Friday, December 14, 2012

Frog-in-bucket-of-milk folklore leads to potential new antibiotics

Dec. 12, 2012 ? Following up on an ancient Russian way of keeping milk from going sour -- by putting a frog in the bucket of milk -- scientists have identified a wealth of new antibiotic substances in the skin of the Russian Brown frog. The study appears in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research.

A. T. Lebedev and colleagues explain that amphibians secrete antimicrobial substances called peptides through their skin. These compounds make up the majority of their skin secretions and act as a first line of defense against bacteria and other microorganisms that thrive in the wet places frogs, toads, salamanders and other amphibians live. A previous study identified on the skin of the Russian Brown frog 21 substances with antibiotic and other potential medical activity. Lebedev's team set out to find more of these potential medical treasures.

They used a sensitive laboratory technique to expand the list of such substances on the frogs' skin, identifying 76 additional substances of this kind. They describe lab tests in which some of the substances performed as well against Salmonella and Staphylococcus bacteria as some prescription antibiotic medicines. "These peptides could be potentially useful for the prevention of both pathogenic and antibiotic resistant bacterial strains while their action may also explain the traditional experience of rural populations," the scientists concluded.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Chemical Society.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. T. Yu. Samgina, E. A Vorontsov, V. A. Gorshkov, E. Hakalehto, O. Hanninen, R. A. Zubarev, A. T. Lebedev. Composition and Antimicrobial Activity of the Skin Peptidome of Russian Brown FrogRana temporaria. Journal of Proteome Research, 2012; : 121113155850001 DOI: 10.1021/pr300890m

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/Og1tDQdGTes/121212130858.htm

the civil wars duggar miscarriage roman holiday belize adele lyrics best new artist 2012 grammys

Green Blog: Campus Divestment Fight Resonates in the East

For apartheid, it was universities in the West and Midwest that got the ball rolling. On the issue of Sudan and Darfur, the cause caught fire earliest at Ivy League schools. But for the latest college divestment movement, most of the action is unfolding at schools like Middlebury, the University of Vermont, Bowdoin, the University of New Hampshire, Tufts,? Vassar and Swarthmore.

Five weeks into a full-court press, a quixotic campaign to persuade universities to rid their endowments of stock in fossil fuel companies seems to be striking the deepest chord on campuses in the Northeast, organizers report.

To highlight the role that fossil fuel emissions play in global warming, students at more than 100 colleges across the country are protesting the investment of their school?s endowment funds in large companies like Exxon, BP and Shell

Some of the groups have made gains earlier than they had expected.

Unity College in Maine, a small institution with an enrollment of just 578, responded in November by adopting a policy of working with its investment firm to minimize all holdings in coal, oil and gas stocks, for example.

?The trustees have looked at the college?s finances in the context of our ethical obligation to our students, and they have chosen to make a stand,? Stephen Mulkey, the college president, wrote in a letter to other administrators.

Middlebury College in Vermont recently responded to students? efforts by revealing that approximately 3.6 percent of its $900 million endowment is invested in fossil fuel, followed by a pledge from administrators to begin looking at divestment.

At Hampshire College in Massachusetts, the administration approved a policy of investing in environmentally responsible companies that it said would rid its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.

Most administrations, however, have ?responded unfavorably or, at best, guardedly. At Harvard, where 72 percent favored divestment in a recent vote in which roughly half the student body turned out, the administration said it was not considering getting rid of fossil fuel stocks. In an editorial, the school newspaper warned about ?the logic and practical ramifications of divestment.?

Organized by a grass-roots alliance including 350.org, the Responsible Endowments Coalition, the Energy Action Coalition, the Sierra Student Coalition and As You Sow, the movement has established an online home, called Fossil Free, that offers students an arsenal of organizational material. A divestment tool kit outlines a six-step plan for students looking to create a successful campus movement, digital petition links, templates and more.

Dan Jubelirer, a Tufts sophomore from Durham, N.C., said the technology had mostly been helpful for connecting an existing network, however. ?While social media is great for amplifying their message, the success for the Tufts Divest for Our Future group mostly hinges on ?old-school? methods, such as word of mouth and in-person meetings,?? he said.

A group called Students for a Just and Stable Future oversees that digital network. At its last meeting, only seven of the 12 students attending were actually in the room. The other five were videoconferencing via Skype.

Of the 15 colleges that have chapters of that group on their campuses, 14 are in the Northeast. As the movement grows, student activists on the West Coast are intently watching and learning from the Northeastern contingent.

?I think it?s great that those schools on the East have gotten such an early start, and it?s interesting to see how their administrations are reacting,? said Meagan Tokunaga, a sophomore from Albany, Calif. who has been organizing divestment efforts there at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

Ms. Tokunaga recently led a candlelight march through the campus to deliver a letter for the presidents of all five Claremont Colleges demanding that they divest.

While many organizations have been pushing students to act, the most high-profile campaign is run by 350.org, led by the climate activist Bill McKibben. Last month he embarked on a ?Do the Math? tour, scheduling campus rallies around the country at which he encourages students to organize.

In October, I attended a dry-run ?event ?that Mr. McKibben organized at the University of Vermont. He bluntly warned the students about what they might be in for. ?Some of you will need to go to jail, and we will be there for you,? he said. ?If you join this fight, it will be the most important thing.?

After the rally, some students said they felt moved to action, but others were hesitant.

?It sounds like a cool message and movement, but I don?t see myself going out on the lawn protesting,? said Matt Sanford, a sophomore from Stonington, Conn.

Students who have signed on are weighing how far they are willing to go to ?push their administrations to take action.

?We think that the university is willing to work with us,? said Dan Cmejla, a junior from Sudbury, Mass., who also spoke at the University of Vermont event. ?We don?t want to impugn the reputation of the university unless we absolutely have to.?

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/campus-divestment-fight-resonates-in-the-east/?partner=rss&emc=rss

ohio school shooting sean young arrested matt kenseth bridge to nowhere primary results dale earnhardt jr michigan primary

Thursday, December 13, 2012

When Renewing Your Cellphone Service Contract, Subsidize Your Plan and not the Cost of a New Phone

When Renewing Your Cellphone Service Contract, Subsidize Your Plan and not the Cost of a New PhoneTo lock down your business for two years, cellular service providers offer free or heavily discounted phones. After the two years are up, you get that opportunity again. But what if you're happy with your current phone and don't want a new one? If you sign another two-year contract, you can ask your provider to apply that subsidy to the cost of service instead of a new phone.

While reading a completely unrelated post about the horrors of eBay and PayPal by developer Vladimir Gurovich, I noticed this small little detail. I did a little research and it turns out you can actually have your subsidy?often around $250?applied to your monthly bill instead. That's a little more than 10% off the cost of service, which may be more valuable than a new phone for some. If you're happy with your phone and your service, call up your provider and ask. Because this isn't often done, you may have to explain the situation a bit, but in the end it'll save you good amount of cash.

Thinking of Selling on eBay With PayPal? Think Again! | CodeNerdz via Swissmiss

Photo by Fernando Eusebio.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/XQKVe_C-qqA/when-renewing-your-cellphone-service-contract-subsidize-your-plan-and-not-the-cost-of-a-new-phone

ahmad bradshaw halftime super bowl 2012 super bowl score madonna super bowl performance superbowl commercials best superbowl commercials madonna half time

Obama's fiscal cliff strategy is tricky balance

FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2012 file photo, President Barack Obama, accompanied by House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, speaks to reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, as he hosted a meeting of the bipartisan, bicameral leadership of Congress to discuss the deficit and economy in Washington. Playing both sides, Obama is trying to balance his public pressure campaign on Republicans over the looming ?fiscal cliff? with his private negotiations with GOP leaders. Advisers see the carrot-and-stick approach as key to winning concessions from Republicans on taxes and reaching a deal to avert the series of year-end tax hikes and spending cuts. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2012 file photo, President Barack Obama, accompanied by House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, speaks to reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, as he hosted a meeting of the bipartisan, bicameral leadership of Congress to discuss the deficit and economy in Washington. Playing both sides, Obama is trying to balance his public pressure campaign on Republicans over the looming ?fiscal cliff? with his private negotiations with GOP leaders. Advisers see the carrot-and-stick approach as key to winning concessions from Republicans on taxes and reaching a deal to avert the series of year-end tax hikes and spending cuts. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

(AP) ? Playing both sides, President Barack Obama is trying to balance his public pressure campaign on Republicans over the looming "fiscal cliff" with his private negotiations with GOP leaders.

The White House is loath to abandon the two-pronged strategy even as the Dec. 31 deadline nears. Obama's advisers see the carrot-and-stick approach as key to winning concessions from Republicans on taxes and reaching a deal to avert the series of year-end tax hikes and spending cuts.

But Obama's campaign to rally public support for his fiscal cliff positions has irked some Republicans. And continuing to publicly lambaste GOP lawmakers as obstructionists for not giving in to White House demands that tax rates rise on the top 2 percent of income earners could undercut trust between Obama and Republicans in their private talks.

For now, the White House says it plans to continue on both tracks. Asked whether the president would be more focused on his public efforts or private talks, White House spokesman Jay Carney said "both."

"We will continue to engage with leaders on Capitol Hill, we will continue to engage with a broader coalition of people who have a stake in this, and that includes ordinary Americans out in the country," Carney said.

But Republicans have made clear that they see the president's public campaign as a hindrance to private negotiations.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday that the White House appears to be placing "a higher premium on politics than the American jobs that are at stake." And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said that the country already knows "the president is a very good campaigner. What we don't know is whether he has the leadership qualities necessary to lead his party to a bipartisan agreement on a big issue like this."

Perhaps with that in mind, there are indications that the White House is scaling back its public campaign as negotiations enter a more serious phase. Unless Congress acts, taxes will increase on all income earners on Jan. 1, and a slew of spending cuts will begin to take effect the following day.

After holding a flurry of fiscal cliff-focused events in recent weeks ? from a Twitter town hall to a photo opportunity in a Virginia family's basement apartment ? the president is expected to spend much of this week out of the spotlight.

In the one public appearance he did make this week ? a campaign-style rally at an auto plant in Michigan ? the president held back his criticism of Republicans. Instead, he put the onus for reaching a fiscal cliff deal on Congress as a whole.

"We can solve this problem. All Congress needs to do is pass a law that would prevent a tax hike on the first $250,000 of everybody's income," Obama said, referring to his position that tax rates be increased on individual incomes over $200,000 and on family incomes over $250,000.

The president's restrained rhetoric was particularly notable given that his remarks came a day after he met privately at the White House with Boehner, their first one-on-one session in 18 months.

Both sides have agreed to not publicly discuss any details of that meeting, and White House officials wouldn't say whether Obama's dialed-back approach reflected any progress in the talks.

Even if Obama continues to retreat from his public cliff campaigning, he'll have plenty of surrogates to pick up the slack.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released new online and radio advertisements Wednesday targeting 21 House Republicans and urging voters in their districts to press them to not "hold the middle class hostage to get more tax cuts for millionaires."

And Obama's re-election campaign, which is still up and running more than a month after Election Day, emailed supporters asking them to call Republican lawmakers. In the email, deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter wrote, "Let's get one thing straight: If your taxes go up, Republicans will have made a conscious choice to let that happen."

