‘We feel like she’s reborn’: Toddler born without windpipe gets new one grown from her own stem cells

National Post | News

CHICAGO — A 2-year-old girl born without a windpipe now has a new one grown from her own stem cells, the youngest patient in the world to benefit from the experimental treatment.

Canadian-South Korean Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

The stem cells came from Hannah’s bone marrow, extracted with a special needle inserted into her hip bone. They were seeded in a lab onto a plastic scaffold, where it took less than a week for them to multiply and create a new windpipe.

About the size of a 3-inch tube of penne pasta, it was implanted April 9…

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Palestinian watchdog group says corruption continues

NOBODY

 

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas chairs a meeting of Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Executive Committee in the West Bank city of Ramallah on April 18, 2013. (AFP)

The Associated Press, Ramallah, West Bank –

A Palestinian watchdog group says it’s looking into corruption claims against government officials.

Azmi Shuabi of the Coalition for Transparency in Palestine said Wednesday it is checking 29 claims that senior officials of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority stole public funds.

Shuabi said the Palestinian Authority also has problems with money laundering, nepotism and misusing official positions.

Shuabi said most cases involve institutions overseen by the Palestinian president’s office. He said it lacked proper oversight over matters like the airport authority, a project to build a shrine for former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the water authority.

He said another 12 cases were investigated and transferred to the courts.

Palestinian Authority Justice Minister Ali Muhanna says the…

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RIP Palestine: 1947-2015

RIP Palestine: 1947-2015.

CBC corrects reporter over use of word “attack” in Israel story

National Post | News

For using the word “attack” in relation to Israel’s 2010 raid on a Gaza blockade-runner, a Middle East reporter for Radio-Canada, the French-language version of CBC, was rebuked by the network on Monday.

In reporting on a deadly skirmish that broke out between Israeli soldiers and a pipe-wielding activist aboard the deck of the M/V Mavi Marmara, correspondent Ginette Lamarche “misused the word ‘attack’ to refer to the legal seizure of the vessel by Israeli forces,” read a brief correction by Radio-Canada.

Ms. Lamarche was referencing the episode in an April 7 report broadcast soon after Israel issued a U.S.-brokered apology to Turkey for the incident, which killed eight Turkish activists.

The CBC correction is only the latest to be issued against Ms. Lamarche, a veteran Middle East reporter whose work has become a frequent target of scrutiny by Canadian Jewish groups.

Earlier this year, for instance, David Ouellette, a…

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The silence of the Muslim Brotherhood

NOBODY

Although the fact finding committee formed by Mohamed Morsi to investigate rights violations from January 2011 to June 2012 found horrid cases of abuse, the president and his backers appear disinterested in its findings

 

 

Khaled Fahmy

Three weeks ago, I briefly reviewed here “Nostalgia for the Light,” Patricio Guzmán’s wonderful documentary about mass murders and forced disappearances in Chile under Pinochet. I was deeply touched by Guzmán’s sensitivity in showcasing the suffering of victims’ families and their relentless efforts to find out what had happened to their loved ones.

My intention was to draw a comparison with our own cases of torture under Mubarak and to highlight the importance of transitional justice without which, I tried to argue, we will not be able to turn over the leaf of the past, and look forward to a promising future where justice and security prevail.

After my article was published…

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After effects: BBC accuracy failure used to promote hate

BBC Watch

Back in March, when the UN HRC produced a report in which it established that the son of BBC Arabic journalist Jihad Masharawi had been killed as a result of a misfired terrorist rocket in November 2012, BBC Watch wrote:

“The BBC used the story of Omar Masharawi to advance the narrative of Israel as a ruthless killer of innocent children. It did so in unusually gory detail which etched the story in audiences’ minds, but without checking the facts, and with no regard whatsoever for its obligations to accuracy and impartiality. BBC reporters and editors  – including Jon Donnison, Paul Danahar and the many others who distributed the story via Twitter – rushed to spread as far and wide as possible a story they could not validate, but which fit in with their own narrative.

It is impossible to undo the extensive damage done by the BBC with…

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Group on mission to prove there is truth in legends that Nazi submarines went far inland from Canadian coast

National Post | News

It was the fall of 1944 and the Canadian navy corvette HMCS Arrowhead had just finished escorting a convoy into Goose Bay, Labrador when its skipper, Lester Hickey, ordered the vessel to stop outside the Inuit community of Rigolet.

The skipper tossed an explosive over the side and when a school of stunned cod rose to the surface, he scooped them up, cut off their heads and threw the prime fillets and the rest of the fish back into the sea. All he wanted was the critical ingredient for his signature cod head soup.

“The soup went down pretty good,” said Glenn Martin, 90, a former Arrowhead crew member now living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Fast forward to 1954 and Mr. Martin is a young machinist in Prince Albert getting a routine chest x-ray from a Czechoslovakian-born doctor.

The men began chit-chatting about the war and, upon learning that Mr…

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Francis may finally open files on ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ says Pontiff’s long-time friend

National Post | Life

Decades of doubt over the role played by “Hitler’s Pope” under the Fascist regimes of Italy and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s may be put to rest after a close friend of Pope Francis suggested the Pontiff may open the Vatican archives.

Rabbi Abraham Skorka, who has known the Argentine Pope for 20 years, said he had discussed the role of Pius XII – the man long known as “Hitler’s Pope” – at length with the new pontiff.

The Rabbi, who recently co-authored On Heaven and Earth, a book of interviews with Pope Francis, said he had made clear that he thought Pius’s legacy ought to be “investigated thoroughly.”

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“It’s a terribly sensitive issue, but he says that it must be investigated thoroughly,” he said. “I have no doubt that he will move to open the archives.”

In an interview with The Tablet, Rabbi Skorka said he…

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Idyllic Israeli resort town of Eilat struck by rockets fired from Egypt

National Post | News

Militants in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula fired at least two rockets at Israel’s southern resort town of Eilat early Wednesday, officials said, highlighting what Israel says is a dire security situation in its southern neighbor.

Nobody was hurt in the attack, police said, although one rocket exploded near the courtyard of a house. A shadowy hardline Muslim group, likely based in the Gaza Strip, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the remains of two Grad-style rockets had been found and bomb experts were looking for more.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was traveling to London Wednesday for the funeral of Britain’s late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said he had spoken with his defense minister and discussed how to respond.

Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel but relations are cool. Sinai was until recently a popular destination for Israeli travelers.

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My Take: Nothing wrong with Nazi assignment

CNN Belief Blog

Editor’s note: Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of “The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation,” is a regular CNN Belief Blog contributor.

By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN

(CNN) – School officials in Albany, New York, are racing to control the damage after a teacher at Albany High School gave students a persuasive writing assignment that challenged them to defend the proposition that “Jews are evil.”

After studying Nazi propaganda and rhetoric, sophomores in three English classes were instructed to imagine that their teacher was “a member of the government in Nazi Germany” and to prove that that they were “loyal to the Nazis.”

But this unidentified teacher is now caught up in a propaganda swirl of his or her own.

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