Where ever you are

Black-on-white crime: The great-granddaughter of General Foods founder and heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post has been found slain at her luxury spa resort on the Caribbean island of Roatan, Honduras police have said

Roatan police chief Alex Madrid said that Nedenia Post Dye, 46, was found stabbed in her room on December 22. He said that police had arrested a local singer whom Dye was helping quit drugs. The black suspect, Lenin Roberto Arana, 25, told police that he and Dye had been romantically involved, Madrid said. Madrid said that Arana had been captured wearing blood-soaked clothing as he tried to flee in Dye's car. Police said that Dye appeared to have been stabbed many times in the back. Madrid said that Dye was murdered by Lenin Roberto Arana Carlos, also known as the musician Canario, with whom she was in a romantic relationship. Police believe that she was a victim of domestic violence. The black man killed her because he wanted to get crack cocaine. He has been charged with her murder.

Pittsburgh: An orthodox Jewish rabbi is being sued for accidentally severing a baby's penis during a traditional bris ceremony

Rabbi Mordechai Rosenberg botched the bris earlier in 2013, forcing the baby to be hospitalized for almost two months and undergo six blood transfusions. But doctors say that the penis was successfully reattached. "It doesn't always work," said a surgeon who wasn't involved in the case. Even after successful "microsurgery", "sometimes the nerves don’t heal well beyond where you reattached it." Rabbi Rosenberg says on his website that he is a "certified mohel" and notes that a doctor's medical circumcision "is not considered valid according to Jewish law." However, attorney David Llewellyn says that the training of mohels is dangerously unregulated: "I think the government probably should require some sort of training if this is going to be done," he said. But Rosenberg said that he is "trained in this" and called the incident a "horrible situation" and a "tragic accident." He has continued to perform circumcisions.

France is considering banning performances by a black comedian whose shows have repeatedly insulted the memory of Holocaust victims and could threaten public order, Interior Minister Manuel Valls has said

He said that his ministry is studying legal ways to ban shows by Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, a comedian repeatedly fined for hate speech who ran in the 2009 European Parliament elections at the head of an "Anti-Zionist List" including far-right activists. Valls announced the move after Jewish groups complained to President Francois Hollande about Dieudonne's trademark straight-arm gesture, which they call a "Nazi salute in reverse" and link to a growing frequency of anti-Semitic remarks and acts in France. "Dieudonne M'bala M'bala doesn't seem to recognize any limits any more," Valls said in a statement announcing the legal review aimed at banning his public appearances. "From one comment to the next, as he has shown in several television shows, he attacks the memory of Holocaust victims in an obvious and unbearable way," he said. France has Europe's largest Jewish minority, estimated at about 600,000, but also sees a steady emigration to Israel of Jews who say that they no longer feel safe there. In the worst recent anti-Semitic incident, a French Islamist killed a rabbi and three pupils at a Jewish school in the southwestern French city of Toulouse. Dieudonne, as he is known on stage, has responded to the criticism from prominent Jewish figures by threatening to sue them for linking his gesture - a downward straight arm touched at the shoulder by the opposite hand - to the Hitler salute. He calls the gesture "la quenelle" - the word for an elongated creamed fish dumpling - and says that it stands for his anti-Zionist and anti-establishment views, not anti-Semitism. The gesture has gone viral on social media recently, with mostly young fans displaying it at parties and sports events. Some do it while in the audience at live television shows. Two soldiers were sanctioned by the army in September 2013 for making the gesture in uniform in front of a Paris synagogue. "It's the Nazi salute in reverse," Roger Cukierman, head of the CRIF umbrella group of Jewish organizations, said after complaining about it to Hollande. "Very clearly, Mr Dieudonne is developing a nearly professional anti-Semitism under the cover of telling jokes." Dieudonne, 46, Paris-born son of a Cameroonian father and French mother, began his comedy career with a Jewish sidekick in the early 1990s and appeared in several films. Originally active with anti-racist left-wing groups, he began openly criticizing Jews and Israel in 2002 and ran in the European elections two years later with a pro-Palestinian party. He has been fined several times in France for defaming Jews. Police broke up his one-man-show in a Brussels theatre for suspected anti-Semitic hate speech, but he was not convicted. When Radio France's Patrick Cohen asked on air if the media should pay so much attention to him, Dieudonne suggested that the journalist should get ready to emigrate. "When I hear Patrick Cohen speaking, I say to myself, you see, the gas chambers ... too bad," he said.

The Office for National Statistics has disclosed that in 2012 more than 80% of babies born in three London boroughs had either one or both parents born outside of Britain

Across London, nearly seven in 10 babies had at least one non-British father or mother, while across England and Wales the figure was one in three. Almost nine in 10 babies born in parts of Britain have at least one foreign-born parent, official figures have revealed for the first time. The biggest migrant group in Britain is those born in India, which accounts for 694,000 people in England and Wales. Pakistan has 482,000 immigrants living in England and Wales.

A gene variant that seems to increase the risk of diabetes in Latin Americans appears to have been inherited from Neanderthals

Modern humans interbred with a population of Neanderthals shortly after leaving Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago. This means that Neanderthal genes are now scattered across the genomes of all non-Africans living today. The gene variant was detected in a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) of more than 8,000 Mexicans and other Latin Americans. The GWAS approach looks at many genes in different individuals, to see whether they are linked with a particular trait. People who carry the higher risk version of the gene are 25% more likely to have diabetes than those who do not, and people who inherited copies from both parents are 50% more likely to have diabetes. The higher risk form of the gene - named SLC16A11 - has been found in up to half of people with recent Native American ancestry, including Latin Americans. The variant is found in about 20% of East Asians and is rare in populations from Europe and Africa. The elevated frequency of this variant in Latin Americans could account for as much as 20% of these populations' increased prevalence of type 2 diabetes - the origins of which are complex and poorly understood. "To date, genetic studies have largely used samples from people of European or Asian ancestry, which makes it possible to miss culprit genes that are altered at different frequencies in other populations," said co-author Jose Florez, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts. "By expanding our search to include samples from Mexico and Latin America, we've found one of the strongest genetic risk factors discovered to date, which could illuminate new pathways to target with drugs and a deeper understanding of the disease." The researchers discovered that the SLC16A11 sequence associated with risk of type 2 diabetes is found in a newly sequenced Neanderthal genome from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Analyses indicate that the higher risk version of SLC16A11 was introduced into modern humans through interbreeding between early modern humans and Neanderthals. It is not unusual to find Neanderthal genes. About 2% of the genomes of present-day non-Africans were inherited from this distinctive human group, which lived across Europe and western Asia from about 400,000-300,000 years ago until 30,000 years ago. But scientists are only just beginning to understand the functional implications of this Neanderthal inheritance. "One of the most exciting aspects of this work is that we've uncovered a new clue about the biology of diabetes," said co-author David Altshuler, who is based at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts. SLC16A11 is part of a family of genes that code for proteins that transport metabolites - molecules involved in the body's various chemical reactions. Altering the levels of the SLC16A11 protein can change the amount of a type of fat that has been implicated in the risk of diabetes. These findings suggest that SLC16A11 could be involved in the transport of an unknown metabolite that affects fat levels in cells and thereby increases risk of type 2 diabetes.

To all my readers

Black women in the United States are much more likely to have high blood pressure than black men or white women and white men, according to a new study

The researchers also found that blacks are twice as likely as whites to have undiagnosed and untreated high blood pressure. "For many years, the focus for high blood pressure was on middle-aged men who smoked. Now we know better," said study author Dr. Uchechukwu Sampson, an assistant professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. For the study, researchers examined data from 70,000 people in 12 southeastern states known as the "stroke belt." This region has higher rates of stroke than anywhere else in the United States. High blood pressure is a risk factor for stroke, the researchers said. The overall rate of high blood pressure among the people in the study was 57%, but was higher in blacks (59%) than whites (52%). The rate among black women was 64%, compared with 52% in white women and 51% in both black and white men. Among the study participants with high blood pressure, 31% of black men were undiagnosed, along with 28% of black women, 27% of white men and 17% of white women. Blacks were twice as likely as whites to have uncontrolled high blood pressure, and men were more likely than women to have uncontrolled high blood pressure.

An Orthodox Jewish drug kingpin under house arrest in Staten Island has been granted permission to join his fiancé in a visit to the tomb of the late Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Schneerson so the couple can prepare for their marriage

Jonathan Braun, who impregnated his fiancé during his term of house arrest, is facing more than 20 years in prison, but convinced Federal Judge Sandra Townes that he wants to make his lady, who is five weeks pregnant, his wife. Braun, who is an Orthodox Jew, will be allowed to visit his future in-laws to make the official announcement of their nuptials, and also leave his home to shop for a wedding ring, get fitted for a tuxedo and accompany the unidentified fiancé to doctor visits, according to papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court. Townes will also allow Braun to attend an engagement party and a seven-night ceremony called “‘Sheva Brachot’ in which close family members gather at a home or restaurant and recite blessings for the newly married couple,” court papers say. Thousands of visitors make the pilgrimage to the rebbe’s resting place in Queens for “blessing, encouragement, or advice,” according to the Ohel Chabad-Lubavitch Center web site. Federal prosecutors had opposed Braun’s release on $8 million bail, but apparently took no position on whether he should be allowed to leave his home to make ready for his wedding. He pleaded guilty earlier in 2013 to supervising a massive marijuana ring that conspired to distribute 10,000 kilos of weed from Canada into the United States between 2007 and 2010. He admitted using encrypted BlackBerry devices to communicate with his underlings. “At its height ... Braun’s organization raked in more than $6 million per week,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Tiscione stated in court papers. Braun also reputedly had ties to the Hells Angels and Canada’s West End gang while deploying a small army of boatmen and drivers who used vehicles with hidden compartments to transport pot from Canada through the Akwesasne Native American reservations to New York, court papers say.

