Japanese researchers developed a cancer vaccine..[ 1664 ]

Researchers develop new cancer vaccine mobilizing immune cells

(Mainichi Japan) August 18, 2010

Japanese researchers have developed a cancer immunotherapy vaccine that mobilizes two types of immune cells at the same time, providing hope for the development of more effective cancer treatment.

The vaccine, developed by researchers including Takashi Nishimura of Hokkaido University, activates immune system cells called killer T cells and helper T cells at the same time, which is said to boost patients' immunity. The researchers confirmed that the vaccine cleared up cancer in a patient for whom anticancer drugs and radiation therapy had proven ineffective.

"We want to conduct more clinical trials and make decisions on its detailed effectiveness. At the same time we want to conduct research on synthesis processes for more effective vaccines," Nishimura said.

Helper T cells are a type of lymphocyte, a kind of white blood cell in the immune system, that help keep track of antigens, including cancer antigens. They aid the action of killer T cells, which attack cancer cells directly.

Previous vaccines focused on the activity of killer T cells alone, but Nishimura and the other researchers set about making both helper and killer T cells active. They created a vaccine dubbed "H/K-HELP" that artificially bound about 40 amino acids that work against cancer from peptides, which are strings of amino acids.

In clinical tests performed at Hokkaido University Hospital and Kinki University Hospital, the researchers administered the vaccine to a breast cancer patient and a patient whose lung cancer had spread to cause bowel cancer. They found that the cancer cleared up or restrained the focus of the cancer.

The researchers plan to announce their findings at a symposium of the International Congress of Immunology beginning in Kobe on Aug. 22.

Click here for the original Japanese story

Israel to Strike Iran Nuclear Facility ? ..[ 1663 ]

Israel Has Until Week's End to Strike Iran Nuclear Facility, Bolton Says

AP2009

In this November 2009 photo released by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), the reactor building of Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant is seen. (AP Photo)

Published August 17, 2010

| FoxNews.com

Israel has until the weekend to launch a military strike on Iran's first nuclear plant before the humanitarian risk of an attack becomes too great, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said Tuesday. 

A Russian company is expected to help Iran start loading nuclear fuel into its plant on Saturday, after which an attack on the Bushehr reactor could trigger harmful radiation, which Israel wants to avoid, Bolton said. So unless the Israelis act immediately to shut down the facility, it will be too late.

"Once it's close to the reactor ... the risk is when the reactor is attacked, there will be a release of radiation into the air," Bolton told FoxNews.com. "It's most unlikely that they would act militarily after fuel rods are loaded." 

Earlier Tuesday, Bolton told Fox Business Network the Israelis will have to move in the "next eight days" if they want to attack the Bushehr facility -- a reference to the window between when the start-up was announced last week and the loading date. Bolton said Tuesday that the date has fluctuated, but he described the start-up as the ultimate deadline. 

Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States, told Fox News that the nation is hopeful sanctions -- passed by the United Nations, European Union and United States -- will "modify" Iran's behavior. Oren said Israel is "committed" to the sanctions program and will assess its impact at a later date. 

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"Until that time, the position of the government of Israel -- as the position of the Obama administration -- is that all options will remain on the table," he said, without commenting directly on Bolton's remarks. 

Though Iranian officials insist the reactor is for peaceful purposes, Bolton warned about the danger of the up-and-running reactor. 

"What this does is give Iran a second route to nuclear weapons in addition to enriched uranium," Bolton said. "It's a very, very huge victory for Iran." 

Bolton, who was U.S. ambassador during the Bush administration, expressed doubt that Israel was planning a military strike but suggested it's an open question. 

"If they were going to do anything, they certainly wouldn't be talking about it," he said. 

He noted that the reactor gives Iran something that both Iraq and Syria were never able to achieve because their facilities were destroyed. 

"Iran will have achieved something that no other opponent of Israel, no other enemy of the United States really in the Middle East has, and that is a functioning nuclear reactor," he said on Fox Business Network. 

Iranian officials on Tuesday warned Israel not to take military action. Iranian media quoted Ahmad Vahidi, Iran's defense minister, as saying Israel would be taking a huge risk with such an attack. 

"We may lose a power plant, but the whole existence of the Zionist regime will be jeopardized," Vahidi was quoted as saying. 

