Man caught pushing dead girlfriend in wheelbarrow

22 minutes ago

Johannesburg - A man was arrested after he was found pushing the decomposing remains of his girlfriend in a wheelbarrow in Bloemfontein, Free State police said on Tuesday.

The body was covered with blankets and a local resident saw a foot sticking out from underneath, around 05:30 on Tuesday in Kagisanong, police spokesperson Peter Kareli said in a statement.
The 35-year-old man was caught and beaten up when he tried to run away.

Kagisanong police took the man to the Pelonomi Hospital where he was under police guard in a critical condition.

The body was identified as the suspect's 31-year-old girlfriend.
A case of murder was opened and a post mortem was being conducted.

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The best therapy for quitting smoking

2015-01-12 13:43
How quickly a smoker breaks down nicotine is a guide to which therapy is best for kicking the habit, according to new research.

Link between craving and enzyme
Most smokers who try to give up tobacco fail within the first week, so matching them to the best treatment is essential, its authors said.
Previous research has found a link between tobacco craving and levels of an enzyme called CYP2A6 which breaks down nicotine.
The faster the nicotine is metabolised, the likelier it is that the smoker will want to light up again soon, and the harder it will be to quit.

Also Read: Smoking cigarettes may worsen menstrual cramps

Scientists in the United States and Canada used a biomarker – the speed at which CYP2A6 does its job – to see whether nicotine patches or a non-nicotine replacement drug called hantix or Champix) were more effective.

Smokers who broke down nicotine quickly – most smokers, in fact – were twice as likely to quit if they used varenicline than if they used patches, they found.
They also had a better chance of staying off tobacco six months later.
Slower metabolisers found nicotine patches to be as effective as varenicline, but without that drug's side effects.

Electronic cigarettes a useful tool
The studies covered 1,246 smokers who wanted to quit, divided roughly equally into fast and slow metabolisers.
The smokers were randomly assigned to an 11-week course that comprised either a nicotine patch plus a dummy pill, varenicline plus a dummy patch or a dummy patch and a dummy pill.
The study did not cover electronic cigarettes, which some advocates say are a useful tool for giving up smoking.

The results should lead to a simple blood test for nicotine metabolism so that doctors can better advise patients, the authors hope.

"As many as 65 percent of smokers who try to quit relapse within the first week," said Caryn Lerman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-led the study.

"Matching a treatment based on the rate at which smokers metabolise nicotine could be a viable clinical strategy to help individual smokers choose the cessation method that will work best for them."
Around six million deaths annually can be attributed to tobacco, and smoking inflicts around $200 billion (169 billion euros) in health costs annually, the paper said.

The study appears in the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine

- AFP

Night shift may boost black women's diabetes risk

2015-01-13 10:11
New York - Researchers have found that black women working the night shift are at higher risk of diabetes.
"In view of the high prevalence of shift work among workers in the USA - 35% among non-Hispanic blacks and 28% in non-Hispanic whites - an increased diabetes risk among this group has important public health implications," wrote the study authors from Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University.

It's important to note, however, that the study wasn't designed to prove that working the night shift can cause diabetes, only that there is an association between the two.

The new research included more than 28 000 black women in the United States who were diabetes-free in 2005. Of those women, 37% said they had worked night shifts. Five percent said they had worked night shifts for at least 10 years, the researchers noted.


Over eight years of follow-up, nearly 1 800 cases of diabetes were diagnosed among the women.
Compared to never working night shifts, the risk of diabetes was 17% higher for one to two years of night shifts. After three to nine years of night shift work, the risk of diabetes jumped to 23%. The risk was 42% higher for 10 or more years of night work, according to the study.

After adjusting for body mass index (BMI - an estimate of body fat based on height and weight) and lifestyle factors such as diet and smoking, the researchers found that black women who worked night shifts for 10 or more years still had a 23% increased risk of developing diabetes. And those who had ever worked the night shift had a 12% increased risk.

The link between night shift and diabetes was stronger in younger women than in older women. Compared to never working the night shift, working night shifts for 10 or more years increased the risk of diabetes by 39% among women younger than 50 and by 17% among those 50 and older.


