Children’s Charity and Its Telemarketer Accused of Bilking over $4.2 Million from Ohio Donors

 

CLEVELAND)—Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine today announced a lawsuit against a purported children’s charity, its operators, and its fundraiser for allegedly defrauding Ohio donors and misleading them about how their money would be spent.

According to the lawsuit, Cops for Kids Inc. (also known as Ohio Cops for Kids) collected over $4.2 million in donations from Ohio residents between 2005 and 2015 but spent less than two percent of it on charitable programming, instead paying the vast majority — over $3.34 million — to its for-profit solicitor, Telcom Enterprises, and an additional $802,662 on salaries and overhead.

“Well-meaning Ohioans gave to Cops for Kids believing their dollars would help Ohio children or support local law enforcement. Instead, an overwhelming percentage of donations were kept by the group’s for-profit fundraiser or the men who operated it,”

 Attorney General DeWine said. “We believe Cops for Kids is a sham operation that has defrauded Ohioans out of millions of dollars while performing almost no legitimate charitable work.”

Continue reading at Ohio Attorney General Office Media Release 

New study uncovers the 'keystone domino' strategy of climate denial

The body of evidence supporting human-caused global warming is vast – too vast for climate denial blogs to attack it all. Instead they focus on what a new study published in the journal Bioscience calls “keystone dominoes.” These are individual pieces of evidence that capture peoples’ attention, like polar bears. The authors write:

These topics are used as “proxies” for AGW [human-caused global warming] in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of “dismissal by association.”

Basically, if these bloggers can create the perception that the science underlying polar bear or Arctic sea ice vulnerability to climate change is incorrect, their readers will assume that all of climate science is fatally flawed. And blogs can be relatively influential – surveys have shown that blog readers trust them more than traditional news and information sources.

Continue reading at theguardian

Smartphone Addiction Creates Imbalance in Brain

CHICAGO, Nov. 30, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --

Researchers have found an imbalance in the brain chemistry of young people addicted to smartphones and the internet, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

According to a recent Pew Research Center study, 46 percent of Americans say they could not live without their smartphones. While this sentiment is clearly hyperbole, more and more people are becoming increasingly dependent on smartphones and other portable electronic devices for news, information, games, and even the occasional phone call.

Along with a growing concern that young people, in particular, may be spending too much time staring into their phones instead of interacting with others, come questions as to the immediate effects on the brain and the possible long-term consequences of such habits.

Hyung Suk Seo, M.D., professor of neuroradiology at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea, and colleagues used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to gain unique insight into the brains of smartphone- and internet-addicted teenagers. MRS is a type of MRI that measures the brain's chemical composition.

The study involved 19 young people (mean age 15.5, 9 males) diagnosed with internet or smartphone addiction and 19 gender- and age-matched healthy controls. Twelve of the addicted youth received nine weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy, modified from a cognitive therapy program for gaming addiction, as part of the study.

Researchers used standardized internet and smartphone addiction tests to measure the severity of internet addiction. Questions focused on the extent to which internet and smartphone use affects daily routines, social life, productivity, sleeping patterns and feelings.

"The higher the score, the more severe the addiction," Dr. Seo said.

Dr. Seo reported that the addicted teenagers had significantly higher scores in depression, anxiety, insomnia severity and impulsivity.

The researchers performed MRS exams on the addicted youth prior to and following behavioral therapy and a single MRS study on the control patients to measure levels of gamma aminobutyric acid, or GABA, a neurotransmitter in the brain that inhibits or slows down brain signals, and glutamate-glutamine (Glx), a neurotransmitter that causes neurons to become more electrically excited. Previous studies have found GABA to be involved in vision and motor control and the regulation of various brain functions, including anxiety.

The results of the MRS revealed that, compared to the healthy controls, the ratio of GABA to Glx was significantly increased in the anterior cingulate cortex of smartphone- and internet-addicted youth prior to therapy.

Dr. Seo said the ratios of GABA to creatine and GABA to glutamate were significantly correlated to clinical scales of internet and smartphone addictions, depression and anxiety.

Having too much GABA can result in a number of side effects, including drowsiness and anxiety.

