From HarlemEnglish.com

Incredibly, the face, neck, and hands of the pretty young woman have become wrinkled and saggy, and she says even her stomach looks like she had a few children.

It happened in 2008 when after eating seafood her face broke out in a rash and became itchy.

She thinks she used to scratch her face even in sleep.

Her husband Nguyen Thanh Tuyen (34) got her some medicines but they did not work and he had to take her to a local doctor. Phuong was diagnosed with dermatitis and prescribed some pills. However, after taking them for a week, her face swelled up and hives appeared on her skin.

She then stopped taking the medicines and went to some traditional Chinese doctors in town. The medicine they gave reduced the swelling but she says she put on weight. But the drugs cost VND30,000 (US$1.5) a day.

Soon she had to wear a mask all day to avoid curious stares.

“We consider it as fate decreed by God and so we stopped trying to cure the disease,” said Phuong.

Recognize only by voice

Ho Thi Hiep, a neighbor, said Phuong used to be a beautiful girl. But people meeting Phuong for the first time after her disfigurement were no longer able to recognize her until they heard her voice.

Le Van Thiem of Giong Trom town says: “A couple of days ago, Phuong went back to her hometown for her grandmother’s death anniversary. I met her and thought some old lady was visiting us. Only when I heard her voice did I realize it was her.”

Her saggy skin notwithstanding, Phuong still has the voice and posture of a young woman and black hair.

“It is not just my face that has become saggy but also my stomach,” Phuong says.

“I have never given birth but the skin on my stomach looks like I have had two or three kids.

“Last September when I had a stomachache and went to a doctor, he said I was caught with early aging syndrome.

But Phuong’s condition has not put off her husband Tuyen.

“When we got married, Phuong was a beautiful girl,” he says. “It’s difficult to talk openly about conjugal matters, but just understand that I still love my wife.”

The couple now live in Bu Dop District in Binh Phuoc Province where she has a job shelling cashew while he works as a carpenter.

What doctors say?

Dr Mai The Trach, former head of the Ho Chi Minh City Endocrine Association, says allergies cause changes in facial skin. But Phuong has not aged since her memory and organs like heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs are normal, he says.

Hoang Viet, head of the Dong Nai Province-based Nguyen Dinh Chieu hospital, says he has dispatched personnel to Giong Trom to gather more information about Phuong’s condition.

He plans to bring Phuong to his hospital and, if he is unable to help, then to take her the Ho Chi Minh Hospital of Dermatology and Venereology.

The Cherokee Supreme Court (the tribe is a sovereign nation) ruled this week a 2007 constitutional amendment that required Cherokee blood in order to belong to the tribe could stand.

“This is racism and apartheid in the 21st century,” Marilyn Vann, the lead plaintiff in the case and a freedman leader, told Reuters.

The controversy over the freedmen’s status is at least in part about money. The Cherokee nation, the second-largest Native American tribe in the country, receives money from the federal government and earns money from its stake in the lucrative gambling industry, which totaled $26.4 billion for all tribes in 2009. In the run-up to the 2007 amendment vote, some proponents of expelling the freedmen suggested that more blacks might apply for membership to receive tribal money.

In the 1800s, the U.S. government passed a law forcing members of the Cherokee nation from their ancestral lands in the Deep South to make room for white settlers. The Cherokee — as well as their black slaves — were forcibly marched west of the Mississippi River to the Oklahoma territory during the “Trail of Tears,” resulting in the deaths of thousands of Native Americans.

After the Civil War, the Cherokee formally admitted by treaty their slaves’ descendants into the nation.

Before the 2007 passage of the amendment, some descendants of the freedmen said the vote on their status within the nation expressed a desire by many tribe members to paper over their slave-owning past. But the tribe’s leadership disagreed. “It’s a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry,” a Cherokee leader told the Washington Post. “We paid very dearly for those rights.”