The study was published in the journal Diabetologia.
In the United States, nearly 13% of black women have diabetes, compared with 4.5% of white women, according to the study.

The researchers said finding a higher risk of diabetes even after adjusting for lifestyle factors and weight status suggests that additional factors, such as disruption of the circadian rhythm, may play a role. Circadian rhythms are the body's natural timekeepers, signaling the need for sleep or waking at a certain time.

"Shift work is associated with disrupted circadian rhythms and reduced total duration of sleep. Similar to the effects of jet lag, which are short-term, shift workers experience fatigue, sleepiness during scheduled awake periods and poor sleep during scheduled sleep periods. These alterations in the normal sleep-wake cycle have profound effects on metabolism," the study authors wrote.

They also said these disruptions can occur even years into a shift work schedule.
The researchers said further study is needed, especially to see if there's a way to better adapt circadian rhythms to shift work. Also, they suggested considering avoiding shift work in favor of other work arrangements whenever possible.

- HealthDay

Obama signs terrorism insurance renewal

2015-01-13 08:54
Washington - President Barack Obama has signed into law a renewal of a federal programme credited with reviving the market for insurance against terrorist attacks after its collapse in the aftermath of 9/11.

The White House says Obama signed the bill on Monday — even though the president had previously expressed reservations about an unrelated provision that chips away at new regulations on financial instruments called derivatives.

The Senate approved the bill last week on a sweeping 93-4 vote, a day after it was approved by the House.
The measure was a leftover from last year that became snagged in the waning days of the last session of Congress. It's the first piece of legislation to pass the Senate since Republicans took control of the chamber last week.

- AP

6 Paris terror suspects may still be at large

2015-01-13 08:54
Paris - As many as six members of a terrorist cell involved in the Paris attacks may still be at large, including a man who was seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the slain gunmen, police officials said on Monday.

Two French police officials told The Associated Press that authorities were searching the Paris area for the Mini Cooper registered to Hayat Boumeddiene, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly. She is now in Syria, according to Turkish officials.

The French police officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to discuss details of the investigation with the news media.

France deployed 10 000 troops to protect sensitive sites — including Jewish schools and neighbourhoods — in the wake of the attacks that killed 17 people last week. Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, as well as Coulibaly, their friend who claimed ties to Islamic extremists in the Middle East, died on Friday in clashes with police.

Prime minister Manuel Valls said the manhunt is urgent because "the threat is still present" after the attacks that began on Wednesday with 12 people killed at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. A policewoman was killed on Thursday, and four people were slain at a kosher supermarket on Friday before the gunmen were killed by police in two nearly simultaneous clashes with security forces around Paris.

Paris' Marais district — one of the country's oldest Jewish neighbourhoods — was filled with police and soldiers by midday Monday. About 4 700 of the security forces would be assigned to protect France's 717 Jewish schools, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

"A little girl was telling me earlier that she wanted to live in peace and learn in peace in her school," Cazeneuve as on a visit to a Paris Jewish classroom, where the walls were covered with children's drawings of smiling faces.

"That's what the government, that's what the Republic, owes to all the children in France: security in all schools, especially in the schools that could be threatened," he added.

The children listened and waved both Israeli and French flags.

Defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the nationwide deployment of troops would be completed by Tuesday and would focus on the most sensitive locations.

"The work on these attacks, on these terrorist and barbaric acts continues ... because we consider that there are most probably some possible accomplices," Valls told BFM television.

French police have said the Charlie Hebdo attacks were carried out by three people, but only two of those attackers — Cherif and Said Kouachi — have been identified by authorities.

Video emerged Sunday of Coulibaly explaining how the attacks in Paris would unfold. French police want to find the person or persons who shot and posted the video, which was edited after Friday's attacks.

Boumeddiene was seen traveling through Turkey with a male companion before reportedly arriving in Syria with him on 8 January — the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack and the same day Coulibaly began his murderous spree by killing the policewoman.

Security camera video footage shown on Monday by Turkey's Haberturk newspaper showed Boumeddiene arriving at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen airport on 2 January. A high ranking Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the woman on the video was Boumeddiene.

