Washington, D.C, United States (AHN) – It appears that quite a few Americans got pink slips for Christmas.

In the week before the holiday, the number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits rose.

Roughly 381,000 people filed initial jobless claims in the week ended Dec. 24, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That was more than forecast and marked an increase of 15,000 from the prior week when claims dropped to their lowest level since April 2008.

Continuing claims, which include Americans filing for their second week of claims or more, increased 34,000 to 3,601,000 in the week ended Dec. 17, the most recent data shows.

Initial claims tend to be volatile around the holidays, so many economist say not to read too much into the increase. Thursday’s numbers are still well below the level of applications for claims during the same period a year ago.

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Corvallis, OR, United States (AHN) – Oregon State University researchers have linked a diet high in omega 3 fatty acids and several vitamins with a decreased risk of cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers simultaneously found that elderly people who regularly eat unhealthy foods perform poorer on mental acuity tests and have more brain shrinkage associated with Alzheimer’s.

The other vitamins besides omega 3 fatty acids found to boost mental ability in seniors were B, C, D and E.

“The vitamins and nutrients you get from eating a wide range of fruits, vegetables and fish can be measured in blood biomarkers. I am a firm believer these nutrients have strong potential to protect your brain and make it work better,” lead researcher Maret Traber said in a statement.

The study is published this week in the journal Neurology.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Confidence among U.S. consumers rose in December to the highest level in eight months, helped by an improving job market that helped gain ground lost following the mid-year government budget battles and credit rating downgrades.

The Conference Board’s index increased to 64.5, exceeding all estimates, in a report released Tuesday. The number is the highest since April. During the recession that ended in June 2009, the index averaged 53.7.

In November, unemployment dropped to its lowest level in more than two years, and gasoline is the cheapest since February. The extra money in consumers’ wallets spurred households to take advantage of discounts during the holiday season.

The percentage of consumers saying jobs were plentiful jumped to the highest since January 2009, while those saying jobs were hard to come by decreased to the lowest.

The shares of respondents expecting more jobs to become available in the next six months increased, and those projecting their incomes will rise improved to the highest level since February.

The outlook for the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, weighs heavily on Europe, where the region’s sovereign debt crisis continues to be a threat to the global economic environment.

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Hanoi, Vietnam (IRIN) – Rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion in Vietnam’s fertile Mekong Delta are forcing farmers and development agencies to rethink how livelihoods can be maintained, using methods such as agricultural genetics, changing crop varieties and simple farming fixes.

With support from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in March 2011 launched a four-year project to introduce the flood-tolerant SUB1 gene and Saltol, a salt-tolerant gene, to Vietnamese rice varieties.

Transferring the genetic information – a process known as introgression – is expected to take three years. Because the genes are being introduced to rice currently grown in Vietnam, farmers will not need to learn new farming practices.

“We are on track. It’s three years, and in the fourth year, we’ll try to disseminate this new variety,” said Reiner Wassmann, a climate change specialist with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

The Mekong Delta is the country’s rice basket, and Vietnam is the world’s second largest rice exporter. With soil and crops already being damaged by saltwater intrusion, farmers and development agencies are troubleshooting ways to cope.

Some rice paddies in Thanh Hoa Province have been converted to shrimp ponds, according to Nguyen Viet Nghi, CARE’s project manager of a community-based mangrove reforestation program in Thanh Hoa.

“It was done by farmers themselves, and CARE is planning to support them combine mangroves and shrimp development in their ponds,” said Nghi.

It is a trend seen across Vietnam: aquaculture has skyrocketed from 641,900 hectares in 2000 to more than 1 million hectares in 2010, and shrimp farming accounts for the bulk of the growth, nearly doubling over the past decade to 645,000 hectares.

While most aquaculture is in the Mekong Delta, even in Thanh Hoa on the central coast, farming in water grew from 10,600 hectares in 2000 to 13,900 a decade later.

Vietnam is one of the countries expected to suffer most from the impact of climate change, and unpredictable rain, higher temperatures and more saltwater could mean less water for irrigation of crops such as watermelons.

Oxfam piloted a small project to help 10 farmers with hardier varieties of watermelons, and taught them simple methods to save water: Draping plastic sheets on the ground around the plants prevents evaporation, so farmers need less freshwater for the crops. To prevent saltwater contamination, farmers built raised beds half a meter above the salinated drainage ditches.

