Canada serial killer inquiry finds “systemic bias” by police

(Reuters) – Police made critical errors in pursuing Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton partly because of “systemic bias” against his victims, sex trade workers from a rough Vancouver neighborhood, according to the final report from a public inquiry released on Monday.

Commissioner Wally Oppal was asked by the British Columbia government to investigate, in effect, why Pickton was not caught sooner. Women disappeared from the Downtown Eastside neighborhood for more than a decade before the pig farmer’s 2002 arrest.

“The investigations of missing and murdered women were characterized by blatant police failures, and by public indifference,” Oppal said at a press conference in Vancouver that was frequently interrupted by protesters.

Pickton was convicted of six murders, but prosecutors believe he killed many more – 20 other charges were stayed after he received the maximum possible sentence.

Oppal outlined a string of police errors, from failing to take proper reports when women went missing and communicate adequately with families, to ineffective coordination across jurisdictions. He called his more than 1,200-page report, which is based on eight months of hearings, “Forsaken”.

“After reviewing the evidence of the investigations, I have come to the conclusion that there was systemic bias by the police,” he said.

Oppal recommended that the provincial government establish a compensation fund for the children of the victims and consider creating a regional police force for Vancouver, instead of the patchwork of jurisdictions currently in place.

After Oppal’s announcement, B.C. Minister of Justice Shirley Bond wiped away tears as she spoke to victims’ families.

“I want you to know that, however inadequate these words sound, we are sorry for your loss,” she said. “We will work hard to prevent these circumstances from being repeated in our province.”

She announced the appointment of a former lieutenant governor, Steven Point, to serve as the report’s “champion”, guiding implementation. Bond said the government would immediately give new funding to WISH, a drop-in center for women who work in the Downtown Eastside’s sex trade.

POLICE RESPOND

The Vancouver Police Department said in a short statement that it is committed to learning from its mistakes and will study the report.

“We know that nothing can ever truly heal the wounds of grief and loss but if we can, we want to assure the families that the Vancouver Police Department deeply regrets anything we did that may have delayed the eventual solving of these murders,” it said.

Deputy Commissioner Craig Callens, who commands the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia, said in a statement that his force will review the report.

Oppal said many individual police officers were diligent, and he commended several by name. But he said that as a system, the authorities failed because of bias against Pickton’s victims, many of whom were poor and addicted to drugs.

“Would the reaction of the police and the public have been any different if the missing women had come from Vancouver’s (more affluent) west side? The answer is obvious,” he said.

Aboriginal women were overrepresented among the victims, and Oppal repeatedly referred to the broader “marginalization” of aboriginal people in Canada.

“There has to be community responsibility for what has taken place,” he said, highlighting poverty and the conditions on the Downtown Eastside. “The social reality is that racism and gender bias are prevalent within Canadian society, and we must do something to eradicate those.”

Victims’ families and activists were on hand for Oppal’s press conference, and he stopped speaking several times as audience members shouted criticism, chanted and played drums.

The provincial government did not offer funding to a number of community organizations that said they needed support to participate in the lengthy and complex inquiry. In protest, other groups boycotted the process.

In November, several organizations, including the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, released their own report, criticizing the inquiry for, among other things, excluding too many aboriginal women, sex trade workers and drug users.

Bond, the justice minister, said she did not regret the decision not to fund those groups, but said she saw them participating in the future. “I think going forward this is room for us to include other voices.” (Reporting by Allison Martell; Editing by Eric Beech)

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Ricky Gervais in negotiations for “The Muppets” sequel

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Ricky Gervais is in negotiations to star in “The Muppets” sequel at Disney, a representative for the actor told TheWrap.

Ty Burrell was cast in the film earlier this month after Christoph Waltz dropped out.

James Bobin, who directed the 2011 Muppets film, is directing the sequel, which he co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller.

Filming is expected to begin in Europe early next year.

The 2011 “Muppets” feature made $ 88 million at the U.S. box office.

David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman are producing the sequel.

Gervais’ recent credits include “Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D.” His upcoming films include “The Wind in the Willows.”

