Patients, their families, and physicians have been satisfied with a ‘death with dignity’ physician-assisted suicide program made available to terminal cancer patients at a Seattle clinic, clinicians there reported.

Among 114 patients who asked about the program at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, the outpatient clinic for the city’s major cancer treatment centers, 40 passed screening examinations and ultimately received lethal prescriptions for secobarbital, although only 24 actually took the drug, according to Elizabeth Trice Loggers, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the clinic and its affiliated centers.

‘Patients, caregivers, and family members have frequently expressed gratitude after the patient obtained the prescription, regardless of whether it was ever filled or ingested, typically referencing an important sense of control in an uncertain situation,’ the authors wrote in the April 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

‘Our Death with Dignity program both allows patients with cancer who wish to consider this option to do so within the context of their ongoing care and accommodates variation in clinicians’ willingness to participate,’ they added. ‘The program ensures that patients (and families) are aware of all the options for high-quality, end-of-life care, including palliative and hospice care, with the opportunity to have any concerns or […]

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Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) on Wednesday explained that Al Gore and the United Nations get most of the blame for what he called a global warming ‘hoax,

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Carbon-dating of an ancient beam from a Guatemalan temple may help end a century-long debate about the Mayan calendar, anthropologists said on Thursday.

Experts have long wrangled over how the Mayan calendar - which leapt to global prominence last year when the superstitious said it predicted the end of the world - correlates to the European calendar.

Texts and carvings from this now-extinct culture describe rulers and great events and attribute the dates according to a complex system denoted by dots and bars, known as the Long Count.

The Long Count consists of five time units: Bak’tun (144,000 days); K’atun (7,200 days), Tun (360 days), Winal (20 days) and K’in (one day).

The time is counted from a mythical starting point.

But the date of this starting point is unknown. Spanish colonisers did their utmost to wipe out traces of the Mayan civilisation, destroying evidence that could have provided a clue.

An example of the confusion this has caused is the date of a decisive battle that shaped the course of Mayan civilisation.

It occurred at nine Bak’tuns, 13 K’atuns, three Tuns, seven Winals and 18 K’ins - or 1,390,838 days from the start of the count. Attempts to transcribe this into the European calendar have given […]

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LONDON — Rudeness and throwing insults are cutting online friendships short with a survey on Wednesday showing people are getting ruder on social media and two in five users have ended contact after a virtual altercation.

As social media usage surges, the survey found so has incivility with 78 percent of 2,698 people reporting an increase in rudeness online with people having no qualms about being less polite virtually than in person.

One in five people have reduced their face-to-face contact with someone they know in real life after an online run-in.

Joseph Grenny, co-chairman of corporate training firm VitalSmarts that conducted the survey, said online rows now often spill into real life with 19 percent of people blocking, unsubscribing or ‘unfriending’ someone over a virtual argument.

‘The world has changed and a significant proportion of relationships happen online but manners haven’t caught up with technology,’ Grenny told Reuters on the release of the online survey conducted over three weeks in February.

‘What really is surprising is that so many people disapprove of this behaviour but people are still doing it. Why would you name call online but never to that person’s face?’

Figures from the Pew Research Center show that 67 percent of online adults […]

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If you’re worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. Its lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you believe deeply in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It’s what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

Tennessee starves what little government it has, ranking dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest among all states as a percent of total tax revenues. (For more detailed data see here.)

As you would expect, this translates into hard times for its public school systems, which rank 48th in school revenues per student and 45th in teacher salaries. The failure to invest in education also corresponds with poverty: the state has the 40th worst poverty rate (15%) and the 13th highest state percentage of poor children (26%).

Employment opportunities also are extremely poor for the poor. Only 25% have full-time jobs, 45% are employed part-time, and a whopping 30% have no jobs at all.

So what do you do with […]

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