The reactor project has been in existence for decades, but the Russians have helped push it to the finish line. Russian state firm Rosatom announced last week that the Bushehr facility would be starting up on Aug. 21. According to the Iranian state Mehr news agency, the head of that company, Sergey Novikov, says the plant "just generates electricity.

South African Workers plan further strike..[ 1662 ]

Workers plan further South Africa strike

Union members rally in Durban, South Africa, on August 17. The country has seen widespread strikes in recent weeks.

 

By Les Neuhaus, CNN

August 18, 2010 -- Updated 1058 GMT (1858 HKT)

 

(CNN) -- More than 1 million workers are planning a countrywide strike in South Africa on Wednesday, according to an official with a public sector union.

Nomusa Cembi, of the South African Democratic Teachers Union -- an affiliate of Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) -- said hospital, education and civil servants demanded better compensation and benefits from their government.

"We are trying to bring them to their knees," Cembi told CNN by phone from Johannesburg, referring to the South African government. "We took a decision yesterday that we would go on strike indefinitely until our employer gives us a better offer."

She said the strike was intended to raise wages to 8.6 percent and that they wanted a 1,000 Rand ($138) per month housing allowance. They also want those improvements to be backdated to April 1 of this year.

Cembi said medical benefits were also part of the negotiating standoff.

The last offer by the South African government, according to Cembi, came last week when a 7 percent wage hike was proffered, along with a 700 Rand a month housing allowance.

"Our organization has rejected their offer," Cembi said.

It was unclear how long the strike might continue.

Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Last week public sector workers went on strike across South Africa, closing schools, impacting hospital staffing and wreaking havoc across a wide array of public services.

A North Korean aircraft, crashes in China..[ 1661 ]

North Korean plane crashes in China

 

In this photograph of the wreckage a North Korean flag can be seen on the plane's tail

BBC .,18 August 2010 Last updated at 09:25 GMT

A North Korean aircraft, which may be a fighter jet, has crashed in China near the country's shared border, say Chinese and South Korean reports.

It is believed the pilot, who was killed, may have been trying to defect to Russia, according to unnamed intelligence sources cited by Yonhap.
The crash happened on Tuesday afternoon in Fushun county, Liaoning province.
Defections are common but an attempt by plane is highly unusual and would be a source of embarrassment for Pyongyang.
China has a repatriation agreement with North Korea, which could explain why the pilot may have been trying to reach Russia, the report added.
North Korea has a military airbase in Sinuiju, near the border with China.
China's state media confirmed an unidentified small plane had crashed and that it may belong to North Korea.
An investigation into the cause of the crash was under way, Xinhua reported.
Soviet-era jet Photographs of the wreckage reportedly taken by a local resident and posted on the internet showed a North Korean flag on the plane's tail.

Military experts said the plane appeared to be a Soviet-era fighter jet, which were used during the 1950-53 Korean War.
A report in Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper said that a second pilot had bailed out but gave no information on his whereabouts. It conflicts with the South Korean report of only one pilot on board.
Technically, North and South Korea remain at war although a ceasefire agreement ended fighting in 1953.
Their border is the most heavily militarised zone in the world.

About the Ground Zero Mosque..[ 1660 ]

What Would Bush Do About the Ground Zero Mosque?

Updated: 10 hours 35 minutes ago

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Andrea Stone Senior Washington Correspondent

AOL News

WASHINGTON (Aug. 17) -- The political battle over plans to build an Islamic center two blocks from ground zero is reaching biblical proportions as Republicans pummel President Barack Obama

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday compared the center -- which many prominentsupport -- to Nazis trying to protest outside a Holocaust museum. Republican campaign staffers send out e-mails placing Obama on the same page as the leader of Hamas. And GOP candidates in places far away from lower Manhattan quickly launched TV ads declaring, "Mr. President, ground zero is the wrong place for a mosque." and Democrats for being insensitive to victims of 9/11. Jewish officials

Doug Mills, AP

Then-President George W. Bush, center, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, left, and other officials look toward at the site of the fallen buildings during a tour of the World Trade Center on Sept. 14, 2001.

But amid all the overheated rhetoric, some may wonder what former President George W. Bush might say about all this.

For now, nothing.

A spokesman for the former president told AOL News that Bush would have no comment on the matter.