Black women will lose less weight than white women even if they follow the exact same exercise and diet regimen

The reason behind this finding is that black women's metabolisms run more slowly, which decreases their daily energy burn, said study author James DeLany, an associate professor in the division of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "African-American women have a lower energy expenditure. They're going to have to eat fewer calories than they would if they were Caucasian, and/or increase their physical activity more," said DeLany. DeLany and his colleagues reached this conclusion during a weight-loss study involving severely obese white and black women. Previous studies have shown that black women lose less weight, and the researchers set out to verify those findings, DeLany said. The research included 66 white and 69 black women, who were placed on the same calorie-restricted diet of an average of 1,800 calories a day for six months. They also were assigned the same exercise schedule. The black women lost about 8 pounds less, on average, than the white women, the researchers found. The explanation can't be that black women didn't adhere to the diet and exercise plan, DeLany said. The researchers closely tracked the calories each woman ate and the calories they burned through exercise, and found that black and white women stuck to the program equally. "We found the African-American women and the Caucasian women were both eating nearly identical amounts of calories," DeLany said. "They were as adherent in physical activity as well." That leaves variations in biology and metabolism to explain the difference in weight-loss success, the study authors said. "The African-American women are [equally] as adherent to the behavioral intervention," DeLany said. "It's just that the weight-loss prescription is wrong because it's based on the assumption that the requirements are the same." The difference in weight-loss success between black and white women has been known for some time, said Dr. Mitch Roslin, chief of bariatric surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "There are racial and genetic differences in obesity," Roslin said. "These things are real." One reason for the difference might be that European foods prevail in America, and form the basis of the modern diet, Roslin said. These foods might not burn as efficiently in the descendants of people from Africa, Asia and other parts of the world. "People of Western European or Eastern European descent have evolved greater mechanisms to withstand the pressures of the modern diet," Roslin said. He said studies have found that Asians subjected to a Western diet are more likely to develop metabolic syndrome and diabetes at a much lower body-mass index (BMI) than whites. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Weight-loss doctors will need to keep these biological differences in mind when prescribing diet and exercise regimens for black women, DeLany said.

In California, 52% of the state's 6 million school children are Hispanic, just 26% are white

Just 33% of Hispanic students are proficient in reading in third grade, compared with 64% of white students. By high school, one in four Hispanic 10th graders in California cannot pass the high school math exit exam, compared with 1 out of 10 white students. Nationally, an achievement gap is also showing up as Latino enrollment has soared from one out of 20 U.S. students in 1970 to nearly one out of four, and white students account for just 52% of U.S. first graders.

Four blacks are in custody after the senseless carjack killing of 30-year-old Dustin Friedland, a lawyer who was shot in the parking lot of an upscale New Jersey mall in front of his horrified wife

The names of the four black suspects who have been arrested are: Hanif Thompson, 29; Karif Ford, 31; Basim Henry, 32; Kevin Roberts, 33. All four blacks were hit with a slew of charges, including murder, carjacking and conspiracy.

The unobservable factors that underpin the infant mortality gap between blacks and whites have persisted for more than 20 years and now appear to play a larger role than the observable factors, according to a new study by Michigan State University researchers

The study is the first to investigate long-term changes in both sets of factors, providing vital context of the scope of the problem as medical experts around the world try to solve the mystery behind the gap. "What's surprising about our findings is that when we take out all the factors we can observe - including mother's age, education level, marital status and state of residence - the difference in the rate in which black and white infants die remained absolutely stable for two decades," said Steven Haider, professor of economics. "We made no progress in shrinking that part of the gap." Haider and fellow economists Todd Elder and John Goddeeris and epidemiologist Nigel Paneth analyzed the birth certificate data from about 50 million births in the United States between 1983 and 2004. The factors they used to predict mortality differences were then drawn from the information available on the birth certificates. For blacks, the rate of deaths within the first year of life dropped from 18.6 per 100,000 live births in 1983 to 12.3 per 100,000 in 2004. The rate of white infant deaths dropped from 9 to 5.3. Overall, the infant mortality rate gap between the races declined by 2.6 deaths per 100,000 live births. While U.S. health officials have said the narrowing of the gap is encouraging, they still point to the fact that the difference remains large and difficult to shrink significantly. The study separated the gap into the part that could be predicted by differences in observable factors and the part that remained after taking those factors into account. The researchers found that the part of the gap that could not be predicted remained remarkably constant over the two decades. By 2004, about 74% of the black-white infant mortality gap was not accounted for by differences in these observable factors. In other words, even if policymakers could wave a magic wand and eliminate disparities in education, marital status and all the other factors the researchers accounted for, it would only reduce the gap by one quarter, Haider said. While the MSU study doesn't explore what the remaining factors may be, it does, for the first time, establish how large and long-standing the problem is.

Gays and black Africans: Ugandan lawmakers have overwhelmingly approved what would be one of the harshest anti-gay laws in the world

Homosexual acts were already illegal in Uganda, but now anyone caught committing this crime twice will be imprisoned for life. The first draft of the law called for the death penalty in such cases, but it was shelved for years amidst international outrage. The bill also makes not reporting homosexuals a crime you could go to jail for. It essentially outlaws gay rights groups as well, making it illegal to promote homosexuality - though many groups were already specifically banned. "This is a victory for Uganda," the lawmaker behind the bill said. "I am glad the parliament has voted against evil." Activists are naturally despairing. "I am officially illegal," one said following the vote.

The share of black immigrants among the black population in the United States has increased from 1% in the 1970s to 11% in 2011

In the United States, black immigrants are much more likely than native blacks to be employed, married, highly educated and not incarcerated. First generation black immigrants undoubtedly have better labor market outcomes than black natives. They directly pass on some characteristics such as high human capital investments to the next generation. The transmission of labor force attachment seems to be weaker, suggesting that the second generation is converging to natives. Black immigrants do not only converge to black natives across generations but also within a generation. Convergence across generations is mostly driven by low-educated second generation blacks that drop out of the labor force in greater numbers than low-educated first generation immigrants do. Similarly, convergence within a generation is driven by the fact that black first generation immigrants who arrive at an early age have a weaker labor force attachment than immigrants who arrive in the United States when they are older.

Nearly 200 African asylum seekers who entered Israel illegally demonstrated in Jerusalem against being housed at a new open facility they walked out of two days earlier

The men had left the Holot facility in southern Israel and made their way to the city on foot and by bus. Holding banners reading "we are refugees not criminals" and "walk for freedom and humanity," they marched from the prime minister's office to the nearby parliament, accompanied by dozens of Israeli human rights activists. The demonstrators, who would be allowed to work and have social benefits if they held refugee status, accused the government of racism. "Many people are suffering from the racism of the right(-wing) government of Israel," Walidin Sleiman, from Sudan, said. Sleiman added that if Israel did not want to give them rights then they should be allowed to go somewhere else. Michal Roisin, a lawmaker from the left-wing Meretz party, said "as long as there is no place that can receive them - they can't go back to their homelands - we must ensure their rights." Activist Moran Mekamel, of the "Students for Refugees" group, said each case should be examined to determine "whether they qualify as asylum seekers," adding that "the facility they've been kept in is nothing short of a prison." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told parliament that "the infiltrators who were transferred to the special facility can be in it, or return to their countries." Police broke up the protest outside parliament, a spokesman said, noting that "some 180 people were transferred to buses awaiting them after an illegal protest." Police used force to disperse the demonstrators, at least two of whom needed medical care. The sprawling detention facility only began operating recently, when 484 illegal immigrants from Africa were taken there, the Israel Prisons Service said. It is open during the day but inmates must return for a night lockdown. Under legislation passed on December 10, 2013 illegal immigrants entering Israel can be held for up to a year without trail. It was the latest in a series of measures aimed at cracking down on close to 60,000 illegal immigrants from Africa, whom Israel says pose a threat to the state's Jewish character. The construction of a high-tech fence along the border with Egypt was recently completed.

The performance gap between Chicago’s black and white students — and between its poorest students and their wealthier classmates — continues to widen, newly released data show

Black Chicago Public Schools students fell further behind whites in three of four key measures, according to the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card. And students who qualify for free school lunches — traditionally a measure of poverty — also fell behind in three of the four tests of grade- and middle-school kids’ ability in reading and math. CPS has identified four priority groups that have become the focus for improvement: blacks, Latinos, students learning English and those with disabilities. The report shows that despite steady improvements over the last decade, Chicago still lags behind most major U.S. cities in math and reading at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels. The gap in fourth-grade math test scores between black and white students in Chicago widened to 40 points — the largest gap since the national study began in 2003, and significantly wider than the 31-point gap in the average major U.S. city. Though the average white student was graded as “proficient” with “solid academic performance” in fourth-grade math, the average black student was just over the threshold for “basic” understanding, or a “partial mastery” at that stage, according to the report. About 8,000 CPS students participated in the test, which is administered every two years.

Scientists present evidence for the accumulation of a Neanderthal DNA region found on chromosome 3 that contains 18 genes, with several related to UV-light adaptation, including the Hyal2 gene

This region was positively selected and enriched in East Asians, ranging from up to 49% in Japanese to 66% in Southern Chinese. The geographic distribution of the Neanderthal genomic region suggests that UV-light mutations were shown to be lost during the exodus of modern human from Africa, and reintroduced to Eurasians from Neanderthals. From 45,000 years to 5,000 years before present, effective population sizes of the Neanderthal region increased at a steady rate. Notably, the growth rate of the effective population size increased at around 5,000 to 3,500 years before present, which suggests a population expansion event. This Asian-specific Neanderthal evolutionary event is also consistent with previous reports of higher levels of Neanderthal ancestry in East Asians than in Europeans.

