11 November 2009 -Cornwall, England, United Kingdom Mary Fox, 59, died in house fire last week a few minutes after helping her 17-year-old son Raum escape from an upstairs window. According to a number of sources Raum had learning difficulties or mild intellectual disabilities and was a target of frequent bullying. whether the incident of Bonfire Night was related to this bullying remains a matter of speculation. What is known is someone put a lit piece of fireworks trough the mailslot of Fox’s home that started the deadly blaze, and mother and son were trapped on the upper floor.In an act of heroism, the mother helped her son out the window before she succumbed. According to the BBC, three teenagers are now in custody.

13 November 2009 – Lincoln, NE, USA A man has been charged with using a shock collar used to train dogs on a young man with cerebral palsy. An employee of the assisted living facility where the young man lives, said that the victim ran screaming from his room during a visit from Scott Gale, 26, who is an employee of Integrated Life Choices, the organization that runs the assisted living facility. Gale had his dog with him. According to the Lincoln Journal Star, the young victim had two red marks on his elbow that appeared to match up with the electrodes on the shock collar that was found at the scene. Gale was charged and released by police and has been suspended by his employer.

Real estate investors are moving back into the market, according to a new survey from Move.com.

According to the Move.com survey, 12.1 percent of home buyers today plan to buy a home as an investment property, compared to 5.6 percent in March 2009. The survey found that 15.8 percent of those interested in investment property were men and 8.1 percent were women and 52.6 percent of the investment buyers were between ages 35 to 49.

Of the 25.3 percent of buyers who are focusing on foreclosure properties, 42 percent regard the purchase they are considering an investment and don’t plan to live in the property themselves; 13.2 percent plan to rent out the property; 11.3 percent are going to fix up the property and resell it; and 17.4 percent plan to house a family member until the property can be sold profitably.

Of the 9.8 percent of buyers who say that they plan to purchase and live in a property in the next two years, 5.4 percent plan to purchase in the next 12 months; 48.3 percent are first-time buyers; 52.8 percent are women, and 44.1 percent are men.

Buyers of investment and personal property say they are motivated by these factors:

• Prices are as low as they will go, 23.6 percent
• Foreclosure prices are a bargain, 18.7 percent
• Great selection of homes for sale in their target community, 21.2 percent
• Concerned interest rates will rise, 14.2 percent

Source: Move.com (11/11/2009)

More than two-thirds of the independent landlords surveyed by the National Association of Independent Landlords say they would offer to reduce rent to keep tenants and one-third say they have already done so in the last 18 months.

Of those who are willing to cut the rent, 61 percent would reduce it by 5 percent while 29 percent would cut it by 10 percent, the survey of 500 mom-and-pop landlords reported.

“Landlords today understand what’s going on. They don’t want an empty home any more than a renter wants to be asked to leave,” says Tracey Benson, president of the association.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, Dawn Wotapka (11/09/2009)

An important reason that the housing market is stabilizing is the reduction in inventory. Current sales and inventories suggest that supply will decline below the pre-2006 levels by the end of 2009.

But analysts say that the stabilization of the market doesn’t mean that prices will rise anytime soon. They point to what they call “shadow inventory,” foreclosed homes that banks are holding off the markets. They predict that these homes will hit the market in spring 2010.

But overall, they are optimistic that the housing recovery is built on an improving economy and say that the market will continue to stabilize.

Source: BusinessWeek.com, James C. Cooper (11/09/2009)

What’s really in that burger? E.coli and chicken feces both allowed by USDA
Friday, November 06, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Key concepts: Disease, Cows and Mad cow
View on NaturalPedia: Disease, Cows and Mad cow

(NaturalNews) There are 14 billion hamburgers consumed each year in the United States alone. The people who eat those burgers, though, have little knowledge of what’s actually in them. Current USDA regulations, for example, openly allow beef contaminated with E. coli to be repackaged, cooked and sold as ready-to-eat hamburgers.

This simple fact would shock most consumers if they knew about it. People assume that beef found to be contaminated with E. coli must be thrown out or destroyed (or even recalled), but in reality, it’s often just pressed into hamburger patties, cooked, and sold to consumers. This practice is openly endorsed by the USDA.

But E. coli may not be the worst thing in your burger: USDA regulations also allow chicken feces to be used as feed for cows, meaning your hamburger beef may be made of second-hand chicken poop, recycled through the stomachs of cows.
Chicken poop in your burgers?
I remember writing about this two years ago. People sent accusatory hate mails to NaturalNews, saying things like, “Stop making things up and scaring people!” Few people believed that chicken feces was being widely used as cattle feed.