He is represented by WME and United Agents.

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Comet stores open for final day

18 December 2012 Last updated at 02:45 ET

Comet stores are to close their doors for the last time on Tuesday, bringing the failed electrical retailer’s 79-year history to an end.

Of the 236 stores the firm presided over when it went into administration last month, only 49 are still open.

On Monday, administrators Deloitte said unsecured creditors would get back less than 1% of the money owed to them.

The chain’s collapse will also cost the government £49.4m in redundancy payments and foregone tax revenues.

The redundancy money owed to thousands of former Comet workers totals £23.2m and will be paid by the government’s Redundancy Payments Service (RPS).

Meanwhile, £26.2m is owed in taxes to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), which is one of dozens of unsecured creditors of the retailer who are owed a total of £233m, none of which will be repaid.

Other unsecured lenders reportedly include landlords owed £135m in rents and other claims, manufacturers unable to reclaim goods delivered to Comet on credit worth £6m, and various other claimants owed £66m, such as ITV and Google, which had reportedly not been paid for advertising.

Big losses

The total hole in Comet’s balance sheet by the time it was wound up had reached £311m, according to Deloitte’s estimations.

Comet’s secured lenders will also be stung by the firm’s failure, receiving only £50m of the £145m they are owed, as the assets on which their debts were secured could not be sold off at a high enough price.

The company’s main secured lender is Hailey, the company set up by private equity firm OpCapita in order to buy up Comet from Anglo-French retail group Kesa last year for a nominal £1 payment.

Continue reading the main story

Founded in 1933 as a business charging radio batteries

Opened its first store in Hull in 1968

Bought by Woolworths and B&Q owner Kingfisher in 1984, which expanded Comet into one of the UK’s best-known retail brands

In 2003 Comet became part of Kesa Electricals, after Kesa was demerged from Kingfisher

It was announced in November 2011 that Comet would be sold to private equity group OpCapita for just £1

OpCapita was also given £50m by Kesa as part of the deal

However, OpCapita failed to turn around Comet’s fortunes, as the company continued to suffer from the fall in UK consumer spending during the recession and the big growth in online rivals.

Deloitte also revealed on Monday that Comet’s losses in the year to April totalled £95m, while its revenues slumped by £200m.

In the subsequent five months, Comet lost a further £31m.

Towards the end, insurers refused to guarantee suppliers, who in turn refused to extend credit on sales to Comet in the run-up to the crucial Christmas sales period.

Comet’s demise is one of the biggest High Street casualties of recent years.

The 236-store business, which at the time employed about 7,000 people, was founded in Hull in 1933 and began life selling batteries and radios.

The closure of the final Comet stores comes after Deloitte failed to find a buyer for the company.

It is unclear what will become of the Comet brand, with one possibility being a sale to an online retailer, similar to the fate of Woolworths.

Kesa Electricals was renamed Darty in July this year.

Despite having its headquarters in London, it focuses on the continental market – especially France, where it has more than 200 stores under the Darty name.

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Hairstyles may keep some black women from exercise

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A number of obstacles may stand between a person and exercise, and hairstyles may be one of them for African-American women, according to a new study.

Researchers found about two of every five African-American women said they avoid exercise because of concerns about their hair, and researchers say that is concerning given the United States’ obesity epidemic.

“As an African-American woman, I have that problem, and my friends have that problem. So I wondered if my patients had that problem,” said Dr. Amy McMichael, the study’s senior researcher and a dermatologist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

McMichael and her colleagues, who published their findings in the Archives of Dermatology on Monday, said hair care can be tedious and costly for African-American women.

Rochelle Mosley, who owns Salon 804 in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, told Reuters Health some of her African-American clients come in once per week to get their hair straightened at a cost of about $ 40.

They may not want to wash their hair more than once a week to keep their hairstyle, and may avoid sweating because of that.

To find out if women were putting hair above their health, the researchers surveyed 103 African-American women who came to the dermatology clinic at Wake Forest University in October 2007.

