Inhaler May Up Asthma Risk

A common asthma reliever drug may increase the risk of asthma attacks in some sufferers, British scientists said on Tuesday.

The researchers found that salbutamol, a popular inhaler medicine, as well as salmeterol, an ingredient in GlaxoSmithKline’s Advair asthma product, are less effective in children with a specific gene variant and may worsen the health of some patients.

‘This is a global question that needs to be addressed,’ Professor Somnath Mukhopadhyay from Brighton and Sussex Medical School told Reuters.

Financial Crisis Boosts IMF

In reponse to our post ‘Most Countries Worse Off After IMF Agreement – US Think Tank, IMF spokesman Bill Murray, using the handler ‘wmurray’ , rejected the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) findings as ‘seriously misleading conclusions’, ‘relying on faulty analysis and often inaccurate information.’ Other critics were Ms Caroline Pearce, from international aid agency Oxfam. AFP quoted her saying “‘If the IMF wants to be relevant, effective, credible and legitimate, it has to give countries hardest hit by the financial crisis a say in their own destiny.’

The Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) study was published to coincide with the IMF/World Bank meetings.

The havoc wrought by the economic crisis has given the IMF a new sense of purpose as the world’s emergency lender – and even some of its fiercest critics are starting to mellow.

It is a remarkable turnaround for an institution targeted by anti-globalisation protesters and reviled by millions of people after imposing harsh conditions on its loans during previous crises.

‘I think the response has been much more positive in this crisis and it’s been very constructive,’ said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist well-known for his diatribes against International Monetary Fund lending practices.

Int’l Rescue Teams Leave Padang Indonesia

Relief workers struggled to reach Indonesian quake survivors still without food or shelter a week after the disaster, while foreign rescue teams packed up their high-tech equipment on Wednesday and prepared to pull out.

Aid has been pouring into the shattered West Sumatran city of Padang since the Sept 30 earthquake, but the scale of the disaster, heavy rain and damaged infrastructure have meant it has been slow to reach outlying areas.

Peparing For The Real Pandemic

The below article was published on September 20 2009 on www.hiddenfromhistory.org.

Last week, many of the aboriginal people in the remote west coast village of Ahousaht were innoculated with the tamiflu vaccine. Today, over a hundred of them are sick, and the sickness is spreading.

 In the same week, body bags were sent to similarly remote native reserves in northern Manitoba that have also received the tamiflu vaccine. On the face of things, it appears that flu vaccinations are causing a sickness that is being deliberately aimed at aboriginal people across Canada, and this sickness will be fatal: a fact acknowledged by the Canadian government by their “routine” sending of body bags to these Indian villages.

2018 – The End Of The Global Dollar

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

Most Countries Worse Off After IMF Agreement – US Think Tank

Weeks before Jamaica completes its application for a US$1.2-billion standby agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a United States think tank has issued a dire warning about the latest impact of the fund on developing countries.

While making no direct reference to Jamaica’s negotiations with the fund, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) yesterday released a discussion paper in which it argues that 31 of 41 of countries with current IMF agreements have been subjected to harmful monetary and fiscal policies.

Caribbean Regulatory Havens Could Be Blacklisted Also

Already under pressure from larger nations cracking down on so-called tax havens, Caribbean nations are now being put on warning that they face blacklisting and sanctions if their financial regulations aren’t made strong enough as well. And they have only six months to do it.

The caution has been issued by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, as he spoke to various media houses ahead of a meeting of finance officials from the G7 nations and the International Monetary Fund’s semiannual meeting which began yesterday in Turkey.

Cocaine Sandwiches Leads To Arrest

Dutch police have arrested two people at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport for allegedly having hidden three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of cocaine in sandwiches, authorities said Thursday.

Inspectors found the drugs last week in 33 sandwiches in the luggage of the two, a 30-year-old man from Suriname and a Dutch woman, 56.

“With the unpacking of the sandwiches … it transpired that they were not fit for consumption,” said a military police statement. “They were filled with about 100 grams of cocaine each.”

www.caribbeannetnews.com

Michael Jackson Healthy Autopsy Report Revealed

Michael Jackson’s arms were covered with punctures, his face and neck were scarred and he had tattooed eyebrows and lips, but he wasn’t the sickly skeleton of a man portrayed by tabloids, according to his autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press.

In fact, the Los Angeles County coroner’s report shows Jackson was a fairly healthy 50-year-old before he died of an overdose.

His 136 pounds were in the acceptable range for a 5-foot-9 man. His heart was strong with no sign of plaque buildup. And his kidneys and most other major organs were normal.

JetBlue Will Not Fail – Richard Sealy

A commitment has been made to ensure that JetBlue does not join the graveyard of failed American carriers to this island.

Making this promise, Minister of Tourism, Richard Sealy, gave the assurance, “We will do all we can do to ensure that JetBlue continues to come to Barbados as a government.”

“We will do what is necessary to ensure that the plane stays up in the air. All too often, we have these inaugurals and no sooner than the water from the fire engine falls on the tarmac, you find that the plane can no longer fly [because] it hasn’t been marketed properly and we know that there is a graveyard of many flags, unfortunately particularly US flags, that have come here and have stopped because we haven’t done all that is necessary to ensure that they stay in the air,” he stated.

US Company Duped Caribbean Investors Out Of Millions

A court in Britain has been told that a company which operated in the US, various Caribbean islands and the UK, duped hundreds of investors out of their savings in a huge $240 million international fraud. 

Three of Imperial Consolidated’s bosses are accused of having lured victims around the world into parting with their cash with glossy forecasts of generous returns up to 36%.

London’s Blackfriars Crown Court was told that behind the façade of seemingly healthy balance sheets were men who allegedly made “promises which could not be kept”.

Prison-Beaten Standford Block From Accessing Insurance Funds

Disgraced financier Sir Allen Stanford has been blocked from trying to go through a court outside the United States to access his Lloyd’s of London liability insurance.

Attorneys acting on his behalf had made an application to a British court, seeking an emergency hearing in London to stop the US receiver Ralph Janvey from interfering with Lloyd’s payment of some fees to Stanford’s lawyers under the liability policy.

British attorney Simon Peter Kamstra, in a statement dated September 23rd , told the court that the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the UK’s Serious Fraud Office had no objection to Stanford obtaining legal defense funds through the Lloyd’s policy.

Tax Havens Crackdown Just An Excuse

The efforts of major and industrialised economies to crack down on so-called tax havens have been described as an excuse to spread the blame for the global financial crisis on countries not responsible for it.

That assessment form St Vincent and the Grenadines Ambassador to the United Nations, Camillo Gonsalves as he addressed the UN General Assembly yesterday.

Gonsalves said his country faces “being stigmatized out of our transition into financial services” by the G20 economies, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and “other non-inclusive bodies”.