“We found that out of 10 [farms], nine have huge profits because production is very good,” said Mondal. Oxfam is now replicating the watermelon project on other small farms, and experimenting with ginger cultivation.

The only solution…

Longer droughts and rising sea levels have begun to salinate farmland, and the only solution is to adapt, according to Oxfam.

“It’s like a slow poisoning, and now it’s increasing, moving up the rivers,” Provash Chandra Mondal, humanitarian program coordinator for Oxfam in Vietnam, told IRIN. “It has a long-term impact, and there’s no solution. Nobody can stop the saline water, but we just have to adapt.”

During the 2010 drought, saltwater from the South China Sea contaminated communities 60 kilometers inland compared with 30 kilometers in years past.

If sea levels rise by one meter – the low end of climate scientists’ projections of a one- to two-meter rise by 2100 – an estimated 1.7 million hectares would be inundated, or 5.3 percent of Vietnam’s land area. Most of this threatened land (82 percent) is in the Mekong Delta, where millions of people would be displaced.

By 2030, rising sea levels could cause rice productivity to drop by 9 percent, according to the UN Development Program.

“We expect a lot of changes in the hydrology in all parts of the Mekong Delta,” said Wassmann, adding that the highly productive delta is vulnerable to tiny changes in the weather.

“If you come to the Mekong Delta, you’ll see every square meter of land is used… It is very intensively used, and it is very much dependent on a relatively stable set of parameters. If we change this system there, all of this success from the fine-tuning becomes useless… If this kind of source of rice for the world market is going down, then it will have major repercussions for the rice market as a whole.”

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– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The 2011 curtain on the ongoing political drama in Washington came down on Friday as President Barack Obama signed a bill extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits for two months, and urged Congress “to keep working without drama” to extend them through 2012 when it returns in January.

Citing the extension as “some good news, just in the nick of time for the holidays,” President Obama said, “This continues to be a make-or-break moment for the middle class in this country, and we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves together — Democrats and Republicans — to make sure that the economy is growing, and to make sure that more jobs are created.”

President Obama addressed journalists in the Brady press briefing room as helicopter engines could be heard revving on the South Lawn for the president as he left immediately for his holiday break in Hawaii.

Earlier the final chapter of the drama in Washington started when Republicans in the House of Representatives labeled the two-month extension a gimmick, after the Senate including Republicans had voted the bill with a thumping majority of 85 votes.

The Republican-controlled House voted 229-193 with no Democratic support to reject the two-month bipartisan Senate measure and called for a yearlong extension of the tax cut.

The House Republicans were forced to back down on their demands for a longer extension under pressure from the public and within their party when the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky implored House Speaker John Boehner to accept the deal that McConnell had stuck last week with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.

The tensions of the drama fizzled out early Friday as first the Senate and then the House of Representatives rapidly approved a compromise to extend the tax cut for two months.

“Thank you, guys. Aloha,” Obama said as he left the briefing room to depart for Hawaii where his wife, Michelle Obama, and their daughters Malia and Sasha have been since last weekend, while he remained in Washington struggling with Congress over extending the payroll-tax cut.

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Boston, MA, United States (KaiserHealth) – There are lots of reasons why an expectant mother and her doctor might choose to deliver the baby before its due date: the health of mom or baby, the doctor’s schedule, the demands of work, or even to hit or avoid a specific birthday. But if that perfect day falls before the 39th week of pregnancy, and there’s no medical reason for an early delivery, many hospitals in Massachusetts are saying no, you have to wait.

The number of early deliveries, from induced labor or C-sections, has been on the rise across the country for more than a decade now, including in Massachusetts. One reason is that we’ve come to expect that babies born “a little bit early” will be fine.

“Before the benefit of the neonatal intensive care unit, people were very conservative and would not induce or do repeat C-sections before 39 weeks,” says Dr. Glenn Markenson, the director of maternal and fetal medicine at Bay State Medical Center in Springfield. “But as they saw how well babies were doing with pediatric care, and they were getting pressured by patients because of social situations, there was a creep down from 39 weeks to 38 weeks, sometimes 37 weeks.”

Expensive neonatal care has allowed babies born very early to survive, and even thrive. Yet, this success has eclipsed the fact that babies born even a bit early are at a higher risk for a variety of problems.

