Researchers have found that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately affected by diabetes, with a lifetime risk of more than 50% compared to the general population's 40%

The main reason for the high rate of diabetes amongst blacks and Latinos seems to be obesity.

More than 6.4 million South Africans are living with HIV with almost 400,000 new infections recorded in 2013, according to new statistics

Dr Harry Lake, chief executive of health NGO Care Works, said that a third of South African women, aged between 30 and 39, are HIV positive.

Patrick J. Buchanan on Ferguson Missouri

Will Eric Holder recuse himself?

A black African woman was rushed to hospital and hundreds of people have been quarantined after she showed symptoms of Ebola virus infection in a job center in Germany

As many as 600 visitors and staff at the employment office building in Berlin were also stopped from leaving for several hours as emergency services sealed off part of the street. The black African woman was from Nigeria and had recently been in contact with people infected with Ebola. The Nigerian woman had turned up at the employment bureau with a high fever. A spokesman for the city's health authority said that emergency services were called after the black African woman collapsed. West Africa's Ebola epidemic, which has hit four nations since it broke out in Guinea early in 2014, is by far the deadliest since the virus was discovered four decades ago in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The World Health Organization said that the Ebola virus had killed 84 people in just three days, bringing the global death toll to 1,229, while confirmed, probable and suspect infections rose to 2,240. The outbreak is not yet under control, the UN health agency said.

Which race did best on the latest ACT college admissions test?

On the benchmarks, Asian-American test-takers did best, with 57% meeting three or more. Forty-nine percent of white test-takers met three or more standards – compared to 23% of Latino test-takers and 11% of African-American test-takers. African Americans scored lowest on the test. Just 10% of African-American students who were tested met the science benchmark. The average composite score for African Americans was 17.0, an increase of just 0.1 points from 2010. Latinos earned an average composite score of 18.8. White students notched an average of 22.3 points, and Asians recorded an average of 23.5.

Unfortunately, the United States is an increasingly multiracial, white-minority society

The black populations in the cities have lower intelligence and are quicker to violence, which explains why they are poor and why they riot. Billions in social welfare spending, affirmative action, and even a black president have not changed this situation.

Violent crime in the United States of America — assault, murder, robbery, rape — emanates disproportionately from the black community, and especially the young male members of that community

Patrick J. Buchanan writes about the black anarchy that is threatening our nation's future.

Within the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, the number of suburban neighborhoods where more than 20% of residents live below the federal poverty line more than doubled between 2000 and 2008-2012

Almost every major metro area saw suburban poverty not only grow during the 2000s but also become more concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. By 2008-2012, 38% of poor residents in the suburbs lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20% or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53%.

A recent Swedish study has found that bad boys are outbreeding good boys

Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners.

Nazi resister returns medal to Israel over Gaza bombs: Dutch resident saved Jewish boy from Nazis, but lost kin in Gaza airstrikes

In World War II, a Dutch man risked his life and saved a Jewish boy from the Nazis — a feat that earned Henk Zanoli Israel's prestigious Righteous Among the Nations medal after the war. Now, the 91-year-old gave it back. The reason? An Israeli airstrike killed relatives of his in the Gaza Strip. After learning the news, Zanoli went to the Israeli embassy in The Hague and returned the medal, issuing a statement detailing the sacrifices his family made resisting the Nazis during the occupation of Holland. “Against this background, it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza," he wrote. "Murder carried out by the State of Israel.” In an interview with the New York Times, Zanoli made clear that his problem is with the government of Israel, not the Israeli people. “I gave back my medal because I didn’t agree with what the state of Israel is doing to my family and to the Palestinians on the whole,” he said. Zanoli's grand-niece is a Dutch diplomat who is married to a Palestinian economist, and an Israeli bomb killed three of the economist's brothers, along with other relatives. Zanoli said he felt that keeping the medal would be an insult to his family.

Skin lightening products are used by millions of women across Africa

In Nigeria, 77% of women use skin lightening products, according to a recent World Health Organization report. In Africa, lighter skinned girls get more attention and are more appreciated than darker skinned women.

As many as seven out of 10 people in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to flush or chemical toilets or latrines, according to the World Bank

No matter what happens in the rest of the world, Africa always remains a hellhole.

DNA and great musicians

Miriam A. Mosing of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute and colleagues looked at the association between music practice and specific musical abilities like rhythm, melody and pitch discrimination in over 10,000 identical Swedish twins. They reported that the propensity to practice was between 40% and 70% heritable and that there was no difference in musical ability between twins with varying amounts of cumulative practice. "Music practice,” they conclude, “may not causally influence musical ability and … genetic variation among individuals affects both ability and inclination to practice." Though the study focused on musicality, the findings can in theory be extrapolated to other skilled and creative activities. Not to get overly reductionist, but it could be assumed that nearly all of our talents and cognitive characteristics are least partly influenced by our respective strings of nucleotides. Complex pursuits, whether creative or technical, involve numerous communicating regions from all over the brain (in contrast to the overly simplistic and now debunked "left brain/right brain" assignments for analytical vs creative types). These structures and the brain’s general blueprint are shaped by our genetic code throughout development; also genes encode for the proteins that run our bodies and brains while plenty of data link specific genetic profiles with varying cognitive abilities.