Whites comprise 64.3% of the overall US population, but are only 45.3% of America’s uninsured and have an uninsurance rate of little more than 11%

Obamacare is really unpopular with white voters. Just like Obama.

An Israeli woman has appealed to the Supreme Court against a rabbinical ruling that ordered her to circumcise her one-year-old son, the Justice Ministry said

There is no law in Israel making circumcision obligatory for Jews, but a rabbinical court that was presiding over the woman's divorce case has ruled that she must fulfill her husband's wish in the matter. It fined her 500 shekels ($142) a day until she did so. Rabbinical courts in Israel have jurisdiction over matters of marriage and divorce and operate under the Justice Ministry. In their ruling, the presiding rabbis said that the woman was using her refusal to circumcise her son as leverage against her husband.

Do Ashkenazi Jews have Iranian ancestry?

Why do some Jews carry R1a, the most prevalent Y-chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europe?

Justin Raimondo reviews Max Blumenthal's new book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

Blumenthal paints a portrait of a society living in a bubble, with the Israeli Ashkenazi aristocracy on top, the Mizrahi drone-workers charged with police work and other non-elite tasks near the bottom, and the Palestinian helots on the lowest rung, eking out a problematic existence with all the legal and economic factors pointing to their eventual expulsion from Israeli society.

Australian police have questioned the former principal of a fervently Orthodox Jewish boys’ school in Melbourne over allegations of decades-old child sex abuse

Rabbi Avrohom Glick, 67, a senior official inside the Chabad-Lubavitch community, made a voluntary statement to police and was released, his lawyer said. The allegations of repeated rape inside the synagogue adjacent to the college are understood to date back to the 1970s. Rabbi Glick was immediately stood down from his position as head of Jewish studies at the boys’ high school, its principal confirmed in a letter to parents. “Notwithstanding that Rabbi Glick is a highly respected staff member and community figure, in accordance with our policy and procedure, he was immediately stood down from his position at Yeshivah,” Rabbi Yehoshua Smukler wrote. “We will continue his suspension from duties and all contact with the students of the school until the outcome of the inquiry is known.”

Differences in children's exam results owe more to genetics than to teachers, schools or the family environment

In the subjects of English, maths and science, genetics accounted for on average 58% of the differences in scores that children achieved. Grades in the sciences, such as physics, biology and chemistry, were more heritable than those in humanities subjects, such as art and music, at 58% and 42% respectively.

The AIDS epidemic in America is rapidly becoming concentrated among poor, young black and Hispanic men who have sex with men

Despite years of progress in preventing and treating H.I.V. in the middle class, the number of new infections nationwide remains stubbornly stuck at 50,000 a year — more and more of them in these men, who make up less than 1% of the population. The affected group includes men who are openly gay, secretly gay or bisexual, and those who consider themselves heterosexual but have had sex with men, willingly or unwillingly, in shelters or prison or for money. Nationally, 25% of new infections are in black and Hispanic men, and in New York City it is 45%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the city’s health department. Nationally, when only men under 25 infected through gay sex are counted, 80% are black or Hispanic. According to a major C.D.C.-led study, a male-male sex act for a young black American is eight times as likely to end in H.I.V. infection as it is for his white peers. The crucial factor was that more of their partners were older black men, who are much more likely to have untreated H.I.V. than older white men. According to the C.D.C., 79% of H.I.V.-infected black men who have sex with men and 74% of Hispanics are not “virally suppressed,” meaning that they can transmit the infection, either because they are not yet on antiretroviral drugs or are not taking them daily.

Anti-apartheid icon Desmond Tutu was burgled while he was paying tribute at Nelson Mandela's memorial service

The thieves apparently targeted his home in the suburbs of Cape Town in the knowledge that he was more than 800 miles away at the ceremony in Johannesburg. It is the second time in four months that the former Archbishop of Cape Town has been the victim of burglars. Burglaries are fairly common in South Africa.

The black man who faked sign interpretation while standing alongside world leaders like Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela's memorial service said he hallucinated that angels were entering the stadium, has schizophrenia and has been violent in the past

Thamsanqa Jantjie said that his hallucinations began while he was interpreting and that he tried not to panic because there were "armed policemen around me." He added that he was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for more than one year. A South African deputy Cabinet minister, Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, later held a news conference to announce that "a mistake happened" in the hiring of Jantjie. However, many questions remain, including who in the government hired the company that contracted Jantjie, how much money the government paid the company and Jantjie's own involvement with the company — and even whether it really exists.

Among African-American women with breast cancer, increased levels of the protein HSET are associated with worse breast cancer outcomes

African-American women are often diagnosed with breast cancer at a younger age than non-Hispanic white women and are more likely to have cancers that spread, recur, or result in death. Prior research has linked HSET overexpression to lung cancer metastasis to the brain, and has shown that HSET is upregulated in a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer that most commonly occurs in African-American women, triple-negative breast cancer.

Diabetes is associated with an increased risk for developing a type of liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma, and this association is highest for Latinos, followed by Hawaiians, African-Americans and Japanese-Americans

The number of new cases of hepatocellular carcinoma in the United States tripled in the past three decades, with Latinos and African-Americans experiencing the largest increase in incidence. Compared with non-Hispanic whites, Latinos have 2.77 times the risk for being diagnosed with hepatocellular carcinoma, the highest risk identified. Native Hawaiians have 2.48 times the risk; African-Americans, 2.16; and Japanese-Americans, 2.07.

In 2012, according to NYPD figures, blacks in New York City committed over 78% of all shootings, though they are only 23% of the city’s population

Whites committed 2.4% of all shootings, though they are nearly 35% of the city’s population. At the same time, blacks were 74% of all shooting victims; whites just under 3%.

Hispanic relives beating by Brooklyn Jewish patrol

A Latino acquitted of attempted murder after shooting four members of a Borough Park community-watch group in self-defense says that his attackers were yelling, “Kill him, he’s a f–king Muslim!” “I hope you die, you son of a bitch!" one of the Brooklyn men hissed at David Flores, 37, before shooting him, Flores said. Flores — who is Christian but thinks the Jewish vigilantes from the Boro Park Shomrim mistook his religion because he was wearing a small woven cap — took a bullet to his left arm. Flores, a Brooklyn native who now lives in Pennsylvania, said that he was simply driving from his childhood home to a nearby bakery to buy pastries on Sept. 2, 2010, when a van stopped short in front of him. A mob of about 20 Hasidic men quickly surrounded his car and began banging on his windows and kicking his doors — with one Shomrim member brandishing a black gun, Flores said. The Shomrim members allegedly thought that he had been masturbating in his car. “They say, ‘Get him out of the car, he’s a f–king Muslim!’ ” Flores said. “They had this look that was just complete rage. They wanted my blood.” Flores said that when he opened the door to try to escape, he was yanked out. “They’re punching me and kicking me, and I’m being tossed like a rag doll,” said Flores, who had a small .22-caliber handgun in his pocket. “I took the safety off [the gun] and began firing,” Flores said. “I wanted it to stop. I never wanted to hurt anybody.” Prosecutors argued at his Brooklyn Supreme Court trial that the Shomrim members jumped Flores — who has a long rap sheet — only after he pulled his gun. Flores didn’t testify. “He came out from his car shooting. Once he started shooting, he was jumped,” maintained Boro Park Shomrim coordinator Jacob Daskal, who insisted nobody yelled anything at Flores. Flores was convicted on an illegal-gun charge, for which he could still face up to 15 years behind bars. “Though he was rightly convicted of carrying a weapon, the jury agreed that the weapon was used to protect his life,” said his lawyer, Doug Appel. Flores’ past criminal record includes 20 arrests for everything from burglary to assault.

Nelson Mandela and the Conservatives

Why do so many so-called conservatives refuse to see Mandela for the Marxist terrorist that he was? On balance, South Africa under black rule is a less pleasant place to live — for blacks and whites — than it was under Apartheid.

White House officials have abruptly changed their story about whether Obama had ever met his father’s half brother, an African living in Boston who faced deportation to Kenya after a drunk-driving arrest in 2011

A couple of years ago, White House officials said that Barack Obama had never met Onyango Obama, known as Omar, Obama’s uncle. But Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, now says that the 2011 statement was incorrect. In fact, the two men lived together briefly while Barack Obama was a student at Harvard Law, Carney said. A judge in Boston has ruled that Omar Obama could stay in the United States and apply for eventual citizenship after he testified that he had lived in the country for 50 years, paid income tax and been arrested only once.

Mandela and the communists

Would Nelson Mandela have become a Soviet puppet if he came to power sooner?

Not good: 40% of American children are born out of wedlock, but for Hispanics it is 53% and for African-Americans it is 73%

Hispanic and African-Americans are more than 30% of the U.S. population and 35% of those in our public schools. Looking at the recent PISA test scores, other than East Asia - China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam - hardly any other nation of Southeast or South Asia, the Arab or Muslim world, Africa or Latin America, is in the top forty in academic performance. And, in these test scores from a diverse world, we can see mirrored the academic performance within our own diverse nation. Just as East Asians and Europeans excel in the PISA tests, so, too, do Americans of East Asian and European descent dominate test scores and excel in educational achievement, while our Hispanic and African-American students trail.

Here is a graph displaying the mean of the Math, Science and Reading test scores from the OECD's 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Hat tip, Steve Sailer!

The knockout attacks on Jewish residents of Crown Heights may stem from ongoing racial tension between the neighborhood's black and Jewish communities, a newly-elected Brooklyn politician has said

Councilwoman-elect Laurie Cumbo, who was elected to represent Crown Heights starting in January 2014, has released an open letter saying that many of her black constituents told her they feel threatened by the growth of the neighborhood's Jewish community — and she fears that the tension could be spiking the recent violence. "Many African American/Caribbean residents expressed a genuine concern that as the Jewish community continues to grow, they would be pushed out by their Jewish landlords or by Jewish families looking to purchase homes," Cumbo wrote in the 1,200-word letter, which was emailed to supporters and posted on her Facebook page.

