No mention of it being at a La Raza ("The Race") Lowrider show until the 11th paragraph.
A fight at a Kent car show left 10 people wounded, on the second day of the show at the La Plaza shopping center parking lot. Police gang detectives are working the scene.
Police say there were likely more than one shooter, though they are uncertain of how many were involved. The ages of the wounded vary from 14 to 32.
A poster for the event said it was a free, all-ages lowrider show sponsored by Lokos music store. Besides a car show, several music groups were scheduled to perform.
The owner of a nearby restaurant said an off-duty police officer had just finished a meal with his family when the shooting started. He left to go to his car, but returned to the restaurant and told everyone to get away from the windows.
The restaurant owner, who did not want her name in the paper, said she had been intimidated throughout the weekend by the rowdy crowds at the car show.
Before the shooting, she said, she saw two men fighting on a corner at the edge of the plaza.
#1
An associated article from last last night says that it may have started over a paint job....
Close by, in neighboring Pyallup the Good Guys car show is also going on this weekend. Think of it as a Pacific NW version of Hot August Nights in Reno. When I first heard about the shooting, that is where I thought it was, as I am not a big follower of the low riders....
[Al Jazeera] Malawi's president has accused opposition leaders of treason and blamed them for the deaths of at least 18 anti-government demonstrators this week. In a speech on Friday, Bingu wa Mutharika accused Joyce Banda, his estranged deputy, John Tembo, the opposition leader and two civil society leaders of being behind the demonstrations.
"The blood of these people who have died is on you," he said. "Let their spirits haunt you at night."
Mutharika said his patience has worn out: "This time I'll go after you! Even if you hide in holes I'll smoke you out!", warned the president.
The speech came a day after he said protesters were "being led by Satan".
Rioters, protesting against mismanagement of the economy and a shortage of fuel, ransacked the offices of Mutharika's Democratic Progressive Party in Mzuzu on Wednesday, demanding he step down.
With only 7,500 officers in this nation of 13 million people, police were quickly overwhelmed and used teargas and sometimes live ammunition to beat back thousands of people who erupted into the streets in cities across the country.
A heavy police and military presence remained in place on the streets of Malawi's major cities on Friday, as mourners gathered to bury some of the dead.
Seven of the protesters killed in the northern city of Mzuzu during Wednesday's violence were laid to rest Friday. But local authorities first tried to block the service, saying Mutharika had ordered them to stop the group funeral to avoid further violence.
The violent response from the security forces prompted international condemnation from the United States, European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... and Malawi's former ruler, Britannia.
Mutharika first came to power in a 2004 election, and was re-elected in May 2009.
Tensions have been growing this year over worsening shortages of fuel and foreign currency, however. High unemployment alongside a deteriorating economic situation also threaten to reverse development gains made in the early years of Mutharika's presidency.
Mutharika, a 77-year-old former World Bank economist, won widespread praise from international institutions and donor governments for pushing through economic reforms and clamping down on corruption. But he also has alienated many former allies including his predecessor, whom he accused of plotting to assassinate him.
Malawi has however enjoyed relative peace and stability in the past decade.
This week, protesters attacked businesses belonging to the president's political allies. Looters in the capital of Lilongwe targeted shops belonging to ruling party officials, witnesses said.
Elections are not due again in Malawi until 2014, and Mutharika is barred from seeking a third term.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/24/2011 00:00 ||
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Hugo Chavez returned to Venezuela on Saturday after undergoing chemotherapy treatment for his cancer in Cuba. The 56-year-old tyrant leader underwent an operation in Cuba a month ago for a cancerous tumor in his pelvis.
Chavez, who was greeted at the airport by members of his cabinet and top military officials, said he expected a quick recovery.
"I am very happy to be back. We will conquer this disease with the help of God and medical science in order to continue paving the way for a new motherland," said Chavez.
He added that Venezuela "cannot lose its way" or "become a colony" again but did not elaborate.
On Friday, Chavez said he had "successfully" finished a first round of chemotherapy and was getting ready for the second round, but did not discuss his schedule of treatment.
"There will be several rounds in order to win this battle and eliminate all risk of malignant cells." He also promised "unsurpassable" courage in his fight against the cancer.
Earlier this month, Chavez asked the National Assembly for permission to go to Cuba to continue treatment following his June operation. Though the National Assembly unanimously approved his request, required for the president to leave the country for more than five days, opposition leaders insisted it was not constitutional for Chavez to exercise executive authority from Cuba.