Obama advisers came out of Election Day banking on being able to translate the enthusiasm ? and massive database ? it used to build support for candidate Obama to build support for a re-elected Obama's policies. It's something the president's aides acknowledge they failed to do during his first term, including during negotiations on the health care overhaul.

There is some evidence to support the Obama team's assertion that its public campaign is working. An Associated Press-GfK poll suggested that 48 percent of Americans want tax cuts to expire in January on earnings over $250,000 but continue for lower incomes. An additional 32 percent said the tax cuts should continue for everybody, which has been the view of Republican lawmakers who say raising taxes on the wealthy would squelch their ability to create jobs.

Some Republican-leaning groups also have sought to build public support for GOP efforts to continue tax cuts for all income earners. Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-backed conservative group, announced a $500,000 television advertising buy last week. The TV spots assert that the president's solution to reducing the deficit is "a huge tax increase" and urge the public to call the president and voice opposition to his proposals.

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-12-12-Fiscal%20Cliff-Obama's%20Strategy/id-5e90e4ed065342728a11ea1f62e965ed

rush limbaugh rush limbaugh msnbc cbs news ny times karl rove Election 2012 Results

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Seven primitive galaxies at the dawn of time

Dec. 12, 2012 ? Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered a previously unseen population of seven primitive galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 3 percent of its present age. The deepest images to date from Hubble yield the first statistically robust sample of galaxies that tells how abundant they were close to the era when galaxies first formed.

The results show a smooth decline in the number of galaxies with increasing look-back time to about 450 million years after the big bang. The observations support the idea that galaxies assembled continuously over time and also may have provided enough radiation to reheat, or reionize, the universe a few hundred million years after the big bang.

These pioneering observations blaze a trail for future exploration of this epoch by NASA's next-generation spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope. Looking deeper into the universe also means peering farther back in time. The universe is now 13.7 billion years old. The newly discovered galaxies are seen as they looked 350 million to 600 million years after the big bang. Their light is just arriving at Earth now.

The greater depth of the new Hubble images, together with a carefully designed survey strategy, allows this work to go further than previous studies, thereby providing the first reliable census of this epoch, say the researchers. Notably, one of the galaxies may be a distance record breaker, observed 380 million years after the birth of our universe in the big bang, corresponding to a redshift of 11.9.

The results are from an ambitious Hubble survey of an intensively studied patch of sky known as the Ultra Deep Field (UDF). In the new 2012 campaign, called UDF 2012, a team of astronomers led by Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to peer deeper into space in near infrared light than any previous Hubble observation. The observations were made over a period of six weeks during August and September, and the first scientific results are now appearing in a series of scientific papers. The UDF 2012 team is publicly releasing these unique data, after preparing them for other research groups to use.

Astronomers study the distant universe in near-infrared light because the expansion of space stretches ultraviolet and visible light from galaxies into infrared wavelengths, a phenomenon called "redshift." The more distant a galaxy, the higher its redshift.

A major goal of the new program was to determine how rapidly the number of galaxies increases over time in the early universe. This measure is the key evidence for how quickly galaxies build up their constituent stars.

"Our study has taken the subject forward in two ways," Ellis explained. "First, we have used Hubble to make longer exposures than previously. The added depth is essential to reliably probe the early period of cosmic history. Second, we have used Hubble's available color filters very effectively to more precisely measure galaxy distances."

The team estimated the galaxy distances by studying their colors through a carefully chosen set of four filters at specific near-infrared wavelengths. "We added an additional filter, and undertook much deeper exposures in some filters than in earlier work in order to convincingly reject the possibility that some of our galaxies might be foreground objects," said team member James Dunlop of the Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh.

For galaxies whose light has been shifted to infrared wavelengths, Dunlop said, the intervening hydrogen will have absorbed all of the light that was originally emitted as visible light and most of the light initially released at near-infrared wavelengths. Therefore, these galaxies will not be detected in most of Hubble's filters. They will only be seen in Hubble's longer-wavelength infrared filters, which hold the key to discovering the earliest galaxies.

The results from the UDF 2012 campaign mean there may be many undiscovered galaxies even deeper in space waiting to be uncovered by the Webb telescope. "Although we may have reached back as far as Hubble will see, Hubble has, in a sense, set the stage for Webb," noted team member Anton Koekemoer of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., who oversaw the Hubble observations and combined the images. "Our work indicates that there may be a rich field of even earlier galaxies that Webb will be able to study."

Astronomers have long debated whether hot stars in such early galaxies could have provided enough radiation to warm the cold hydrogen that formed soon after the big bang. This process, called "reionization," is thought to have occurred 200 million to a billion years after our universe's birth. This process made the universe transparent to light, allowing astronomers to look far back into time. The galaxies in the new study are seen in this early epoch.

"Observations of the microwave afterglow from the big bang tell us that reionization happened more than about 13 billion years ago," said Brant Robertson of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Our data confirms that reionization was a drawn-out process occurring over several hundred million years with galaxies slowly building up their stars and chemical elements. There wasn't a single dramatic moment when galaxies formed; it was a gradual process."

The team's finding on the distant galaxy census has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/fZr53U4Ng2w/121212141807.htm

gary carter died cmas cmas tcu dr. oz heart attack grill las vegas the heart attack grill

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Nazareth College Arts Center Presents renowned vocal ensemble ...

Related Media

Anonymous 4

ROCHESTER, NY (12/10/2012)(readMedia)-- Nazareth College Arts Center is pleased to present an evening of virtuosic ensemble singing by Anonymous 4, featuring medieval and early American holiday music. The performance's medieval compositions will include selections from the British Isles, France, and Spain through the early 15th century; the evening's American music was composed primarily in the 18th century.

Anonymous 4 is celebrating 25 years together. The quartet has twice been voted one of Billboard's top classical artists, and their release, American Angels: Songs of Hope, Redemption & Glory, was one of Amazon's Top 100 Overall Customer Favorites across all categories. Just last week, they were featured on NPR's "Morning Edition."

Marjorie Roth, professor in the Nazareth College Department of Music and a scholar of music history, will lead a pre-performance lecture at 7 p.m. in the Peace Theater (room A14), located in the lower level of the Arts Center.

Tickets to Anonymous 4 are $30-$60.

The Nazareth College Arts Center's 2012-2013 Subscription Series is sponsored by M&T Bank, Wendy's Restaurants of Rochester, and the New York State Council on the Arts. The performance by Anonymous 4 is sponsored by Barbara and John Lovenheim and Larry and Nancy Peckham.

_______________________________________________________________________

For more than 40 years, the Nazareth College Arts Center has served as a venue and educational resource for students, educators, visual and performing artists, and audiences to create, study, and experience all areas of the arts. These cultural programs support the College's curriculum in music, art, and theatre arts, and provide area residents with opportunities to experience exceptional dance, children's theatre, and international entertainment.

The Nazareth College Arts Center is a nonprofit institution; attracts more than 80,000 adults and children annually; is the premier presenter of world-class dance, children's theatre, and international entertainment in Rochester; is the performance home of Rochester City Ballet and world-renowned Garth Fagan Dance, as well as the home of Rochester Children's Theatre and Bach Children's Chorus; houses the Nazareth College departments of art, music, and theatre arts, which present exceptional theatre productions, musicals, operas, recitals, and art exhibitions each year (events are open to the public); serves as a venue for auditions, art classes, music lessons, recitals, fundraisers, lectures, community theater productions, camps, workshops, and graduations; provides access to master classes, school performances, and subscription series shows for underserved youth; and presents an annual Dance Festival.

For more information, visit artscenter.naz.edu.

Source: http://readme.readmedia.com/Nazareth-College-Arts-Center-Presents-renowned-vocal-ensemble-Anonymous-4-in-a-magical-holiday-program/5154427

oakland shooting mega millions winning numbers autism speaks ubaldo jimenez ncaa final country music awards autism awareness

Rob Nabors is man behind many political deals (Washington Post)

Share With Friends: Share on FacebookTweet ThisPost to Google-BuzzSend on GmailPost to Linked-InSubscribe to This Feed | Rss To Twitter | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/269822268?client_source=feed&format=rss

the vow review luol deng culkin wooly mammoth no child left behind no child left behind neurofibromatosis

anger management quotes: The Science Of Self Improvement

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://oversimple-corvus.blogspot.com/2012/12/anger-management-quotes-science-of-self_9.html

grand canyon skywalk tonga pid corned beef hash the walking dead season 2 finale born free walking dead finale

Monday, December 10, 2012

llc - What does it mean to be registered as a professional company ...

This is dependent on the jurisdiction, you cannot ask such a question without telling what country/State/Province you're at.

In the USA, in many States licensed professionals providing personal services (like lawyers, CPA's, doctors, architects, civil engineers, cosmetologists, etc) are barred from working under LLC. In some States they must operate either as sole proprietors/partnerships or as corporations (for example, California), other States provide specific legal structures like PLLC and/or PC (professional corporation) which these professionals must use. Generally this is done to disallow the "limited" liability protection for personal services.

You should consult a legal professional whether or not you should use LLC or PLLC. If you're not a State-licensed professional, usually you wouldn't be limited in using LLC (for example, EA, licensed by the Federal Government, can operate under LLC in California). This depends on the specific State you're in.

Source: http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/44919/what-does-it-mean-to-be-registered-as-a-professional-company

metta world peace suspension apple earnings report john l smith apple earnings the glass castle jennifer hudson trial north korea threat

Internet and Online Business: Why Purchase EBooks - Benefits of ...

Ever since the idea of digital books took the publishing world by storm, millions of enthusiastic readers are looking for eBooks as the popular reading choice over hardbound paper copies. The best thing about eBooks is that you do not have to destroy the rainforests to produce paper on which to print the written word. Here are some benefits of choosing eBooks as your present and future reading choice.

Benefits of eBooks

What is an e-book? An e-book - also known as an electronic or a digital book - is the digitalized version of a full-length book manuscript. This can include links, hyperlinks, text, images, flowcharts and diagrams. eBooks can be written on any topic imaginable and can be of any length. All you need is an e-book reader to interpret the digital word into a readable format.

Some of the popular hand-held reader brand names are Cybook Opus, Hanlin V3, Illiad, iPad, IRex digital reader, JetBook, Kindle DX, Kobo Reader, Samsung Galaxy, Nook, Microsoft reader, Sony Reader, Tablet, etc.

Where to Purchase Digital eBooks?

Are you looking for eBooks on a specific topic? You need to look for a place where you can buy the electronic book of your choice and download it on your computer or on your e-book reading device. Some of the better-known digitalized books selling sites have just this downside - you cannot read their eBooks on your own personal e-book reader. You have to buy their expensive electronic book reading software. This may turn out to be an expensive proposition for a number of people. That is why you need to choose a well-known and popular e-book selling site where you can purchase digital books that can be read easily and instantly on your own personal e-book reader.

Advantages of eBooks over Printed Books

A digital book is forever. It is never going to be torn and its pages are never going to be attacked by silverfish, dry rot, or Time. That is why valuable and priceless books are being turned into eBooks by a number of libraries- as well as by Google - for eternal preservation purposes.