Anders Behring Breivik has confessed to the July 22 shooting massacre at a youth camp conducted by the governing party, in which 69 people died, and the car bombing hours earlier in Oslo’s government quarter that killed eight.

Breivik, in a manifesto issued shortly before the attacks, denounced Norway’s left-leaning government and its tolerance of Muslim immigration. In the manifesto, he claimed contact with extremists elsewhere.

“We still think he was alone, but we cannot conclude about that. He holds back some information, and that worries us,” prosecutor Christian Hatlo told The Associated Press.

Hatlo also said Breivik has been questioned about his travels to 10 other countries and about equipment bought for the attacks. He declined to elaborate on either thread of inquiry.

The 32-year-old Breivik appears to have planned the attacks meticulously, but failed to anticipate one consequence — that he would be held in isolation after his arrest.

“He told us he had not thought of that, and he should have,” Hatlo said.

Earlier Thursday, former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who left the Utoya island youth camp just hours before the massacre, said the day will be remembered as one of the country’s darkest.

Speaking at the funeral of 16-year-old victim Marianne Sandvik in the southwestern city of Stavanger, a tearful Brundtland said “the loss of a young life can never give any meaning.”

Brundtland, who was prime minister for 10 years, led a left-leaning government with liberal immigration policies. In his manifesto, Breivik denounced Brundtland.

Hatlo also said that police have questioned a blogger whose anti-Muslim writings under the name of Fjordman were cited as an influence by Breivik in his manifesto.

Meanwhile, Oslo’s deputy mayor Baard Folke Fredriksen told The Associated Press that a request by authorities to close the street where Breivik’s explosive-laden car was parked had been approved last year. The necessary construction work to close it for vehicles was expected to be completed in September, he said.
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Abdulkadir Omar, 22, filed his federal lawsuit July 15 in Seattle against Sacramento-based American Patriot Security, seeking back pay and unspecified damages for emotional pain and loss of enjoyment of life, among other reasons.

“Growing up in this country, where the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of religion, I was let down,” Omar said Thursday at a press conference.

According to the lawsuit, Omar was hired by a local manager of the security company in May 2009 and earned $9 an hour guarding a FedEx warehouse in Kent, Wash. He said he started the same day he was hired, and was not told about the clean-shaven policy.

In November 2009, a supervisor from headquarters told him he had to shave his beard because of company policy. Omar responded that his beard is part of his religious beliefs and refused. He was suspended, and then fired the following spring, the lawsuit said.

A representative from American Patriot Security declined to answer questions.

“Everyone in the company is clean shaven,” Omar said. “And I chose not.”

Omar filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which found that he was wrongfully terminated and had the right to sue, according to a press release by the Council for American-Islamic Relations.

“There’s no policy that can go against the law of the land,” said Arsalan Bukhari, executive director of the Washington state chapter of CAIR. “Civil Rights Act trumps any (company) policy.”

Bukhari said companies need to accommodate someone’s religious beliefs unless it’s an “undue burden.”

Mary Fan, a law professor at the University of Washington, said that there are very limited exceptions to the protections provided by the Civil Rights Act against employers impinging on a person’s religious grooming.

“If the company is worried about customers who don’t like people who have beards and look Muslim — that’s exactly what the law is set to protect against,” she said.

Omar, originally from Yemen, immigrated to the U.S. when he was 10 years old. He said he’s a naturalized citizen. His beard covers his face and doesn’t extend past his chin.

Omar said he learned about the security guard job through his brother, who worked for the company as well. Asked if his brother experienced similar difficulties or if he still worked for the company, Omar declined to answer.

He did say that he doesn’t want his job back because found a better job.

Asked if he’s ready for the attention the lawsuit will bring, Omar said he was ready, but didn’t allow photographers to take pictures of his face.
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His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub’s pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub’s “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

“That’s where the head scratching comes,” Haub said. “What does that mean? Does that mean I’m healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we’re missing something?”

