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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Anne Frank’s adolescent curiosity about sexuality is too much for a Virginia school district that has pulled the complete version of the young Jewish girl’s diary off its curriculum and off its shelves over a parent’s complaint about sexually explicit passages.

Culpeper County Public Schools has pulled Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition off the shelves because parents complained “over the sexual nature of the vagina passage in the definitive edition,” reports the Culpeper, Virginia, Star-Exponent.

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Chris Hedges gives us a quick sketch of his latest book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”. He discusses the real role of the US media as one of the main culprits in promoting a sense of exceptionalism by disseminating fantasy, and poisoning civil and political discourse with entertainment and trivia. He talks about the spectacle surrounding Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign and his function as a brand just like any other commercial commodity brand advertised and promoted by corporations, the last decade’s coup d’état in slow motion, and much more!

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A British survey revealed that Facebook is responsible for 20% of divorces in the country. The survey took into account five thousand petitions for separation and found 989 instances that cited the network of relationships.

But is the Internet a tool that facilitates betrayals? According to psychologist Carmen Magalhães, specializing in relationships, it can distort reality. “Everything can be planned and calculated on the Internet. The shy becomes spirited and outgoing. Pictures shown are the best, with angles that people want to show,” he says. “It’s easier to wear a mask and seductive escape from reality. The man loves the game of conquest and has a tool that facilitates their escapades without interfering in their day to day, as he can talk of work,” he added.

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