Julius Nyang'oro, the former chair and former professor of African studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been indicted on a felony charge of accepting $12,000 for a course that he did not teach

The indictment is another milestone in a scandal about no-show courses - many of them taken by athletes. Nyang'oro left his faculty position as the university stepped up its investigation into the classes.

Based on health data for 500 unrelated black men over age 20 enrolled in the Howard University Family Study, researchers found that those who had lived with one parent rather than two as children had higher average blood pressure readings

The men who had grown up in single-parent households also had a 46% greater risk of developing high blood pressure, also known as hypertension.

Puerto Rico: The economy has been in recession for nearly eight years, crimping tax revenue and pushing the jobless rate to nearly 15%

Meanwhile, the government is burdened by staggering debt, spawning comparisons to bankrupt Detroit and forcing lawmakers to severely slash pensions, cut government jobs and raise taxes in a furious effort to avert default. The implications are serious for Americans outside Puerto Rico both because a taxpayer bailout would be expensive and a default would be far more disruptive than Detroit’s record bankruptcy filing in July 2013. Officials in San Juan and Washington are adamant that a federal bailout is not on the table, but the situation is being closely monitored by the White House, which recently named an advisory team to help Puerto Rican officials navigate the crisis. The island’s problems have ignited an exodus not seen here since the 1950s, when 500,000 people left for jobs in the United States. Now Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, are again leaving in droves. They are choosing the uncertainty of the job market in Orlando or New York City or Philadelphia over what they view as the certainty that their dreams would be crushed by the U.S. territory’s grinding economic problems. Puerto Rico lost 54,000 residents — 1.5% of its population — between 2010 and 2012 alone. Since recession struck in 2006, the population has shrunk by more than 138,000 to 3.7 million, with the vast majority of the outflow headed to the United States. The brutal combination of a long recession, a shrinking population and overwhelming debt has left Puerto Rico’s political leaders struggling to manage a conundrum: How do they tame at least $70 billion in debt while marshaling the resources to grow a shrinking economy and battle corrosive social problems, including a homicide rate that is nearly six times the U.S. average? And while government workers make up about a quarter of the commonwealth’s workforce — much higher than the U.S. average of 16% — their ranks are shrinking as the pervasive debt and economic problems careen toward a reckoning. Now, just over 41% of working-age Puerto Ricans are in a job or even looking for one. As work has disappeared, more Puerto Ricans have relied on the government to survive: About a third of the commonwealth’s population relies on food stamps, and residents of the island are twice as likely as those in the United States to receive Social Security disability benefits, according to researchers.

A rabbi is on a quest to toughen up New York City Jews being targeted by “knockout” thugs

“If Jewish kids started fighting back, they wouldn’t get picked on so much,” said Gary Moskowitz, a seventh-degree karate black belt. “I’m just trying to encourage the Jewish community to do that.” Of course, if a Christian clergyman ever tried to train white gentile children to defend themselves he would be denounced as a racist.

Researchers have found an aggressive new strain of HIV in West Africa that develops into AIDS much faster than other strains

The strain is a "recombinant" virus, or a combination of two different viruses that join together in the body to create a completely new virus. This particular strain combines the two most common HIV strains in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. And it's pretty strong: Scientists say that the new strain can develop into AIDS in just five years. That's up to two-and-a-half years faster than either of its parent strains. So far, the strain has only been seen in Guinea-Bissau, but researchers warn that it could spread quickly.

Police digging up mass graves in western Mexico have now found human remains from at least 54 victims there

The grim figure released by Mexico's Attorney General's Office was the latest since authorities made the startling find recently of dozens of hidden graves during an investigation into the disappearance of two federal agents. So far, authorities haven't said whether the missing agents' bodies have turned up in the hidden graves found in La Barca, a town near the border of Mexico's Jalisco and Michoacan states. Prosecutors say that they haven't identified the bodies they've found. Some of the victims showed signs of being bound, gagged and tortured, investigators said. Authorities believe that municipal police officers were tied to the federal agents' disappearances, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said. "We detained them, and from that investigation, we found a place where the federal agents might have been buried," he said. For years, authorities have described police corruption in Mexico as one of their top concerns as they combat drug cartels. Federal officials have said that the lower salaries of local police officers make them more susceptible to corruption. Recently, 13 police officers in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco were arrested and accused of running a kidnapping gang. The discovery of the hidden graves comes amid high tensions in the region, where cartels are battling for turf and government forces are cracking down on emerging citizen self-defense groups.

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have found that a genetic variation that is linked to increased levels of triglycerides - fats in the blood associated with disorders such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and stroke - is far more common than previously believed and disproportionally affects people of African ancestry

The finding offers a clue as to why Africans and people of African descent have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes compared to many other populations, says the study's senior author, Dr. Ronald Crystal, chairman of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell. African Americans with the variant had, on average, 52% higher triglyceride levels compared with blacks in the study who did not have the variant. "The prevalence of the ApoE mutation may put large numbers of Africans and African descendants worldwide at risk for a triglyceride-linked disorder," Dr. Crystal says. The number of Africans and African descendants who may have this gene variant is significant, Dr. Crystal says. "Based on our findings, we estimate that there could be 1.7 million African-Americans in the United States and 36 million sub-Saharan Africans worldwide with the variant, which increases risk of the lipid disorder and, to some unknown extent, the diseases associated with it," he says. The gene variant the scientists studied is a single point mutation - a replacement of one of DNA segment with another - in the ApoE gene, which carries fats and other molecules through the blood. Scientists have believed that more than 95% of the world's population has one of three common ApoE variants - 2, 3, or 4. The rest have one of 38 rare ApoE mutations, among them the R145C variant studied in this research. In the three decades since the variant's discovery, only 32 instances of it have been reported in the scientific literature, Dr. Crystal says. "This ApoE variant was believed to be so extremely rare that no one paid much attention to it," he says. Weill Cornell researchers in Qatar decided to investigate the mutation in their work evaluating the genetics of Qatari natives - people who have lived in the country for three generations or more. That population is made up of three genetic sub-populations: Arab, Persian, and sub-Saharan African. The researchers were able to look at the genomes of 228 Qatari participants. To their surprise, investigators found that 17% of the African-derived genetic subgroup had the rare ApoE variant. None of the Arab or Persian participants had the mutation. The team then expanded their study. They looked at participants in the worldwide 1000 Genomes Project (1000G), and found that while the R145C variant is rare to non-existent in populations that are not African or of African descent, it is common (occurring 5% to 12% of the time) among African-derived populations, especially those from sub-Sahara. Weill Cornell Medical College researchers then looked for the variant in New York-area participants taking part in a study on smoking-related lung health. They found that R145C was rare (occurring 0.1% of the time) in the 1,012 whites that they studied, but common in the 1,266 African-American participants, 4% of whom carried the variant. "This research is a good example of how studying a small population can give you insights that are very relevant to the rest of the world," Dr. Crystal says.

The CDC reports a big increase in the number of men having unprotected anal sex — from 48% of gay and bisexual males in 2005 to 57% in 2012

About a third of the men surveyed hadn't been tested for HIV within the past year. It's not that concerns about contracting HIV have vanished, it's that more gay men are using a strategy known as "sero-sorting," says CDC chief Thomas Frieden. The strategy — playing off the phrase "HIV seronegative" on lab reports — refers to an uninfected man who has sex only with other uninfected men, or at least men who think they are. “The problem with sero-sorting is that it’s really easy to get it wrong," says Frieden. The number of new HIV infections in the United States per year has held steady at about 50,000 in recent years, the study's lead researcher said. But considering that 65% of new infections are the result of men having sex with other men, "we are concerned about the increase," she says.

Britain is turning into a colour-coded society as whites and ethnic minorities choose to live apart

In Britain, when whites leave urban areas to have children they tended to settle in overwhelmingly white areas in the countryside. At the same time, members of ethnic minorities tend to move to areas that are largely populated by other ethnic minority groups. A study, by Demos and Birkbeck, University of London, surveyed the movements of different groups around the country between the censuses in 2001 and 2011. It found that 100,000 ethnic minority people left London for other parts of England and Wales, but tended to avoid the 80% of the country that is overwhelmingly white. Instead they mainly moved to mixed areas where there are already other established minority groups. White Britons, by contrast, tended to move into mixed areas in London in their 20s, and move out when they start a family. Some 600,000 whites left London for other parts of England and Wales over the same period, with many opting for homogeneous areas that are more than 90% white.

Afghanistan is planning to reintroduce public stoning as punishment for adultery 12 years after the Taliban was ousted from power, according to a new draft penal code

More barbarism from the Islamic world.

About 55% of black children and 31% of Hispanic children live with one parent, compared to 20% of white children and 13% of Asian children

Children raised in single-parent households in the United States are far more likely to live in poverty than children with both parents present, according to Census figures. As a result, far more black and Hispanic children are raised in poverty than white kids.