One of the best advantages of an e-book over its printed equivalent is its tiny size. Thanks to the storage capacity ranging from 2 GB to 32 GB of a number of e-book readers, you can store anywhere between 200 to 20,000 books on your readers nowadays. Just imagine carrying your full library with you wherever you go. It is impossible, obviously! Thanks to these books, however, having been preserved in the digital mode, you can appreciate the clear and crisp images, drawings and paintings of your favorite books, displayed on your e-book reader screen.

How to Download eBooks of Your Choice

Downloading eBooks and preserving them on your eBook reading device is very easy. Once you have purchased the book of your choice, you are going to be directed to the book's download link. After that, you can download books online in the format of your choice. Book publishers normally publish their books in EPUB and MOBI format. These are the most popular and easily read e-book formats available and preferred in the digital publishing world today.

You can now read your downloaded book on your computer. You can also read your purchased electronic book on your e-book reading device after loading the book on it.

Therefore, now that you know all about the advantages of eBooks and how to?purchase eBooks, add new volumes to your digital library and book collection right now. Learn about how to?purchase eBooks, their readers, different formats and benefits of eBooks. Get to know more about buying digital and download more of them to add into your collection.

Source: http://internetandonlinebusiness.blogspot.com/2012/12/why-purchase-ebooks-benefits-of-buying.html

eva longoria Rihanna wiz khalifa Michael Clarke Duncan Nazanin Boniadi Deval Patrick Dedication 4

HBO Human-Like Chimp Nim Died of 'Broken Heart'

Nim, a baby chimpanzee, was taken screaming from his sedated mother days after his birth in 1973 at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, then given to a large New York City family to be raised among humans.

Nim Chimpsky, named with some irony for the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, was part of a great experiment: to see whether he could learn sign language and communicate.

The initially adorable animal played with his human siblings, slept in a bed and even nursed from his adoptive "mother's" teat. But as he matured, Nim became unmanageable, destroying furniture, biting those who loved him and behaving just as nature intended, like a wild animal.

Nim wreaked havoc, biting his teachers, and lands in a New York City medical lab. In the end, he was abandoned at a sanctuary among chimpanzee brethren he had never known.

His story is told in an HBO documentary, "Project Nim," which will air Dec. 20.

Based on the book "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human" by Elizabeth Hess, the film paints a poignant picture of an animal capable of human emotion: love, jealousy and even the capacity for forgiveness.

The film, directed by James Marsh ["Man on a Wire"], won the Sundance Film festival in 2011, and was the darling of animal rights activists in limited theatrical release last year.

'Chimpanzee' Reveals Oscar's Incredible Adventures Watch Video

But Marsh said he was less interested in advocacy than telling a unique story about an animal and how the treatment by his human caretakers reflects man's potential for good and evil.

"Essentially, we are capable of cooperation and kindness and all kinds of positive emotions in the world, but we also have this hubris," Marsh, 48, said from his offices in London. "It's a kind of 'Franken-story' in a way, about kindness and material instincts and scientific ambitions."

Chimps play a large role in human research. They were first in space, helped develop hepatitis vaccines and were crucial to early studies of HIV-AIDS.

Support for chimp research has been on the decline since Nim's death in 2000, and the National Institutes of Health has now found most invasive experimentation to be unnecessary, according to a recent report in Scientific American.

NIH stopped funding at several research centers in September and has relocated scores of chimps to sanctuaries, according to the Washington Post.

Nearly 1,000 other research chimps are still languishing in government custody, according to advocacy groups such as the Great Ape Protection Project.

"The big sin, in my view, is [the scientists] didn't think beyond what they were doing and what in the end ... would happen to Nim when he gets to be 5-years-old," Marsh said. "Even children know chimps get big and strong."

At the film's start, Columbia psychology professor Herb Terrace brings Nim to live with one of his former students, Stephanie LaFarge, and her brood of seven children in New York City.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/project-nim-hbo-film-chimp-raised-humans/story?id=17920481

angelman syndrome total recall troy tulowitzki katie couric good morning america the rock vs john cena acm awards 2012 january jones

M 1.7, 3km SSW of Tahoe Vista, California

U.S. Department of the Interior | U.S. Geological Survey
Page URL: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc71901161
Page Contact Information: Contact Us
Page Last Modified: December 09, 2012 02:51:08 UTC

Offsite LinkDOI and USGS link policies apply. Privacy Act Statement You are not required to provide your personal contact information in order to submit your survey. However, if you do not provide contact information, we may be unable to contact you for additional information to verify your responses. If you do provide contact information, this information will only be used to initiate follow-up communications with you. The records for this collection will be maintained in the appropriate Privacy Act System of Records identified as Earthquake Hazards Program Earthquake Information. (INTERIOR/USGS-2) published at 74 FR 34033 (July 14, 2009). Paperwork Reduction Act Statement The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C. 3501 et. seq.) requires us to inform you that this information is being collected to supplement instrumental data and to promote public safety through better understanding of earthquakes. Response to this request is voluntary. Public reporting for this form is estimated to average 6 minutes per response, including the time for reviewing instructions and completing the form. A Federal agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a currently valid OMB Control Number. Comments regarding this collection of information should be directed to: Bureau Clearance officer, U.S. Geological Survey, 807 National Center, Reston, VA 20192.

Source: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc71901161

deadmau5 phoebe snow jennifer hudson tribute to whitney houston nicki minaj grammy jason whitlock beach boys tony bennett

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Vikings up-end Bears? |? Peterson chasing history

By JON KRAWCZYNSKI

AP Sports Writer

Associated Press Sports

updated 5:02 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2012

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Everyone in the stadium knows Adrian Peterson is going to get the ball when the Minnesota Vikings are on offense. No one seems to know how to stop him once he does.

His sights set squarely on 2,000 yards, Peterson's latest jaw-dropping performance also made sure the Vikings can keep their eyes on the playoffs.

Peterson rushed for 154 yards and two touchdowns and Harrison Smith returned an interception for a score to lead the Vikings to a 21-14 victory over the free-falling Chicago Bears on Sunday.

Peterson topped 100 yards before the first quarter was over, helping the Vikings (7-6) overcome another lackluster day from quarterback Christian Ponder to get a victory that will keep their playoff hopes alive.

"The guy's unbelievable," Ponder said of his star running back. "I don't know if he's human or not."

Jay Cutler was 22 for 44 for 260 yards, one touchdown and two interceptions and couldn't finish the game for the Bears (8-5), who have lost four of five. He took a wicked hit to the head from Everson Griffen in the fourth quarter, remained in for the rest of that drive, but was replaced by Jason Campbell with 3 minutes to play.

Cutler has a neck injury, which could leave the reeling Bears without two of their most important players down the stretch. Linebacker Brian Urlacher did not play because of a strained right hamstring that threatens to end his season.

"It started stiffening up more and more," Cutler said. "I just have to take it day by day."

Campbell threw a 16-yard TD to Brandon Marshall with 1:48 to play, but Kyle Rudolph recovered the onside kick. Marshall had 10 catches for 160 yards, but Chicago's struggling offense couldn't do enough to overcome the two turnovers and Peterson's relentless effort.

Peterson's remarkable comeback from a torn left ACL late last season seems to get more impressive every week. Not even a year removed from that major injury in Washington, he broke the 100-yard mark for the seventh straight game. He has 1,600 yards with three games to play, putting a hallowed 2,000-yard season within reach. He ran for 51 yards on the opening play and continued to gash the broken-down Bears the rest of the way.

"I think about it," Peterson said of 2,000 yards. "I don't try to think about it too much. I feel like it will happen. It's obvious we're going to continue to run the ball and the chips will fall where they may."

No one was happier to see it than Ponder, who continued to look skittish in the pocket and out of whack with his mechanics. He finished 11 of 17 for 91 yards, including an ugly interception off his back foot late in the first half.

This time, his performance didn't doom the Vikings. Owner Zygi Wilf addressed the team this week after a string of four losses in five games threatened to spoil a 5-2 start.

"You know when you play the Vikings you're going to have to stop Adrian Peterson," coach Leslie Frazier said. "And for him to come out and gain 100 yards in the first quarter, just an amazing feat by him."

Vikings fans trudged through a snow storm to get to the Metrodome, and they were ornery and ready to give Ponder all the grief they could. They booed him in pregame introductions, then Peterson touched the ball on five of six plays in the opening drive. He also ripped off a 16-yard run and finished it with a 1-yard TD.

"It looks like we weren't ready for it, but we were," Bears cornerback Kelvin Hayden said. "We were ready. It was the first drive and there was so much football played after that, I thought we did a pretty good job after that."

Josh Robinson intercepted Cutler on the next possession, returning the ball to the Chicago 5 to set up Peterson's second touchdown. The Vikings were off and running, exactly what they were hoping to do.

Cutler responded, hitting Alshon Jeffery with a 23-yard TD pass that got a healthy contingent of Chicago fans chanting "Let's Go Bears!"'

Just as the Bears appeared to seize momentum, Cutler floated a pass over Marshall's head and right into the arms of Smith, who headed down the Chicago sideline for a 56-yard touchdown late in the third quarter and a 21-7 lead.

The Vikings haven't made big plays in the passing game ever since Percy Harvin was lost for the season with a severely sprained left ankle against Seattle on Nov. 4. They finally did it Sunday, but it was the defense that made it happen.

Robinson and Smith combined for 100 return yards, more than the Vikings' passing game had through the air.

Now the Bears must try to hold off another December malaise under coach Lovie Smith. They started 7-1, but Smith tried to ratchet up the intensity this week, saying the Bears had to win out to get into the playoffs.

Through six games, the Bears gave up an average of 71 yards rushing. But they had given up 136 yards per game on the ground in the previous six games.

"It's all willpower, man," Peterson said. "They pretty much know we're going to run the ball. Offensive line knows that, receivers. Everybody's dialed in."

NOTES: Vikings CB A.J. Jefferson suffered a concussion in the fourth quarter. He will be re-evaluated on Monday. ... Marshall joined Jerry Rice, Marvin Harrison and Wes Welker as the only players in history with at least four seasons of 100 or more receptions. Marshall also set the all-time Bears record with his 101st catch this year. ... Bears K Robbie Gould did not kickoff on Sunday after straining his left calf in pregame warm-ups. He did kick the Bears' two extra points.

---

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP-NFL

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


advertisement

More newsGetty Images
Can Lions break Lambeau curse?

Bedard: The Lions have not won a game against the Packers in Green Bay since 1991, the longest such road losing streak in the league. They aim to snap it on Sunday Night Football.

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/50138330/ns/sports-nfl/

the tree of life movie academy award nominees 2012 2012 oscar nominations kyle williams florida debate rand paul mark kirk

University College Office Closing at Noon

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://ucollege.wustl.edu/events/2012/12/event-609

charlotte bobcats new york rangers nfl mock draft 2012 norfolk island michael brockers lisa marie presley florida panthers

Saturday, December 8, 2012

HTC Windows Phone 8X for Verizon: what's different?

