Category Archives: Transhuman News

(Read the update to this story here.)

Interpol finally issued an international red notice for Viktor Yanukovych today, almost a year after the former President fled Ukraine following a failed attempt to violently disperse Euromaidan protesters on Kyivs Independence Square. More than a hundred people were killed when security forces opened fire on demonstrators.

His name appeared on the international police agencys wanted list on charges of misappropriation, embezzlement or conversion of property by malversation, if committed in respect of an especially gross amount, or by an organized group.

The move will come as some relief to Ukraines post-revolutionary government, who have faced fierce criticism for failing to gather enough evidence of human rights violations or corruption to obtain the Interpol red notice and support EU sanctions against former regime officials.

Ukraines Minister for Internal Affairs, Arseniy Avakov, announced that after argument and explanation and months after the submission of a request from the Interior Ministry, Prosecutor General of Ukraine and the Security Service, Interpol had appointed a special commission to deal with the request.

On the international wanted list of Interpol (red notice wanted for extradition to Ukraine): Viktor F. Yanukovych, Olexander Yanukovych, Azarov Mykola Azarov, Bagatyreva Raisa [former Health Minister], Kolobov Yu (former Minister of Finance), Dzekon GB (Former head of Ukrtelecom), he posted on Facebook.

However, while former President Yanukovych appeared on Interpols website this morning, some of the other fugitives listed by Avakov did not appear alongside him, including Yanukovychs son Olexander, former Health Minister Raisa Bagatyreva and former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov.

An Interpol spokeswoman declined to say whether a red notice had been issued for the former Prime Minister or the others, but told the Kyiv Post that there were only two reasons they would not be listed:

When we issue a red notice it is either made public or restricted to law enforcement agencies, she said. Either there is no red notice for that person, or the country has requested that the red notice not be made public.

Given Avakovs facebook post and the intense pressure on the government to bring its former officials to justice, it seems incredibly unlikely that Ukraine has requested the names be restricted to law enforcement.

Excerpt from:
Interpol places former President Yanukovych on wanted list, former Prime Minister Azarov missing

By Jim Barnes January 11

Jessica Woelkers, a social worker with Prince William County schools, asked a group of middle school staff members last month whether they knew the average age at which children enter into human trafficking. One hazarded a guess: 16? Another suggested 15.

Its age 13, Woelkers replied. For both males and females.

Woelkers was presenting a training session on human trafficking to teacher assistants at New Dominion Middle School, an alternative school in the Manassas area. It was part of a grant-supported program the school system has initiated to educate students, parents and school employees about human trafficking and to increase awareness of the problem.

Prince William schools started the trafficking prevention program in response to a 2012 Virginia General Assembly mandate that school systems educate students about the hazards of getting involved in teen trafficking, Young said.

Woelkers said that trafficking takes two main forms: labor and sex. In labor trafficking, people are coerced into performing work for which they do not receive a fair wage. This has been a problem for day laborers and domestic workers in Northern Virginia and in businesses such as restaurants and spas, she said.

Most of the training session focused on sex trafficking, in which teens are lured into the commercial sex trade, which includes prostitution, pornography and performing in strip clubs.

The common thread, Woelkers said, is coercion, often involving fear or threats.

Betsy Young, supervisor of social workers for the school system, told the class that teen trafficking is a problem even in relatively affluent counties such as Prince William.

Trafficking cuts across all socioeconomic lines, Young said. A human trafficking operation broken up by the FBI in 2012 the largest juvenile sex trafficking bust in the United States up to that time involved girls from Lorton and Woodbridge, she said.

See the original post here:
Prince William schools educate staff, students and parents on human trafficking

Why do some people develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while others who suffered the same ordeal do not? A new UCLA discovery may shed light on the answer.

UCLA scientists have linked two gene variants to the debilitating mental disorder, suggesting that heredity influences a person's risk of developing PTSD. Published in the February 2015 edition of the Journal of Affective Disorders, the findings could provide a biological basis for diagnosing and treating PTSD more effectively in the future.

"Many people suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder after surviving a life-threatening ordeal like war, rape or a natural disaster," explained lead author Dr. Armen Goenjian, a researcher at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. "But not everyone who experiences trauma suffers from PTSD. We investigated whether PTSD has genetic underpinnings that make some people more vulnerable to the syndrome than others."

In 1988, Goenjian, an Armenian American, raced to Spitak, Armenia, after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake devastated the country. The temblor leveled entire towns and cities, killing more than 25,000 Armenians, two-thirds of them children.

With support from the Armenian Relief Society, Goenjian and his colleagues helped establish a pair of psychiatric clinics that treated earthquake survivors for 21 years. A dozen multigenerational families in northern Armenia agreed to allow their blood samples to be sent to UCLA, where Goenjian and his colleagues combed the DNA of 200 individuals for genetic clues to psychiatric vulnerability.

In 2012, his team discovered that PTSD was more common in survivors who carried two gene variants associated with depression. In the current study, Goenjian and first author Julia Bailey, an adjunct assistant professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, focused on two genes called COMT and TPH-2 that play important roles in brain function.

COMT is an enzyme that degrades dopamine, a neurotransmitter that controls the brain's reward and pleasure centers, and helps regulate mood, thinking, attention and behavior. Too much or too little dopamine can influence various neurological and psychological disorders.

TPH-2 controls the production of serotonin, a brain hormone that regulates mood, sleep and alertness -- all of which are disrupted in PTSD. Antidepressants called SSRIs, or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, which were designed to treat depression, target serotonin. More physicians are prescribing SSRIs to treat disorders beyond depression, including PTSD.

"We found a significant association between variants of COMT and TPH-2 with PTSD symptoms, suggesting that these genes contribute to the onset and persistence of the disorder," said Goenjian. "Our results indicate that people who carry these genetic variants may be at higher risk of developing PTSD."

The team used the most recent PTSD criteria from the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual to measure genes' role in predisposing someone to the disorder. The new criteria increased estimates of a person's predisposition for PTSD to 60 percent; estimates based on older criteria reached only 41 percent.

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Study identifies two genes that boost risk for post-traumatic stress disorder