They found that more than half of the women were exercising for less than 75 minutes per week, which is less than the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services‘ recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise.

That’s also less than U.S. women on average, according to a 2007 study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found about half of all U.S. women were exercising close to 150 minutes per week.

More than a quarter of the women in the new study said they didn’t exercise at all.

About a third of the women said they exercise less than they’d like because of their hair, and half said they have considered changing their hair for exercise.

McMichael and her colleagues found that women who avoided exercise because of their hair were almost three times less likely to meet the recommended physical activity guidelines. That finding, however, could have been due to chance.

Also, scalp issues, such as itching and dandruff, played a role in the women’s decision-making process.

SALON OWNER NOT SURPRISED

McMichael also admits that they only surveyed African-American women, and they can’t say whether this is a problem shared by other ethnicities.

“It is a really important conversation that African-American women want to have, and they’re looking for solutions,” said McMichael.

Salon 804′s Mosley told Reuters Health that she’s not surprised by the findings based on her 22 years in business.

Previously, studies have connected people who get their hair done and their overall health. Some barbershops and salons even act as health clinics (see Reuters article of June 29, 2011 here: http://reut.rs/WjFXgB).

Mosley added that some women schedule their visits around their exercise schedule, but she also tries to find a hairstyle that will work with physical activity.

“If you don’t have a healthy body then you aren’t going to have any hair to fix,” she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/WjBo5P Archives of Dermatology, online December 17, 2012.

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Facebook to launch new Snapchat alternative with self-destructing messages

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Syrian rebels take control of Damascus Palestinian camp

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels took full control of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp on Monday after fighting raged for days in the district on the southern edge of President Bashar al-Assad‘s Damascus powerbase, rebel and Palestinian sources said.

The battle had pitted rebels, backed by some Palestinians, against Palestinian fighters of the pro-Assad Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). Many PFLP-GC fighters defected to the rebel side and their leader Ahmed Jibril left the camp two days ago, rebel sources said.

“All of the camp is under the control of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army,” said a Palestinian activist in Yarmouk. He said clashes had stopped and the remaining PFLP fighters retreated to join Assad‘s forces massed on the northern edge of the camp.

The battle in Yarmouk is one of a series of conflicts on the southern fringes of Assad’s capital, as rebels try to choke the power of the 47-year-old leader after a 21-month-old uprising in which 40,000 people have been killed.

Government forces have used jets and artillery to try to dislodge the fighters but the violence has crept into the heart of the city and activists say rebels overran three army stations in a new offensive in the central province of Hama on Monday.

On the border with Lebanon, hundreds of Palestinian families fled across the frontier following the weekend violence in Yarmouk, a Reuters witness said.

Syria hosts half a million Palestinian refugees, most living in Yarmouk, descendants of those admitted after the creation of Israel in 1948, and has always cast itself as a champion of the Palestinian struggle, sponsoring several guerrilla factions.

Both Assad’s government and the mainly Sunni Muslim Syrian rebels have enlisted and armed divided Palestinian factions as the uprising has developed into a civil war.

“NEITHER SIDE CAN WIN”

Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa said in a newspaper interview published on Monday that neither Assad’s forces nor rebels seeking to overthrow him can win the war.

Sharaa, a Sunni Muslim in a power structure dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, has rarely been seen since the revolt erupted in March 2011 and is not part of the president’s inner circle directing the fight against Sunni rebels. But he is the most prominent figure to say in public that Assad will not win.

Sharaa said the situation in Syria was deteriorating and a “historic settlement” was needed to end the conflict, involving regional powers and the U.N. Security Council and the formation of a national unity government “with broad powers”.

“With every passing day the political and military solutions are becoming more distant. We should be in a position defending the existence of Syria. We are not in a battle for an individual or a regime,” Sharaa was quoted as telling Al-Akhbar newspaper.

“The opposition cannot decisively settle the battle and what the security forces and army units are doing will not achieve a decisive settlement,” he said, adding that insurgents fighting to topple Syria’s leadership could plunge it into “anarchy and an unending spiral of violence”.