DNP HTC Windows Phone 8X for Verizon what's different

We've seen HTC's Windows Phone 8X in many colors and also many carrier variants -- it's already made its way to AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, and many other operators worldwide. Even though there's already been a heavy dose of coverage on this device, our work isn't quite done yet: Verizon's version has finally graced our reviews desk, which means it's time for us to explain how it differs from the global model, and how it measures up to the competition. The phone will be available in black, red and blue for $199 with a two-year commitment, a $100 markup over the Nokia Lumia 822. Is it worth the difference in price? Join us after the break as we discuss the merits -- and demerits -- of Verizon's newest Windows Phone flagship.

Continue reading HTC Windows Phone 8X for Verizon: what's different?

Filed under: , , , ,

Comments

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/SsZUvrlgwgc/

is snooki pregnant snooki pregnant gbc hedy lamarr jack white kowloon walled city ronda rousey vs miesha tate

Sleep Easy By Using These Advice On Loud snoring ? Darul Uloom ...

  • The Options Available for Mix Wheel Fixes

    by madelynder94 with No Comments

    If you car comes with alloy wheels as part of the standard specification, or whether it was an upgrade ordered alone the functionality and look of the...

  • Ramontja appointed as new Mineral Resources DG

    by zenzhcn with No Comments

    JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) ? Cabinet has appointed Dr Thibedi Ramontja, the former CEO of the Council for Geoscience, as the new ...

  • There Is No Need To Become Vegetarian To Lose Excess Weight

    by KieverCrocetti697 with No Comments

    Lots of people report that losing bodyweight is almost impossible however, it doesn't need to be for those who have expertise on how to effectively dr...

  • High River buys Russian nickel deposit

    by zenzhcn with No Comments

    TSX-listed High River Gold Mines has, through its 85%-owned Russian subsidiary, OJSC Buryatzoloto, bought the Chaya nickel deposit, in an auc...

  • Subscribe Your Great Consumer in Lightning Rate

    by camelliaha22 with No Comments

    It's annoying to truly have a conversation with a possibility that ends with the problem, "What is your rate?" Accompanied by a sudden, "Thanks, but n...

  • Source: http://darululoomnewcastle.co.za/?p=9468

    kawasaki disease resurrection masters tickets one direction tulsa news scalloped potatoes the ten commandments

    Slim London Escort can make you feel good with their presence and their seduction skills.MORE: http://vlondonescorts.co.uk/blog/girls/how-slim-escorts-stay-trim/

    This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

    Friday, December 7, 2012

    Tim Cook Speaks About Apple Maps, Samsung, and Apple's Future ...

    Tim Cook has held the reins at Apple for over a year now, and this evening, he gave his first official television interview with Brian Williams on NBC's Rock Center, where he spoke about his role as CEO after Steve Jobs, lamented about the Maps debacle, and revealed a few hints about what's to come for Apple in the future. The full video is embedded below.

    The first part of the interview focused on his first year as CEO, and what it was like to follow in the footsteps of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Cook was humble and personable as he explained that Jobs taught him to "just do what's right."

    When asked about Apple's Maps application, which has faced significant criticism and resulted in the restructuring of the company, Cook told Williams that Apple "screwed up," and is "putting the weight of the company behind correcting it."


    Part 1

    Cook also touched on the ongoing conflict between Samsung and Apple, after Williams played a Samsung commercial for the Galaxy S3 that attacks Apple's iPhone, branding it as uncool.
    We love our customers. And we?ll fight to defend them with anyone. Is it thermonuclear war? The reality is, is that we love competition, at Apple. We think it makes us all better. But we want people to invent their own stuff.
    In one interesting section of the interview, Williams asked Cook if Apple would last, and how the company would avoid becoming like Sony, popular in the 80's and 90's before fading into the background. Cook reiterated Apple's drive to focus on a small number of products.
    We?re very simple people at Apple. We focus on making the world?s best products and enriching people?s lives. I think some companies ? maybe even the one that you mention, maybe they decided that they could do everything. We have to make sure, at Apple, that we stay true to focus, laser focus ? we know we can only do great things a few times, only on a few products.
    The juiciest details of the exchange between Williams and Cook, which were leaked in teasers earlier this afternoon, came in the second part of the interview, where Williams focused on the Apple television, the death of Steve Jobs, and the U.S. production of Apple products.

    Part 2

    Cook commented on the much rumored Apple television set, mentioning, as revealed earlier, Apple's "intense interest" in the market, but he revealed little beyond that, speaking cryptically about his love of "The Jetsons."
    It?s a market that we see, that has been left behind. You know, I used to watch ?The Jetsons? as a kid. I love "The Jetsons." We?re living ?The Jetsons? with this. It?s an area of intense interest. I can?t say more than that. But ?
    He also went into more detail about Apple's plans to bring production back to the United States, confirming that next year, one of the Mac lines will be produced in the United States.
    You know, this iPhone, as a matter of fact, the engine in here is made in America. And not only are the engines in here made in America, but engines are made in America and are exported. The glass on this phone is made in Kentucky. And so we?ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States. Next year, we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States.
    Williams ended the interview trying to get a few more tidbits on Apple's plans for the future, but this is all Cook had to say:
    Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn?t know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can?t imagine your life without it. And you can count on Apple doing that.

    Source: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/07/tim-cook-speaks-about-apple-maps-samsung-and-apples-future-in-tv-interview-with-brian-williams/

    Freeh Report direct tv wimbledon ray allen Savages Home Run Derby 2012 San Diego fireworks

    CO-GPS from Microsoft Research: better GPS with incredible battery life

    We?ve all been there: using our favorite apps to track our jogging, or navigating around a new city when we notice that our phones only have 5% charge left. It?s frustrating, depressing and potentially dangerous if you rely too much on your phones locations services. The reason this happens is that GPS destroys batteries due to the amount of information it needs to receive and then compute in order to show our location.

    Most standalone GPS receivers get their data directly from the satellites that are orbiting the Earth, and this data can come down as slowly as 50 bits per second, not to mention the receiver has to do a lot of processing to correctly interpret this data. That?s why it can take up to 30 seconds, and a lot of battery usage, until you get your first tracked position.

    We do a little better than this on mobile phones due to a technology called Assisted GPS (A-GPS) in which phones receive part of the GPS data through the phone?s network rather than decoding it from a satellite. Apps on our smartphones can also use cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi access points to speed up getting a precise fix on our location. However there?s still a lot of processing involved and that uses up our battery.

    But Microsoft Research is trying to improve this and in?a paper published last month they seem to have done it. Microsoft has developed a technique called Cloud Offloaded GPS (CO-GPS) in which all the computation is done in the cloud. The prototype they developed called CLEO pushed raw GPS data to the cloud for processing which resulted in high precision location information with a dramatic reduction in power consumption ? three orders of magnitude less power used compared to today?s mobile phones. Or put differently ?with a pair of AA batteries, CLEO can theoretically sustain continuous GPS sensing ( at 1s/sample granularity) for 1.5 years?.

    Now before you go out to celebrate this amazing feat remember this is still a trial, and Microsoft is looking at standalone receivers rather than mobile phones. However, such dramatic improvements will no doubt one day come to our smartphones and other devices. The sooner the better.

    Via: Ars Technica? Source: Microsoft Research | Satellite Navigation Image?via Shutterstock

    Source: http://feeds.neowin.net/~r/neowin-all/~3/NgZKtYp7jqE/co-gps-from-microsoft-research-better-gps-with-incredible-battery-life

    katy perry and russell brand katy perry divorce brock lesnar retires new years wake forest wake forest old dominion

    Wrapping up the Massachusetts Death With Dignity Defeat | Diane ...

    ?sunsetcloudsDeath ? the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening.

    ?Sir Walter Scott

    Now that the dust has settled around the Massachusetts ballot initiative for Death with Dignity, and the opposition and the proponents are preparing for the next battles in New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont, I?m going to provide excerpts from articles released in November leading up to the vote and its defeat to see what happened.

    An interesting thing about this emotional argument is all the different players involved so I?m going to present their perspectives according to the articles leading up to the Massachusetts vote? with the caveat that I?m in favor of a Death with Dignity law but not particularly of the one that was proposed in Massachusetts or the ones that currently exist in Washington and Oregon. I will reserve my opinion for a subsequent blog post. So in alphabetical order?

    THE DISABLED COMMUNITY

    According to Second Thoughts (People with disabilities opposing the legalization of Assisted Suicide) director John Kelly, the only way for the law to be acceptable to them would be to make the safeguards so exacting that no one could get past them.

    ? They fear heirs might pressure their relatives to end their life early and with dementia they might relent.

    ? They stress people with mental illnesses,? including depression, are unable to make these decisions.

    ? They fear someone putting something into a feeding tube without the person?s knowledge.

    ? They fear wanton killing of? sick elderly and handicapped, disabled, challenged people as was done in Nazi Germany because they were considered unworthy, too expensive and too much trouble to take care of.

    Second Thoughts contends that:

    ? Assisted suicide is a deadly mix with a profit-driven healthcare system. Pressure to cut costs, delays in treatment and limited coverage for home care can lead patients, families and doctors to choose the cheapest alternative, even if that is assisted suicide.

    ? Assisted suicide is unnecessary because current law gives every person the right to refuse lifesaving treatment, and to have adequate pain relief, including palliative sedation to die in your sleep. Assisted suicide decreases self-determination by giving doctors and insurers the power not just to cure, but to kill.

    ? The proposed law is a recipe for elder abuse. An heir can be a witness and help sign someone up, and once a lethal drug is in the home, no one will know how the drug is administered. If the person struggled, who would know?

    ?A lack of safeguards and oversight in the proposed law puts people at risk of misdiagnosis, deprivation of treatment and economic pressure to choose suicide, while protecting doctors from liability.

    • No mental health evaluation is required for depression or other treatable cause of suicidal feelings.
    • If a doctor refuses lethal drugs, the patient or family simply can?and do?find another doctor (?doctor shopping?).
    • ?Terminal condition? and ?death within six months? are often misdiagnosed, opening the dangers of assisted suicide to many who are not terminally ill.
    • Nothing in the law can offer protection when family pressures, whether financial or emotional, distort patient choice.
    • The law does not include enforcement provisions, investigation authority, oversight or data verification. The only foolproof safeguard is for the prescribing doctors. The law holds doctors only to a ?good faith? standard, which makes any safeguards unenforceable.

    ? Discrimination: A law that singles out some people (such as old, ill and disabled people) for assisted suicide instead of suicide prevention is not in step with Massachusetts? progressive tradition as a leader against discrimination.

    *

    A writer commented? ?Now is the worst time to perpetuate that death is better than disability.?

    *

    Not Dead Yet Director Diane Coleman praised Second Thoughts Director John Kelly and the Steering committee for inserting the disability rights perspective into the Massachusetts debate. Coleman said Second Thoughts made the difference in preventing assisted suicide from gaining a foothold in the Northeast.

    *

    A woman now confined to a wheelchair because of her MS, which she described as ?the slow road to death,? was opposed to voluntary euthanasia until recently. ?As little as five years ago, I really did believe that without safeguards, voluntary euthanasia could be open to the terrible abuse of the elderly and the vulnerable in our society. I felt that quite strongly.? But she had no idea her illness would go into such a steep slide, prompting a ?drastic change in my feelings? about voluntary euthanasia. Now with her new consciousness, she wonders why it is illegal. ?If I?ve got a suffering animal, I won?t hesitate to have them euthanised,? said the keen horsewoman.