But days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush had much to say about the need for religious tolerance even after Islamic extremists carried out the worst foreign attack in history on U.S. soil.

"The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," Bush said at the Islamic Center of Washington in a speech that set the tenor for when he later sent U.S. troops to fight on Muslim soil in Afghanistan and later Iraq. "That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."

He went on to say, in words that Democrats who disagreed with Bush on nearly every issue now recall fondly, that despite raw emotions, millions of American Muslims "need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect."

Nearly nine years later, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson echoed the message of his old boss. Writing in The Washington Post, he defended Obama. Unlike pundits, he wrote, "A president does not merely have opinions; he has duties to the Constitution and to the citizens he serves -- including millions of Muslim citizens."

Gerson went on to say that "those who want a president to assert that any mosque would defile the neighborhood near ground zero are asking him to undermine the war on terrorism. A war on Islam would make a war on terrorism impossible."

American Muslims who protested the Bush administration's treatment of detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say they long for the former president to speak out against the rhetoric of his fellow Republicans.

"President Bush would have said more or less the same thing as President Obama, only President Bush wouldn't have come under attack from extremists for saying so," Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told AOL News. "Any leader has to take a position based on principle and not on a sense of mob rule."

Hooper accused elected officials like House Minority Leader John Boehner -- who called the proposed mosque "deeply troubling, as is the president's decision to endorse it" -- of trying to score "cheap political points based on hysteria and Islamophobia."

Mixing Politics and Religion

Though his message would get muddled over the weekend, Obama's initial impulse to strongly support the Islamic center sparked a firestorm of protest that was a reminder why mixing politics and religion can be a volatile brew.

"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country," he said Friday at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan.

J. Scott Applewhite, AP

President Barack Obama hosts an iftar dinner, the meal that breaks the dawn-to-dusk fast for Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan, in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Aug. 13, 2010. For over a billion Muslims, Ramadan is a time of intense devotion and reflection.

With two of three Americans opposed to the so-called ground zero mosque, GOP leaders saw an opening in a year when Democrats were already expected to lose seats in November's election. Republicans privately spoke with glee about how the issue put Democrats on the defensive. One strategist who didn't want his name used said it "will ultimately lead some to question the president's motives."

Obama should never have opened his mouth, said GOP pollster Whit Ayres. "It's a political plus for Republicans if they frame it as a local issue with security implications that needs to be resolved at the local level, not at the national level," he said. "This will be one more point in a long litany of points about how the president and the Democratic leadership are out of step with the thinking of most Americans."

White House spokesman Bill Burton, asked about criticism of the president's remarks, said, "I can't speak to the politics of what the Republicans are doing. And the president didn't do this because of the politics. He spoke about it because he feels he has an obligation as the president to address this."

Apparently the most powerful Democrat in the Senate didn't get the message as candidates far from New York sought to distance themselves from Obama.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, fighting to keep his seat in Nevada against a challenge from tea party Republican Sharron Angle, came out against the planned Islamic center, saying it "should be built some place else."

That prompted Angle to tweet "Nice of you to join us" even as Republican campaign staffers e-mailed that it was "regrettable that he hasn't demonstrated this same independence from President Obama on the critical issues facing America during the last 19 months."

The controversy "could be a useful one for some Republicans, especially in conservative states and districts," said John Green, a University of Akron political scientist who studies the intersection of politics and religion.

"Much of the Republican base is likely to disagree with Obama and the cost at the ballot box may be small because Muslims are not very numerous and not very popular in the public," he said.

But Green warned that in the long run the issue could backfire on Republicans because of the country's growing religious diversity. "It is an issue like immigration, with some short-term advantages for the GOP in many places but a long-term disadvantage in the nation as a whole," he said.

"Politically it wasn't smart or necessary for President Obama to wade into this controversy. It just adds another unappetizing side dish to the Democrats' full plate of problems heading to November," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. "But we've seen a long list of so-called political game changers fail to change much, including the BP oil spill, immigration and gay marriage. This election is about the economy, and it's going to stay that way."

Republican strategist Ron Bonjean agreed that other issues are uppermost in voters' minds but warned against underestimating the impact of Obama's remarks on the mosque.

"Jobs and the economy will remain the top issues of this election," he said, "but President Obama's comments can be used to remind Americans just how disconnected the White House is from voters who wonder why he decided to involve himself in the matter."