Researchers have identified a genomic variant strongly associated with sensitivity to the sun, brown hair, blue eyes and freckles

In the study of Icelanders the researchers uncovered an intricate pathway involving the interspersed DNA sequence, or non-coding region, of a gene that is among a few dozen that are associated with human pigmentation traits. It is more common to find people with ancestors from geographic locations farther from the equator, such as Iceland, who have less pigment in their skin, hair and eyes. People with reduced pigment are more sensitive to the sun, but can more easily draw upon sunlight to generate vitamin D3, a nutrient essential for healthy bones. The researchers, including scientists from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a part of NIH, analyzed data from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 2,230 Icelanders. A GWAS compares hundreds of thousands of common differences across individuals' DNA to see if any of those variants are associated with a known trait. "Genes involved in skin pigmentation also have important roles in human health and disease," said NHGRI Scientific Director Dan Kastner, M.D., Ph.D. "This study explains a complex molecular pathway that may also contribute insights into skin diseases, such as melanoma, which is caused by the interaction of genetic susceptibility with environmental factors." The GWAS led the researchers to focus on the interferon regulatory factor 4 (IRF4) gene, previously associated with immunity. IRF4 makes a protein that spurs production of interferons, proteins that fight off viruses or harmful bacteria. The researchers noted from genomic databases that the IRF4 gene is expressed at high levels only in lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell important in the immune system, and in melanocytes, specialized skin cells that make the pigment melanin. The new study established an association between the IRF4 gene and the pigmentation trait. "Genome-wide association studies are uncovering many genomic variants that are associated with human traits and most of them are found in non-protein-coding regions of the genome," said William Pavan, Ph.D., co-author and senior investigator, Genetic Disease Research Branch, NHGRI. "Exploring the biological pathways and molecular mechanisms that involve variants in these under-explored portions of the genome is a challenging part of our work. This is one of a few cases where scientists have been able to associate a variant in a non-coding genomic region with a functional mechanism." The Icelandic GWAS yielded millions of variants among individuals in the study. The researchers narrowed their study to 16,280 variants located in the region around the IRF4 gene. Next, they used an automated fine-mapping process to explore the set of variants in IRF4 in 95,085 people from Iceland. A silicon chip used in the automated process enables a large number of variants to be included in the analysis. The data revealed that a variant in a non-coding, enhancer region that regulates the IRF4 gene is associated with the combined trait of sunlight sensitivity, brown hair, blue eyes and freckles. The finding places IRF4 among more than 30 genes now associated with pigmentation, including a gene variant previously found in people with freckles and red hair. Part of the research team, including the NHGRI co-authors, studied the IRF4's role in the pigment-related regulatory pathway. They demonstrated through cell-culture studies and tests in mice and zebrafish that two transcription factors - proteins that turn genes on or off - interact in the gene pathway with IRF4, ultimately activating expression of an enzyme called tyrosinase. One of the pathway transcription factors, MITF, is known as the melanocyte master regulator. It activates expression of IRF4, but only in the presence of the TFAP2A transcription factor. A greater expression of tyrosinase yields a higher production of the pigment melanin in melanocytes. "This non-coding sequence harboring the variant displayed many hallmarks of having a function and being involved in gene regulation within melanocyte populations," said Andy McCallion, Ph.D., a co-author at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and collaborator with the NHGRI group. The newly discovered variant acts like a dimmer switch. When the switch in the IRF4 enhancer is in the on position, ample pigment is made. Melanin pigment gets transferred from melanocytes to keratinocytes, a type of skin cell near the surface of the skin, and protects the skin from UV radiation in sunlight. If the switch is turned down, as is the case when it contains the discovered variant, the pathway is less effective, resulting in reduced expression of tyrosinase and melanin production. The exact mechanism that generates freckling is not yet known, but Dr. Pavan suggests that epigenetic variation - a layer of instructions in addition to sequence variation - may play a role in the freckling trait.

A research group discovered a novel receptor, which allows the immune system of modern humans to recognize dangerous invaders, and subsequently elicits an immune response

The blueprint for this advantageous structure was in addition identified in the genome of Neanderthals, hinting at its origin. The receptor provided these early humans with immunity against local diseases. The presence of this receptor in Europeans but its absence in early men suggests that it was inherited from Neanderthals. This receptor, which is abbreviated as “HLA-DRaDPb”, consists of the combination of subunits of already known receptors. Scientists compared the gene sequence, which encodes the discovered receptor, with data bases and determined that an estimated two-thirds of Europeans carry this important structure. Scientists also found that the gene sequence required for this receptor is rare in people in southern Africa, the region known as the cradle of mankind.

By the current blood test for vitamin D, most African-Americans are deficient

That can lead to weak bones. So many doctors prescribe supplement pills to bring their levels up. But the problem is with the test, not the patients, according to a new study. The vast majority of African-Americans have plenty of the form of vitamin D that counts — the type their cells can readily use. The research resolves a long-standing paradox. "The population in the United States with the best bone health happens to be the African-American population," says Dr. Ravi Thadhani, a professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study. "But almost 80% of these individuals are defined as having vitamin D deficiency. This was perplexing." The origin of this paradox is a fascinating tale of genes interacting with geography. To unravel the mystery, Thadhani and his colleagues looked closely at various forms of vitamin D in the blood of 2,085 Baltimore residents, black and white. They focused on a form of the vitamin called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which makes up most of the vitamin circulating in the blood. It's the form that the standard test measures. The 25-hydroxy form is tightly bound to a protein, and as a result, bone cells, immune cells and other tissues that need vitamin D can't take it up. It has to be converted by the kidneys into a form called 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D. For whites, blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D are a pretty good proxy for how much of the bioavailable vitamin they have. But not for blacks. That's because blacks have only a quarter to a third as much of the binding protein. So the blood test for the 25-hydroxy form is misleading. His study finds that because of those lower levels of the protein, blacks still have enough of the bioavailable vitamin, which explains why their bones look strong even though the usual blood tests say that they shouldn't. "The conclusion from this study is that just because your total levels are low, it doesn't mean we need to replace vitamin D" using supplements, Thadhani says. The reason people of African descent have far less protein-bound vitamin D is probably related to the geographic origins of the human race. Our earliest ancestors lived near the equator in Africa, where sunlight was plentiful and intense year-round. Vitamin D is synthesized in the skin when sunlight strikes it. When sunlight is deficient, the vitamin has to come from dietary sources such as eggs and fish oil. Humans living in sunny climates make plenty of vitamin D on their own. In fact, one reason for the high degree of skin pigmentation in people of African descent is to prevent the synthesis of too much vitamin D, which can be toxic. Early humans didn't need to store up reserves of vitamin D, so they didn't need as much of the binding protein, whose function is to squirrel the vitamin away in a form where it can be used later. "Everyone who came out of Africa had the ancestral genotype associated with lower vitamin D-binding proteins," Thadhani says. "When humans moved to areas with less sunlight, a different genotype evolved. The further north they went, the more people needed reserves of vitamin D. So D-binding protein levels went up." And that genetic difference in vitamin D-binding proteins is what researchers have finally figured out.

Online dating app shows that most men preferred Asian women (with the exception of Asian men) while all women (except black women) were most drawn to white men

Research examining the preferences of Facebook dating app, Are You Interested (AYI) found that black men and women receive fewer responses to their messages. Asian women seem to favor advances from white men, as they responded to "yes" messages almost 8% of the time – more than any other race. Men are least likely to respond to "likes" from black women and did so 7.5% of the time, which is less often than for Asian, Latino and white women.

London: The two suspects in a major slavery case are from India and Tanzania and came to Britain in the 1960s

Two of the three female victims, who were held against their will for over 30 years, met the male suspect in London "through a shared political ideology and that they lived together at an address that you could effectively call 'a collective,'" said Commander Steve Rodhouse. Police are investigating "the nature of that collective and how it operated," he said, without providing details about the collective or its ideology. The two suspects, a male and a female, both aged 67, have been released on bail. Rodhouse said that police are beginning house-to-house inquiries seeking information from neighbors who live near the house where the women were held in the Lambeth area of south London. The disclosure that a 69-year-old Malaysian, a 57-year-old Irish woman and a 30-year-old Briton were freed after apparently spending three decades in captivity prompted a flurry of speculation and questions about how it went unnoticed for so long. The arrests were made after the Irish woman phoned a charity to say that she was being held against her will along with two others. The charity engaged in a series of secretive conversations with the women and contacted police. Two of the women eventually left the house, and police rescued the third. The three women are receiving extensive counseling after their decades-long ordeal.

Denmark: By 2050, less than one fifth of the population will have IQs in the 90 to 104 range, whereas over half will have IQs in the 70 to 85 range

Primary schools in Denmark will mainly have low IQ children of sub-Saharan, Middle Eastern, North African, Latin American, and Caribbean backgrounds. By 2072, ethnic Danes will have fallen to 60% of the population and 33% of all births. They will become a minority around 2085.

Israel will no longer issue birth certificates for babies born to foreigners

Israel says that it is not obliged to issue documentation and wants to stop foreigners using birth certificates to stay in country. Israel is to stop issuing birth certificates to babies born to foreigners – a move targeted at migrants but will also encompass diplomats and other international workers. The absence of official documentation is likely to cause major problems when applying for passports and other identity papers. The plan was disclosed in state papers filed to the high court in response to a challenge to an existing policy of refusing to include the father's name in foreigners' birth certificates. As part of this policy, Israel also insists that only the mother's family name may be documented as the baby's last name. The Israeli government says that it has no legal obligation to issue official birth certificates to foreigners, and intends to stop doing so to prevent foreigners using such documentation to claim the right to stay in the country. Instead, foreigners will be given hospital-issued birth notices, which are currently hand-written in Hebrew. It is interesting that Jews tend to be pro-immigration in the United States and Europe but not in Israel.

The 14-year-old black student who raped, robbed and murdered his white high school math teacher used a tree branch to sexually assault her and left a hate note next to her body

Philip Chism left a folded piece of paper with the words "I hate you all" next to the corpse of Colleen Ritzer after he slit her throat in a bathroom. He raped her, slit her throat with the box cutter, wheeled her body outside in a large recycling bin and dumped it in the woods behind the school.Her body was found naked from the waist down with the three foot branch still inside her corpse, which was covered in leaves. Chism was seen on CCTV emerging from the bathroom after killing Miss Ritzer, leaving the building and using a service elevator to return with a recycling bin in which he stuffed her body. Chism has been indicted in a Massachusetts court on charges of murder, aggravated rape and armed robbery.