According to the FDA, farmers feed their cattle anywhere from 1 million to 2 million tons of chicken feces each year. This cross-species crap-as-food practice worries critics who are concerned it may lead to increased risk of mad cow disease contaminating beef products. So they want to ban the practice and disallow the feeding of chicken litter to cows.

Believe it or not, McDonald’s has joined the fight seeking to ban the practice, saying “We do not condone the feeding of poultry litter to cattle.” Apparently, even they don’t want their customers looking at a Big Mac and thinking, “Wow, this is made out of second-hand chicken crap.”

CSPI and the Consumers Union have also joined the fight, petitioning the FDA to ban the practice.

Now, you might wonder how chicken feces could pose a mad cow infection risk to cows. And if you’re not already grossed out by what you’ve read so far, you will be when you read the answer to this question: It’s because chickens are fed ground up parts of other animals such as cows, sheep and other animals. Some of that chicken feed spills out and gets swept up as chicken litter, then fed to cows.

So now we have a bizarre experiment in animal feed where dead cows, sheep and other animals are fed to chickens, and then chicken feed spills onto the floor where, combined with chicken poop, it gets swept up and fed to cows. Some of those cows, in turn, may eventually be ground up and fed back to the chickens.

Do you see how this might be a problem?
Do not feed animals to each other
First off, in the real world cows are vegetarians. They don’t eat other cows, or chickens, or poop from any creature. Chickens don’t eat cows in the real world, either. If given free range, they live primarily on a diet of bugs and weeds.

But through the magic of horrific factory food production practices in the USA, dead cows are fed to chickens, and chicken poop is fed to cows. This is precisely how mad cow disease could contaminate this unnatural food cycle and end up contaminating U.S. cattle with mad cow prions.

Some say this has already happened, and it’s only a matter of time before mad cow disease starts appearing in the U.S. population. It takes approximately 5 – 7 years after eating an infected burger for mad cow disease to destroy the brain of a consumer, and cooking a burger does not destroy the mad cow disease prions. That means even burgers that are fully cooked and handled according to federal safety standards can infect consumers with mad cow disease, causing their brains to turn to mush within 7 years.

The beef industry doesn’t see a problem with any of this. And that’s why this industry deserves what’s coming: A massive culling of cattle and a complete economic wipeout of cattle ranchers one day after mad cow disease is revealed in U.S. cattle herds. Rather than trying to protect the integrity of their cows, the U.S. beef industry chooses to pretend that there’s nothing wrong with practice of feeding corpses to chickens, and feces to cows. Is there anything too gross, inhumane or horrific for the beef industry to stomach? Seems not.

Remember, too, that the USDA has banned farmers from testing their own cattle for mad cow disease. So instead of allowing cattle ranchers to protect the safety of their herds, the USDA has a policy of covering their eyes and pretending not to see the very real risks that exist. When it comes to infectious disease, this is a sure recipe for disaster.
The perfect storm for mass infections
It all adds up to a “perfect storm” for the mass infection of the beef-eating population with mad cow disease. And remember: Cooking meat does not destroy prions, so if the beef supply becomes contaminated with mad cow disease, it’s only a matter of time before humans start to be stricken with the disease.

That takes 5-7 years, as I mentioned previously. It’s important to note because it means there could be a five-year gap between the time mad cow disease is present in the beef supply and the time health authorities start to notice a problem. But by that time, most of the population will have already eaten infected beef, and it will be too late to stop the mass human deaths sure to follow.

Dying from mad cow disease isn’t pretty, painless or quick. It’s ugly. Your brain cells start to turn to mush, slowly shutting down cognitive function little by little like some strange, aggressive form of Alzheimer’s disease. First you lose concentration ability, then your speech goes, and eventually all brain function stops altogether. It’s a horrifying way to waste away.

Is the risk of that really worth eating burgers?

Remember: Right now, the practice of feeding chicken feces to cow herds continues. So there is a risk of mad cow disease infection in U.S. beef right now. Very little testing is currently being conducted for mad cow disease, meaning an infection could very easily go undetected for years. Meanwhile, the average hamburger contains beef parts from as many as 1,000 different cows.

