KABUL — Afghan protesters marched through downtown Kabul on Sunday morning chanting anti-American slogans and denouncing NATO bombardments that have killed civilians.

Led by a police escort, the couple of hundred demonstrators carried banners calling the United States the ‘guardian and master of [the] ruling Mafia in Afghanistan’ as well as images of burned and bandaged children.

The protesters said they were angry not only about the civilian toll from ongoing NATO military operations in Helmand province but also a traffic accident Friday involving an SUV driven by DynCorp International contractors that killed four Afghans.

‘Many times NATO troops and these cars have killed our innocent people. They never care whether we are Afghans or animals,’ said Samia, 26, an activist from Kabul who took part in the demonstration.

Samia, who like many Afghans goes by only one name, said that she did not want the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan but that NATO has only aggravated the situation over the past decade and fed a parasitic and dependent Afghan government.

‘We want NATO troops and American troops to leave Afghanistan. Even with their huge army, they couldn’t do anything in the past 10 years. And in the future, they won’t be able […]

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More energy is wasted in the perfectly edible food discarded by people in the US each year than is available in oil and gas reserves off the nation’s coastlines.

Recent estimates suggest that 16 per cent of the energy consumed in the US is used to produce food. Yet at least 25 per cent of food is wasted each year. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin calculate that this is the equivalent of about 2150 trillion kilojoules lost each year.

That’s more than could be gained from many popular strategies to improve energy efficiency. It is also more than projections for how much energy the US could produce by making ethanol biofuel from grains.

Dairy foods and vegetables are the greatest culprits, with around 466 and 403 trillion kilojoules lost as waste each year, respectively (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es100310d).

The numbers are likely to be conservative, the team says, as they are based on food-waste figures from the US Department of Agriculture from 1995 – the latest available. Since then food prices have dropped and waste is likely to have increased. What’s more, the figures do not […]

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NEW YORK — Unilever’s Omo detergent is adding an unusual ingredient to its two-pound detergent box in Brazil: a GPS device that allows its promotions agency Bullet to track shoppers and follow them to their front doors.

Starting next week, consumers who buy one of the GPS-implanted detergent boxes will be surprised at home, given a pocket video camera as a prize and invited to bring their families to enjoy a day of Unilever-sponsored outdoor fun. The promotion, called Try Something New With Omo, is in keeping with the brand’s international ‘Dirt is Good’ positioning that encourages parents to let their kids have a good time even if they get dirty.

Omo accounts for half of Brazil’s detergent sales and is already found in 80% of homes there, so Unilever’s goal is more to draw attention to a new stain-fighting version of Omo and get it talked about rather than looking for a big increase in sales.

That made the idea of doing a promotion where the prize finds the consumer, rather than the consumer having to look for the prize — and maybe not bothering — appealing.

Fernando Figueiredo, Bullet’s president, said the GPS device is activated when a shopper removes the […]

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A Menlo Park biotech firm said Friday that federal regulators will let it proceed with the world’s first human test of a treatment made from embryonic stem cells, a much-anticipated but controversial study of patients with spinal cord injuries that had been placed on hold for nearly a year because of safety concerns.

If the treatment from Geron works, it ‘would be revolutionary,’ said Dr. Richard Fessler, a neurological surgeon at Northwestern University, who will lead the study of a stem-cell treatment designed to be injected into patients with spinal injuries to restore their motor function. ‘The therapy would provide a viable treatment option for thousands of patients who suffer severe spinal cord injuries each year.’

Geron has spent 15 years and more than $150 million to develop the treatment, and ‘getting it into a clinical trial, just by itself, is a big deal,’ added Fessler, who has no financial ties to the company.

Many people hope that human embryonic stem cells, which can turn into any type of tissue in the body, could prove useful for everything from generating organs for transplants to helping test drugs on numerous diseases. But because the cells are derived from discarded 3- to-5-day-old embryos, their use […]

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When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease.

Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif.

Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too - 37 of them just up the freeway at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, 269 more at the renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and dozens more at a hospital in Huntsville, Ala.

The overdoses, which began to emerge late last summer, set off an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration into why patients tested with this complex yet lightly regulated technology were bombarded with excessive radiation. After 10 months, the agency has yet to provide a final report on what it found.

But an examination by The New York Times has found that radiation overdoses were larger and more widespread than previously known, that patients have […]

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