    *

    Tony Nicklinson (58), a former soccor player in England, who developed locked-in syndrome following a stroke in 2005 and could only move his eyes, fought for the right to die by doctor-assisted lethal injection.? When his last request was turned down by the High Court in August, he felt his only alternative was to stop eating and drinking thus starving himself to death. Tony developed pneumonia and died a week after the verdict. His wife, Jane, and other people with locked-in syndrome, are continuing to pursue a change in the law to allow euthanasia for people like Tony who are incapable of doing it for themselves and need professional assistance.

    THE DYING ONES

    These are excerpts from various articles, letters, blogs by people who are or were in the process of dying:

    ?To end this suffering is not euthanasia. It is a display of pure love and decency for a fellow human through assisted suicide, and an acknowledgment of his own written wishes.?

    *

    ?It is not a choice between living and dying, but between different ways of dying.?

    *

    ?I don?t know if I?ll use the prescription but I know it?s there, just in case I decide I do. It gives me peace of mind.?

    *

    ?It?s not that I?m depressed, I?m just fed up and frustrated,? Ms Harrison (New Zealand) said. ?I?ve had such a wonderful life, travelled widely, with glorious memories and now I have no control over my life whatsoever with much worry and anxiety. I am living in such despair. I want to go. I?m quite happy to go. I have no fear of death whatsoever. My one fear is, because I have spent the last 3 years in bed, that I?ll suffer a stroke or other medical disability and my wishes will evaporate with my physical or mental agility. If euthanasia was legal, I could spend more time alive without worrying that I must terminate my life as soon as possible before anything drastic happens.?

    Ms Harrison has lived with MS for more than three decades but says the deterioration of her condition in recent years has made life unbearable. Confined to the living room that was once the bustling centre of her family home, she relies on her 26-year-old son, a member of the Army Reserve who is studying for his masters degree, as her primary carer. ?All my loves . . . I loved nature, I love books, horseriding. Everything is now lost to me,? she said. ?I have to cope daily with double incontinence, gripping spasms and physical and nerve pain, to say the least.?

    As a member of Philip Nitschke?s right-to-die group Exit International, Ms Harrison had planned to travel to Dignitas. However, difficulty in obtaining paperwork led to delays and this year she fractured her femur, making the trip impossible .?I wanted to do it properly, to die in the company of friends and with dignity, I didn?t want it to be ?suicide?,? she said.

    EHTICISTS

    ?While I?m certainly someone who believes in increasing and furthering and advancing patient autonomy, I think that there are a lot of problems with the current ballot initiative. Primarily, the potential problems in having this initiative without any mandate for psychiatric evaluation.?

    *

    ?Euthanasia, also known as mercy killing, is the act or practice of deliberately killing a dying individual, who no longer wants to tolerate pain and suffering, in a relatively painless way. Physician assisted suicide, on the other hand, takes direct control out of a doctor?s hands. The doctor presents the patient with the means to end his life. Both issues are extremely controversial in the world of bioethics.? (Bioethicist)

    *

    ?The only really difficult ethical question surrounding assisted suicide is how we can ensure that an individual?s desire to end their life is the genuine, settled, free choice of a mentally competent individual. Of course, therefore, there must be safeguards in any future regulation of assisted dying. But as long as stringent safeguards are put in place, it is difficult to see the ethical case against it being provided at all.?

    FAMILIES

    ?Those who have witnessed the agonies of a loved one in the final stages of ALS, MS, cancer, dementia, etc., will tell you that when there is no dignity nor purpose left, then the choice should be the patient?s.?

    *

    I had a million questions about how he expected Ed?s decline to progress and I needed advice regarding the multitude of issues involved in end-of-life care. I wanted to know about ventilators, antibiotics, DNR (do not resuscitate) orders, living wills and so many other things. I also wanted to know how much longer he thought Ed might live, what specifically he might die of, and what signs I should look for that would indicate the end was imminent. And I had a lot of questions about hospice care, including whether I could stop it if I changed my mind later. (He told me I could stop it at any time, for any reason, and that if I changed my mind again, I could resume the services.) The conversation was incredibly stressful. At one point I realized I was holding my breath.

    After answering all my questions, Doug looked at me kindly and said, ?You know, Marie, the real question for the caregiver is how to help the patient have the highest possible quality of life in the time that is remaining.?That completely changed my thinking about the situation. It gave me a new and positive goal ? to bring Ed as much happiness as possible. It led me to think about all the special things I could do for Ed ? visiting him more often, taking my little Shih Tzu to see him, having that violinist come back and play another concert, reading to him from the New York Times, and buying him even more of the stuffed animals he loved so much. After that talk, I spent many hours pleasantly thinking up special things to do for and with Ed. Once I got my mind off his looming death, we were able to have a beautiful, pleasurable months-long conclusion of our life together.

    *

    But in focus groups support took a nosedive when participants were told the measure did not require mental health specialists to sign off and did not mandate that family members be notified. When told that one of the common lethal prescriptions required patients to break up 80 to 100 capsules and stir their contents into a drink, support waned. People didn?t find that very dignified.

    They also recoiled at the idea that the prescription would be obtained from a local pharmacy and ingested without supervision. As one guy said, ?So, I?m waiting in line for my Sudafed and some guy waiting in front of me is trying to kill himself?? The research informed a series of powerful ads, including one featuring a pharmacist warning of the dangers and pouring out a bottle of red pills that skittered into a glass dish.?No doctors, no hospitals, just a hundred of these,? the pharmacist in the ad says. And they call that death with dignity?

    *

    Although I asked point blank what to expect, I was told not to worry, mum would simply spend more time asleep and quietly pass away. If only. The weeks over which my mother passed away were a drawn out and traumatic experience that I would not wish on anyone. Several times I tried to get information about what would happen, from all the places you might expect, but none of it cut the mustard. It may be difficult to predict exactly what will happen in individual cases, but we weren?t even told about what might happen and how to prepare for it. Even when it was staring everyone in the face, there was little mention of the elephant in the room. Instead, the stark reality of what was happening was glossed over by those whose honest advice we might have benefited from. I?m sure our family is not alone, and although we may not all want such detail about what happens during death, most of us would admit we need to know it, however hard that might be. Informative conversations about the end of life give patients a better quality of life and help families cope with their bereavement.

    *

    Thomas sat across from me on his sofa, holding his wife?s living will and health care proxy in his hands, still wondering if he chose the right time. Could his wife have changed her mind? Sure, she could have lived weeks or months more, perhaps, but would she have wanted that if she were able to choose?

    His wife?s living will did seem to cover such a scenario, though typically such a document applies to a patient who is in a vegetative state rather than one who is conscious and talking (but not making any sense). Hers read: ?If I have an incurable, irreversible condition that will cause my death within a relatively short time?I direct the withholding or withdrawal of all treatment, including nutrition and hydration, that only prolongs the process of dying.?

    ?I was very fortunate to have met Judy,? Thomas said of Schwarz, explaining that she had ?held my hand through this process and provided advice that wasn?t coming from anyone else.? Still, Thomas is angry that the American medical system isn?t set up to deal with the complexities of the situation he faced.

    ?There aren?t a lot of guides for this process,? he said. ?You would hope your own physician is [a guide], but they are there to treat you.?

    ?What am I doing?? she asked my father several times. ?Life is not worth anything like this.?

    Her hospice nurse was part of a team sent by Hospice and Palliative Care, which also included a doctor, a social worker and a rabbi. I was told when we met last spring that my mom?s quality of life had been deteriorating as April dragged on. She said my mom had told her, ?I?m ready.? But my mom knew better than to ask a hospice nurse for help with that task. The goal of hospice is to keep the dying patient as comfortable as possible until death naturally occurs.

    The associate chief medical officer told me that if a patient decides on her own to stop nourishment, medicine or machinery, no one will stand in her way.

    *

    For months afterwards, George lay in bed, helpless and wasting away, with 24-hour nurses who washed and fed him and changed his diapers. He was lucid, and asked my mother and her sister to poison him. They told him they couldn?t do that, but my aunt Nina pointed out that his medicine was probably keeping him alive. Ending his life merely by omission hadn?t occurred to him.

    ?It was humane to put him out of his suffering but done through his choice,? Aunt Nina told me recently. ?He certainly acted on that information pretty quickly.?

    He died a few days later.

    *

    The week she started hospice care, at the beginning of April 2011, my father contacted them. A few days later, they got a call from the clinical coordinator of Compassion & Choices, who lived nearby on the Upper West Side. She came over and spent a few hours talking with my parents, explaining her organization?s mission and discussing my mother?s illness and the options available. ?She was warm and it was personal,? my father said. ?She was a professional who is very skilled at dealing with situations like this.?

    ?The first thing she did was set me straight on the terminology when asked about ?assisted suicide.? The term ?suicide? has a lot of baggage whether religious, legal or moral, so to call it ?assisted suicide? or ?euthanasia? is to miss a crucial distinction.

    We use the term ?aid in dying because it more accurately reflects the information and support we provide to terminally ill and suffering clients??information about how patients might control the circumstances or timing of their death. She went on to say that the motivation for suicide, which often results from mental illness and depression, is another thing entirely. ?We do not support suicide,? she said, noting the difference between suicide and the ?thoughtful and considered decisions? made by some terminally ill patients as a means to avoid further suffering.

    *

    Although Thomas? wife was concerned about how this decision might affect her family members, it?s what she wanted to do. They got the lethal dose of medicine ready for when she might decide she needed it. But not long after preparing the dose, the cancer spread to her brain and she became unable to make the decision on her own. ?So that plan went out the window,? Thomas said.

    Even if his wife had been capable of deciding, Thomas wonders whether she would have made the decision to take the lethal dose, after all. ?What point have you crossed where you truly don?t want to live in the situation any longer?? he asked. ?It sounds more clear-cut when you are talking about it in the abstract than when you?re actually faced with it.?

    Nevertheless, in a state of dementia, with hallucinations of snakes, Thomas? wife was certainly not getting much in the way of dignity or quality of life. So after nearly 44 years of marriage, he decided to stop offering liquid when she stopped asking for it.

    ?She wasn?t able to consciously express the desire to die,? he said. ?I acted on what I believed her wishes would have been.?

    It took over a week before she fell into a coma and died.

    HOSPICE/PALLIATIVE CARE

    Patients would not be required to consult with a palliative care or a hospice expert. Hospice addresses the multifaceted distress that dying patients and their friends and families are experiencing by providing extensive palliative care, expert pain management, and extraordinary social and spiritual supports.? Hospice works with the patient to design a program that is individualized for the patient and provides choice, control and dignity when most needed.? Unlike even a few years ago, appropriate medical care is now able to keep patients comfortable and pain free. When the Oregon law was first passed, hospice care was only a glimmer of what it is today. Even though hospice services are now widely available, they are infrequently accessed.

