‘Less troops, more drones is new US defense policy’

 

The plan, to be unveiled by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday and in budget documents next month, calls for a 30% increase in the U.S. fleet of armed unmanned aircraft in the coming years, the Wall Street Journal quoted defense officials as saying.

 

It also foresees the deployment of more special-operations teams at a growing number of small “lily pad” bases across the globe where they can mentor local allies and launch missions.

 

The utility of such tools was evident on Wednesday after an elite team—including members of Navy SEAL Team Six, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden—parachuted into Somalia and freed an American woman and Danish man held hostage for months.

 

The strategy reflects the Obama administration s increasing focus on small, secret operations in place of larger wars. The shift follows the U.S. troop pullout from Iraq in December, and comes alongside the gradual U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, where a troop-intensive strategy is giving way to an emphasis on training Afghan forces and on hunt-and-kill missions.
Defense officials said the U.S. Army plans to eliminate at least eight brigades while reducing the size of the active duty Army from 570,000 to 490,000, cuts that are likely to hit armored and heavy infantry units the hardest. But drone and special-operations deployments would continue to grow as they have in recent years.

 

At the same time, the Army aims to accentuate the importance of special operations by preserving light, rapidly deployable units such as the 82nd and the 101st Airborne divisions.

 

“What we really want is to see the Army adopt the mentality of special forces,” said a military officer who advises Pentagon leaders.

 

The new strategy would assign specific U.S.-based Army brigades and Marine Expeditionary units to different regions of the world, where they would travel regularly for joint exercises and other missions, using permanent facilities and the forward-staging bases that some advisers call lily pads.

 

Marines, for example, will use a new base in Darwin, Australia, as a launch pad for Southeast Asia, while the U.S. is in talks to expand the U.S. presence in the Philippines—potential signals to China that the U.S. has quick-response capability in its backyard, defense officials said.

 

Yet many of the proposed bases will be secret and could temporarily house small commando teams, the officials said.

“There are going to be times when action is called upon, like Tuesday night, when it will be clearly advantageous to be forward deployed,” a military official said, referring to the Somalia operation. “On the other hand, most of the time it will help you to be there to develop host nation or regional security.”

 

The Pentagon still will invest in some big-ticket items, including the F-35 stealth fighter, as a counterweight to rising powers, including China—although the department is poised to announce this week that it is going to slow procurement of the new plane, said defense officials.

 

Vitamin D high in Crohn’s disease patients

Contrary to expectations, people with the inflammatory bowel condition Crohn s disease are likely to have excessive levels of the active form of vitamin D in their blood, researchers have found. This is associated with low bone mineral density, they report.

Dr. Maria T. Abreu from the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles led the study. She said, “Most doctors think that Crohn s patients automatically have decreased vitamin D levels and encourage supplementation with vitamin D. We would like to urge doctors to check vitamin D levels before making that recommendation.”

As Abreu s team explains in the medical journal Gut, under certain circumstances too much active vitamin D can actually contribute to the breakdown of bone, leading to osteoporosis.

The researchers found “inappropriately high” blood levels of the active form of vitamin D in 42 percent of the 138 people they studied with Crohn s disease. This was true of only 7 percent of 29 patients with ulcerative colitis, another type of inflammatory bowel disease.

Also, the higher the blood levels of active vitamin D in Crohn s patients, the lower was their bone density — regardless of whether they were treated with steroids — the investigators found.

A high vitamin D level is “an additional risk factor predisposing to development of osteoporosis” for some Crohn s disease patients, the team concludes. Treatment of the underlying inflammation, “may improve metabolic bone disease.”

NASA finds new evidence of liquid water on Mars

LOS ANGELES: NASA scientists have discovered new evidence that briny water flows on Mars during its warmest months, raising chances that life could exist on the Red Planet, the space agency said on Thursday.

NASA first found signs of water on Mars more than a decade ago, but earlier indications were that any existing water would be frozen and concentrated at the poles.

Recently analyzed images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite show dark, finger-like features that extend down some slopes and crater walls on the planet during its late spring through summer, fading in the Martian winter.

“This is the best evidence we have to date of a liquid water occurring today on Mars,” said Philip Christensen, a geophysicist at Arizona State University, Tempe, in a NASA panel announcing the findings in Washington.

NASA scientists believe that if there is liquid water on Mars, it would be highly salty and lie beneath the surface. That would explain why it would not freeze in the planet’s frigid surface temperatures, which can fall to around 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 128 degrees Celsius), or evaporate in its low air pressure.

“It is more like a syrup, maybe, in how it flows,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator in charge of a special camera on the Mars orbiter called a High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment.