“Early-term infants have higher rates of respiratory distress. There are also issues with feeding,” says Dr. Lauren Smith, medical director at the state Department of Public Health. “The most recent evidence shows that babies born before 39 weeks may also have developmental issues, so when you add up the increased risks and you weigh that against a situation when it’s purely elective, then you really can’t justify it.”

A growing number of hospitals in Massachusetts, and across the country, are saying no to elective inductions and C-sections before 39 weeks. The change is happening quietly and some new mothers don’t like it.

Lisa Coulouris sits on her hardwood kitchen floor with the Moms Club of Reading baby playgroup.

“The bottom line is women should have 99 percent of the say in what happens with their pregnancy and their bodies,” says Coulouris, who delivered twins eight months ago after complications that led to an emergency C-section. She does not like the idea of hospitals telling women they must carry to at least 39 weeks.

Doctors who are trying to end early elective deliveries say they don’t have a savings goal. Their focus right now is on reversing the trend.

“You’re already out of control of your body, so at least to know if you go to your doctor’s office and say, ‘Look, we’re at 37 weeks, and I feel like I’m ready,’ ” Coulouris says, imagining a case in which a mom would not want to wait. “To know that I would have that choice would just make me feel better. But to take it away from me just adds to the pressure of being pregnant.”

Across the room, Jennifer Brickley agrees that doctors need to take a mom’s emotional state into account, but she is bothered by the rise in what she calls “convenient deliveries.”

“In recent years it’s kind of gotten in line with the spa appointments or the hair appointments,” says Brickley, who supports timing a delivery based on medical evidence. “So I agree with what they are doing. Probably it’s a lot of costs involved that are driving this as well.”

Doctors who are trying to end early elective deliveries say they don’t have a savings goal. Their focus right now is on reversing the trend. Some hospitals have installed scheduling software that rejects deliveries before 39 weeks.

At Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Jeff Ecker, a high-risk obstetrician, is the gatekeeper. Each week Ecker reviews the schedule for early inductions and C-sections to see if they are all medically necessary. He says the decisions are easy when either the date is clearly a choice or the mother or baby is very sick.

“And in between are sometimes shades of gray – how high is the blood pressure, how small is the baby?” he says.

Privately, some obstetricians worry about how hospitals that stop early elective deliveries will handle cases that aren’t clear-cut.

Ecker says he tries to make sure that physicians and patients weigh the risks of an early birth against the pregnancy complication they face. He says physicians at Mass. General, when presented with the evidence, have largely stopped requesting early elective deliveries.

“Our goals are to make it virtually a never event, so there will not be truly elective deliveries less than 39 weeks, and we’re pretty much there,” he says.

In health care, a “never event” is the equivalent of a medical mistake for which hospitals may not get paid under Massachusetts law. That’s not the case yet with early elective deliveries.

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – U.S. stocks rose Thursday following news that the number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits hit a 3 1/2-year low.

Just after the opening bell on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 40 points, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 6 points and the NASDAQ advanced 18 points.

Initial jobless claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 364,000, the Labor Department reported, reaching the lowest level since April 2008.

The data shows that the labor market is showing strong signs of gains. The improving jobless situation softened the blow from a separate report from the Commerce Department revealing that gross domestic product grew at a 1.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter. Growth had previously been reported to have expanded at a 2 percent pace.

Despite the tepid pace of economic growth in the third quarter, it is a step up from the April-June period’s 1.3 percent pace.

Additionally, although the rest of the world is slowing down and a mild recession is forecast in Europe next year, the U.S. economy remains resilient. Households continue to spend, home building is picking up and factory output is expanding, putting the U.S. economy on course for at least a 3 percent growth pace in the fourth quarter. That would be the fastest pace in 18 months.

Commodities were mixed in morning trading. Oil was up 47 cents at $99.14 a barrel and gold was down $3.80 at $1,609 a troy ounce.

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New York, NY, United States (IRIN) – While antiretroviral drugs have significantly improved the life expectancy of people living with HIV, the virus – and often the ARVs themselves – can make people more susceptible to non-communicable diseases than the rest of the population.