Do the math. Unless cattle feeding practices are significantly reformed, eating beef products of any kind — hot dogs, hamburgers, steaks — is like playing Russian Roulette with your brain cells.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-…

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellne…

About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher and author with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a manufacturer of mercury-free, energy-efficient LED lighting products that save electricity and help prevent global warming. He’s also a successful software entrepreneur, having founded a well known email marketing software company whose technology currently powers the NaturalNews email newsletters. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and pursues hobbies such as Pilates, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. Known on the ‘net as ‘the Health Ranger,’ Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org

7 November 2009 – Madison, WI, USA Darell Bracey, Sr., 51, has been charged with 2 counts of second degree sexual assault. The alleged victim is 50-year-old woman who has been described as having cerebral palsy, mild intellectual disabilities, and epilepsy. According to the story in the Wisconsin State Journal, Bracey denies taking the woman to his home, where she claims she was sexually assaulted, but she has provided a description of Bracey’s home. Bracey is described in the story as having a felony record.

7 November 2009 – New Brighton, New Zealand Someone came into the home of eight-year-old boy who has severe cerebral palsy and stole his communication device from him, while he was using it.

According to a New Zealand Police press release:

Acting Sergeant Ed Landstra of New Brighton says it was a despicable thing to do and asks whoever has it leave it somewhere safe so it can be recovered and returned to Caleb without damage.

“Please leave it anonymously at a reception at a school, Police, or the Library so we can get it back and working to Caleb as soon as possible.”

Anyone with information is asked to contact New Brighton Police phone 373 9100.

5 November 2009 – Los Angeles, CA, USA In 1997, Shawn Boehm, 23, who was described as having a mental disability, and his mother Nancy, 57, were stabbed to death in their Hollywood home. The crime went unsolved for more than a decade. Now, the Los Angeles Police Department says that they have a suspect, identified as 37-year-old Rafael Martinez. Martinez, who is currently serving a prison sentence for the 2001 stabbing murder of another woman in the area of the city. According to an Associated Press story in the Mercury News, DNA recovered from under the mother’s fingernails matches Martinez.

4 November 2009 – Reno, Nevada, USA Richard Bunch, a 51-year-old trucker has been sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of luring a 13-year-old girl described as mentally disabled into his truck and sexually assaulting her. The offense took place in July 2008, and Bunch entered guilty plea, which he later attempted to withdraw.The Associated Press report carried by KOMOnews.com indicates that Bunch is suspected of two other sexual assaults that took place in 2008, including one against a 9-year-old girl.

4 November 2009 -London, England, UK According to a 2009 survey of 1253 respondents conducted by the Leonard Cheshire Disability Trust, 9% of people with disabilities in the United Kingdom report having been the victim of a disability bias crime. The survey asked people if they had experienced a crime that they believed was motivated by their disability. In all 12% of respondents indicated that they had been crime victims in the past year.

As reported by Peter Walker in The Guardian, this was the first year the survey included this question:

The charity said it had included the question after high-profile incidents in which disabled people had been targeted, notably the case of Fiona Pilkington and her 18-year-old daughter, Francecca. In September, an inquest jury criticised police and a council in Leicestershire for failing to help Pilkington after her family suffered years of abuse from gangs of youths. Pilkington killed herself and Francecca by setting the family car alight in a layby near their home.

The second wave of foreclosures is driven by unemployment and is harder to fix, says Rick Sharga, senior vice president of RealtyTrac, which researches foreclosures.

Sharga predicts an “L-shaped recovery in the housing market through 2013” with the housing market stabilizing without much increase in prices or construction.

“The housing market will not feel healthy for a few years. This is not a short-lived recession,” he says.

Source: Newsweek, Nancy Cook (10/28/2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPtiZGKE–Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEMhgIFLljE

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r18KO125dLs

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0xzJdsFr7c

What are the signs that mortgage rates, now at historic lows, are about to go up?

One way to catch a clue is to read the minutes of the Federal Reserve. For instance, the Federal Open Market Committee said in its September minutes that when it came to interest rates, there is “no policy change.” And the minutes said that while the Fed believes “an economic recovery is underway,” it regards a weak economy as a greater risk than inflation. Upcoming meeting minutes are likely to be just as forthcoming if an uptick is in the cards.

Other signs include:

• Declining unemployment: The unemployment rate is sitting at 9.7 percent. If lots of Americans go back to work, an increase in interest rates is likely.
• Rising discount rate: The rate the Fed charges banks that borrow from it directly stands at 0.5 percent. If it rises or the spread between it and the Federal Funds rate widens, then mortgage rate increases won’t be far behind.

Source: BusinesWeek.com, Marc Roth (10/28/2009)