“Don\u27t Buy Another Vote. I Won\u27t Pay for a Landslide : The Sordid and Continuing History of Political Corruption in West Virginia

This study documents the long and sordid history of corruption--both perceived and corroborated--in the West Virginia political process. The researcher explores the considerable amounts of money spent by wealthy individuals for election or re-election. It documents the effect of high-cost elections, an effect which in many instances has spawned criminal activity. The author relates ostensibly ceaseless measures of corruption at the executive, legislative, and judicial levels. The findings indicate the existence of problems in West Virginia politics since the State\u27s inception in 1863, including vote buying, vote rigging, undue geographical barriers, and lawlessness leading to numerous declarations of martial law. The research chronicles a weak, ineffectual Ethics Act as well as a lack of statewide prosecutorial power and illuminates a lack of accountability for numerous criminal actions. The data attests that the ongoing practice of corruption has not been confined to one level of government as city, county, state, and even federal candidates have been subject to well warranted scrutiny including the nationally pivotal 1960 West Virginia Primary involving victorious candidate John F. Kennedy, Jr. The author examines Clean Money legislation as one potential avenue to reform providing that no reform will be successful without the elimination of the many advantages available only to incumbents. The researcher obtained information from books, magazines, state and federal cases, national and state newspapers, personal interviews of current and former candidates, elected officials, campaign workers, and citizens. Moreover, the author garnered information from his personal employment history in a governor\u27s office, a United States Congressional office, two state supreme courts, a county prosecuting attorney\u27s office, his work as a Senior Assistant Attorney General, as well as his experiences in campaign work on the county, state, and national levels. The principal initiative of this body of work is to serve as an educational tool promoting a grass roots effort to clean up the State\u27s unfortunate political problems and mitigate voter apathy and cynicism

“Don\u27t Buy Another Vote. I Won\u27t Pay for a Landslide : The Sordid and Continuing History of Political Corruption in West Virginia

This study documents the long and sordid history of corruption--both perceived and corroborated--in the West Virginia political process. The researcher explores the considerable amounts of money spent by wealthy individuals for election or re-election. It documents the effect of high-cost elections, an effect which in many instances has spawned criminal activity. The author relates ostensibly ceaseless measures of corruption at the executive, legislative, and judicial levels. The findings indicate the existence of problems in West Virginia politics since the State\u27s inception in 1863, including vote buying, vote rigging, undue geographical barriers, and lawlessness leading to numerous declarations of martial law. The research chronicles a weak, ineffectual Ethics Act as well as a lack of statewide prosecutorial power and illuminates a lack of accountability for numerous criminal actions. The data attests that the ongoing practice of corruption has not been confined to one level of government as city, county, state, and even federal candidates have been subject to well warranted scrutiny including the nationally pivotal 1960 West Virginia Primary involving victorious candidate John F. Kennedy, Jr. The author examines Clean Money legislation as one potential avenue to reform providing that no reform will be successful without the elimination of the many advantages available only to incumbents. The researcher obtained information from books, magazines, state and federal cases, national and state newspapers, personal interviews of current and former candidates, elected officials, campaign workers, and citizens. Moreover, the author garnered information from his personal employment history in a governor\u27s office, a United States Congressional office, two state supreme courts, a county prosecuting attorney\u27s office, his work as a Senior Assistant Attorney General, as well as his experiences in campaign work on the county, state, and national levels. The principal initiative of this body of work is to serve as an educational tool promoting a grass roots effort to clean up the State\u27s unfortunate political problems and mitigate voter apathy and cynicism

Combating Cancer Through Public Health Practice in the United States: An In-Depth Look at the National Comprehensive Cancer Control Program

Cancer is the second leading cause of the death in the United States (U.S.). The National Comprehensive Cancer Control Program (NCCCP) is a national, public health practice program funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The NCCCP has been planning and implementing interventions to reduce the burden of cancer since 1998. Interventions are implemented across three areas primary prevention, early detection, and survivorship using health systems and environmental changes to promote sustainable cancer control. The aim of this chapter is to provide a summary of the NCCCP, and highlight specific examples of interventions and successes to aid cancer planning in other countries. Cancer plan analyses show that all NCCCP participant cancer plans address reducing tobacco use for cancer prevention and 98% contain activities to increase colorectal cancer screening. The vast majority implement activities to improve the quality of life following a cancer diagnosis (94%). Relatively fewer cancer plans contain activities to reduce radon exposure (42%), promote human papilloma virus vaccination (62%), and incorporate the use of genomics in cancer control (56%). The examples of NCCCP activities demonstrate success in controlling cancer and other non-communicable diseases through public health practice

Rebuttal to Hasan and Pedraza in comments and controversies: "Improving the reliability of manual and automated methods for hippocampal and amygdala volume measurements"

Here we address the critiques offered by Hasan and Pedraza to our recently published manuscript comparing the performance of two automated segmentation programs, FSL/FIRST and FreeSurfer (Morey R, Petty C, Xu Y, Pannu Hayes J, Wagner H, Lewis D, LaBar K, Styner M, McCarthy G. (2009): A comparison of automated segmentation and manual tracing for quantifying of hippocampal and amygdala volumes. Neuroimage 45:855-866). We provide an assessment and discussion of their specific critiques. Hasan and Pedraza bring up some important points concerning our omission of sample demographic features and inclusion of left and right hemisphere volumes as independent measures in correlational analyses. We present additional data on demographic attributes of our sample and correlations analyzed separately on left and right hemispheres of the amygdala and hippocampus. While their commentary aids the reader to more critically asses our study, it falls short of substantiating that our omissions ought to lead readers to significantly revise their interpretations. Further research will help to disentangle the advantages and limitations of the various freely-available automated segmentation software packages