Here are six non-communicable diseases that are more likely to affect people living with HIV:

Heart disease – Several studies have made the link between coronary disease and HIV infection: one presented at the 18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in March 2011 found that HIV-infected participants had an increased risk of “acute myocardial infarction” – heart attack – compared with demographically and behaviorally similar HIV-negative study participants.

Another 2011 study found that HIV infection was a risk factor for heart failure, with ongoing viral replication associated with a higher risk of developing heart failure.

The link between ARVs and heart disease is less clear; one study , also presented at CROI, found that HIV infection increased the risk of coronary heart disease, but ARVs and higher CD4 counts – a measure of immune strength – significantly reduced this risk. However, a 2011 Canadian study found that several ARVs – abacavir, efavirenz, lopinavir, and ritonavir – were all associated with an increased risk of heart attack.

Cervical cancer – After breast cancer, it is the second most common cancer among women worldwide; more than 80 percent of new cases and deaths from the disease occur in developing countries.

Studies have found that HIV-positive women are at higher risk of human papillomavirus (HPV), a precursor to cervical cancer; women with low CD4 counts seem to be particularly vulnerable.

HPV can be prevented with a vaccine recommended for pre-adolescent girls before they reach their sexual debut but the vaccine is too expensive for most women in developing countries. In addition, cervical cancer screening levels remain very low in many poor countries; for instance, just 3.2 percent of Kenyan women aged 18-69 are tested every three years, compared with 70 percent of women in the developed world.

Other cancers – People living with HIV are more susceptible to several cancers, including Kaposi sarcoma, Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, anal cancer, skin cancer and liver cancer – than HIV-negative people, a new study has found.

Published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, the study found that immunodeficiency was positively associated with all cancers examined except prostate cancer. The authors recommended starting antiretroviral therapy earlier to maintain high CD4 levels.

Mental illness – Studies show that the prevalence of mental illness among HIV-positive in-patients and out-patients in the US ranges between 5 and 23 percent compared with 0.3-0.4 percent in the general population.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) , apart from the psychological impact of HIV, the virus has direct effects on the central nervous system, leading to neuropsychiatric complications, including HIV encephalopathy, depression, mania, cognitive disorders, and dementia.

Studies also show that depression can lead to high-risk behavior , including transactional sex, partner abuse and low condom use.

However, depression is frequently overlooked by healthcare providers; a severe shortage of mental health professionals in developing countries means patients often suffer in silence.

Kidney disease – Known as HIV-associated nephropathy , kidney disease is relatively common in people living with HIV. The virus interferes with the kidneys’ ability to function correctly, particularly in people with advanced HIV who have a low CD4 count and a high viral load, as well as older people.

Poorly functioning kidneys can cause other health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, nerve damage, bone disease, and anemia.

Certain ARVs, tenofovir in particular, have also been associated with a decline in renal function.

Liver disease – A leading cause of morbidity and death among HIV-positive individuals , it is mainly caused by co-infection with hepatitis B or hepatitis C, alcohol abuse, insulin resistance or side-effects of medicines.

Experts say early identification and proper management of liver disease in HIV-infected people are crucial to improve long-term outcomes.

kr/mw

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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Kathmandu, Nepal (AHN) – A nationwide strike called by Nepal’s main opposition party, Nepali Congress (NC), after its youth leader was killed in a prison brawl paralyzed the normal life across the nation on Monday.

Transportation has come to a halt and entire market areas, academic institutions and industries have been shut down by the strike. Thousands of NC party members scattered throughout major cities and highways protesting the death of their leader.

They also vented ire against the government for not declaring their murdered youth leader a martyr and not fulfilling other demands forwarded by the party.

General strike is a common phenomenon in Nepal, a tool to take forward and fulfill demands by any dissatisfied political parties, ethnic groups, trade unions or pressure groups. The nation has lost million of dollars in revenue due to the strike, according to the Nepal Federation of Chamber of Commerce.

According to media reports, dozens of drivers who tried to defy the strike had their vehicles vandalized. Police have arrested dozens of NC members for obstructing traffic.

The United States Ambassador to Nepal, Scott H DeLisi, said such “repeated strikes” could lead to the reinstatement of U.S. travel warnings. “The U.S. recently lifted the travel warning for American citizens hoping to visit Nepal and we are actively seeking to bring American investors here,” DeLisi wrote on his Facebook wall on Sunday.

He further said, “This type of political violence puts our efforts at risk and threatens to recreate the atmosphere that led to the travel warning in the first place.”