Haub’s sample day
Espresso, Double: 6 calories; 0 grams of fat

Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat

Centrum Advanced Formula From A To Zinc: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat

Little Debbie Star Crunch: 150 calories; 6 grams of fat

Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat

Diet Mountain Dew: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat

Doritos Cool Ranch: 75 calories; 4 grams of fat

Kellogg’s Corn Pops: 220 calories; 0 grams of fat

whole milk: 150 calories; 8 grams of fat

baby carrots: 18 calories; 0 grams of fat

Duncan Hines Family Style Brownie Chewy Fudge: 270 calories; 14 grams of fat

Little Debbie Zebra Cake: 160 calories; 8 grams of fat

Muscle Milk Protein Shake: 240 calories; 9 grams of fat

Totals: 1,589 calories and 59 grams of fat Despite his temporary success, Haub does not recommend replicating his snack-centric diet.

“I’m not geared to say this is a good thing to do,” he said. “I’m stuck in the middle. I guess that’s the frustrating part. I can’t give a concrete answer. There’s not enough information to do that.”

Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

Families who live in food deserts have limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, so they often rely on the kind of food Haub was eating.

“These foods are consumed by lots of people,” he said. “It may be an issue of portion size and moderation rather than total removal. I just think it’s unrealistic to expect people to totally drop these foods for vegetables and fruits. It may be healthy, but not realistic.”

Haub’s body fat dropped from 33.4 to 24.9 percent. This posed the question: What matters more for weight loss, the quantity or quality of calories?

His success is probably a result of caloric reduction, said Dawn Jackson Blatner, a dietitian based in Atlanta, Georgia.

“It’s a great reminder for weight loss that calories count,” she said. “Is that the bottom line to being healthy? That’s another story.”

Blatner, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said she’s not surprised to hear Haub’s health markers improved even when he loaded up on processed snack cakes.

Being overweight is the central problem that leads to complications like high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, she said.

How well are you managing your diabetes?

“When you lose weight, regardless of how you’re doing it — even if it’s with packaged foods, generally you will see these markers improve when weight loss has improved,” she said.

Before jumping on the Ding Dong bandwagon, Blatner warned of health concerns.

“There are things we can’t measure,” said Blatner, questioning how the lack of fruits and vegetables could affect long-term health. “How much does that affect the risk for cancer? We can’t measure how diet changes affect our health.”

I was eating healthier, but I wasn’t healthy. I was eating too much.

–Professor Mark Haub

“I’m eating to the point of need and pushing the plate or wrapper away,” he said.

He intended the trial to last a month as a teaching tool for his class. As he lost weight, Haub continued the diet until he reached a normal body mass index.

Before his Twinkie diet, he tried to eat a healthy diet that included whole grains, dietary fiber, berries and bananas, vegetables and occasional treats like pizza.

“There seems to be a disconnect between eating healthy and being healthy,” Haub said. “It may not be the same. I was eating healthier, but I wasn’t healthy. I was eating too much.”

He maintained the same level of moderate physical activity as before going on the diet. (Haub does not have any ties to the snack cake companies.)

To avoid setting a bad example for his kids, Haub ate vegetables in front of his family. Away from the dinner table, he usually unwrapped his meals.

Study: U.S. obesity rate will hit 42 percent

Haub monitored his body composition, blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose, and updated his progress on his Facebook page, Professor Haub’s diet experiment.

To curb calories, he avoided meat, whole grains and fruits. Once he started adding meat into the diet four weeks ago, his cholesterol level increased.

Haub plans to add about 300 calories to his daily intake now that he’s done with the diet. But he’s not ditching snack cakes altogether. Despite his weight loss, Haub feels ambivalence.

“I wish I could say the outcomes are unhealthy. I wish I could say it’s healthy. I’m not confident enough in doing that. That frustrates a lot of people. One side says it’s irresponsible. It is unhealthy, but the data doesn’t say that.”