Determination of Biotransformation Products of Platinum Drugs in Rat and Human Urine

Cisplatin is an extremely effective cancer chemotherapeutic agent, but its use is often accompanied by toxicity. Second generation drugs such as carboplatin are becoming more widely used because of reduced toxicity. Since biotransformation products have been implicated in the toxic responses, we have begun to investigate the reactions of cisplatin and carboplatin with potential biological ligands. Reaction products were characterized using HPLC with inductively coupled plasma - mass spectrometry (HPLC-ICP-MS), 1H and 13C NMR and fast atom bombardment - mass spectrometry (FAB-MS). Three Pt-creatinine complexes, cis-[Pt(NH3)2Cl(Creat)]+, cis-[Pt(NH3)2(H2O)(Creat)]2+ and cis-[Pt(NH3)2(Creat)2]2+, were synthesized and the platinum was shown to coordinate to the ring nitrogen, N(3). Human urine samples from patients on cisplatin chemotherapy were shown to contain cisplatin, its hydrolysis product and biotransformation products containing Pt-creatinine, Pt-urea and Pt-uric acid complexes. Urine from carboplatin patients shows fewer biotransformation products. Studies with control and diabetic (protected against cisplatin toxicity) rats showed systematic differences in the biotransformation products formed on administration of cisplatin

Protocol for the saMS trial (supportive adjustment for multiple sclerosis): a randomized controlled trial comparing cognitive behavioral therapy to supportive listening for adjustment to multiple sclerosis

BackgroundMultiple Sclerosis (MS) is an incurable, chronic, potentially progressive and unpredictable disease of the central nervous system. The disease produces a range of unpleasant and debilitating symptoms, which can have a profound impact including disrupting activities of daily living, employment, income, relationships, social and leisure activities, and life goals. Adjusting to the illness is therefore particularly challenging. This trial tests the effectiveness of a cognitive behavioural intervention compared to supportive listening to assist adjustment in the early stages of MS.MethodsThis is a two arm randomized multi-centre parallel group controlled trial. 122 consenting participants who meet eligibility criteria will be randomly allocated to receive either Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Supportive Listening. Eight one hour sessions of therapy (delivered over a period of 10 weeks) will be delivered by general nurses trained in both treatments. Self-report questionnaire data will be collected at baseline (0 weeks), mid-therapy (week 5 of therapy), post-therapy (15 weeks) and at six months (26 weeks) and twelve months (52 weeks) follow-up. Primary outcomes are distress and MS-related social and role impairment at twelve month follow-up. Analysis will also consider predictors and mechanisms of change during therapy. In-depth interviews to examine participants’ experiences of the interventions will be conducted with a purposively sampled sub-set of the trial participants. An economic analysis will also take place. DiscussionThis trial is distinctive in its aims in that it aids adjustment to MS in a broad sense. It is not a treatment specifically for depression. Use of nurses as therapists makes the interventions potentially viable in terms of being rolled out in the NHS. The trial benefits from incorporating patient input in the development and evaluation stages. The trial will provide important information about the efficacy, cost-effectiveness and acceptability of the interventions as well as mechanisms of psychosocial adjustment.Trial registrationCurrent Controlled Trials ISRCTN91377356<br/

Comfort radicalism and NEETs: a conservative praxis

Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people's lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion and it is feared that they will become a 'lost generation'. This paper(1) draws upon English research, seeking to historicise the debate whilst acknowledging that these issues have a much wider purchase. The notion of NEETs rests alongside longstanding concerns of the English state and middle classes, addressing unruly male working class youth as well as the moral turpitude of working class girls. Waged labour and domesticity are seen as a means to integrate such groups into society thereby generating social cohesion. The paper places the debate within it socio-economic context and draws on theorisations of cognitive capitalism, Italian workerism, as well as emerging theories of antiwork to analyse these. It concludes by arguing that ‘radical’ approaches to NEETs that point towards inequities embedded in the social structure and call for social democratic solutions veer towards a form of comfort radicalism. Such approaches leave in place the dominance of capitalist relations as well as productivist orientations that celebrate waged labour

Midgut microbiota of the malaria mosquito vector Anopheles gambiae and Interactions with plasmodium falciparum Infection

The susceptibility of Anopheles mosquitoes to Plasmodium infections relies on complex interactions between the insect vector and the malaria parasite. A number of studies have shown that the mosquito innate immune responses play an important role in controlling the malaria infection and that the strength of parasite clearance is under genetic control, but little is known about the influence of environmental factors on the transmission success. We present here evidence that the composition of the vector gut microbiota is one of the major components that determine the outcome of mosquito infections. A. gambiae mosquitoes collected in natural breeding sites from Cameroon were experimentally challenged with a wild P. falciparum isolate, and their gut bacterial content was submitted for pyrosequencing analysis. The meta-taxogenomic approach revealed a broader richness of the midgut bacterial flora than previously described. Unexpectedly, the majority of bacterial species were found in only a small proportion of mosquitoes, and only 20 genera were shared by 80% of individuals. We show that observed differences in gut bacterial flora of adult mosquitoes is a result of breeding in distinct sites, suggesting that the native aquatic source where larvae were grown determines the composition of the midgut microbiota. Importantly, the abundance of Enterobacteriaceae in the mosquito midgut correlates significantly with the Plasmodium infection status. This striking relationship highlights the role of natural gut environment in parasite transmission. Deciphering microbe-pathogen interactions offers new perspectives to control disease transmission.Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD); French Agence Nationale pour la Recherche [ANR-11-BSV7-009-01]; European Community [242095, 223601]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente