Domestic abuse may affect children in womb

© RT.com

Domestic violence can affect children even before they're born, indicates new research by Michigan State University scientists.

The study is the first to link abuse of pregnant women with emotional and behavioral trauma symptoms in their children within the first year of life. Symptoms include nightmares, startling easily, being bothered by loud noises and bright lights, avoiding physical contact and having trouble experiencing enjoyment.

"For clinicians and mothers, knowing that the prenatal experience of their domestic violence can directly harm their babies may be a powerful motivator to help moms get out of these abusive situations," said Alytia Levendosky, psychology professor and study co-author.

The study of 182 mothers ages 18-34 found a surprisingly strong relationship between a mother's prenatal abuse by a male partner and postnatal trauma symptoms in her child. The researchers examined the women's parenting styles and also took into account risk factors such as drug use and other negative life events, marital status, age and income.

Levendosky said prenatal abuse could cause changes in the mother's stress response systems, increasing her levels of the hormone cortisol, which in turn could increase cortisol levels in the fetus.

"Cortisol is a neurotoxic, so it has damaging effects on the brain when elevated to excessive levels," Levendosky said. "That might explain the emotional problems for the baby after birth."

A clinical psychologist for nearly 20 years, Levendosky has counseled many domestic violence survivors who didn't believe the abuse would affect their child until the child was old enough to understand what was going on.

"They might say things like, 'Oh, I have to leave my partner when my baby gets to be so-and-so age - you know, 3 or 4 years old - but until then, you know, it's not really affecting him, he won't really remember it,'" she said. "But I think these findings send a strong message that the violence is affecting the baby even before the baby is born."

The study appears in the research journal . Levendosky's co-researchers include Brittany Lannert, a former doctoral student, and psychology professors Anne Bogat and Joseph Lonstein.

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Psychopath Ann Coulter on women reporting rapes: Just 'girls trying to get attention'

In an appearance on talk radio's last week, conservative talking head Ann Coulter claimed that women who report rapes, most of the time, are just "girls trying to get attention."

According to Right Wing Watch, the author said that a botched story about a campus rape at the University of Virginia just shows that "there is no campus rape problem."

Coulter dismissed the notion of date or acquaintance rape out of hand, insisting that unless a victim gets "hit on the head with a brick," it isn't a legitimate rape.

"People know what a rape is," Coulter insisted, "and to have girls trying to get attention - from Lena Dunham to this poor psychotic at UVA, Lady Gaga claiming she was raped but she didn't admit it to herself for five years. What major crime do people say, 'I didn't admit it to myself?'"

In a second part of the interview, the 53-year-old pundit said that liberals are vastly overplaying instances of campus rape, which, in her experience is generally perpetrated by liberal men like the "Clintons and Kennedys," anyway.

Listen to Coulter's remarks, embedded below via Right Wing Watch:

Part One

Part Two

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Bird flu feared in mass deaths of 3,000 Swedish and Danish seals

© Susanne Nilsson/Flickr

"So far this year about 3,000 harbour seals have died in Swedish and Danish waters and were probably infected with the bird flu virus H10N7," the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management said in a statement.

The virus was first detected among sick and dead seals found in April off the coast of Gothenburg southwest of Sweden -- and the agency said the death toll was far higher than initially thought.

In October the numbers of seals killed by the virus was estimated at about 700 but researchers now say most of the dead animals had sunk, making estimates difficult.

"We still don't have the full picture of how many seals are affected or exactly how the infection has spread," a biologist at the marine agency said.

The agency believes that most Swedish seals have probably been infected with the virus but that the majority have developed antibodies which protect them.

There are around 12,000 seals in Denmark, while Sweden has an estimated 10,000 seals.

In late November, authorities in the northern German region of Schleswig-Holstein reported that 1,600 seals had died from the bird flu virus out of a population of 13,000.

There have also been some reports of seal deaths related to bird flu in Norway and the Netherlands.

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Life on Mars? Curiosity rover detects mysterious methane 'burps' in Martian atmosphere

A gas strongly associated with life on Earth has been detected again in the Martian atmosphere, opening a new chapter in a decade-old mystery about the on-again, off-again appearance of methane on Mars.

The latest discovery comes from NASA's Curiosity rover, which in addition to analyzing rocks and soil samples, is sniffing the air at its Gale Crater landing site.

A year ago, scientists reported that Curiosity had come up empty-handed after an eight-month search for methane in the atmosphere, leaving earlier detections by ground-based telescopes and Mars-orbiting spacecraft an unexplained anomaly.