Sources close to the Syrian government say Sharaa had pushed for dialogue with the opposition and objected to the military response to an uprising that began peacefully.

In a veiled criticism of the crackdown, he said there was a difference between the state’s duty to provide security to its citizens, and “pursuing a security solution to the crisis”.

He said even Assad could not be certain where events in Syria were leading, but that anyone who met him would hear that “this is a long struggle…and he does not hide his desire to settle matters militarily to reach a final solution.”

In Hama province, rebels and the army clashed in a new campaign launched on Sunday by rebels to block off the country’s north, activists said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-linked violence monitor, said fighting raged through the provincial towns of Karnaz, Kafar Weeta, Halfayeh and Mahardeh.

It said there were no clashes reported in Hama city, which lies on the main north-south highway connecting the capital with Aleppo, Syria’s second city.

Qassem Saadeddine, a member of the newly established rebel military command, said on Sunday fighters had been ordered to surround and attack army positions across the province. He said Assad’s forces were given 48 hours to surrender or be killed.

In 1982 Hafez al-Assad, father of the current ruler, crushed an uprising in Hama city, killing up to 30,000 civilians.

Qatiba al-Naasan, a rebel from Hama, said the offensive would bring retaliatory air strikes from the government but that the situation is “already getting miserable”.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes, Erika Solomon and Dominic Evans in Beirut, Afif Diab at Masnaa, Lebanon; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

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Hollywood hacker honed his skills for years

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Long before Christopher Chaney made headlines by hacking into the email accounts of such stars as Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera, two other women say he harassed and stalked them online.

The women, who both knew Chaney, say their lives have been irreparably damaged by his actions. One has anxiety and panic attacks; the other is depressed and paranoid. Both say Chaney was calculated, cruel and creepy: he sent nude photos they had taken of themselves to their family members.

Their accounts as cybervictims serve as a cautionary tale for those, even major celebrities, who snap personal, and sometimes revealing photos.

Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., is set to be sentenced Monday and could face up to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty to nine felony counts, including wiretapping and unauthorized access to a computer, for hacking into email accounts of Aguilera, Johansson and Mila Kunis.

Aguilera said in a statement that although she knows that she’s often in the limelight, Chaney took from her some of the private moments she shares with friends.

“That feeling of security can never be given back and there is no compensation that can restore the feeling one has from such a large invasion of privacy,” Aguilera said.

Prosecutors said Chaney illegally accessed the email accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry between November 2010 and October 2011. Aguilera, Kunis and Johansson agreed to have their identities made public with the hopes that the exposure about the case would provide awareness about online intrusion.

The biggest spectacle in the case was the revelation that nude photos taken by Johansson herself and meant for her then-husband Ryan Reynolds were taken by Chaney and put on the Internet. The “Avengers” actress is not expected to attend the hearing, but she has videotaped a statement that may be shown in court.

Some of Aguilera’s photos appeared online after Chaney sent an email from the account of her stylist, Simone Harouche, to Aguilera asking the singer for scantily clad photographs, prosecutors said.

Chaney forwarded many of the photographs to two gossip websites and another hacker, but there wasn’t evidence he profited from his scheme, authorities said.

For the two women, who were only identified in court papers by their initials, their encounters with Chaney went from friendly to frightening.

One of the women, identified by the initials T.B., said she first met Chaney online in 1999 when she was 13 years old. She began talking with a girl named “Jessica” that later turned out to actually be Chaney.

Chaney figured out his victims’ email passwords and security questions and set a feature to forward a copy of every email they received to an account he controlled.

The woman said that in February 2009 her friends contacted her and let her know that several nude photos of her were uploaded to a public gallery. A year later, Chaney sent a link to a photo-sharing website he created and had her nude pictures sent to her father.

She said she spends several hours a week monitoring the Internet for her personal information and breaks into a sweat whenever she receives a Google alert email notifying her that her name has been mentioned online.

In her letter to U.S. District Judge S. James Otero, she said she thinks Chaney won’t stop and she still feels like he has control over her reputation, relationships and career.