    PROCESS: Before care is provided, hospice staff meets with the patient?s personal physician and a hospice physician to discuss patient history, current physical symptoms, and life expectancy. They then meet with the patient and their family to discuss the services provided, pain and comfort levels, support systems, financial and insurance resources, medications and equipment needs. The patient must have a doctor?s referral to enter into hospice. Medicare covers all services, medications, and equipment related to the illness for patients with a prognosis of 6 months or less. (Source: www.hospicefoundation.org)

    BENEFITS OF HOSPICE CARE: The use of hospice care can offer benefits to not only patients but their family members and loved ones as well.
    1.?? ?For terminally ill patients, the decision to receive hospice or palliative care instead of continued curative treatment can help them avoid the dangers of over-treatment.
    2.?? ?Hospice can reduce anxiety in the terminally ill patients as well as their family by helping them achieve some level of acceptance.
    3.?? ?Other than the focus on the physical health and comfort of the patients, hospice also focuses on the emotional needs and spiritual well-being of patients and their families.
    4.?? ?In-home care from a hospice IDT often means the patient receives greater monitoring than he or she would in a hospital. (Source: www.helpguide.org)

    HELP FOR FAMILY MEMBERS:? The death of a loved one can be a difficult time and another benefit of hospice care is the support offered to family members after a patient has died. The bereavement support is when the hospice care team works with surviving family members to help them through the grieving process. This can include counselor visits to the family during the first year, support groups, and phone calls or letter contact with the family.

    LAWS, COURTS

    Sadly, many still believe that those living wills filled out years ago offer us some protection. They do not. We have progressed with the development of representation agreements and advanced directives, but the legal system still hovers threateningly. The author of such a directive ? now in no fit state to demand execution of his wishes ? must still face each day as a living hell.

    *

    Death With Dignity Act ? the state secretary, ?This proposed law would allow a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at a terminally ill patient?s request, to end that patient?s life. To qualify, a patient would have to be an adult resident who (1) is medically determined to be mentally capable of making and communicating health care decisions; (2) has been diagnosed by attending and consulting physicians as having an incurable, irreversible disease that will, within reasonable medical judgment, cause death within six months; and (3) voluntarily expresses a wish to die and has made an informed decision.?

    There are, of course, a number of other safeguards built in, such as the need to make the request twice, separated by 15 days, in the presence of witnesses.? However, there could probably be stronger safeguards to protect individuals who are experiencing depression and anxiety, and might have preferable alternatives to physician-assisted death.

    If passed on Election Day, physician assisted suicide would become legal under Massachusetts law, effective January 1, 2013. No additional legislative or other approvals would be necessary.? As written, the legislation is poorly written and lacks the basic safeguards against unintended consequences.

    *

    Law is to make sure the assister isn?t prosecuted for helping a terminally ill person who wants to die carry out their wishes? not to determinate rightness or wrongness of the act of helping someone hasten their death. -dg

    *

    In Montana, physician assisted suicide is not explicitly legal, but a state Supreme Court ruling gives legal protection to it.

    The Montana Board of Medical Examiners has rejected a request to strike its policy on physician-assisted suicide that opponents criticize as too permissive. The board this year tried to provide some guidance to doctors on the issue that remains unclear in law. The board says it will review complaints on their merits if any are filed against a doctor for providing ?aid-in-dying.?

    Montanans Against Assisted Suicide says it wants the board to revoke that policy, saying it appears to condone a procedure that they argue is illegal. The board rejected the request on Friday, potentially paving the way for opponents to sue. The Montana Supreme Court in 2009 declared nothing in state law or precedent makes the procedure illegal. The Legislature has been unable to provide any further clarity.

    *

    ?Assemblyman John Burzichelli (NJ) introducted a bill modeled on the Death with Dignity Act legislation?of Oregon and Washington. It is doctor-assisted suicide, NOT?euthanasia. As a humane society we do not force animals?to suffer an agonizing death. Why should we not be given the option of having that same right if that is our personal choice??

    *

    Gov. Peter Shumlin (VT) says he is confident that the Vermont Legislature will pass marijuana decriminalization and Death with Dignity or what opponents call physician-assisted suicide legislation this session.

    *

    In recent years, Compassion & Choices has tried to do something about the shortcomings?or failure, in many opinions?of physicians to guide their patients through the dying process. David C. Leven, a lawyer and the executive director of the organization?s New York affiliate, has led the effort on the legal front.

    ?Why do you feel the need to urge doctors to diagnose dying?? I asked.

    ?Nobody tells them to,? he said. ?Nobody reimburses you for that diagnosis.?

    1997 Supreme Court ruling that individuals have no constitutional right to aid in dying. This ruling left it to states to decide the issue for themselves.

    ?We are over-treating people at the end of their lives,? Leven said. ?People who are dying often suffer unnecessarily because they?re receiving aggressive interventions they may not want and don?t benefit from.?

    The solution, in his opinion, is to provide patients with more information so that they can make informed end-of-life decisions that suit their needs. To this end, Leven helped enact New York?s Palliative Care Information Act, which took effect in February 2011. The act requires that doctors provide information and counseling to terminally ill patients who want it?which turns out to be most of them. But it seems that the vast majority of doctors don?t even know about the law. (In the group he spoke to at the hospital on Roosevelt Island, less than a quarter had heard of it.) Another problem is that some doctors may reject a legal mandate that tells them what to do with their patients, which is why the New York State Medical Society opposed the legislation. In Leven?s view, this shouldn?t be an issue because it is supposed to be part of a doctor?s job description.

    ?Doctors already have an ethical obligation to provide their patients with a diagnosis, prognosis, treatment options, and the risks and benefits of those options so that patients can make informed decisions,? he said.

    Leven cited studies showing that a large percentage of doctors don?t have this conversation with their patients or don?t do it well. If they did, patients would be much better off, he said. For instance, when the big picture is explained to them and the options are reviewed, patients typically choose less aggressive treatment and opt more often for ?palliative care and?quality of life than for extending it. (Gawande made the same point in his New Yorker piece.)

    Patients may get referred to hospice care, set up a do-not-resuscitate order, and put other measures in place to make sure that doctors don?t provide treatment against the patient?s wishes. (New York ranks 49th in the country in hospice enrollment.) The result, Leven said, is reduced medical costs, better quality care, and ultimately, a death that is peaceful and dignified; all from a simple conversation between the patient and his doctor.

    Dr. Alan B. Astrow, Chief of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, said he agrees that it is a doctor?s responsibility to have this talk with patients. But he told me he understands why they often don?t.

    ?Many doctors avoid having to tell the patient that things are not going well and that the patient is at risk of dying in the near future,? Astrow said. ?It?s hard to tell people, and also patients don?t really want to hear that news.?

    However, he does not believe that the solution is a statute ordering doctors to do this?a point he made in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine last year. Astrow instead favors ?more training in how to discuss end-of-life care issues with patients.? (David Leven agrees that doctors need more training, and is currently working on a bill that would require all healthcare practitioners in New York to get training in pain management and end-of-life care every four years.) Astrow acknowledged, however, that even with training, such care will still be very difficult for doctors. He stressed that he does agree with the goals of the Palliative Care Information Act, which provides a path toward ?good medical care,? but he doesn?t think a legal remedy is enough to bring about a change in the overarching medical culture.

    Considering that most doctors still don?t know about the Palliative Care Information Act, which isn?t enforced unless specific complaints are made to the New York State Department of Health, Astrow does have a point.

    This is why Compassion & Choices, with a national staff of forty, has been trying to pick up the slack, making information available to anyone who needs it. After all, roughly a million and a half Americans die of terminal illness every year.

    ?Too many people are having bad deaths,? Leven said, ?and it?s in some measure because they don?t have all the information they should have.?

    NURSES

    If ratified, the ANA would join the American Medical Association in saying that the ?clinician?s participation in assisted suicide is incompatible with professional role integrity? and that assisted suicide and euthanasia ?violate the social contract the professions have with society.?? Both organizations have ?vowed to honor the sanctity of life and their duty not to inflict harm.? The document acknowledges the ?distress? nurses suffer when asked to participate in active euthanasia and assisted suicide, and asserts that limits to their commitment to the patient?s right to self-determination ?do exist.?The nurse is not allowed to ?administer the medication that will lead to the end of the patient?s life,? says the draft document.Even in states in which assisted suicide is legal ? Oregon, Washington and Montana ? the ANA directs nurses to refrain from participation, as doing so would violate The Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements. For anti-euthanasia advocates, there is cause for concern, however, in the section of the document on the ?withholding or withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments (WWLST).

    *

    Opponents of the proposal say doctors should never, as a matter of professional ethics, intentionally hasten the death of one of their patients, even one who is terminally ill. The codes of medicine and nursing ethics reject helping patients die.

    PHYSICIANS

    The AMA ?strongly opposes any bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide? because the practice is ?fundamentally inconsistent with the physician?s role as healer.?

    *

    A difference between this proposal (called Question 2, which allows for physician-assisted death if a terminal illness is diagnosed with a prognosis of less than six months of survival) and some others is that there is no requirement for evaluation by a psychiatrist for depression before the lethal medication dose is administered.?This itself is a fatal flaw.??(written by a psychiatrist)

    *

    On being too aggressive trying to save patient, a doctor said: if you can?t save his life; sometimes, being a good doctor means learning to help people die.

    *

    For Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer on social medicine at the Medical School and one of the initiative?s major public proponents, this question of autonomy and choice has a clear answer.?It seems to me that this most personal and faithful of decisions belongs with the patients and no one else: not the church, not the Mass. Medical Society, not the state, no one but the patient. And it hurts no one if the patient makes this choice,? she said.

    Angell said that the experiences of those who have taken advantage of the law in Oregon shows that the availability of this choice is valuable, even if not used by many.?Good palliative care and assisted suicide?those two things are not mutually exclusive any more than the medical treatment of heart failure and heart transplantation. You use one when the other fails,? Angell said. ?Allowing the most desperate of patients to have assisted dying to bring about a slightly faster, more peaceful death, does nothing to the other 99.8 percent of patients.?

    ?First of all, the totality of suffering at the end of life often involves pain, but it often reflects other reasons as well. For instance, air hunger in someone who has pulmonary disease, or sleeplessness in someone with so-called Lou Gehrig?s disease. So pain control is a major part of palliative care, but palliative care is broader than just pain control. The concept of ?total pain? has been in the literature for years. ?Total pain? includes physical pain but also involves spiritual or existential pain and psychological burdens. So there?s more to palliative care than pain control, and there?s more to pain than just its intensity.

    In the clear majority ? in most cases of, say, cancer-related pain ? the figure that people quote is from studies applying a very simple three-step ladder that was developed by the World Health Organization: You can control about 90% of the pain in people with cancer. Now, I?m blending together different cancers, different stages and resting pain versus movement pain. But if you were to say: ?Can you control most people?s pain with simple, non-invasive measures,? the answer is yes. That?s been studied.

    *

    As for people who have more difficult pain problems despite moving up the medication ladder, by providing a suitable nerve block or infusion, you can probably control the majority of the remainder. So the instances in which you have to choose between the patient?s being awake but in intolerable pain or being deliberately sedated to the point of unresponsiveness are very few.

    If you talk to people who work in hospice or palliative care, terminal sedation is uncommon. ? It?s wrong to oversimplify this. That?s why, as a program, although we have superb faculty who teach classes about end-of-life and palliative care issues, we?re not saying yes or no on Question 2.