"We thought we had closed the book on methane. It was disappointing to a lot of people that there wasn't significant methane on Mars, but that's where we were," Curiosity scientist Christopher Webster with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

Then, on the day after Thanksgiving in 2013, methane readings shot up in Gale Crater and stayed high while Curiosity made three more measurements over the next 60 days.

"It was a complete surprise," Webster said.

Six weeks later, the rover's Tunable Laser Spectrometer scanned again and found methane concentrations were back down to about seven parts per billion, a background level that dovetails with previous measurements by telescopes and Mars orbiters.

Methane concentrations stayed at that background level through July 9, 2014, the last measurement included in a report to be published in this week's .

The discovery revives two somewhat dormant investigations. The first and most difficult to answer is tracing the source of the methane and figuring out what triggers its periodic release into the atmosphere.

One possibility is that Mars hosts past or present colonies of methane-producing microbes known as methanogens. It is highly unlikely that Curiosity -- or India's newly arrived methane-hunting Mars-orbiting spacecraft -- has the sensitivity to chemically analyze isotopes in the methane molecules and identify whether the gas is produced by biological processes or geochemical ones.

Methane is a chemical compound comprised of one carbon atom bonded with four hydrogen atoms. On Earth, living systems produce more than 90 percent of the methane in the atmosphere. The rest stems from geochemical processes.

Another option for Mars' methane is that carbon-rich meteorites occasionally blast through Mars' thin envelope of atmospheric gases, temporarily spiking methane levels as the carbon cooks in ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

"It's basically an organic bomb," astrobiologist Chris McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

Impacting meteorites are just one of several potential geochemical sources of Mars' methane. Other possibilities are the erosion of methane-pocketed basalt rock, transformations of the rock-forming mineral olivine and subsurface methane-laced ice.

The second mystery reopened Curiosity's findings concerns methane's rather shocking disappearing act. On Mars, the gas should last 300 years in the atmosphere. But Curiosity's readings, among others, show it dissipates orders of magnitude faster.

Based on Curiosity's measurements alone, that may be because the winds changed, pushing the pocket of methane beyond the rover's nose. Add in previous detections of methane plumes over larger regions and the story gets more complicated -- and puzzling.

"The take-home message here is that we're really being faced with a paradigm shift," planetary scientist Michael Mumma, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Discovery News.

Mumma, who led a team that found methane in Mars' atmosphere in 2003, was not involved in the Curiosity research.

The findings will be released today at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

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Massachusetts mother charged with murder after three dead babies found in home

© Reuters/Paul Kapteyn

A Massachusetts woman has been indicted on murder charges after police found the remains of three babies in her home, the Worcester district attorney announced Tuesday.

The Boston Globe reports police arrested Erika Murray, 31, in September after searching her Blackstone home following the removal of four neglected children from the home in August. She has been in custody since that time.

Authorities had been notified of a problem after one of the children went to a neighbor trying to get help for a crying baby. When they responded, police found four children, ranging in age from 5 months to 13 years old, living in what they said were deplorable conditions.

Prosecutors said the 5-month-old and 3-year-old were covered in their own feces and the 3-year-old was unable to walk or talk. Police removed the children from Murray's care.

They returned in September with a search warrant for the home. That is when they found the remains of two babies, dressed in diapers and infant outfits. The body of the third child is described by The as that of a fetus.

"I have never seen anything like the facts in this case," Worcester District Attorney Joseph Early said at a news conference Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. "Everyone who went into that house, to a person, said they'd never seen anything like it."

The house, which was eventually demolished, was said to be infested with rodents and insects, with feces smeared on the walls.

"Upstairs looked like a landfill with garbage and trash piles," Assistant District Attorney John Bradley said in court Tuesday.

Murray stands charged with two counts of murder for the deaths of the two older babies. She is also charged with concealment of fetal remains in connection with the death of the youngest baby. She was also indicted on two counts of assault on a child with substantial injury, two counts of reckless endangerment of a child, and two counts of animal cruelty.

Prosecutors have also charged Murray's boyfriend, 38-year-old Raymond Rivera with two counts of assault and battery on a child, and two counts of reckless endangerment of a child. Rivera is said to be the father of the children.

He has pleaded not guilty and said he had been living in the basement of the home and was not aware of the conditions in the rest of the house. The judge ordered Rivera be held on $100,000 bail.

Murray's attorney, Keith Halpern, said the murder charges against his client were an overreach by prosecutors.