Chaney was arrested in October 2011 as part of a yearlong investigation of celebrity hacking that authorities dubbed “Operation Hackerazzi.” Chaney’s computer hard drive contained numerous private celebrity photos and a document that compiled their extensive personal data, according to a search warrant.

Chaney has since apologized for what he has done, but prosecutors are recommending a nearly six-year prison sentence for him. They also want him to pay $ 150,000 in restitution, including about $ 66,000 to Johansson.

The second woman, identified in court papers only as T.C., said she was a close friend of Chaney’s for more than a decade. As early as 2003 she noticed her passwords were being reset and email she hadn’t looked at had been read by someone. She also said Chaney forwarded an invitation to an online photo gallery to her brother, who eventually saw naked pictures of her.

The woman said the night before she got married, Chaney deleted her email account and she was unable to correspond with a notary until she created a new email address.

In her letter to the judge, the woman said she’s been broken by the physical and emotional toll and can no longer recall what it was like to have a private life.

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Debating Gun Control, Post-Newtown

The Newtown (Conn.) elementary school massacre has reignited the debate about gun control. Firearm skeptics demand new restrictions. Gun proponents insist on respect for Second Amendment rights. Like abortion, guns evoke irreconcilable political and cultural cleavages. We live in a big country. Our conflicting values cannot all be neatly squared.

Still, rational discussion could lead to better understanding, mutual respect across ideological lines, and even some majority-backed changes. Slogans and symbolism contribute little. In that spirit, let’s review some of the proposals that politicians and others will talk about in coming weeks.

Demonization A couple of weeks before Newtown, our premier sports broadcaster used his Sunday Night Football halftime soapbox to issue a heartfelt appeal for reducing the prevalence of handguns. Responding to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher murder-suicide, Bob Costas said, said: “Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.” Similar pained cries have echoed in the wake of the Connecticut disaster —for example, this column by the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik, entitled, “Newtown and the Madness of Guns.”

The emotionalism is understandable. Yet railing against guns in general gets us nowhere. What are Costas and Gopnik suggesting? Confiscating some, most, or all of the 300 million firearms already in private hands? The Second Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, says that’s not happening. Our democratically grounded political system says that’s not happening. The United States, for better or worse, is a gun culture. Nearly half of American households have one or more guns, according to Gallup. Publicly mourning the degree to which firearms are woven into the fabric of our society only plays into the hands of those who contend that any discussion about regulating guns is a pretext for prohibition. The hard truth for gun foes is that the firearms are out there, and they’re not going away.

Assault weapons President Barack Obama supports a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban, according to White House aides. After asserting this position during his 2008 campaign, Obama dropped it, fearing a politically costly fight with the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress. The Newtown shooting revives the issue because the killer used an assault weapon—more precisely, a semiautomatic military-style rifle—to kill most, and possibly all, his victims, according to the Connecticut medical examiner.

We tried an assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004. It didn’t work. To avoid the restrictions of a poorly written law, gun manufacturers simply made cosmetic design changes and then enjoyed a sales boom. American gun enthusiasts reliably buy more of any make or model opponents want to deny them. Moreover, while black matte military-style rifles may look especially ominous to the uninitiated, they’re not more lethal, shot-for-shot, than grandpa’s wooden-stock deer hunting rifle (which is derived from an earlier generation of military weapons). Fully automatic machine guns—capable of firing a stream of bullets as long as the trigger is depressed—are already unavailable, unless you have a special permit. And finally, any proposal to ban the manufacture and sale of new assault weapons would do nothing about the many millions lawfully owned by private citizens. Democrats are not going to propose impounding rifles already in private gun racks.

Large-capacity magazines The coming proposals to limit the size of magazines, the spring-loaded boxes that contain ammunition, are more relevant, if no less controversial, than assault weapons “bans.” In a mass killing, the lethality of a semiautomatic rifle (or pistol) relates to how quickly and often the shooter can fire before reloading. Law enforcement officials said Sunday that the Newtown shooter used multiple 30-round magazines with his rifle, firing something on the order of 100 rounds in a very short period.