    I would say hypothetically, there may be an instance, exceedingly rare, where physician-assisted suicide is warranted. But in practice, in those infrequent instances where pain is hard to control, we now already can offer terminal sedation, where someone can be brought to a restful, sleep-like state by using medications. But even that is uncommon.

    Preparing a living will and designating a health proxy before illness strikes or becomes advanced, promotes each person?s working through these issues in a thoughtful, unrushed way.

    *

    Critics say the Death With Dignity Act as written does not provide enough safeguards against mentally ill people securing the drug or prevent patients from being coerced into killing themselves. There are also no rules regarding storage of the lethal pills once they?re brought home.

    Furthermore, the Massachusetts Medical Society says that asking doctors to provide lethal drugs is antithetical to what healers stand for and goes against the Hippocratic Oath, a sort of medical code of conduct.

    *

    As a retired clinical psychologist, I must note that there is a vast difference between the depression of a terminally ill patient, who realistically perceives his situation to be hopeless, and a physically healthy patient suffering from clinical depression.

    In the case of a physically healthy patient who is clinically depressed, feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness are the product of inaccurate perceptions of self and circumstances ? mental distortions produced by the illness itself. For such patients, treatment can produce marked improvement.The same cannot be said for terminally ill patients, whose feelings of hopelessness are, sadly, all too realistic and whose depression is often a normal response to a disheartening reality.

    While the ?counseling and caring? the doctor recommends can provide comfort to the terminally ill patient, they cannot change the reality of a patient whose quality of life has diminished to the point where each day is another round of frustration and pain, be it physical or emotional.

    If I should become terminally ill, I would not want to cede to a third party the right to determine when my life is no longer worth living

    *

    ?With proper safeguards, this option is valuable for a very small subset of patients with terminal illnesses that would progress with unbearable physical or psychological suffering. The key is to have the right type of safeguards so only appropriate patients are given this option.?

    *

    The Massachusetts Medical Society officially came out against the measure, arguing that, ?the proposed safeguards against abuse are insufficient.? It?s difficult to determine exactly when someone?s six months would begin. More loftily, they reasserted the idea that ?physician assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician?s role as healer.?

    *

    Assisted dying is best dealt with by preventing it from ever developing in the first place by giving patients the opportunity to talk with their physicians and families about how much care they want and offering them palliative or hospice care before being subjected to needless treatments in the first place. Most physicians and patients and their families would agree with this.

    It is not surprising, however, that needless treatment can bring on the serious depression and hopelessness that in some patients can drive the desire for assisted suicide. It is hard, as it should be, and becoming harder all the time because of the rapid advances in medical science to decide when and what kind of treatment is ?needless.?

    Physicians usually make the judgment after considering all the possibilities that modern medicine can offer and then try to make the best medical and humane judgments, taking into consideration the patient?s prognosis and wishes. But sometimes physicians can be moved by the fear of malpractice suits for not having ?done everything? and resort to over-treatment as a solution. This is called defensive medicine. It will continue, however, until the defects in the malpractice system are corrected and physicians are not penalized for using good judgment that is later seized upon as a reason for a malpractice suit.

    But insurance plays a significant role in over-treatment as well because it isolates patients and families from the astronomical costs of over-treatment, making it easy for them to demand that ?everything be done,? even when it is against the collective judgment of the physicians taking care of the patient. But once the decision to do everything is made, it sets in motion a steady stream of reports from CAT scans and laboratory tests and consultants that often create confusion that worsens patients? feelings of hopelessness and loss of control.

    There is a real danger that the insurance companies? pressure on doctors to practice ?economically? will subtly influence the decisions that patients, their families, and physicians make. Already physicians are under great pressure to practice medicine with severe ?cost-saving? restrictions.

    *

    WebMD?s physician web site, recently surveyed 24,000 doctors ? When asked if physician-assisted suicide should be allowed in some situations, 47% of doctors said ?yes,? 40% said ?no,? and 13% said, ?It depends.?

    RELIGION

    Vote NO on Question 2,? reads a sign outside St. Stephen?s Parish in downtown Framingham. The message on a second sign is printed in Spanish. The Roman Catholic Church in recent weeks has spoken out fiercely against the ballot measure to legalize physician-assisted suicide and Catholic groups nationwide have donated most of the $2 million the opposition has raised this election cycle. Cardinal Sean O?Malley of the Archdiocese of Boston last weekend broadcast a special sermon to parishes across the state urging churchgoers to vote no on Question 2. Local parishioners last week said they agree. ?It?s taking something that?s out of our control.?

    *

    Rabbi Andrew Vogel said Judaism unlike some other religions doesn?t take a black and white stance. The religion opposes suicide but encourages compassion, he said. He opposes the measure but encouraged Jews to make their own decision.

    *

    The flaws Meade cites include no mandatory family notification ? and no mandatory counseling. Her allies include Boston Cardinal Sean O?Malley. In a video homily, posted on the cardinal?s blog, he makes it clear that he wants Catholics to vote no.? O?Malley says ?We cannot ignore the impending legalization of physician assisted suicide as if it did not affect us. It would bring spiritual death, a cheapening of human life, the corrupting of the medical profession. PAS means making doctors nurses, pharmacists, friends, and society itself accomplishes in suicide.?

    *

    Rabbi Ronne Friedman of Temple Israel of Boston spoke in favor of the question during his Oct. 5 sermon, and he and four other reform rabbis have released a statement backing the measure.?There are a lot of people who want to know that it would be possible,? Friedman said Sunday in a phone interview. ?It?s hard to imagine that level suffering if you?re not in that condition. They want to feel that if it?s intolerable, they have the right and permission to exit on their own terms. Just the knowledge provides a sense of relief.?

    *

    Imam William Suhaib Webb, of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, said that while the question has not been formally addressed during services, ?religiously we?re pretty much in agreement as Muslims? against it.?We believe that every breath is a gift,? Webb said. ?Every difficulty through that suffering is a means of purifying into the life thereafter.?

    *

    ?It?s the wrong direction to go in,? said Bob Denning, 57, of Boston. Denning said that society was ?looking for a quick fix? to suffering and that physician-assisted suicide was ?immoral and a crime. The way the law is, it?s actually insulting to humans.?

    *

    The Rev. Walter Kim of Park Street Church, a Protestant church in Boston, said his church recently held a panel discussion on the question, which he opposes.?It?s a moral as well as a political issue,? Kim said. ?If we created a culture that really took care of the elderly and gave them vibrant communities, we?d be greatly alleviated. ?The wording of the question ?is so problematic it doesn?t enable us to speak with moral clarity,? he said. He added that the lack of safeguards makes it such ?that you don?t even have to get to all the moral issues. This ballot is problematic.?

    *

    The Rev. Kazimierz Bem, pastor of the First Church in Marlborough, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, preached a sermon against the physician-assisted suicide question on Oct. 21. He said that educating the public was important and that he was moderator of a panel discussion held that same day at the church. Supporters and opponents sat on the panel, he said, but the choice is a clear one.?A person ravaged by disease has no less dignity than Michael Phelps in the swimming pool,? said Bem. ?It is not up to us to decide when we go.?

    *

    The widow of Senator Edward Kennedy has joined a line-up of high-profile liberal Catholics opposing a referendum that would permit physician-assisted suicide in the predominantly Democrat state of Massachusetts.Victoria Reggie Kennedy voiced her opposition to physician-assisted suicide in an op-ed article in the Cape Cod Times, saying that Tuesday?s referendum would turn her late husband?s lifelong commitment to health care ?on its head by asking us to endorse patient suicide ? not patient care ? as our public policy for dealing with pain and the financial burdens of care at the end of life.? Mrs Kennedy noted that when her husband was diagnosed with cancer he was given two to four months to live and survived for another 15 months.

    *

    According to financial reports filed with the state, the Archdiocese of Boston and some of its affiliated organizations, such as the Boston Catholic Television Center and St. John?s Seminary, spent at least $2.5 million to defeat the proposed law. He added that the American Principles Project, a national conservative organization, along with one of its founders, added another $500,000 to oppose the initiative.

    *

    In remarks to the assembly earlier in the day, O?Malley thanked his fellow bishops and Catholic organizations for their help in defeating physician-assisted suicide in Massachusetts, which he called a ?terrible assault on human life.

    ?The Catholic church teaches that all life is sacred, from conception to natural death, and that suicide is always objectively wrong, though whether a person bears responsibility for committing suicide depends on his or her psychological and physiological state.

    In his remarks, O?Malley pointed to the Netherlands, where doctor-assisted suicide is legal and where a group is now creating mobile teams that will offer euthanasia to patients at home, making lethal drugs more widely available to patients. The United States, O?Malley said, is a long way from that scenario, but only because voters in all but two states have held the line.

    ?What has put the brakes on the growth of physician-assisted suicide in the US is that more than 20 states have rejected proposed legislation and ballot initiatives,? he said.

    *

    The Archdiocese of Boston led the fight against Question 2, the ballot measure that would have allowed people with less than six months to live to obtain lethal prescriptions. The church helped build a diverse coalition of doctors, hospice workers, and interfaith leaders and helped raise more than $4 million, much of it from Catholic organizations and wealthy donors across the country.

    *

    On Tuesday the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston did something it had not done for a while: It won a major political battle.The archdiocese and other Catholic donors supplied a significant share of the $5 million spent to defeat Ballot Question 2, which would have let terminally ill people obtain a prescription drug to end their lives. But the church did not win the fight alone. By Election Day a large, diverse coalition of opponents had united against the measure, including many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim clergy; palliative care doctors; hospice workers; and pharmacists.

    Polls in early October suggested two-thirds of voters supported the ballot question. But on Election Day it failed by 2 points. Opponents outspent proponents by a factor of six.

    ?Physician-assisted suicide,? Cardinal O?Malley told the assembly, ?presents a moral and ethical threat to society, the medical profession, the disabilities community and the common good. It brings spiritual death, a cheapening of human life, and a corrupting of the medical profession. During the course of preaching and speaking about this issue, I often cited the Hippocratic Oath of ?do no harm.??Although the measure to legalize assisted suicide was defeated, the Church is nonetheless called to ?become more focused on the fact that we must do more to promote good palliative and hospice care at the end of life.?

    ?The Church has always been committed to compassionate and dignified end of life care,? he said. ?We must work with our hospice care and palliative care communities to continue to provide quality of care for the terminally ill. Fear of tremendous pain is advanced as a reason to support physician-assisted suicide. In almost every instance palliative care can suppress pain.?

    The cardinal also reminded the assembly that ?people already have the right to refuse burdensome, life-extending treatments. They also have the option of leaving advance directives to determine their care when they are no longer able to express their wishes. The death that results from withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining treatment has always been separated by a bright line from active measures to cause death.?

    ?Assisted suicide proponents seek to blur this line,? he said. In preventing this measure from being passed, however, the Massachusetts prelate emphasized the importance of providing pastoral and medical care for terminally patients.