The Affordable Care Act can be construed as a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly – 77% of recipients are white — to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7% minority

Over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act cuts $455 billion from the Medicare budget in order to help pay for Obamacare. So basically, Obamacare is about shifting tax dollars and other resources away from whites towards blacks and Hispanics.

A black man has been arrested for attacking his pregnant sister after she complained that he ate her chicken nuggets, police said

Kareem Gordon, 28, attacked his 25-year-old sister, who was four months pregnant, after he spotted her eating the fast food treat in their mother's Orlando home, according to a police report. “I will punch you down,” Gordon barked at the woman before grabbing her neck and tossing her into a nightstand, the report said. Gordon — who has a prior arrest for domestic violence against his wife — was charged with aggravated battery.

At least 33 mutilated corpses have been found buried in an area of western Mexico where drug cartels are battling each other, officials have said, the latest in a series of grisly finds amid a scourge of gang-related violence

The bodies, which showed signs of torture, were found in 19 ditches in La Barca, on the border between the states of Michoacan and Jalisco, where a clutch of rival cartels operate. Experts began searching the area based on comments from 25 municipal police who were detained, accused of links to criminal organizations. Some of them had said that corpses of people killed by rival gangs were dumped in the area. Mexico has suffered from a wave of drug-related violence, with about 1,000 people a month dying in gangland killings. About 80,000 people have died since 2007 in cartel violence.

A Durham jury has found former Duke Lacrosse accuser Crystal Mangum guilty of second-degree murder

Mangum stabbed boyfriend Reginald Daye with a kitchen knife during an argument in April 2011. Daye died at the hospital 10 days later from complications related to the stabbing. The jury had to choose between first-degree murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter or not guilty. At the sentencing hearing, Daye's family asked Judge Paul Ridgeway for the maximum sentence, saying that he was loved and didn't deserve what happened to him. Ridgeway immediately sentenced Mangum to serve a minimum of 14 years in prison. Mangum previously made national headlines in 2006 when she accused a group of Duke University lacrosse players of sexually assaulting her while she worked as a stripper at a party. The accusations were later found to be false and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dismissed all charges filed against the students.

If you're black, you are almost 25 times more likely to be shot in New York City than a white person — and you are also more likely to be arrested for pulling a trigger, alarming new NYPD statistics show

Data collected during the first six months of 2013 reveal that 74% of the city’s 567 shooting victims were black. An additional 21.5% were Hispanic. Less than 3% of shooting victims were white, according to the report. Blacks also accounted for the majority — about 70% — of the 222 people arrested for shooting someone during the first half of 2013, according to the NYPD’s Crime and Enforcement Activity report. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has used similar statistics to defend stop-and-frisk, pointing out that police stop more people in minority communities not because of their racial makeup, but because more crimes happen there. “Last year, 97% of all shooting victims were black or Hispanic and reside in low-income neighborhoods,” Kelly recently said as he lashed out against Judge Shira Scheindlin’s decision that stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional and appointed a monitor to oversee the program — a reform put on hold after the city appealed. “There were more stops with suspicious activity in neighborhoods with higher crime because that’s where the crime is.” The six-month report shows that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be the victims of murder, rape, robbery, and assault — and to be arrested for committing those violent felonies — than whites. Blacks compose 25.5% of the city’s residents, according to the 2010 census. Non-Hispanic whites make up 33.3%, while Hispanics and Latinos make up 28.6% and Asians 12.7%. The only crimes that saw more whites victimized were larcenies, both grand and petty, which include pickpocketing, credit card fraud and theft of more than $1,000 in property, according to the report. Yet about 50% of the people arrested for grand larceny and 45.8% of those charged with petty larceny were black, the report shows. Blacks also account for more than 55% of those who police stopped and frisked, the report said. Hispanics constituted 29% of those stopped and frisked.

Obamacare's big winners

The giant health insurance companies are the biggest winners of the Affordable Care Act, not the consumers who supposedly need insurance.

A pair of Iraqi bomb-making experts who boasted about killing American soldiers made it into the United States as refugees because of bungles with background checks — and authorities fear that there could be dozens of similar cases

Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi were allowed to settle in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 2009 despite having been detained by Iraqi authorities during the war. After a tip-off, investigators discovered Alwan's fingerprints on a phone used to detonate IEDs in Iraq several years earlier — possibly including one that killed four American troops. Both men were arrested after an FBI sting operation caught them trying to ship weapons and cash to al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the two Iraqis bragged to undercover agents about having killed American troops. The pair are now serving lengthy prison sentences. Some 73,000 Iraqis were admitted to the United States for resettlement between 2006 and 2012.

An ultra-Orthodox rabbi from Israel is being held in New York without bail for hiding his monstrous sex crime record in order to get a US visa and come to New York

Yakov Yitzchak Roth — a “rebbe” in the Hasidic group Shomrei Emunim — has been arrested in Borough Park by police with the NYPD Special Victim’s Squad. He had flown to New York from Tel Aviv in late August 2013 after swearing in a visa application that he had never been arrested or convicted, according to the federal complaint against him. In reality, just six months earlier he had finished serving a 16-year sentence on his 1997 conviction in the District Court of Tel Aviv for raping, sodomizing and sexually assaulting a child relative, the complaint said.

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest that he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin. The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25% — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population. The other surprise from the Mal’ta boy’s genome was that it matched to both Europeans and Native Americans but not to East Asians. The scientists' interpretation was that the ancestors of Native Americans had already separated from the East Asian population when they interbred with the people of the Mal’ta culture, and that this admixed population then crossed over the Beringian land bridge that then lay between Siberia and Alaska to become a founding population of Native Americans. The scientists estimate that 14% to 38% of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population. A European contribution to Native American ancestry could explain two longstanding puzzles about the people’s origins. One is that many ancient Native American skulls, including that of the well-known Kennewick man, look very different from those of the present day population. Another is that one of the five mitochondrial DNA lineages found in Native Americans, the lineage known as X, also occurs in Europeans.

Community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals

Researchers have found that the more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive.

A former Chief Rabbi has been arrested in Israel following a fraud inquiry

Yona Metzger faces accusations of bribery, money laundering and income tax violations. Police said that the crimes were committed while Metzger served as Chief Rabbi. Metzger was Chief Rabbi for Israel’s Ashkenazi, or European-descended, Jews. Along with a second Chief Rabbi from the Sephardic, or Middle Eastern lineage of Jews, Metzger led the country’s supreme body for overseeing Jewish religious services.

Study: 60% of Jewish children in the New York City area live in Orthodox homes

Every year, the Orthodox population has been adding 5,000 Jews while the non-Orthodox population has been losing 10,000 Jews. Much of the growth appears to have come from the ultra-Orthodox including the Hasidic sectors. The Orthodox birthrate in the United States is far higher than that of most other religious groups. Orthodox Jews average 4.1 children per adult, while America’s general public averages 2.2 children. The Orthodox Jewish number is higher than the average for Protestants (2.2) and Catholics (2.4). Hispanic Catholics (3.1) come close, but still fall short. Orthodox Jewish communities rely on government aid programs to subsidize their child-heavy lifestyle. In Rockland County, New York, the Hasidic village of New Square receives Section 8 housing subsidies at a higher rate than anywhere else in the region. In New Jersey, schools in the Orthodox Jewish city of Lakewood get more federally backed E-Rate telecom subsidies than schools in any other municipality. Half of the people living in the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, New York, are on food stamps; a third are on Medicaid.

Radical anti-government fighters in Syria mistakenly beheaded a wounded fellow rebel soldier after assuming he was a supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, according to an online statement from the radical fighters' group

A separate online video showed a gruesome display of radical fighters holding what appeared to be the victim's head. After the beheading, the victim was determined to be Mohammed Fares, an anti-government fighter wounded in clashes against the Syrian Army earlier, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. An online statement from a spokesman for the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), whose fighters apparently carried out the beheading of Fares, called for forgiveness for the killers and asked for "restraint and piety" from anti-government supporters. "We call on God to accept Mohammed Fares into his Kingdom and to forgive his brothers that sought to rid us of the enemies of God and our enemies," Omar Al-Qahatani said in Arabic in the ISIS statement. Fares apparently shouted the names of two revered figures in Shiite Islam when he arrived wounded in a makeshift hospital, prompting the overwhelmingly Sunni opposition to assume he was a government fighter, Al-Qahatani added in the statement. In the separate online video, two fighters from ISIS are seen displaying what appears to be the decapitated head of a bearded man to a crowd in Syria's commercial capital of Aleppo. "He is an Iraqi Shiite volunteer fighter in Bashar al-Assad's army," a young man brandishing a knife in one hand and holding the decapitated head in another says in Arabic to a group of men all dressed in black. "If they (al-Assad's army) enter they will not distinguish between supporters and opponents. I swear they will rape the men before the woman," another jihadi fighter continues in the amateur video. The incident comes as deadly clashes and infighting continues between extremist opposition factions and more secular rebel brigades, potentially weakening the armed movement against al-Assad and further threatening the safety of civilians caught in the conflict. Human rights groups and some members of the Syrian opposition have condemned barbaric actions by ISIS including the execution of wounded government soldiers, the shooting of a 15-year-old boy for blasphemy, and public flogging of women for behavior deemed to violate Sharia law.