It’s not difficult to buy a 50-round “drum” magazine. Banning civilians from owning such magazines, it seems to me, would not infringe on anyone’s Second Amendment rights. Perhaps the same could be said for 30-round magazines, or 20-round magazines. Choosing the cap is necessarily arbitrary. The assault weapons ban of 1994-2004 prohibited the manufacture and sale of new magazines exceeding 10 rounds. In theory, we could reinstitute that rule.

The problem with restricting magazine capacity is that to make such a limitation meaningful, Congress would have to ban the possession of large magazines, not just the sale of new ones. Otherwise, the millions of big magazines already on the market will provide an ample supply to future mass killers. As a matter of political and law enforcement reality, are lawmakers prepared to send sheriffs and police out to take away all privately owned magazines exceeding 10 rounds? In the 1990s, the answer was no. Has that changed? I doubt it.

Background checks Here is where there’s room for achievable, meaningful improvement. The existing computerized background-check system screens out felons, minors, and other prohibited categories. The system has gaps, however. It covers only sales by federally licensed firearm dealers. “Private collectors” are allowed to sell guns without background checks. By some estimates, 40 percent of all sales slip through this gaping loophole. It ought to be closed. Nonlicensed sellers could be required to conduct their transactions via a licensed dealer, who would receive a small fee.

Improving the background-check system would make it more difficult for some significant number of shady characters to obtain guns. (They could still acquire them illegally, of course.) The Newtown shooter tried to buy a rifle at a local store shortly before his rampage and was turned away when he wouldn’t submit to a background check.

However, an improved background-check system would not have stopped the Newtown killer from doing what he did: scooping up his mother’s legally acquired guns before shooting her and all those teachers and children. Mass killers tend to be young men who, despite deranged minds and evil hearts, prepare carefully. Some have clean records before going berserk. Others obtain their weaponry from relatives or friends. Fixing background checks is worth doing. It won’t stop the next Newtown.

Mental illness Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. Congress and executive branch agencies at the federal and state level can do more to make sure that disparate and often disorganized records of individuals who’ve been found to have serious mental health problems find their way into the background-check system. The law already prohibits people who’ve been adjudicated mentally ill from buying firearms. We need to do a better job of collecting and disseminating the relevant information.

Many who are dangerously mentally ill escape treatment that would prevent them from harming themselves and others. Short of mass murder, hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people commit crimes and end up in prison without adequate antipsychotic medication. It’s too difficult for relatives, friends, teachers, and others to civilly commit dangerously mentally ill individuals before they do harm.

Taking steps well short of incarceration—our current de facto policy for warehousing the dangerously mentally ill—would be a humane alternative for all concerned, and it could prevent school shootings. This is not gun control, per se, yet it deserves urgent attention.

Personal responsibility People who own guns need to keep them away from children and psychologically troubled members of their households. With the right to own firearms comes great responsibility. We don’t yet know all the details about the Newtown killer and his deceased mother. Yet it’s hard to imagine what she was thinking: a disturbed, antisocial, 20-year-old son and a half-dozen guns?

The most important gun control can’t be legislated. It’s common sense.

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Keep thimerosal in vaccines: pediatricians

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A mercury-containing preservative should not be banned as an ingredient in vaccines, U.S. pediatricians said Monday, in a move that may be controversial.

In its statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) endorsed calls from a World Health Organization (WHO) committee that the preservative, thimerosal, not be considered a hazardous source of mercury that could be banned by the United Nations.

Back in 1999, a concern that kids receiving multiple shots containing thimerosal might get too much mercury – and develop autism or other neurodevelopmental problems as a result – led the AAP to call for its removal, despite the lack of hard evidence at the time.

“It was absolutely a matter of precaution because of the absence of more information,” said Dr. Louis Cooper, from Columbia University in New York, who was on the organization’s board of directors at the time.

“Subsequently an awful lot of effort has been put into trying to sort out whether thimerosal causes any harm to kids, and the bottom line is basically, it doesn’t look as if it does,” Cooper, who wrote a commentary published with the AAP’s statement, told Reuters Health.

