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29th May 2012 0 Comments

By Nadra Kareem Nittle Contributing Writer

(Special to the NNPA News Service from the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education)Social wedge issues such as abortion, birth control and sex education in public schools have taken center stage and sometimes dominated the political debate this year, but progressive experts on reproductive rights are concerned that women of color are rarely represented in the mainstream medias coverage.

If elected president, presumptive Republican candidate Mitt Romney has vowed to defund Planned Parenthood, a move that the state of Texas is attempting. Moreover, Tennessee has passed legislation to severely limit what educators can teach in sex education classes, and states such as Arizona, Mississippi and Virginia have passed legislation that significantly restricts abortion access.

Conservative attacks on reproductive rights repeatedly make headlines. But women of color and low-income women who disproportionately depend on the services of Planned Parenthood and face challenges accessing reproductive care have not figured prominently in mainstream news coverage of the reproductive rights debate.

Experts on the topic say that because underprivileged women have the most to lose as lawmakers curb such rights, the media should focus on them in the discussion.

Women who are poor and also women of color have disproportionately high rates of unwanted pregnancy, says Heather Boonstra, a senior public policy associate of the Guttmacher Institute, a Washington, D.C., organization that advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Some of that has to do with the basics in terms of obtaining health care and the kinds of social conditions in the womens lives that make it hard for them to use contraception and use it consistently, she says. Poorer women their lives have a lot of disruptions. Using and obtaining contraception, let alone affording it and getting it on a routine basis is harder.

According to the institute, Black women are three times as likely as white women to have an unplanned pregnancy, and Hispanic women are two times as likely. Among poor women, Hispanics have the highest rate of unplanned pregnancy. In addition, financial pressures related to the sluggish economy are likely leading more poor women to terminate pregnancies. The institute found that the number of abortion recipients who were poor jumped from 27 percent in 2000 to 42 percent in 2008, the first full year of the economic downturn.

Media outlets tend to ignore these findings and the financial pressures driving them, and simply report on abortion rates and laws without factoring in race and class. Including more women of color and their advocates in mainstream media stories would produce more comprehensive articles.

Original post:
Discussion of reproductive rights should include women of color

Animal Studies Indicate Vacc-C5 Generates Immune Responses to HIV, Similar to Those in HIV Patients who Naturally Suppress the Virus

OSLO, NORWAY--(Marketwire - May 29, 2012) - Bionor Pharma ASA (OSLO: BIONOR)

News Summary

Bionor Pharma ASA (OSLO: BIONOR) announced today that the first study of Bionor Pharma's Vacc-C5 is now approved to begin at Oslo University Hospital. Vacc-C5 is a therapeutic HIV vaccine developed to slow down or stop induction of immune hyperactivation, a feature that drives the production of HIV and is damaging the immune system, leading to AIDS. Vacc-C5 also may have the potential to be a preventive vaccine, alone or in combination with Vacc-4x.

The phase I/II study will use Vacc-C5 at three different dose levels, in order to evaluate safety and provide a determination for the optimal dose of the vaccine, when given intradermally (in the skin) or intramuscularly.

"The pre-clinical studies of Vacc-C5 in rabbits, and sheep, as well as data confirming an association between high antibody levels and slow progression of HIV in humans have generated considerable interest," said Dag Kvale, MD, PhD, Principal Investigator at Oslo University Hospital. "We look forward to see how people living with HIV respond when on Vacc-C5."

The study seeks to recruit 36 patients who have been infected with HIV for at least one year. Study participants must have been stable on antiretroviral therapy (ART, traditional HIV medicine) for at least six months with a viral load of less than 50 copies per milliliter. The primary endpoint of the trial is to evaluate safety of the vaccine at three different dose levels. Secondary endpoints include measuring specific antibody and T-cell responses to Vacc-C5 and to evaluate T-cell activation markers. Vacc-C5 will be given in combination with two different adjuvants, (that enhance the immune response), either GM-CSF (Granulocyte Macrophage Colony Stimulating Factor) or Alhydrogel (an aluminum-based treatment).

How Vacc-C5 is considered to Work, in Comparison to Vacc-4x Vacc-C5 generates antibodies based on modified, manufactured (synthetic) peptides from the C5 region (of gp 120) at the HIV-virus surface. Data suggest that anti-C5 antibodies may play a crucial role for Natural Viral Suppressors, a group of people who are able to control the HIV infection without the need of HIV medication.

Bionor Pharma has filed a patent application covering Vacc-C5.

The further strategy is to use Vacc-C5 in combination with Vacc-4x since Vacc-4x already has via T-cell (killer cell) responses shown to lower the viral load set point (stabilized virus level) by statistically significant levels compared to placebo.

More:
First Human Clinical Study of HIV Vaccine Vacc-C5 Approved to Begin

Iran claimed on Tuesday to have come up with an anti-virus programme against "Flame," extraordinarily sophisticated malware that hit its servers and deployed various spying modules, apparently at the behest of a foreign power.