“It’s clearly an airplane contrail,” Pike said Tuesday afternoon. “It’s an optical illusion that looks like it’s going up, whereas in reality it’s going towards the camera. The tip of the contrail is moving far too slowly to be a rocket. When it’s illuminated by the sunset, you can see hundreds of miles of it … all the way to the horizon.

“Why the government is so badly organized that they can’t get somebody out there to explain it and make this story go away … I think that’s the real story,” Pike added. “I mean, it’s insane that with all the money we are spending, all these technically competent people, that they can’t get somebody out there to explain what is incredibly obvious.”

Mystery launch off California A U.S. Northern Command official who didn’t want to be identified said the contrail could very well be from an airplane. An “illusion” effect made the contrail appear as if it’s rising straight up, but it’s actually level, the official said. The event is similar to another sighting around New Year’s Eve in which observers believed they witnessed a missile, he said.

Col. Dave Lapan, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said later Tuesday that while there is no evidence that the contrail was left by a missile the department is still investigating.

No Defense Department units reported launches at the time. The North American Aerospace Defense Command and the U.S. Northern Command did not report any foreign missile launches off the California coast, Lapan added. Regardless, there was no threat to the United States, he said.

Tuesday morning, the Pentagon and the North American Aerospace Defense Command were investigating video shot by a news helicopter operated by CNN affiliate KCBS/KCAL showing an ascending orange-colored contrail high into the atmosphere, officials said. A contrail is the visible vapor trail behind airplanes or rockets traveling at high altitudes.

The Federal Aviation Administration, the Coast Guard, Navy, Air Force, and California Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Jane Harman — whose coastal districts are closest to the offshore contrails — were at a loss to explain the images.

“The FAA ran radar replays of a large area west of Los Angeles based on media reports of the possible missile launch at approximately 5 p.m. (PT) on Monday. The radar replays did not reveal any fast moving, unidentified targets in that area,” said FAA spokesman Ian Gregor. “The FAA did not receive reports … of unusual sightings from pilots who were flying in the area on Monday afternoon.

“The FAA did not approve any commercial space launches around the area Monday,” he added.

Lapan said that various agencies are trying to find out what happened.

“I don’t know specifically what they are all doing. I just know they have been pinged and that we are talking to the FAA, we are talking to other parts of the U.S. government. We are trying to do everything we can to figure out if anybody has any knowledge of what this event may have been,” Lapan said in off-camera comments to journalists.

“So far we have come up empty,” he added.

Dehydration is one of its tell-tale signs. In a camp in Cabaret, just east of Port-au-Prince, children lie on cots as life-sustaining fluids are pumped intravenously into their bodies.

The cholera outbreak in Haiti has now killed 583 people and another 9,123 people have been hospitalized, according to Gabriel Timothe, director general of Haiti’s Ministry of Health.

Medical personnel fear rising waters over the banks of Haiti’s Arbonite River, which they say is a source of contamination, have increased the risk of a wider rate of infections.

“We’re doing everything we can to mitigate [the] spread,” Dr. Jon K. Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, said during a press conference on Tuesday.

Health officials had braced for problems after Tomas, fearing the hurricane that battered the Caribbean nation over the weekend could worsen the cholera outbreak.

On Monday, Dr. Toni Eyssallenne of Hospital Bernard Mevs confirmed the first case of cholera — in a 3-year-old boy — to originate and manifest entirely in Port-au-Prince.

Two more cases were confirmed Tuesday by Eyssallenne.

A 41-year-old woman who contracted the disease has not traveled in a year, the official said. A 33-year-old who lives in a tent city uses a communal water source. She, too, did not bring the infection into the city.

Previous cases had been centered in Haiti’s Artibonite and Central Plateau regions, including the city of St. Marc, north of the nation’s capital. Until Monday, health officials said that those being treated for cholera in Port-au-Prince all contracted the disease elsewhere.

The young Port-au-Prince boy lived in a tent city across the street from a place that sells macaroni, and he had not traveled in over a year, and he hadn’t had any contact with people from St. Marc or the Artibonite region, Eyssallenne said.