He also is the lead author of a report on evidence of water flows published on Thursday in the journal Science.

BETTER THAN ICE

The scientists on NASA’s panel stressed that liquid water is more likely to sustain life than ice, underscoring the importance of the latest discovery.

Past NASA discoveries revealed evidence of ancient shorelines and riverbanks on Mars. And analysis of gullies on the Red Planet five years ago turned up fresh mineral deposits that suggested recent water flows, but provided no categorical proof of that, scientists said.

The latest discovery is more difficult to explain away as evidence of anything but contemporary water flows, said Michael Meyer, Mars exploration program lead scientist at NASA.

Another possibility to account for the periodic darkening in the areas under examination is dust moving along the surface of the planet, McEwen said. But dust avalanches would occur at more random intervals, rather than on a seasonal basis, he said.

Scientists on the panel said the latest imaging evidence of flowing water also suggests the existence of liquid water closer to the planet’s equator than previously found.

Any liquid water would likely lie beneath the surface because the atmosphere on Mars is so thin that liquid water above ground would quickly evaporate, scientists said.

Some organisms on Earth thrive underground with little access to sunlight, and the same thing could be occurring on Mars, said Lisa Pratt, biogeochemist at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a participant on the NASA panel discussing the results on Thursday.

Pratt said further research is needed at the seven sites where recurring evidence of flowing water was found.

“It is our first chance to see an environment on Mars that might allow for the expression of an active biological process, if there is present-day life on Mars,” she said. AGENCIES

Kadhafi seeks UN, AU probe into Libyan unrest

PARIS: Moamer Kadhafi said he wanted the United Nations or the African Union to probe the unrest rocking Libya and promised investigators free access, in an interview published Sunday.

The strongman, making his first such demand since the outbreak of violent protests against his rule and the ensuing bloody riposte, also warned that the unrest would spell disaster for Europe.

“First of all I would like that an investigatory commission of the United Nations or the African Union comes here to Libya,” he told the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

“We will let this panel work unhampered,” he said, adding that he would be in favour of France “coordinating and leading” the probe body.

Shortly after the unrest broke out, Kadhafi”s son Saif al-Islam, long seen as a possible successor, said he wanted an independent domestic probe into the unrest.

On February 22, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Navi Pillay also called for an independent international investigation and an immediate halt to serious abuses committed by Libyan authorities.

Kadhafi underscored that the violence posing the greatest challenge to his more than four decade rule would have serious repercussions for Europe, which has been facing an uphill battle to stem clandestine immigration, especially from North Africa and Asia.

“Thousands of people from Libya will invade Europe,” he said, “and there will be no-one to stop them.”

Kadhafi repeated an oft-repeated charge that the revolt against his regime was being spearheaded by Al-Qaeda. (AFP)

Gaddafi complains lack of help in terror fight

PARIS: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said in a French newspaper interview released on Sunday that he was embroiled in a fight against terrorism and expressed dismay at the absence of support from abroad.

“I am surprised that nobody understands that this is a fight against terrorism,” the longtime autocrat of the North African oil-producing state told the Journal du Dimanche in excerpts of an interview due to be published later on Sunday.

“Our security services cooperate. We have helped you a lot these past few years. So why is it that when we are in a fight against terrorism here in Libya no one helps us in return?”

Gaddafi, who has ruled Africa’s fourth largest country since a 1969 coup, faces an unprecedented popular uprising that has seen rebel forces assert control over Libya’s east and loosen his grip in the west near the capital Tripoli.

Western leaders have denounced what they say has been Gaddafi’s brutal, bloody response to the uprising, and the International Criminal Court said he and his inner circle could be investigated for alleged crimes committed against civilians by his security forces.

Gaddafi, who spoke to journalists from his headquarters in Tripoli, said Islamic holy war would engulf the Mediterranean if the insurrection in Libya, inspired by successful pro-democracy uprisings in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, succeeded.

“There would be Islamic jihad in front of you, in the Mediterranean,” he said. “Bin Laden’s people would come to impose ransoms on land and sea. We will go back to the time of Red Beard, of pirates, of Ottomans imposing ransoms on boats.”

Gaddafi added that his government was “doing well” despite the armed turmoil and warned Europe against an influx of Libyan migrants to its shores if his foes drove him from power. AGENCIES

B Vitamins Help Memory Problems

Taking certain B vitamin supplements on a daily basis can cut in half the rate of brain shrinkage in elderly people suffering from mild memory problems, reveals a new Oxford University study.