"Tools to recognise and clean this malware have been developed and, as of today, they will be available for those (Iranian) organisations and companies who want it," Maher, a computer emergency response team coordination centre in Iran's telecommunications ministry, said on its website.

Flame, a crafty volume of code that can steal files, take screenshots, activate computer microphones to record conversations, log keystrokes and carry out other activities controlled remotely, was identified this week by leading anti-virus firms around the world.

Maher said Flame was undetectable by 43 different anti-virus programmes it tested, forcing it to come up with its own defence after "months of research." It did not give details of how its Flame-killer worked.

Iran appeared to be the main target of the worm-like malware, though it was also detected in other regions, including Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Sudan and Syria.

The virus hit Iran's oil ministry servers in April, forcing authorities to shut them down.

"Experts from Maher... have said that the theft of large volumes of data in recent weeks was caused by Flame," the Fars news agency reported.

Anti-virus experts said Flame was many times more sophisticated than Stuxnet, a virus that in 2010 infected computers running Iran's sensitive uranium enrichment, knocking out hundreds of centrifuges, or a cousin to Stuxnet, Duqu, which struck in 2011.

The staggering complexity of all three of these viruses suggested a nation-state was responsible, with suspicion falling on the United States or Israel.

Flame is "actively being used as a cyber weapon attacking entities in several countries," a top Russian anti-virus software firm, Kaspersky Lab, said in a statement late on Monday, describing its purpose as "cyberespionage."

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Middle East Online

AFP Tuesday, May 29, 2012

TEHRAN - Iran claimed on Tuesday to have come up with an anti-virus programme against "Flame," extraordinarily sophisticated malware that hit its servers and deployed various spying modules, apparently at the behest of a foreign power.

"Tools to recognise and clean this malware have been developed and, as of today, they will be available for those (Iranian) organisations and companies who want it," Maher, a computer emergency response team coordination centre in Iran's telecommunications ministry, said on its website.

Flame, a crafty volume of code that can steal files, take screenshots, activate computer microphones to record conversations, log keystrokes and carry out other activities controlled remotely, was identified this week by leading anti-virus firms around the world.

Maher said Flame was undetectable by 43 different anti-virus programmes it tested, forcing it to come up with its own defence after "months of research." It did not give details of how its Flame-killer worked.

Iran appeared to be the main target of the worm-like malware, though it was also detected in other regions, including Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Sudan and Syria.

The virus hit Iran's oil ministry servers in April, forcing authorities to shut them down.

"Experts from Maher... have said that the theft of large volumes of data in recent weeks was caused by Flame," the Fars news agency reported.

Anti-virus experts said Flame was many times more sophisticated than Stuxnet, a virus that in 2010 infected computers running Iran's sensitive uranium enrichment, knocking out hundreds of centrifuges, or a cousin to Stuxnet, Duqu, which struck in 2011.

The staggering complexity of all three of these viruses suggested a nation-state was responsible, with suspicion falling on the United States or Israel.

Read more:
Iran readies anti-virus for 'Flame' spy malware

By Stephen Glover

PUBLISHED: 18:21 EST, 28 May 2012 | UPDATED: 05:34 EST, 29 May 2012

A stranger to our shores watching Tony Blair at the Leveson Inquiry yesterday would have got the impression of a reasonable and decent man who had unaccountably been abused and mistreated by a his word feral Press.

If I had not lived through the Blair years, and seen the way in which newspapers were manipulated and sometimes lied to by his formidable Press machine, I might have been persuaded by this suave and confident performance.

Much as I admire Lord Justice Leveson and the sardonic Robert Jay, QC, who asks most of the questions, I am afraid that either as a result of ignorance or excessive indulgence, their interrogation of the former prime minister was terribly lame. He was not put on the spot over many issues where he certainly has a case to answer.

Suave: Tony Blair was a confident witness at the Leveson Inquiry, and unlike other witnesses received very soft interrogation

For example, he was not examined as to why he and his turbulent spin doctor Alastair Campbell who has inexplicably been treated with the softest of kid gloves by this inquiry aided and abetted the bid for the Daily Express by the pornographer Richard Desmond in 2000. At that time, the Express was a New Labour-supporting paper, and Mr Blair believed Mr Desmonds assurances hed keep it so.

No questions were put about why he had permitted Mr Campbell to oversee the crucial September 2002 dossier about Iraq, which convinced many people that Saddam Hussein constituted a danger to this country. Equally, he was not required to justify his Press Secretarys fraudulent second dossier partly based unattributably on a long-out-of-date university doctoral thesis published in February 2003.

He was not asked why, in an unprecedented move, he had allowed his spin doctor to give orders to senior civil servants, and was not made to explain why Mr Campbell had connived in the politicisation of the civil service by installing Labour placemen as departmental press officers answerable to him.

More here:
Tony Blair at Leveson Inquiry: Kid gloves and damning questions ex-PM WASN'T asked