More study is needed to understand the clinical implications of the findings, but Dr. Seo believes that increased GABA in the anterior cingulate gyrus in internet and smartphone addiction may be related to the functional loss of integration and regulation of processing in the cognitive and emotional neural network.

The good news is GABA to Glx ratios in the addicted youth significantly decreased or normalized after cognitive behavioral therapy.

"The increased GABA levels and disrupted balance between GABA and glutamate in the anterior cingulate cortex may contribute to our understanding the pathophysiology of and treatment for addictions," Dr. Seo said.

Co-authors are Eun-Kee Jeong, Ph.D., Sungwon Choi, Yunna Kwon, Hae-Jeong Park, and InSeong Kim.

Note: Copies of RSNA 2017 news releases and electronic images will be available online at RSNA.org/press17 beginning Monday, Nov. 27.

RSNA is an association of over 54,000 radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and related scientists, promoting excellence in patient care and health care delivery through education, research and technologic innovation. The Society is based in Oak Brook, Ill. (RSNA.org)

Editor's note: The data in these releases may differ from those in the published abstract and those actually presented at the meeting, as researchers continue to update their data right up until the meeting.

For patient-friendly information on MRS, or MR spectroscopy, visit RadiologyInfo.org.

SOURCE Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)
Related Links

http://www.rsna.org

Additional information on smartphone addiction: Get Help with Smartphone Addiction

A different opinion: Not All Scientists Agree - Inverse Science

Related: TED Sherry Turkle: Connected but, alone?

Polygamous Mormon Church Allowed to Keep Its Police Force

The Marshal’s Office was accused of discriminating against non-believers and ignoring church members’ marriages to underage girls.

Gaby Del Valle

04.21.17 5:00 AM ET

An inter-state police force that serves a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon community won’t be required to disband—despite alleged discrimination against nonbelievers, surveillance of dissidents, and facilitation of child abuse.

Instead, officers in the Colorado City Marshal’s Office will be required to attend annual training sessions to ensure they comply with federal laws and don’t discriminate against the community’s non-religious minority. The Marshal’s Office has been serving the adjoining towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona since 1985.

Together, the two towns make up Short Creek, a 7,500-person community that’s home to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a polygamous offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that splintered from the Mormon church when the latter renounced plural marriage at the beginning of the 20th century.

The U.S. Department of Justice called for the disbanding of the CCMO as part of a lengthy anti-discrimination lawsuit against the twin towns that comprise Short Creek that began in 2012. According to the complaint, the community’s powerful FLDS leaders denied non-members access to housing, police protection, and public services including water and electricity.

In March 2016, a jury determined the community’s leadership had discriminated against non-FLDS members and awarded $2.2 million in damages to six Short Creek residents. The Justice Department then demanded the federal government disband Short Creek’s police force, which it claimed was enforcing the church’s discrimination against non-members.

Prosecutors claimed the Marshal’s Office was using its “state-granted law enforcement authority” to “carry out the will and dictates” of Warren Jeffs, the infamous FLDS leader who is currently serving a life sentence for sexually abusing two young girls whom he called his “spiritual wives.”

In October 2005, marshal Fred Barlow wrote a letter to Jeffs, a fugitive at the time. “I want to fill the position that you would have me fill and do the job the way you would like it done,” Barlow wrote. “We will continue to do that directive unless you would like us to do something different.”

Continue Reading

Why people are marching for science: ‘There is no Planet B’

 Why people are marching for science: ‘There is no Planet B’

By Joel Achenbach, Ben Guarino and Sarah Kaplan April 22 at 4:19 PM


Thousands of people gathered in the rain Saturday on the soggy grounds of the Washington Monument to turn Earth Day into an homage to science. After four hours of speeches and musical performances, they marched down Constitution Avenue to the foot of Capitol Hill, chanting “Build labs, not walls!” and “Hey, Trump, have you heard, you can’t silence every nerd!” The March for Science began as a notion batted around online on Reddit after the Women’s March on Washington, which was held Jan. 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. The idea snowballed after it was endorsed by numerous mainstream science organizations, which vowed that it would not be a partisan event. It eventually became a global phenomenon, held in more than 600 cities on six continents — and cheered on by scientists on a seventh, Antarctica.