Approximately 1 in 6 elderly people over the age of 70 has mild cognitive impairment, experiencing troubles with memory, language or other mental functions, but not enough to interfere with everyday life.
About half of people with mild cognitive impairment will go on to develop dementia – mainly Alzheimer’s disease – within five years of diagnosis. Certain B vitamins – vitamin B6, vitamin B12 and folic acid – control levels of homocysteine in the blood, and it is known that high levels of this amino acid are linked to an increased risk for Alzheimer’s. So a team from the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing (OPTIMA) set out to discover whether supplements of these B vitamins could slow down the higher rate of brain shrinkage, or atrophy, as seen in mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s. The study observed 168 volunteers aged 70 or over with mild memory problems. Half of these volunteers took high-dose B vitamin tablets for two years while the other half took a placebo tablet. The scientists evaluated disease progression in this group by using MRI scans to measure the brain atrophy rate over a two-year period. The findings are published in the journal PLoS ONE. The researchers found that the brains of those taking folic acid, vitamin B6 and B12 supplements shrank at a rate of about 0.76 percent a year, while those in the placebo group had a mean brain shrinkage rate of 1.08 percent. People with the highest levels of homocysteine benefited the most, showing atrophy at only half the rate of those on placebo. It is our hope that this simple and safe treatment will delay the development of Alzheimer’s disease in many people who suffer from mild memory problems, said Professor David Smith of the department of pharmacology at Oxford University, a co-leader of the trial. Along with studying the rate of brain shrinkage, the scientists also evaluated cognitive test scores, discovering that those with the slowest rate of shrinkage scored the strongest in cognition.

Anti-obesity drugs dull brain

Anti obesity drugs might make that pastry look a lot less appetizing, according to scientists at the University of Cambridge.
Professor Paul Fletcher and colleagues discovered that the anti-obesity drug sibutramine reduced brain responses in two regions of the brain, the hypothalamus and the amygdala, both of which are known to be important in appetite control and eating behaviour.
MRI scans revealed that in participants given sibutramine – an anti-obesity drug – the brain activity in these areas was reduced significantly.
Additionally, people who had the greatest reduction of brain activation following drug treatment tended to eat less and to lose more weight. The findings are reported today in The Journal of Neuroscience.

New oral vaccine for Polio found more effective

New oral vaccine for Polio found more effective A new Polio vaccine is helping leaps and bounds in eradicating the epidemic of Polio from the country.
Research published online in the journal The Lancet, shows that the new vaccine already used in Afghanistan, India and Nigeria is effective enough in combating the virus of Polio and is believed to eradicate the epidemic of Polio very soon.
A study has been carried out in India where the old vaccines and new oral vaccines were compared by subjecting 830 infants to either the new Vaccine or one of the old vaccines in two doses one at birth and one 30 days later.
Results revealed that seroconversion the rise in antibodies produced by the immune system against polio, over the examined blood samples, is about 30% more in the new oral vaccine than the older vaccine.Not just the new vaccine, credit goes to the mass vaccination campaigns and awareness campaign that spread the universal message of eroding the epidemic from the society.
Records reveal that the number of polio endemic countries has fallen from 125 in 1988 to just 4 in 2005. Also an actual drop in cases from 350,000 to just 1,606 in 2009 has been noticed.In India the cases for Polio affected saw a steep fall from 464 case last year to 39 cases this year. Nigeria too has seen a fall on 95%.Well, then finally human effort has achieved a remarkable triumph over a monster named, Polio

Facebook applications are being breached: Report

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that 10 popular Facebook applications have been transmitting users’ personal identifying information to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies.The newspaper said Monday that the breach also includes users who set all their information to be completely private. And in some cases, it says, the apps provided access to friends’ names. A Facebook spokesman told the Journal that the company would introduce new technology to contain the breach. It’s not clear how long the breach went on. The paper says Facebook also has taken immediate action to disable all applications that violated their terms. Most apps are made by independent software companies, not by Facebook.

Toddlers immune to ‘contagious’ yawning: study

WASHINGTON: Children under the age of four and kids with autism appear to be immune from contagious yawning, the phenomenon where one person’s yawn triggers a chain reaction of open mouths, a study published Wednesday says.

Researchers from the University of Connecticut observed 120 typically developing one- to six-year-old and 30 six- to 15-year-old with autism spectrum disorders for the study, which was published in the journal Child Development.

They found that although babies yawn spontaneously even before they leave the womb, most children show no signs of succumbing to contagious yawning until they reach the age of four.

Kids with autism were less likely to yawn contagiously than typically developing children with the same mental and chronological ages, and the more severe a child’s autism, the less likely he or she was to yawn contagiously, the study

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