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New York, NY, United States David Rosenberg / The Med – New York City’s Roosevelt Island is half a world away from the Technion’s home on Mount Carmel. But that is exactly the point, says Oded Shmueli, vice president for research, explaining why the Israeli university is embarking on an ambitious multi-billion-dollar joint venture with Cornell to build a new technology institute of higher education in New York.

New York City will benefit from the new university, drawing high tech businesses and creating new jobs and new companies. But the Technion, also known as the Israel Institute of Technology, will benefit too by raising its profile in the scientific world and attracting new human and financial resources.

“If you look at science and technology today, it’s no longer a local affair. Our scientists cooperate with scientists worldwide,” Shmueli told The Media Line.

Shmueli was speaking a day after the city announced the two universities had won a heated competition to build the campus on a small island off Manhattan. Their joint proposal calls for spending $2 billion to build a campus of 2,500 students and 280 faculty with the aim of not just conducting research and teaching but acting as an incubator of high tech start-ups. The plan includes a $150 million revolving to fund to get them off the ground.

“Thanks to this outstanding partnership and groundbreaking proposal from Cornell and the Technion, New York City’s goal of becoming the global leader in technological innovation is now within sight,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. “By adding a new state-of-the-art institution to our landscape, we will educate tomorrow’s entrepreneurs and create the jobs of the future.”

Although it is the world financial capital, New York has been a laggard in luring technology companies. It only recently overtook Boston for attracting venture capital for start-ups and Bloomberg has bemoaned the shortage of engineers in the city. The new institution when fully up and running will increase the number of locally trained graduates in engineering by 70 percent.

The Technion has had a successful history of morphing its academic research into commercial technology and in the process attracting technology start-ups and multinational R&D operations into its orbit. Its Alfred Mann Institute, set up four years ago, is dedicated to creating practical applications for medical-technology research.

The Cornell-Technion partnership was formed only a few months ago after the two institutions filed separate expressions of interest in the campus New York wanted to develop. The two institutions had no formal ties beforehand.

“It will be a good match, based on history, based on complementary assets,” said Shmueli, who is a computer scientist by training. “We understood we couldn’t do it ourselves.”

The partnership was up against stiff competition, although one major contender – Stanford University – dropped out at the last minute. That left the two vying with Columbia University and groups led by Carnegie Mellon University and New York University. The Cornell-Technion bid was given an 11th-hour boost by a gift of $350 million to Cornell for the venture.

The two universities are both well respected academically. Cornell, based in the upstate New York town of Ithaca ranked 13th among 500 in last year’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, which rates institutions of higher education based on the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel and other prizes as well as research citations in top academic journals.

The Technion tied with other institutions at 102, making it the No. 2-ranked Israeli university after The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It ranked 15th in the world in computer science, 42nd in engineering/technology, and 51st in natural sciences and mathematics. All seven Israeli universities made it onto the top-500 list, the 13th-largest national group even though Israel is a country of just 7 million people.

But Shmueli said The Technion had to do more to raise its international profile in the increasingly global world of science. A premier institution needs to attract talent from outside the country and give its own students and faculty exposure to developments abroad. Manhattan has the drawing power that by itself The Technion’s Haifa home cannot match.

“Now the Technion will be household name,” Shmueli explained. “When a brilliant PhD student thinks about where to do his post-doc, The Technion will be among the places he thinks of going.”

The New York partnership is not the Technion’s first foray into global science. In the past two years it has set up three research laboratories in Singapore with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. It has established an international program that offers degree in civil and environmental engineering and plans to expand to other degree programs. “Toward the end of the decade we want 1,000 foreign students on campus,” he said.

The new university may also give a boost to Israeli academics, which is only now beginning to recover from years of budget cuts that prevented it from hiring faculty and expanding departments.

“There are Israelis abroad that right now that cannot find a position in Israel who may start their career in this institute and decide to move back to Israel later. It can serve as a bridge,” he said.

Shmueli said he did not see the new campus in New York drawing away resources from Israel. The new university will generate much of its own income from tuition, research grants, commercialization of technology and a $100 million contribution promised from the city. The new institution, which will host visiting Technion faculty and students, will also open new research-funding opportunities. by making them eligible for a wider range of U.S. government funds, he said.

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