Sociologist says that it is racist to talk about native and non-native plant species and the purity of different soil types

Apparently, to leftists, everything is racist.

Keep your children away from blacks

The 9-year-old white boy fatally stabbed in a Michigan playground spent his dying breaths telling his brother that he loved him and re-assuring him that the shocking attack wasn’t his fault, a family member has revealed. Michael ‘Connor’ Verkerke was playing with two of his brothers and a black boy Jamarion Lawhorn, 12, who pulled out a knife and repeatedly stabbed Connor. Police say that Jamarion's attack on Conner was unprovoked and inexplicable. He didn't know Conner before the attack and had joined the 9-year-old and two friends on the playground. Suddenly, he pulled a knife out of the sand and stabbed Conner multiple times in the back, authorities say. Police aren't saying where Jamarion got the weapon. Connor ran to his home house nearby and collapsed on the porch. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition and died hours later.

Between 1976 and 2005 blacks com­mitted more than half of all murders in the United States

The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement. “Even allowing for the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice system, the higher rates of crime among black Americans cannot be denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their classic 1985 study, Crime and Human Nature. “Every study of crime using official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes. The overrepresentation of blacks among arrested persons persists throughout the criminal justice system,” wrote Wilson and Herrnstein. “Though prosecutors and judges may well make discriminatory judgments, such decisions do not account for more than a small fraction of the overrepresentation of blacks in prison.” Others have also noticed the the excessive amount of black criminality. “High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote William Stuntz, a Harvard law professor, in his 2011 book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segrega­tion but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans — and of African American control of city governments.” Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the United States today are run by blacks.

Our brains are able to judge the trustworthiness of a face even when we cannot consciously see it, a team of scientists has found

Their findings shed new light on how we form snap judgments of others. "Our findings suggest that the brain automatically responds to a face's trustworthiness before it is even consciously perceived," explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and the study's senior author. "The results are consistent with an extensive body of research suggesting that we form spontaneous judgments of other people that can be largely outside awareness," adds Freeman, who conducted the study as a faculty member at Dartmouth College. The study's other authors included Ryan Stolier, an NYU doctoral candidate, Zachary Ingbretsen, a research scientist who previously worked with Freeman and is now at Harvard University, and Eric Hehman, a post-doctoral researcher at NYU. The researchers focused on the workings of the brain's amygdala, a structure that is important for humans' social and emotional behavior. Previous studies have shown this structure to be active in judging the trustworthiness of faces. However, it had not been known if the amygdala is capable of responding to a complex social signal like a face's trustworthiness without that signal reaching perceptual awareness. To gauge this part of the brain's role in making such assessments, the study's authors conducted a pair of experiments in which they monitored the activity of subjects' amygdala while the subjects were exposed to a series of facial images. These images included both standardized photographs of actual strangers' faces as well as artificially generated faces whose trustworthiness cues could be manipulated while all other facial cues were controlled. The artificially generated faces were computer synthesized based on previous research showing that cues such as higher inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones are seen as trustworthy and lower inner eyebrows and shallower cheekbones are seen as untrustworthy. Prior to the start of these experiments, a separate group of subjects examined all the real and computer-generated faces and rated how trustworthy or untrustworthy they appeared. As previous studies have shown, subjects strongly agreed on the level of trustworthiness conveyed by each given face. In the experiments, a new set of subjects viewed these same faces inside a brain scanner, but were exposed to the faces very briefly - for only a matter of milliseconds. This rapid exposure, together with another feature known as "backward masking," prevented subjects from consciously seeing the faces. Backward masking works by presenting subjects with an irrelevant "mask" image that immediately follows an extremely brief exposure to a face, which is thought to terminate the brain's ability to further process the face and prevent it from reaching awareness. In the first experiment, the researchers examined amygdala activity in response to three levels of a face's trustworthiness: low, medium, and high. In the second experiment, they assessed amygdala activity in response to a fully continuous spectrum of trustworthiness. Across the two experiments, the researchers found that specific regions inside the amygdala exhibited activity tracking how untrustworthy a face appeared, and other regions inside the amygdala exhibited activity tracking the overall strength of the trustworthiness signal (whether untrustworthy or trustworthy) - even though subjects could not consciously see any of the faces. "These findings provide evidence that the amygdala's processing of social cues in the absence of awareness may be more extensive than previously understood," observes Freeman. "The amygdala is able to assess how trustworthy another person's face appears without it being consciously perceived."

An Indian couple has been arrested in New York City and charged with subjecting their 12-year-old daughter to unspeakable physical abuse for months by starving her and beating her with a metal handle and baseball bat, leaving her severely bruised and hospitalized for surgery

Rajesh Ranot, 46, and his wife Sheetal Ranot, 31, of Queens were arraigned in Queens Criminal Court and together charged in a criminal complaint with first, second and third degree assault, unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child, District Attorney Richard Brown said. Sheetal, who is the child's stepmother, is presently being held in jail on $60,000 bail and faces a total of 33 years in prison if convicted. Rajesh is the child's biological father and faces up to seven years in prison if convicted. He too remains in jail on $25,000 bail. Sheetal repeatedly hit her stepdaughter Maya Ranot on her body and face, causing bruising and pain and locked her inside her bedroom, refusing to feed her for extended periods of time between December 2012 and May 2014, according to the charges. In one instance in May 2013, Sheetal hit Maya with a broken metal broom handle on her body, causing a deep laceration and bleeding on her left wrist and right knee. Medical personnel found Maya lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen with her wrist cut down to the bone. Maya underwent emergency surgery for her wrist and received stitches to her knee. The doctors treating Maya observed several bruises, marks and scars in various stages of healing throughout her body including bruises on her right ear and legs. In another instance, Sheetal hit Maya in the face with a wooden rolling pin in April 2014 causing a laceration, swelling and pain to her cheek. Doctors found her to be underweight and thin, weighing 58 pounds, and wearing dirty clothes. "The criminal charges allege that this young victim was subjected to years of unspeakable physical abuse at the hands of her father and stepmother," Brown said. The complaint additionally charges that Rajesh repeatedly beat Maya with his hands, feet, belt and baseball bat between December 2012 and May 2014, causing bruising, swelling and pain in her ears, head and legs. The New York City Administration for Children’s Services filed an abuse petition against the father and step-mother in family court following the investigation. Commissioner Gladys Carrion said that the investigation saved the life of the young girl and ensured that she and her siblings are now safe from further abuse.

India accounts for about 60% of the world’s residents without toilets, according to a report by the World Health Organization and Unicef

Many Indians prefer to defecate out in the open because they believe it is more sanitary.

A new study finds that human skulls changed in ways that indicate a lowering of testosterone levels at around the same time that culture was blossoming

"The modern human behaviors of technological innovation, making art and rapid cultural exchange probably came at the same time that we developed a more cooperative temperament," said lead author Robert Cieri, a biology graduate student at the University of Utah who began this work as a senior at Duke University. The study, which is based on measurements of more than 1,400 ancient and modern skulls, makes the argument that human society advanced when people started being nicer to each other, which entails having a little less testosterone in action. Heavy brows were out, rounder heads were in, and those changes can be traced directly to testosterone levels acting on the skeleton, according to Duke anthropologist Steven Churchill. What they can't tell from the bones is whether these humans had less testosterone in circulation, or fewer receptors for the hormone. The research team also included Duke animal cognition researchers Brian Hare and Jingzhi Tan, who say that this argument is in line with what has been established in non-human species. In a classic study of Siberian foxes, animals that were less wary and less aggressive toward humans took on a different, more juvenile appearance and behavior after several generations of selective breeding. "If we're seeing a process that leads to these changes in other animals, it might help explain who we are and how we got to be this way," said Hare, who also studies differences between our closest ape relatives - aggressive chimpanzees and mellow, free-loving bonobos. Those two apes develop differently, Hare said, and they respond to social stress differently. Chimpanzee males experience a strong rise in testosterone during puberty, but bonobos do not. When stressed, the bonobos don't produce more testosterone, as chimps do, but they do produce more cortisol, the stress hormone. Their social interactions are profoundly different and, relevant to this finding, their faces are different, too. "It's very hard to find a brow-ridge in a bonobo," Hare said. Cieri compared the brow ridge, facial shape and interior volume of 13 modern human skulls older than 80,000 years, 41 skulls from 10,000 to 38,000 years ago, and a global sample of 1,367 20th century skulls from 30 different ethnic populations. The trend that emerged was toward a reduction in the brow ridge and a shortening of the upper face, traits which generally reflect a reduction in the action of testosterone. There are a lot of theories about why, after 150,000 years of existence, humans suddenly leapt forward in technology. Around 50,000 years ago, there is widespread evidence of producing bone and antler tools, heat-treated and flaked flint, projectile weapons, grindstones, fishing and birding equipment and a command of fire. Was this driven by a brain mutation, cooked foods, the advent of language or just population density? The Duke study argues that living together and cooperating put a premium on agreeableness and lowered aggression and that, in turn, led to changed faces and more cultural exchange. "If prehistoric people began living closer together and passing down new technologies, they'd have to be tolerant of each other," Cieri said. "The key to our success is the ability to cooperate and get along and learn from one another."