Australia: A former leader at a Melbourne Jewish youth organization has been charged with child sex offenses

Aaron Kestecher, also known as Ezzy, faced Melbourne Magistrates Court over allegations that he abused two boys, including one who was under his care. Kestecher, 28, is believed to have been a leader of the Chabad Youth group and worked as a substitute teacher at Yeshivah College in East St Kilda. The offenses, including sexual penetration of a child under 16 and other indecent acts, are alleged to have taken place between June 2009 and March 2010.

Two specific genetic variations in people of African descent are responsible for persistent atopic dermatitis (AD), an itchy, inflammatory form of the skin disorder eczema

A new report by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that loss-of-function mutations to Filaggrin-2 (FLG2), a gene that creates a protein responsible for retaining moisture and protecting the skin from environmental irritants, were associated with atopic dermatitis in African American children. The study is the first report to deduce the mechanism responsible for the persistent form of the condition in African American children. Nearly half of people with atopic dermatitis in the United States are African-American children. The team evaluated DNA from 299 African American children, none of whom had experienced skin free of symptoms of AD while not on medication in the previous 6 months. Within the group, researchers discovered that children with either one of two FLG2 mutations - rs12568784 or rs16833974 - were more than 50% more likely to have persistent AD than those without the mutations.

New data on graduation rates from the U.S. Department of Education shows that at the nation’s largest universities that participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I, the black student graduation rate (for all students, not jut athletes) in 2013 was 44%

For whites the graduation rate is 22 points higher at 66%. This roughly 20-percentage-point racial gap in college graduation rates has persisted for more than the past two decades. When the figures are broken down by gender, black men have a college graduation rate of 39%, whereas the rate for black women is 48%. Since 2009, there has been a slight reduction in the gender gap in black student graduation rates from 12 percentage points to nine percentage points. The rate for black women has declined while the rate for black men has increased slightly. For men the racial gap between blacks and whites is 25 percentage points. For women, the racial gap is 20 percentage points.

Three members of two popular Iranian indie bands who were living and working in the United States were shot and killed in Brooklyn by a fellow rocker who then turned the gun on himself

The dead included Soroush Farazmand, 27, whose rock band the Yellow Dogs was featured in a 2009 CNN report about Iran's burgeoning underground rock scene. Police found the guitarist dead from a shot to the chest in a second-floor bedroom of the East Williamsburg building where band members lived and practiced. Farazmand's brother, Arash, 28, a drummer with the band the Free Keys, was also shot and killed at the same location as was a third Iranian musician, Ali Eskandarian, 35. An Iranian street artist was shot in the arm, police said. The shooter, who took his own life on the rooftop of the building, was identified as Ali Akbar Mohammadi Rafie, 29, police said.

Corey Dunton, the black teen who opened fire at a crowded Manhattan ice-skating rink, injuring two, posted on social media that he was heading to the rink with an "amp" - which is slang for a gun

The black 16-year-old is charged as an adult with attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon in connection with Saturday night's shooting in Bryant Park. Dunton opened fire at the park's ice skating rink after he demanded that a 20-year-old man give up his $600 coat. When the man refused, Dunton left the skating rink, returned with a gun and fired several shots into the crowd. The intended target was shot once in the arm. A 14-year-old bystander, identified as Adonis Mera, was shot in the back and family members said that it's possible he may never walk again.

A high-risk genetic variant confers a significantly increased risk of progressive kidney disease in African Americans, at least partly explaining a racial disparity in end-stage renal disease (ESRD)

Analysis of black and white patients in another trial - half with diabetes - showed kidney function declined almost three times as fast in blacks with the high-risk APOL1 profile as compared with whites. "These variants explain, in part, the markedly increased risk of ESRD among black patients, as compared with white patients, regardless of diabetes status," Lawrence J. Appel, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, and colleagues reported. "These results also highlight the need to identify other risk factors that can account for residual disparities in ESRD between black patients and white patients. In the context of previous studies, our results suggest that APOL1 high-risk variants increase the risk of progression of chronic kidney disease among black patients, regardless of the cause," they said. Blacks in the United States have almost double the risk of ESRD compared with whites, even after accounting for differences in socioeconomic and clinical factors.

Spanish police arrested a gang of 25 Nigerians who were engaged in human trafficking, Internet fraud and money laundering

Five women victims of sex slavery were released during the crackdown on the underground operation in Spain. The gang was using Spain as a springboard to send Nigerian women to be exploited in other countries and it laundered profits by buying luxury products that were shipped to Lagos, Nigeria, in vans with darkened windows and welded doors. The crackdown seized 94 vans near Madrid and 26 loaded ones at Valencia port containing goods — such as expensive television sets and cases of premium liquor — with an estimated value of $6.7 million. The gang, originally formed around 1990 at Nigerian universities, was behind Nigerian letters that tried to fraudulently extract money from recipients. The gang captured women in Nigeria, flew them with false identity papers to Mexico and Brazil, then sent them to Paris, from where they were driven to Spain. Eight of the 25 suspects were illegal immigrants and the arrests occurred in several Spanish cities.

Obama's America: From January 2009 to October 2013, foreign-born employment increased by 2.132 million, or by 9.85%

During that same period, native-born American employment declined by 785,000. From October 2012 to October 2013, immigrants gained 486,000 jobs while native-born American workers lost 381,000 positions. The foreign-born working age population continues to grow faster than the comparable native-born American population. This imbalance has been bringing increasing pressure on American workers for decades. It will continue as long as our elected leaders continue to ignore the consequences of current immigration policy and will likely intensify if more pro-immigration bills are passed into law.

Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to develop heart disease

It seems that fragments circulating in the blood, known as platelets, can form blood clots more easily in African Americans. Clotting is a classic element of heart disease and heart attack. "Unexpectedly, we found that platelets from black donors clotted faster and to a greater extent in response to the naturally occurring clotting agent, thrombin," says Paul Bray of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "This provides a new understanding of the effects of race on heart disease and other blood-clot related illnesses." Bray and his colleagues took blood samples from 70 black and 84 white healthy volunteers and found that a protein known as PC-TP, short for phosphatidylcholine transfer protein, is one of the main culprits. PC-TP activates a clotting factor called PAR4. The gene that produces the protein is four times more active in the platelets of black Americans than it is in white Americans. The underlying explanation could be more complex, though. A cellular substance that can prevent excessive build up of PC-TP was present at much higher quantities in the white volunteers than it was in the black. Called miR-376c, this suppressing fragment of microRNA may be the key to the puzzle, says Bray. "Compared with white patients, black people have a twofold increased incidence of heart disease and a lower long-term survival," he says. "The reasons for this disparity are complex, but even when socioeconomic and environmental factors are considered, the survival of black heart attack patients is two-and-a-half times lower than in white patients." An important implication, says Bray, is that we need to develop a wider array of treatments to make sure that there are drugs that work for everyone. "Black people are very poorly represented in most clinical studies on heart disease," he says. "Our findings suggest doctors cannot therefore assume that heart disease treatment studies on whites will hold true for everyone."

The surprise winner of a Texas election has been criticized for misleading the mainly black constituents into believing that he was African American

Dave Wilson, a white Republican and anti-gay activist, beat Houston's 24-year incumbent Bruce Austin in what has been described as a "racially tinged campaign". Wilson won with a margin of 26 after he campaigned using flyers featuring African Americans and the message "Vote for our neighbor Dave Wilson".

Obama and Bernie Madoff

Guess which one swindled more people.

Jews in Europe are afraid of Muslims and the European left-wing

Interestingly, Jews in Europe are less afraid of right-wingers.

Asian Indians share a gene with Europeans that plays a significant role in coding for lighter skin

The gene, which is responsible for 27% of skin color variation in Asian Indians, was positively selected for in North, but not South Indian populations. When something is "selected for," that means it provides some advantage and so gets passed down to offspring, becoming more prevalent in a population over time. The Indian subcontinent has an enormous variation in skin color. "We have dark brown [tones], yellow tones and whitish-pinkish tones," said Chandana Basu Mallick, a biologist at the University of Tartu in Estonia. "We have quite a range and diversity in the biological spectrum of skin color." But because South Asian gene studies are relatively rare, it wasn't clear which genes contributed to this variation. Past research has found at least 126 genes that code for pigmentation in general, Basu Mallick said. To find out, Basu Mallick and her colleagues took skin color measurements for about 1,228 individuals in Southern India. The researchers then conducted a genetic analysis and found that about 27% of the skin color variation was due to a variation in a skin pigmentation gene. Called SLC24A5, this gene codes for lighter skin and is present in almost 100% of Europeans. The team also examined the gene in 95 people around the subcontinent and found that both South Asian and European populations inherited this particular variant from a common ancestor who lived sometime between 22,000 and 28,000 years ago. The team then looked for the gene in more than 2,000 people from 54 ethnic groups around the subcontinent. Some groups, such as populations in Tibet and Burma, didn't have the gene variant at all, whereas the Northwestern tip of the subcontinent had a nearly 90% prevalence of the gene. Lighter skin has less dark melanin, a pigment that blocks the sun's UV rays; the body uses these rays to make vitamin D. The SLC24A5 gene is linked to less dark melanin production, so the gene may have become more common in Europe because it allowed people's skin to make more vitamin D in the continent's low-light conditions. But in India, the prevalence of the gene in different populations didn't correlate with latitude, but instead seemed strongly linked to language, geography and demographic history. The study also showed that the gene was positively selected for in North, but not South India (though both light- and dark-skinned people live in both regions). It's not clear exactly what caused the gene to be favored in certain regions, but it probably wasn't the production of vitamin D alone.

Polio might just be looking at a comeback tour, thanks to the Syrian civil war

There's a significant risk that the now-rare disease could spread from Syria to Europe, as refugees seek asylum there, a group of German scientists have warned. The danger is that many people may not know they're carrying the disease; only about 1 in 200 people infected develop symptoms. The vaccine commonly known in Europe exacerbates this, because it's good at preventing symptoms but only partially effective at preventing infection. It could take almost a year of silent transmission before the outbreak is detected, although hundreds of individuals would carry the infection. Simply vaccinating Syrian refugees is insufficient. This is one reason why you want to keep refugees out of your country.