Continue Reading

Actual paid protestors found in Arizona — and they work for the GOP

By Tommy Christopher   | April 21, 2017 

 

Numerous elected Republicans, up to and including Donald Trump, have falsely accused the town hall resistance of being made up of paid protesters. But according to The Arizona Republic, it is the Republicans who are openly paying people to protest at Democratic town halls.

 

  

In a particularly despotic and disturbing move, Donald Trump spent his Easter trying to intimidate protesters, while also explicitly accusing them of being paid to show up at Tax Day demonstrations.
Trump’s accusation has been echoed by many other Republicans, refuted by the town hall constituents themselves, and debunked by Politifact.

The accusation is an odd one coming from a person whose own Federal Elections Commission filings show that he, in fact, paid actors to attend his own campaign launch, but the hypocrisy runs even deeper than that. According to The Arizona Republic, the Republican Party of Arizona sent an email soliciting attendance at a town hall event for Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and offering to reimburse attendees to the tune of $25:

The email noted that to attend the event required joining the coffee club and paying $25. “If someone does have to pay, the Party is willing to reimburse the expense,” the email stated.
Kory Langhofer, attorney for the state Republican Party, said if people are reimbursed the $25 entry fee, the party will “make sure it’s fully disclosed and reported correctly. As long as the transaction is disclosed and transparent, it’s perfectly acceptable,” he said.

Such reimbursements may well be “acceptable” as a matter of law, but for a party that accuses others of paying for resistance, it is hypocritical in the extreme.
Fortunately, even at the relatively cheap price of 25 bucks a head, there is not enough money in the world to equal the resistance to Trump that has grown from the grassroots, free of charge.

 

Source

March for Science: Worldwide protests begin to support 'evidence'

By Laura Smith-Spark, CNN

Updated 12:56 PM ET, Sat April 22, 2017

London (CNN)Crowds of people are marching Saturday in the United States and around the world in support of science and evidence-based research in a protest fueled by opposition to President Donald Trump's environmental and energy policies.

Besides the main march in Washington, organizers said more than 600 "satellite" marches were due to take place globally in a protest timed to coincide with Earth Day.

Happy Earth Day! In Celebration... Over 600 marches worldwide #MarchForScience #earthday2017 Let's go loud and proud! pic.twitter.com/kt2w7YWmBL

— SCI MARCH (@scimarch) April 22, 2017

The march, whose beginnings reflect the viral birth of the Women's March on Washington, has been billed by its organizers as political but nonpartisan. The event's website describes it as "the first step of a global movement to defend the vital role science plays in our health, safety, economies and governments."

"I think there has been a declining sense of what science means to progress. I think we take so much for granted," said march honorary co-chair Lydia Villa-Komaroff ahead of the event.

Supporters of science and research gather Saturday for the March for Science protest in Sydney.

Demonstrators in Australia kicked off the day of protest.

In Sydney, marchers carried banners, many homemade, with slogans such as "Science makes sense," "Science-based policy = stuff that works," and "Climate change is real, clean coal is not." Another placard displayed the message, "Governments: stop ignoring inconvenient science!"

'We're not going to be silent': Why scientists are marching

Chant for evidence-based science

It wasn't only major cities where scientists and their supporters came out.

A video of our mini #marchforscience around the telescope dome! #downwithclouds @ScienceMarchAu pic.twitter.com/LaOrcWoxmy

— Rebecca McElroy (@re_mcelroy) April 22, 2017

Rebecca McElroy, an astrophysics doctoral student at the University of Sydney, tweeted video of a "mini march for science" around the dome of the Anglo-Australian Telescope in New South Wales.

Demonstrators also turned out in New Zealand cities, including Wellington, Auckland, Dunedin and Christchurch.

"What do we want? Evidence-based science! When do we want it? After peer review!" #marchforsciencenz pic.twitter.com/nvMbsBPAKw

— James Shaw (@jamespeshaw) April 22, 2017

New Zealand Green Party co-leader James Shaw tweeted a popular chant from the marchers: "What do we want? Evidence-based science! When do we want it? After peer review!"

Marches were also held in Durban and Cape Town, South Africa, and in Tokyo.