Critics of the president have demanded more details about his condition, as well as answers to why he cannot be treated in Venezuela, where authorities claim to have a quality health care system. Venezuela's government has not explained the extent of Chavez's cancer or provided any other details about the disease.
#2
Any serious trauma has a shock component. I am curious how Chavez copes with this insult. He is a fighter or at least sounds like one. We shall see what he is made of. Key to his dealing with this would be those close to him and public support.
I read this in the magazine about a month ago, but it was not immediately available on the web. What is below is a bit less than half of the article, I think. I thought it might be interesting to several 'Burgers, especially including Joe!
Elijah Stommel, a neurologist at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock medical center in New Hampshire, often has to deliver bad news to his patients, but there is one diagnosis he particularly dreads. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, kills motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, progressively paralyzing the body until even swallowing and breathing become impossible. The cause of ALS is unknown. Though of little solace to the afflicted, Stommel used to offer one comforting fact: ALS was rare, randomly striking just two of 100,000 people a year.
Then, a couple of years ago, in an effort to gain more insight into the disease, Stommel enlisted students to punch the street addresses of about 200 of his ALS patients into Google Earth. The distribution of cases that emerged on the computer-generated map of New England shocked him. In numbers far higher than national statistics predicted, his current and deceased patients' homes were clustered around lakes and other bodies of water. The flurry of dots marking their locations was thickest of all around bucolic Mascoma Lake, a rural area just 10 miles from Dartmouth Medical School. About a dozen cases turned up there, the majority diagnosed within the past decade. The pattern did not appear random at all. "I started thinking maybe there was something in the water," Stommel says.
That "something," he now suspects, could be the environmental toxin beta-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA. This compound is produced by cyanobacteria, the blue-green algae that live in soil, lakes, and oceans. Cyanobacteria are consumed by fish and other aquatic creatures. Recent studies have found BMAA in seafood, suggesting that certain diets and locations may put people at particular risk. More worrisome, blooms of cyanobacteria are becoming increasingly common, fueling fears that their toxic by-product may be quietly fomenting an upsurge in ALS--and possibly other neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's as well. But...but...fish is good for you!
Hints about the potential health threat of BMAA stretch back half a century to the remote Pacific island of Guam. There, in the aftermath of World War II, U.S. Army physicians encountered an outbreak of a strange syndrome that the native people called lytico-bodig--the term lytico signifying paralysis and bodig dementia. Some victims had ALS-like symptoms, others exhibited the rigid posture of Parkinson's disease, and still others displayed the mental fogginess typical of Alzheimer's.
Cox then set about getting brain tissue samples collected during autopsies of six Chamorros who had died of lytico-bodig. He compared those samples with brain tissue taken from 15 Canadians, two who had died of Alzheimer's and 13 with no signs of neuropathology before death. He contacted Susan Murch, a biochemist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and an expert in finding biomolecules in human tissues, to test the samples in a double-blind study. All six of the Chamorros' brains contained BMAA. Stunningly, so did the two Alzheimer's brains from Canada, while the 13 controls had not a trace. "Suddenly, this was not a story about a remote people on a small island," Cox says.
At this point, Cox had a fresh mystery on his hands: How did BMAA find its way into the brains of Alzheimer's victims so far from Guam? An answer came when he traced the origin of the BMAA in cycad seeds to cyanobacteria growing in the plant's roots. It was not the plant but the associated microbes that were churning out the toxic chemical. The reach of BMAA, Cox concluded, extended far beyond the cycad trees of Guam. Cyanobacteria are among the most ubiquitous organisms on earth. They are routinely found in soil but also in water, where the microbes form blooms familiar as the slimy green film often seen on the surfaces of rivers and lakes. Constituting the foundation of the aquatic food chain, cyanobacteria are a favorite meal of fish and mollusks, which are in turn eaten by us.
When Cox pondered cyanobacteria's central role in the planet's food web, he says, "I felt for a moment as if I were staring into the abyss." It does put a few things into perspective, doesn't it?
The Miami team found BMAA in 23 out of 24 samples derived from 12 Alzheimer's patients but in only 2 out of 24 samples taken from 12 controls. They also tested samples from 13 ALS patients, all of which tested positive for BMAA. However....