In a 2004 safety review, for example, the independent U.S. Institute of Medicine concluded there was no evidence thimerosal-containing vaccines could cause autism. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came to the same conclusion in 2010.

With the exception of some types of flu shots, the compound is not used in vaccines in the United States, which are distributed in single-dose vials.

And nobody is arguing that should change, according to Dr. Walter Orenstein, a member of the AAP Committee on Infectious Diseases and a researcher at the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta.

But in countries with fewer resources – where many children still die of vaccine-preventable diseases – it’s cheaper and easier to use multi-dose vials of vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus, for example.

Thimerosal prevents the rest of a multi-dose vial from getting contaminated with bacteria or fungi each time a dose is used.

Researchers estimated it could cost anywhere from two to five times as much to manufacture vaccines for developing countries without thimerosal, and both transporting vaccines and keeping them refrigerated would be much harder as well.

“If we had to take the thimerosal out of those multi-dose vials, we’re having a hard time completing the task of getting every kid immunized now, that would add a tremendous burden,” Cooper said – and more children would probably die as a result.

“Children who can now be protected from these life-threatening diseases could become vulnerable,” Orenstein told Reuters Health.

The new statement is published in the AAP’s journal Pediatrics.

Thimerosal contains a type of mercury called ethyl mercury. Toxic effects have been tied to its cousin, methyl mercury, which stays in the body for much longer.

Earlier this year, the WHO said replacing thimerosal with an alternative preservative could affect vaccine safety and might cause some vaccines to become unavailable.

Mercury, however, is still on the list of global health hazards to be banned in a draft treaty from the United Nations Environment Program – which would mean a ban on thimerosal.

Reducing mercury exposure “is a wonderful thing,” Orenstein said.

However, “We need this exception because thimerosal is so vital for protecting children.”

He said keeping thimerosal in vaccines is essential mostly for humanitarian reasons – although preventing childhood diseases in the developing world could also help the U.S. because other countries can serve as reservoirs for illness.

“For American parents, this is more looking at the world and our role and responsibility in protecting the children of the world than it is a direct impact,” Orenstein said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online December 17, 2012.

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Kat Von D Accepts DJ Deadmau5′s Marriage Proposal — Via Twitter

Saturday was just another crazy day in the love life of Kat Von D – you know, marriage proposals via Tweet, etc.

After a two-month hot and heavy romance with Canadian DJ Deadmau5 (followed by a November breakup), the pair is not only back together, they’re engaged — and it all went down on Twitter.

PLAY IT NOW: Meet The Six Little McGhees

“I can’t wait for Christmas so…. Katherine Von Drachenberg, will you marry me?” Deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) Tweeted on Saturday, along with a photo of the engagement ring he plans to get the tattoo artist.

Click HERE to see the ring – complete with a diamond flanked by (what else?!) two skulls!

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Stars Who Got Engaged In 2012

Kat replied with a series of exclamation points, to which Deadmau5 romantically responded with, “Holy f***ing s**t. im engaged and stuff!”

The freshly-minted engaged couple then thanked their followers for their support.

“Mi corazon!!! Thank you all for the lovely congratulations!” Kat wrote. “Please excuse me while I go squeeze the hell out of my fiance!”

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Guess The Celebrity Ink!

“Thanks for the well wishes and support from the horde and everyone else!” Deadmau5 Tweeted. “brb while i spend the rest of my evening with my future wife ”

VOTE: Will Kat & Deadmau5 make it down the aisle?

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Hollywood’s Smokin’ Hot Couples

Prior to her whirlwind romance with Deadmau5, Kat was recently engaged to Sandra Bullock’s ex-husband, Jesse James, but the now-ex-couple broke it off in June, 2011.

As previously reported on AccessHollywood.com, Kat and her new fiance, dubbed “Kat and Mau5″ (mouse), were first spotted together in September, and the DJ called Kat “The love of my life” just one month later.

One month after his declaration of love, the pair broke up.

– Erin O’Sullivan

Copyright 2012 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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