"There's no evidence that she did anything to cause the death of any of these infants," Halpern said. "There's no evidence of how they died."

He said Murray has mental health problems and that she told police she found one of the babies dead after she put the child down for a nap.

Murray is due in court for arraignment Dec. 29. She has a pretrial conference scheduled for Jan. 14. She is being held on $1 million bail.

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Frat house banned at San Diego State after members waved sex toys at anti-rape march

© Reuters/Adnan Abidi

San Diego State University has banned the Gamma Alpha fraternity after members allegedly threw eggs and waved sex toys at people involved in an anti-rape march on campus in November.

San Diego State University (SDSU) said on its website that the national Delta Sigma Phi fraternity had agreed to close the school's Gamma Alpha chapter at least until the fall of 2016, according to Reuters.

"There is no place in our campus community for the type of ongoing behaviors displayed by those involved with this fraternity chapter," Eric Rivera, SDSU vice president for student affairs, said in a written statement.

"We appreciate the willingness of the national office of Delta Sigma Phi to step in and address these issues and take action with us. We hope that through these actions, when the time is right, they will bring a chapter back to SDSU and be productive members of our community."

Gamma Alpha members are accused of taking part in harassing about 35 students taking part in a "Take Back the Night" anti-campus-rape march, as colleges across the nation are addressing a spate of head-turning sexual assault allegations and subsequent demonstrations of defiance by students.

SDSU was one of four California public universities that was cited in a statewide June audit for poor staff training and preparation for sexual assault issues on campus. The gaps in training, the audit said, left staff at risk for botching reports of sexual assault.

The university has since installed staff training and student education programs about sexual misconduct, an SDSU spokesman said.

Meanwhile, graphic allegations of rape on US college campuses at schools such as Columbia University have spurred a wave of protest and calls for action, including the possibility of reform of the fraternity systems.

Following an account recently published by of alleged fraternity-led sexual assaults at the University of Virginia, the school suspended fraternity activities until the beginning of the spring semester.

Yet has since backtracked on the article's veracity, citing "discrepancies" regarding accounts of what happened to the story's source and whether fraternity members were involved.

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Obama announces US will lift sanctions and establish embassy in Cuba

© AFP Photo / Saul Loeb

United States President Barack Obama said Wednesday that the US is initiating plans to rebuild its relationship with Cuba following decades of disputes between the two nations.

Speaking from the White House in Washington, DC, Pres. Obama said Wednesday that the US is seeking to establish diplomatic relations with Cuba and soon plans to open an embassy in Havana, authorize sales and exports between nations and make changes to current travel laws that for decades have restricted traffic between the two countries.

Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba Obama said as he offered to "extend a hand of friendship" while unveiling what he called the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.

We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interest Obama said.

Raúl Castro, the president of Cuba, announced in a statement televised concurrently with Obama's that his nation will "reestablish diplomatic relations" with the US.

© AFP Photo/Yamil Lage

Cuban President Raul Castro.

Since the administration of Pres. John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, restrictions and sanctions have kept the American and Cuban ways of life from all but converging policies put in place at the dawn of the Cold War in an attempt to curb the spread of Communism.

Yet Obama said Wednesday that, while rooted in the best of intentions, this "rigid policy" has "had little effect" a half-century later. Indeed, Obama acknowledged, a Castro still sits atop the Cuban government as during the Kennedy administration, and that similar restraints concerning how the US dealt with China and Vietnam, "once controversial," have long been lifted following decades of disagreements.

"This is fundamentally about freedom and openness, and also expresses my belief in the power of people-to-people engagement," Obama said of the policy change, adding that he intends such "contact will ultimately do more to empower the Cuban people

© AFP Photo/Cubadebate.cu/Ismael Francisco

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, will soon begin discussions with Cuban representatives, the White House said; in April an official from Havana will be welcomed to attend the annual Summit of Americas.

The announcements on Wednesday occurred only hours after it was revealed that Alan Gross, an American citizen imprisoned in Cuba for the last five years, had been released on humanitarian grounds, along with a US intelligence official who has similarly been detained for 20 years. On its part, the US has released three individuals from the so-called "Cuban Five" who had until now been imprisoned.

© AFP

US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signs the order of naval blockade of Cuba, on October 24, 1962 in White House, Washington DC, during the Cuban missiles crisis.

Announcements from the Obama and Castro offices came only hours after the head of the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, announced plans to resign following a five-year term marred in recent months by scandals surrounding American efforts to influence Cuban youths.

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