The field has been dogged by clashing findings, leading some critics to question whether BMAA truly is a potent neurotoxin. "You can stuff mice with as much BMAA as you like and you simply don't see it in the brain," says Christopher Shaw, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Furthermore, he says, no known mechanism can explain how an amino acid that is alien to human biology could travel across the blood-brain barrier, get incorporated into proteins, and then trickle out to cause disease.
Surprisingly, Cox agrees that the overall risk from BMAA is probably low. In fact, he eats shrimp and crab with relish. "ALS is very rare, and only a few people are genetically at risk," he says. "Even if BMAA causes common disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, that still doesn't mean we should shun seafood." Commercial fishermen generally are not working in areas heavily contaminated with cyanobacteria, he notes, so the danger of exposure in the United States and Canada should be modest for those who eat typical store-bought or homegrown food and avoid drinking--as Cox puts it--"green, smelly" water. I should be safe, then.
But this might be a good time to unload that lakefront vacation home.
The data suggest that ALS is 2.5 times more common than average within one-half mile of a lake or pond where cyanobacteria have bloomed. Stommel hypothesizes that people living around the lakes may have breathed in BMAA from the air, eaten fish contaminated with it, or accidentally swallowed it while swimming. He and Cox are conducting tests of brain bank tissue to see if the ALS patients in these regions do in fact have elevated levels of BMAA.
While the evidence mounts, Cox is already thinking about ways to detect toxic exposure before it causes disease. He recalls the intriguing case of a woman who died of an ALS-like illness called progressive supranuclear palsy. For decades before her death, she had a habit of cutting her hair, dating it, and putting it in her diary. Since virtually everything consumed leaves a trace residue in hair, Cox and biochemist Murch realized they had an opportunity to see if the woman had been exposed to BMAA. Her hair, they discovered, had been accumulating the toxin as early as 1939, with the level creeping upward over the next two decades. By 1957 the neurotoxin had reached the kind of abundance that Cox had measured in Alzheimer's patients. The amount peaked around 1962 and then began to decrease, with none detectable at the time of the woman's death. Interesting, but how does it correlate, I wonder?
In the future, doctors might routinely test for BMAA overload. They might even be able to counteract its effects. Before health officials are likely to consider limiting environmental exposure to BMAA, however, they will need stronger proof of harm. To that end, Mash would like to see the compound tested again in primates. "The one monkey trial ever done was certainly very provocative," she says. To her frustration, funding agencies have been reluctant to spend money on a theory so contentious.
For now, Mash and Cox grasp at each clue hoping it will prove the clincher. Researchers in France and Sweden have, over the past couple of years, shown that when BMAA is injected into rodents it gets incorporated into their eyes (pdf), where it could build up and potentially cause damage to cells in the retina. Almost half of the Chamorros who died of lytico-bodig showed damage to retinal cells. Most experts attribute that damage to a parasite, not BMAA. But John Steele, a neurologist at Guam Memorial Hospital who led some of the key research on the disease, adds a detail that sounds. . .fishy: Despite intensive research, no one has yet identified what the parasite could have been. Algae blooms are often linked to climate warming, yet this author missed that opportunity.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/24/2011 15:59 ||
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#1
"Stommel enlisted students to punch the street addresses of about 200 of his ALS patients into Google Earth" May other problems show up as well.
This information is hard to secure for the average person because of patient privacy. When a toxic waste dump is discovered to be a cause of illness in any community it takes time to discover. Should a person be able to plot the hot spots then the alarm will sound. I did this myself and had so many stick pins in my wall map you couldn't see the streets in some concentrated populated areas. Take your pick, brain cancer, ALS, MS, birth defects and Lung cancer. Yes, higher populated areas stood out but small communities also. Just for information sake for myself. Nothing to prove. When you went to purchase a new home in a new area I wonder if you new some of the medical history would it impact your decision. Then also I was a big time fresh water swimmer, lakes , rivers and ponds. O well you gotta die of something.
#2
Reminded me of the scary as hell 'coin toss scene' from No Country For Old Men. Javier Bardem, the killer, won the best supporting actor Oscar hands down for this, in a scene with almost no action at all, just dialogue. It doesn't even need context, other than to know that he is a stone cold killer.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Hugo Chavez returned to Venezuela on Saturday after undergoing chemotherapy treatment for his cancer in Cuba. The 56-year-old 