After suffering from nausea and diarrhea, the boy was treated and released from the hospital after his condition improved.

Hurricane Tomas’ trek past Haiti killed 20 people and injured another 36, a Communications Ministry official said Monday. Seven people were missing and 5,954 were homeless, the official said.

Health officials fear that the water dumped by the storm will worsen the outbreak. The concern is that overflow from latrines and septic tanks could contaminate the supply of fresh drinking water and contribute to the spread of the bacteria.

In the capital, the canals were not overflowing, said American Red Cross spokeswoman Andrea Koppel. But that was not the case in cities west of the capital, which bore the brunt of Hurricane Tomas, she said.

Still, even Port-au-Prince looks and smells like a dump — a caldron of water, garbage and human waste. “We get used to it,” said one resident.

Ten months after a magnitude-7 earthquake laid waste to much of the nation, people compete with animals scavenging through the ubiquitous dumps for scraps of food.

“The quick solution is management,” said Environment Minister Jean Marie Claude Germain. “Management meaning that you have a structure in place, but the structure was not conceived with the slums in mind.”

But most of the residents of Port-au-Prince live in slums.

“We’re working on it,” Germain said. “We will work with the private sector.”

“We’re all very afraid of what’s coming,” said Julio, a car wash worker in the city of Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville at the southern tip of Texas. “This was already a war zone and it is only going to get worse.”

The killing of Ezequiel “Tony Tormenta” Cardenas, head of the Gulf cartel, by Mexican marines last week was a brief victory in President Felipe Calderon’s fight against the gangs warring over smuggling routes into the United States.

Since the death of Cardenas, cartel roadblocks and gunfights have intensified across Matamoros and nearby Reynosa and Monterrey, Mexico’s richest city. The Zetas have strung up threatening banners on major roads in the cities.

Antonio Garza, police chief of northeastern Tamaulipas state that is home to Matamoros, warned of a “collective psychosis” since Friday’s killing of Cardenas, with many fearful residents staying home and schools being closed.

Hundreds of university students were evacuated on Tuesday in a series of bomb scares in Matamoros, after 10 high schools received similar warnings on Monday.

All turned out to be false and no one was injured but residents have good reason to be scared. Since December 2006, when Calderon launched his crackdown, more than 31,000 people have been killed across Mexico in drug-related violence.

Cardenas — the brother of former Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas, who was extradited to Texas in 2007 — was killed in a hail of grenades and gunfire after marines closed in on him in a house in downtown Matamoros.

No photos of his body have surfaced. Journalists and civil protection sources in Matamoros said he was buried on Monday in the port city but officials declined to comment.

“ALL-OUT ASSAULT”

Cardenas was the fourth drug baron to be killed or captured since last December.

But drug trade analysts see more violence as the Zetas, the Gulf cartel’s former armed wing, fight to win back power in Reynosa and Matamoros, both manufacturing cities where investment is being frozen because of the violence.

“Tony Tormenta’s death means the Zetas are likely to attempt to regain influence in these regions and perhaps even mount an all-out assault,” U.S. security consultancy Stratfor said in a report. “As a result, violence in the region is likely to spike in the short term.”

Headed by Heriberto “The Executioner” Lazcano, the Zetas split from the Gulf cartel earlier this year and are blamed for some of the worst atrocities in the drug war, including the murders of 72 migrants in August.

Founded in the late 1990s by about 40 soldiers who deserted army special forces units to work for the Gulf cartel, the Zetas may now number 10,000 across Mexico and Central America.

Mexico’s most wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, who leads the powerful Sinaloa cartel, could also wade in and try to take over the lucrative smuggling routes.

“It opens a valuable space to secure a new position and to launch a counter-offensive,” said Pedro de la Cruz, a security analyst at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

Guzman could exploit the vacuum by allying himself with the Gulf cartel. There may also be a power struggle within the Gulf cartel, said security analyst Alberto Islas.