Asian and black women who have IVF are less likely to become pregnant than white women using similar fertility treatment, British research suggests

The Nottingham University team say that they are unsure why this is, but genetic factors could play a role. They looked at IVF success rates for 1,517 women treated in their clinic. Live birth rates for ethnic minority women were significantly lower. Overall, 35% of ethnic minority women successfully conceived and gave birth after IVF compared with 44% of white women treated at the clinic between 2006 and 2011. This was despite all the women appearing to have favorable chances of having a baby, based on factors such as the quality of their egg reserves. The birth rate also differed between three ethnic sub-groups - 21.4% for Middle East Asian women, 23.3% for African-Caribbean women and 38% for South East Asian women - although this finding was not statistically significant. Lead researcher Dr Walid Maalouf said that the reasons behind the findings were unclear. "Further research into genetic background as a potential determinant of IVF outcome, as well as the influencing effects of lifestyle and cultural factors on reproductive outcomes is needed," he said.

When a person is deemed trustworthy, we perceive that person's face to be more similar to our own, according to a new study

A team of scientists from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway University, found that feelings of similarity towards others extend beyond social closeness and into physical characteristics, using trust as the basis in this experiment. Researchers showed volunteers images in which varying percentages of the volunteer's face were morphed with that of one of two other people, and asked them to decide whether each photo contained more of their face or more of the others. The volunteers then took part in bargaining games with both of the other people - one in which trust was reciprocated, and in the other in which it was betrayed. After the game, the volunteers carried out the photo morph task again and it was found that participants judged the trustworthy player to be more physically similar to them than the untrustworthy one. "Recent studies show that when a person looks similar to ourselves, we automatically believe they are trustworthy. Here we show for the first time that the reverse is also true. When a person is shown to be more trustworthy, it can lead us to perceive that person as looking more similar to ourselves," said researcher Harry Farmer. The team also believes that their results could hold important implications for social relationships. "It may be that our experience of facial similarity tracks information about genetic relatedness. If so, our results suggest that evidence of trust in others also serves as a cue to kinship," said researcher Ryan McKay.

Only about a million of Puerto Rico’s 3.6 million people are employed

Not coincidentally, Puerto Rico’s population shrank 4% in the past decade, as many of its people left for the U.S. mainland.

For the first time in nearly 40 years, Detroit will have a white mayor

Former hospital chief, prosecutor and political pit bull Mike Duggan, who campaigned as the candidate most capable of leading Detroit back from the brink, has defeated Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon in the election for Detroit mayor.

Two men and a woman have been killed in Western Norway after an African wielding a knife hijacked the express bus that they were travelling on

The African in his 30s, from South Sudan, has been arrested and was flown to hospital in Bergen where he was being treated for injuries sustained during the hijack. Trine Erdal, a spokesperson for Norwegian police said that she could not yet give details on the hijacker's state of mind or his likely motive. Police said that there were only three people on the bus at the time of the attack – the 50-year old driver, a Swedish citizen also in his 50s and a 19 year old Norwegian girl – and that the hijacker killed all of them. The 31-year-old killer is from southern Sudan but is currently living in Årdal, the small Norwegian town where the hijack took place. The attack marks the second time that the express bus between the towns of Aardal and Tyin has been hijacked by an African. In 2003, a mentally disturbed 26-year-old Ethiopian man seized the bus and stabbed the driver to death.

Race matters when it comes to searching for a partner online, according to a new study

A sociologist has found that members of dating sites are most likely to contact individuals who share their own racial background on dating websites. Professor Kevin Lewis studied the interaction patterns of 126,134 users of dating website OkCupid.com in the United States over a two-and-a-half month period. The sociologist, from the University of California, San Diego, found the tendency to initiate contact with someone from a shared race, is strongest among East and South Asians and weakest among whites, the study said.

The biggest donor to Republican Party political groups has said that the United States should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran to spur the country to end its own nuclear program

Sheldon Anderson, the Jewish billionaire, said this while on a panel at Yeshiva University in New York City.

Girls are going through puberty earlier than ever and obesity is to blame

Researchers found that African American girls first show signs of breast development at eight years and 10 months, on average. Hispanic girls first show signs of breast development at nine years and four months on average, and white and Asian girls at nine years and eight months. For white girls, the researchers found that puberty is now hitting about four months earlier than in a 1997 study that also measured breast development. They also discovered that heavier girls tend to start developing breasts at a younger age.

A 2009 mutiny of disgruntled border guards seeking higher wages in Bangladesh resulted in 74 deaths; now far more than that are set to die

After a mass civilian trial that began in 2011 and involved 846 defendants, 152 border guards have been sentenced to execution. Some 161 others are getting life in prison, while 256 have been sentenced to three to 10 years. Another 277 were acquitted, though many of them were convicted in military tribunals and are unlikely to go free. Human Rights Watch criticized the proceedings, noting that 47 suspects died in custody. "Trying hundreds of people en masse in one giant courtroom, where the accused have little or no access to lawyers, is an affront to international legal standards." The defense plans an appeal. The mutiny lasted 30 hours and saw 57 officers killed, with bodies tossed in sewers. "The atrocities were so heinous that even the dead bodies were not given their rights," said the judge as he read the verdicts, a process that took hours. But he did point out that the soldiers should have indeed been awarded better pay. In earlier military tribunals, some 4,000 people were found guilty and received sentences lasting up to seven years.

According to the World Bank a third of the world’s poorest people live in India

Half of India's children are undernourished and half of all Indian families have no access to sanitation.

Australia: Sydney detectives have charged a businessman with child sexual abuse offences at Bondi's Jewish Yeshiva center during the 1980s

A 49-year-old man has been charged with two counts of gross indecency against 14 and 16 year old males at the Jewish Center in 1985 and 1986. He has been refused bail and detectives want people with further information about the 1980s offenses to come forward. The arrested man is Daniel Hayman, who has been residing in Los Angeles in recent years. The arrest and charging of Hayman is likely to put some of Australia's most senior rabbinical figures under scrutiny over their failures to act on complaints from victims. Despite complaints, Hayman was never reported to police and left Australia to live in the Los Angles Jewish community, where leaders again acted to shield him. Corporate records show that Hayman was a director of a major Australian Jewish educational arm for several years after his sexual abuse of boys. Hayman recently told one of his victims that Yeshiva spiritual leader Rabbi Pinchus Feldman had admonished him about 25 years ago over his relationship with a boy. The leader of the Organization of Rabbis of Australasia, Moshe Gutnick, in March 2013 revealed that he failed to alert police to an anonymous complaint about Hayman in the 1980s. Rabbi Gutnick said in hindsight that he was wrong not to alert police. Rabbi Feldman said that he had no recollection of any confession of child sex abuse 25 years ago. There is an audio recording of another senior Australian rabbi discussing Hayman's interaction with boys or adolescents. In the tape recording, Rabbi Baruch Lesches said that some of Hayman's victims may have consented. Rabbi Lesches, who was at Bondi Yeshiva at the time of the incidents and now is a major New York Jewish leader, also cautioned against reporting Hayman to police. He later apologised for his private remarks after the audio of his discussion about Hayman was released. Two recent convictions of men associated with Melbourne's Yeshiva college in St Kilda for historic child sex offenses have put the spotlight on the attitudes of Australia's senior orthodox Jewish leaders to handling abuse claims. Victorian detectives are investigating how senior St Kilda Yeshiva figures handled complaints against David Kramer and David Cyprus, who were both employed by the school. Strike Force Bungo was formed in 2012 to investigate child sexual abuse in the Jewish community in Sydney's east. Hayman abused the boys while a volunteer supervisor at a camp run by the Yeshiva center.

From 1960 to 1990, nearly half of blacks were born to unmarried parents

And African-American kids from different classes are named differently. Black kids born to lower-income parents are given unique names more often. Or, as Steve Sailer puts it, high achieving blacks don't have goofy names quite as often as blacks in the police blotter.

Mitt Romney won the white Protestant vote by a crushing 69% to 30% margin, and he won the white Catholic vote by a substantial 59% to 40% margin

In 1980, these numbers would have translated into an enormous landslide. But Romney lost among every other racial and religious group, except Mormons. Romney lost in part because the insatiable greed of GOP donors and fat cats - such as Sheldon Adelson - for cheap labor has prevented the party from embracing an immigration moratorium.

New Jersey: A Muslim who co-founded a radical Islamic website has pleaded guilty to using the Internet to make threats against Jewish groups

Yousef Mohamid al-Khattab, 45, of Atlantic City started the now-defunct Revolution Muslim website in 2007 with partner Jesse Curtis Morton. Al-Khattab, who converted from Judaism and was previously known as Joseph Cohen, is the third person connected with Revolution Muslim to be convicted in federal court in Alexandria. Morton and another man, Zachary Chesser, admitted using the site to deliver thinly veiled threats against the creators of the “South Park” television show for perceived insults to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Al-Khattab’s guilty plea does not mention the “South Park” threats. In court documents, al-Khattab admits encouraging readers to take unspecified action against Jewish leaders. In some postings, he provided names and addresses of Jewish leaders and synagogues and urged Muslims angered by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to “deal with them directly at their homes.” In another posting he praised Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan for “13 knockouts,” a reference to the 13 people Hasan shot and killed in the 2009 attacks. Al-Khattab faces up to five years in prison at a sentencing scheduled for February 7, 2014. His lawyer, Alan Yamamoto, said that it is not yet clear what length of term will be recommended under the federal sentencing guidelines.