too long ago (relatively speaking), that governments and the groups of elites that controlled them did not find it necessary to conscript themselves into wars of disinformation. Propaganda was relatively straightforward. The lies were much simpler. The control of information flow was easily directed. In fact, during the early Middle-Ages in most European countries commoners were not even allowed to own a Bible, nor was the Bible allowed to be interpreted from Latin to another language, let alone any other tome that might breed “dangerous ideas”. This was due in large part to the established feudal system and its hierarchy of royals and clergy. Rules were enforced with the threat of property confiscation and execution for anyone who strayed from the rigid socio-political structure. Those who had theological, metaphysical, or scientific information outside of the conventional and scripted collective world view were tortured and slaughtered. The elites kept the information to themselves, and removed its remnants from mainstream recognition, sometimes for centuries before it was rediscovered.

With the advent of anti-feudalism, and most importantly the success of the American Revolution, elites were no longer able to dominate information with the edge of a blade or the barrel of a gun. The establishment of Democracies (and Democratic Republics), with their philosophy of open government and rule by the people, compelled Aristocratic minorities to plot more subtle ways of obstructing the truth and thereby maintaining their hold over the world without exposing themselves to retribution from the masses. Thus, the complex art of disinformation was born. The technique, the “magic” of the lie, was refined and perfected. The mechanics of the human mind and the human soul became an endless obsession for the elites.

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Most voters believe we are living in broken Britain, according to a poll.

Nearly three fifths say they hardly recognise the country they are living in and are deeply pessimistic about the state of Britain today.

The survey shows that 70 per cent believe that society is now broken and 68 per cent believe people who play by the rules get a raw deal.

Many say they are worried by the pace of social change and 42 per cent admit they would like to emigrate, the Populus poll for the Times found.

Women, working-class people and Tory voters were more likely to say that they hardly recognise their own country.

Overall, 64 per cent think that Britain is going in the wrong direction and just 31 per cent believe it is on the right track.

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Always find yourself with nothing to do while you’re sitting on the can? Introducing iPoo – a new iPhone application that gives you something to do – while you poo! iPoo is a social community that brings together pooers from around the world. Write messages, draw graffiti on the virtual stalls, see what others are posting – all while dropping a deuce!

Visit: http://www.ipoonow.com/

Andersson, known to his patients as Dr. Syed, had a wall of photos at his home office in San Francisco’s Lakeshore district, showing him with actress Julia Roberts and actress-model Elizabeth Hurley, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and other notables.

His Web site boasted of his research that had led to cures for everything from stretch marks to hair loss.

San Francisco prosecutors say it was all a lie. The pictures were digitally altered, the credentials and research manufactured, his patients – children told they had cancer, adults injected with drugs they didn’t need – taken for thousands of dollars.

Andersson, 66, was charged with 51 counts this week in San Francisco Superior Court, including practicing medicine without a license and grand theft through deception. He appeared in court Wednesday and was ordered held on $1 million bail.