Cardenas ran the gang with Jorge Eduardo Costilla, known as “El Coss,” who is still at large.

“Obviously there’s going to be a settling of scores and if Tony Tormenta’s henchmen don’t get 100 percent in line behind El Coss … they are going to disappear,” Islas said.

(Additional reporting by Miguel Angel Gutierrez; Editing by John O’Callaghan)

“Lesbian rumors!” Oprah said in her trademark exaggerated voice.

But his new Marine commandant thinks otherwise and the Senate has not yet taken action, setting up yet another hurdle for gay activists who see their window quickly closing. After Tuesday’s elections that saw Republicans chip away at Democrats’ majority in the Senate and wrest the House from their control, their hopes for ending the 17-year-old law have dimmed.

“I would like to see the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ but I’m not sure what the prospects for that are and we’ll just have to see,” Gates told reporters traveling with him to Australia this weekend.
Gates has said he would prefer Congress act after the Pentagon releases its study of how repeal would be implemented, which is due Dec. 1.

That goal, though, lacks the backing of the Marine Corps commandant at a moment the country is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This is not a social thing. This is combat effectiveness,” Gen. James Amos said.

That hesitation could be enough to give senators permission not to act, activists fear.

The House has passed legislation repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but it has not yet seen a vote in the full Senate, where Democrats don’t have the votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. Democratic leaders says they are trying to reach a deal across the aisle now that Election Day has passed.

“The Senate should call up the defense bill reported out of committee and pass it before it goes home for the year,” said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “If the president, Majority Leader Reid, Secretary Gates and a handful of Republican senators are committed to passing the comprehensive defense bill, there is ample time to do so.”

Gay activists worry the repeal could be stripped from the bill that funds the Pentagon.

“Any talk about a watered-down defense bill, whereby the ‘don’t ask’ revisions would be stripped out, is unacceptable and offensive to the gay and lesbian service members who risk their lives everyday,” said Sarvis, whose organization provides legal services for gays and lesbians who face discharge.

Obama on Wednesday also said he wanted a repeal before the new Congress arrives.

“This should not be a partisan issue,” he said. “You’ve got a sizable portion of the American people squarely behind the notion that folks who are willing to serve on our behalf should be treated fairly and equally.”

A Gallup poll in May found 70 percent of American favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly.

The legislative countdown comes as a parallel effort to end the ban continues in court.

Last month, the Pentagon was forced to lift its ban on openly serving gays for eight days after a federal judge in California ordered the military to do so. The Justice Department has appealed, and a federal appeals court granted a temporary stay of the injunction.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is in the midst of a study of how it would implement a repeal should Congress act. Leaders of that effort have said a hasty pace and inadequate protections for gay and lesbian military members could be a disaster.

The White House had hoped lawmakers would delay action until the Pentagon had completed its study so fellow Democrats would not face criticism that they moved too quickly or too far ahead of public opinion in this election year. House Democrats would not wait. Administration officials joined the negotiations to make certain a repeal was not done too quickly.

Obama, Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen — the top uniformed military official in the country — have spoken in favor of repeal but have emphasized that it must be paced. The White House’s favored plan could give the Pentagon years to implement the repeal process and would require the approval of Obama, Gates and Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a speech last year at the Army War College, Gates noted that the 1948 executive order for racial integration took five years to implement.

“I’m not saying that’s a model for this, but I’m saying that I believe this is something that needs to be done very, very carefully,” he told the audience.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was imposed by a 1993 law intended as a compromise between President Bill Clinton, who wanted to lift the ban on gays entirely, and a reluctant Congress and military that said doing so would threaten order.

Under the policy, the military can’t ask recruits their sexual orientation. In turn, service members can’t say they are gay or bisexual, engage in homosexual activity or marry a member of the same sex.

Between 1997 and 2008, the Defense Department discharged more than 10,500 service members for violating the policy.