Turkish intelligence then tracked Boumeddiene from her arrival.

Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the state-run Anadolu Agency that she had stayed at a hotel in Istanbul with another person before crossing into Syria on Thursday. She and her traveling companion, a 23-year-old man, toured Istanbul, then left 4 January for a town near the Turkish border, according to a Turkish intelligence official who was not authorised to speak on the record.

Her last phone signal was on 8 January from the border town of Akcakale, where she crossed over apparently into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria, the official said. Their 9 January return plane tickets to Madrid went unused.

- AP

Sudan troops battle rebels in war-torn South Kordofan

2015-01-13 10:11
Khartoum - The Sudanese military has been battling insurgents for control of parts of the conflict-stricken South Kordofan region, both sides said, giving conflicting reports of the situation there.

The fighting comes as Khartoum presses its latest offensive in the South Kordofan and Blue Nile areas and the western region of Darfur to try to end the conflicts wracking its peripheries.

The army said on Monday its troops had "defeated the remnants of the insurgents" from the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army-North northeast of South Kordofan state capital Kadugli on the road leading to the Umm Serdiba area.

Military spokesperson Colonel Al-Sawarmy Khaled Saad said the army had "inflicted heavy losses on the rebels in life and equipment," without specifying when the fighting had taken place.

He said the army had suffered some casualties but gave no details.

But in a statement released late Sunday, the SPLM-N said its fighters had repulsed the "biggest advances of the regime's militias" in Um Serdiba and several other areas in South Kordofan over the past week.

The SPLM-N said it had lost one soldier with nine others wounded, saying 20 government troops were killed.

Marginalisation
Fighting erupted in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states in 2011 when former rebels from the SPLA-N took up arms against Khartoum, complaining of marginalisation by Sudan's Arab-dominated government.
Khartoum has also been battling an insurgency in the western region of Darfur since 2003 and fighting in North Darfur state has intensified in recent weeks as part of the government offensive.

Army spokesperson Saad said his forces had on Monday driven rebels out of the Abu Laha area from where "the rebel movements used to direct their operations" in the surrounding villages and towns, without giving details of casualties.

It was not immediately possible to reach the insurgent groups in the area for comment.
In more than a decade of fighting in Darfur, the UN says more than 300 000 people have been killed and more than two million displaced.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in the region.

- AFP

UN chief accuses India of intolerance with gay sex ban

2015-01-13 10:11
New Delhi – The United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon has accused India of fomenting intolerance with its ban on gay sex amid uproar over a ruling party minister's plans to make homosexuals "normal".

Speaking on a visit to the capital New Delhi, Ban said he "staunchly opposed the criminalisation of homosexuality" referring to India's colonial-era law that prohibits gay sex.

"I am proud to stand for the equality of all people - including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender," the UN secretary general said in a statement late Monday.

"I speak out because laws criminalising consensual, adult same-sex relationships violate basic rights to privacy and to freedom from discrimination. Even if they are not enforced, these laws breed intolerance."
India's Supreme Court reimposed a ban on gay sex in late 2013, ruling that the responsibility for changing the 1861 law rested with lawmakers and not judges.

Violation of rights
Gay sex had been effectively legalised in 2009 when the Delhi High Court ruled that banning "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" was a violation of fundamental rights.

Ban's comments came on the same day that a state minister from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party announced his plans to make gays "normal" in the coastal resort state of Goa.

Ramesh Tawadkar, sports and youth affairs minister in Goa's state government, told reporters that he planned to open up centres on the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous to treat them.

"We will make them normal. We will have centres for them, like Alcoholic Anonymous centres," Tawadkar said, adding that the state would "train them and give them medicines too".

Widespread and ridicule
Tawadkar, a member of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made the comments after releasing the state's policy on youth issues which listed lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders as a stigmatised group that needed attention.

His comments drew widespread criticism and ridicule from gay rights groups and social media with jeering remarks posted on Twitter.

"There has to be someone from the higher authorities... from the BJP who will have to speak up on this because when you are silent about someone making such an irresponsible statement you are actually admitting it," Harish Iyer, a gay rights activist, told NDTV news channel.

- AFP