    *

    Some religious groups, of course, have starkly different ideas. The Catholic Church has been vocal in its criticism of assistance in dying and, particularly, of Compassion & Choices. Last year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops laid out its official position in a statement. The bishops make a range of well-worn arguments, including the sanctity of the Hippocratic Oath and how ?suicidal? people need counseling, confusing the distinction between those who are truly suicidal?who do not want to live?and someone who is terminally ill, who wants to live but chooses to hasten their death because they can?t prevent it. The bishops also argue that allowing people to have a say in how and when they die will inevitably lead to abuse of the practice.

    ?Taking life in the name of compassion also invites a slippery slope toward ending the lives of people with non-terminal conditions,? the statement said.

    RIGHT TO DIE

    Death with Dignity 2012, the political action group supporting the measure, staunchly disagrees, saying people deserve to choose how they die.

    *

    Compassion & Choices provides information about end-of-life choices to help patients make informed decisions that reflect their personal values and wishes for care. They don?t provide the means. They don?t administer. They don?t encourage or coerce. They have no agenda other than to provide complete and accurate information about end-of-life options.

    *

    Final Exit instructs terminally ill people how to end their lives with helium and an ?exit mask??self-acquired and self-administered?and does not pursue legislative reform.?The group has run into legal trouble in recent years,?notably in Phoenix, Atlanta, and most recently Minnesota, for breaking state laws that prohibit assisting in suicide. Compassion & Choices has so far avoided such problems.

    *

    ?For the past year, the people of Massachusetts participated in an open and honest conversation about allowing terminally-ill patients the choice to end their suffering,? said Compassion & Choices. ?The Death with Dignity Act offered the terminally-ill the right to make that decision for themselves, but regrettably, we fell short. Our grassroots campaign was fueled by thousands of people from across this state, but outspent five to one by groups opposed to individual choice.?

    The ?Death With Dignity Act,? which aimed at allowing a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication to a terminally ill patient to end their own life, lost 49% to 51%, according to election results.

    In Massachusetts, 1,439,785 voters were against the proposal, while 1,382,651 supported the measure. In Boston, however, voters didn?t share the same sentiment as the rest of the Commonwealth. Hub voters favored the act, with 111,852 of those registered casting a ?Yes? vote, compared to 107,377 who voted ?No.?

    ?Even in defeat, the voters of Massachusetts have delivered a call to action that will continue and grow until the terminally-ill have the right to end their suffering,? backers of Question 2 said on Wednesday.

    *

    Compassion & Choices also debunks misinformation, like the idea that ceasing to eat and drink could be painful. It?s not. Terminally ill people typically don?t have healthy appetites to begin with, so hunger pangs are unlikely. Headaches are common at the beginning, but those pass quickly; thirst or dry mouth is the biggest challenge, but it?s more discomfort than pain, and there are ways to ease it.

    ?I never tell patients I?m going to help them have a good death,? she said. ?What I say is, ?Let?s work together to have the least bad death possible.??

    RIGHT TO LIFE

    Some disability groups and religious organizations believe that the terminally ill who are disabled deserve better palliative care and emotional support rather than a prescription of deadly medicine. They also worry that people may feel compelled or coerced into choosing death because their care is expensive, they see themselves as a burden to others or because relatives are thinking that they do not want to spend the grandchildren?s college tuition to keep grandpop going in a nursing home or ICU. Given the current push to contain medical costs, the biggest fear is that the vulnerable will get the bum?s rush to the hereafter.

    *

    Few people know that there is not a provision in this ballot language requiring family members to be notified if their loved one decides to take his or her life, that doctors are not present at the end, and that a terminally ill patient can get this prescription filled at the local pharmacy. There is a misguided perception that somehow this all takes place in a medically supervised setting. In reality, there is no tracking of these pills once they are picked up and brought to the person?s home.

    *

    Patients would not be required to seek psychiatric care before obtaining the lethal drug.? Multiple studies show a connection between a terminal diagnosis and patients developing depression.? As it stands, no mental health professional would be required to be part of the consultative process. I don?t think that the fact that the cardinal is sending out a homily to people is changing poll numbers,? said Mark Horan, spokesman for the Committee Against Physician Assisted Suicide.
    Horan said many voters agree the measure has flaws, such as no requirement to notify family members or for psychological counseling.

    *

    Harvard Right to Life stands for the right to life from conception to natural death,? HLR president Matthew R. Menendez ?14 said. ?So it is our view that it is never right to voluntarily end a life, and so in that sense we are opposed to [the Death with Dignity initiative].?

    *

    Wesley J. Smith of Secondhand Smoke blog says opposition consists of:
    ??? ?Disability rights activists who see themselves and the elderly?rightly?as the targets of the movement;
    ??? ?Medical professional organizations are overwhelmingly opposed to legalizing assisted suicide.
    ??? ?Egalitarian liberals, such as Robert P. Jones, believe that assisted suicide threatens equality.
    ??? ?Pro-lifers offer a solid foundation of opposition from which to build a winning coalition.
    ??? ?Advocates for the poor who understand that assisted suicide could easily become a form of medical cost containment

    *

    The landmark 2009 report by MetLife Mature Market Institute describes elder financial abuse as a crime ?growing in intensity.? The perpetrators are often family members, some of whom feel themselves ?entitled? to the elder?s assets. The report states that they start out with small crimes, such as stealing jewelry and blank checks, before moving on to larger items or coercing elders to sign over the deeds to their homes, change their wills or liquidate their assets. The report states that victims ?may even be murdered? by perpetrators.

    With legal assisted suicide in Oregon and Washington state, perpetrators are instead able to take a ?legal? route by getting an elder to sign a lethal dose request. Once the prescription is filled, there is no supervision over administration. The elder could be cajoled or coerced into taking the lethal dose, for example, while under the influence of alcohol. The lethal dose could be administered while the elder slept. If he awoke and struggled, who would know?

    *

    A Boston Globe poll in September showed 68 percent of voters in support and 20 percent opposed. In the end, the margin of defeat was 62,000 votes out of nearly 3 million cast. Some commentators attributed the defeat to prominent opposition by disability activists there who feared pressure to use the law, especially for older people with disabilities. Opposition also included the Massachusetts Medical Society and Senator Ted Kennedy?s widow.

    AUSTRIA

    The Gallup Inc. poll for the Swiss Medical Lawyers Association (SMLA) found that Catholic Austria had the third highest support for the idea of allowing people to decide to take their own lives with 83 per cent in favour. An additional 4 per cent had no opinion and 13 per cent did not agree.

    The country which showed the least enthusiasm still also had a majority in favour in Greece where just over half ? 52 per cent ? agreed assisted suicide should be allowed in some cases such as terminal illness. Support was only stronger in Germany and Spain.

    In addition 72 per cent of people in Austria agreed that they could consider using assisted suicide themselves with 18 per cent against the idea, and of these 85 per cent said it should always be carried out with professional assistance in the form of a medically qualified person.

    Most Austrians also felt it was wrong that doctors could face prosecution for helping with assisted suicide with 77 per cent calling for it to be lifted against 14 per cent that felt it was right to keep the law in place and 9 per cent that did not know.

    Some 27 per cent of Austrians however also admitted that they were worried that they might be put under pressure to choose suicide if it was legalised, saying they saw it as an occasional risk and 7 per cent said they imagined it would be a frequent risk.

    AUSTRALIA

    Every week about five elderly Australians commit suicide, and euthanasia advocates say most of them hang themselves for lack of a better way to end their pain.

    At the same time, keeping people alive with ?futile? but expensive treatments in hospitals is both cruel and blowing out health budgets, an intensive care doctor says. ?The vast majority is by hanging themselves. The explanation for that is that rope is very easy to get and access to information about how to hang yourself is easy to get ? but information about a safe peaceful mediated death is not.

    CANADA

    Exposing Vulnerable People to Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide by Alex Schadenberg uncovers data from peer reviewed journal articles and studies related to the euthanasia deaths without request, the unreported euthanasia deaths, and the experience of nurses with euthanasia in Belgium. The book also examines the most recent statistics from the Netherlands.

    This book exposes how vulnerable patient groups are dying by euthanasia and it also exposes how Justice Smith in the Carter case, the Royal Society of Canada end of life decision making report and the Quebec Commission on Dying with Dignity avoided the truth in order to establish false and dangerous recommendations for the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide. ?Using already existing studies, Schadenberg has uncovered the shocking truth about euthanasia in Belgium, the lives lost and the deep threat to others. His work demonstrates unequivocally that we must never follow this Belgian pathway to the easy killing of people whose lives are not valued by those who do the killing.?

    SOUTH AFRICA

    Davison, author of Before We Say Goodbye: Helping my mother die and After We Said Goodbye, was sentenced to five months of house arrest in New Zealand for assisting in the suicide of his terminally ill mother. He returned to South Africa at the end of April. Davison is on the executive committee of DignitySA and they have drafted a policy document that could be used as the basis for a draft bill. The organisation is considering bringing a class action to the Constitutional Court if the bill is not adopted by parliament. They are aiming to legalise euthanasia by the end of next year.

    UNITED KINGDOM

    An independent review of the controversial palliative care practice known as the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) has been announced, many newspapers report.

    The LCP is intended to allow people with a terminal illness to die with dignity. But there have been a number of high-profile allegations that people have been placed on the LCP without consent or their friend?s or family?s knowledge.

    Concerns have also been raised about hospitals receiving payments for increasing the number of patients who are placed on the LCP.

    Care minister Norman Lamb is quoted as saying ?It is clear that everyone wants their loved ones? final hours of life to be as pain free and dignified as possible, and the Liverpool Care Pathway is an important part of achieving this aim.?

    ?However, as we have seen, there have been too many cases where patients were put on the pathway without a proper explanation or their families being involved. This is simply unacceptable.?

    *

    Does the cost of applying heroic measures at the end of life exceed the cost of palliative care for 6 months? Can?t be about saving money. In America, nothing happens without a cost-benefit analysis. But the case for a less excruciating death can stand on a more neutral, less disturbing foundation, namely that it is simply a kinder way of death.

    *

    A Church of England body is opposing changes to a British law on assisted dying, saying it would permit people to actively participate in someone?s death, a move unprecedented since the country?s abolition of capital punishment.

    ?

    NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

    Care Not Killing (UK)

    Committee Against Physician-Assisted Suicide (US)

    Compassion & Choices (US)

    Compassion in Dying (UK)

    Death with Dignity (US)

    Dignitas (Switzerland)

    Dignity in Dying (UK)

    Dying with Dignity (Canada)

    Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (Canada)

    Final Exit Network (US)

    Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (UK)

    Not Dead Yet (US)

    Patient Rights Council (US)

    Second Thoughts (US)

    World Federation of Right to Die Societies (UK) ? The World Federation, founded in 1980, consists of 45 right to die organizations from 25 countries. The Federation provides an international link for organizations working to secure or protect the rights of individuals to self-determination at the end of their lives.

    BOOKS

    How to Die Consciously by Diane Goble ? Practical suggestions about how to prepare yourself and your family for your transition whenever/however it happens (because we are all going to die)

    Like this:

    Be the first to like this.

    Source: http://dianegoble.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/wrapping-up-the-massachusetts-death-with-dignity-defeat/

    kid cudi breedlove florida state football florida state football ben breedlove kid cudi ben breedlove matt barnes