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The Ontario government is looking for a new human rights watchdog.

Former Toronto mayor Barbara Hall, chief commissioner for the Ontario Human Rights Commission, is retiring at the end of next month.

Hall, 68, who was appointed to the $167,000-a-year post by former premier Dalton McGuinty in 2005, has had her term extended four times.

Her contract expires Feb. 27 and a new chief is expected to be named before then.

From 1994 to 1997, Hall was the last mayor of the old city of Toronto and twice ran for the mayoralty of the amalgamated megacity, losing in 1997 to Mel Lastman and in 2003 to David Miller.

Sources say several prominent candidates are being considered for the job.

One person being touted is Bernie Farber, former chief executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress and a long-time anti-racism activist.

Farber who ran for the Liberals in the 2011 provincial election, losing Thornhill to Progressive Conservative Peter Shurman has worked with at-risk youth, battered women, and served on numerous community race-relations and safety committees over the years.

Another potential candidate is former New Democrat MPP Rosario Marchese.

Marchese, who lost the riding of Trinity-Spadina to Liberal Han Dong in the June 12 provincial election, was minister of culture and communications in former premier Bob Raes government and served at Queens Park for 24 years.

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Liberals shopping for new human rights commissioner as Barbara Hall retires

Kenneth Lau

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

About 50,000 are expected to join a February 1 rally for universal suffrage as the post-Umbrella Movement era begins, organizer Civil Human Rights Front said.

The walk from Victoria Park will end at the Chater Road pedestrian zone, where protesters may lie down depending on the situation, group convener Daisy Chan Sin-ying said.

Chan said the rally is only a beginning for the post-Umbrella Movement era. "During this new stage, the government issued a public sentiment report and launched the second round of political consultation. But the report did not reflect public opinion ... it even pushed the responsibility to the pan democrats," she said.

Chan explained that the sentiment report, submitted to the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office in Beijing, does not give reasons for or provide analysis of the 79-day movement, which ended on December 14.

She said it is not a comprehensive report.

She said the rally aims to pressure the SAR government into relaunching the "five-step" process for the 2017 chief executive elections.

She also said the August 31 framework by tne NPC Standing Committee is still a small group election that prescreens two to three candidates.

They called on the central government to withdraw the framework.

More:
`Post-umbrella era' starts with rally

(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.

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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

The richest person in the world recently drank a glass of clean water derived from piles of human feces. There was no bet, dare or quirky fundraising spin involved here it was simply Bill Gates doing Bill Gates things, raising awareness for a machine that processes human waste to generate electricity and produce drinkable water.

In November, Gates visited the Omniprocessor run by Janicki Bioenergy, an engineering firm based in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, about 70 miles north of Seattle. The machine, which is about 38 feet wide and 66 feet long, is able to turn sewer sludge from 100,000 into 86,000 liters of drinkable water a day and 250 kW of electricity, along with pathogen-free ash.

Related:Bill Gates back on top in Forbes rich list, Zuckerberg biggest gainer

Sewer sludge enters the Omniprocessor and gets fed up a conveyor belt into tubes where its boiled. During this boiling process, water vapor is separated from the solid, dry sludge. The solid sludge is put into a furnace, producing steam that powers a steam engine, which powers a generator. This electricity is used to power the Omniprocessor itself, with excess electricity availableto power the surrounding community. The water vapor separated from the sludge during the boiling process is run through a cleaning system and turned into clean water.

The water tasted as good as any Ive had out of a bottle, writes Gates in his blog post about the Omniprocessor. And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. Its that safe.

This machine is part of the Gates Foundations endeavor to improve sanitation in poor countries, which affects more than 2 billion people. The Omniprocessor is an attempt to reinvent the sewage treatment plant, and it will be part of a pilot project later this year in Senegal.

If we get it right, it will be a good example of how philanthropy can provide seed money that draws bright people to work on big problems, eventually creating a self-supporting industry, according to Gates.

Originally posted here:
Bill Gates drinks water that came from human feces for a good cause, of course

Yesterday I was struck by a Forbes headline, 97% Of Climate Scientists Agree Is 100%Wrong. The post questions the way Australian science popularizer John Cook arrived at this often-quoted number to illustrate the scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to global warming.

I agree with one statement in the post, which is the premise that in science, logic and explanation trump scientific opinion. I would have said logic and evidence, but thats close enough. And yet, the piece focuses primarily on the derivation of the 97% statistic, rather than on the logic and explanation behind the concern over human-generated global warming and the widespread fear among scientists that global warming will indeed prove dangerous and costly. I decided to expand on this post by giving some climate scientists a chance weigh in.

1: The oceans are getting warmer.

Measurements of global air temperatures show a long-term rise over recent decades, but the rise isnt steady. Like the stock market, it jumps up and down on shorter time scales. There was a spike in 1998, for example. If you measure global warming from that year onward, you get a distorted picture the overall trend, said Penn State climatologist Richard Alley. The trend over decades is what we should focus on.

Whats even more worrisome, he explained, is that air temperatures only give part of the picture. The real concern with the buildup of greenhouse gases is that were getting more energy from the sun than were sending back into space, he said. That energy, he said, is not only warming the atmosphere, its also melting ice and warming the oceans.

The oceans have warmed by about .3 degrees F since 1969, according to NASA. How much greenhouse gas-related heating goes into the ocean depends on currents known as El Nino and La Nina, he said. Those currents affect the surface temperatures of the oceans, with warmer water coming to the surface during the El Nino phase. In 1998, El Nino switched to La Nina. That shift caused cooler water to come to the surface and allowed the oceans to absorb heat like a big sponge.

During the years since, the measured air temperature rise has flattened. Some people have used that trend to argue that global warming has stopped. It hasnt. The currents have tended to oscillate, said Alley, so eventually the oceans will switch back to the El Nino pattern, after which that warmer water will come back to the surface and force more heat to go into the atmosphere.

2: Theres experimental evidence showing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts to direct heat back toward Earth heat that would otherwise have been lost to space. Thats the greenhouse effect. And theres ample data showing that weve changed the composition of the atmosphere enough to alter the global climate.

In fact, human activity has nearly doubled our atmospheres load of carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution started. The basics behind this are the laws of physics, said Ben Horton a professor of marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers University.

The reason we accept that fossil fuel burning is increasing CO2 and warming the planet comes down to basic physics and chemistry thats more than 100 years old, said Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann. The fact that were measuring the effects is validation of the prediction.

Read the original here:
Four Reasons To Worry About Global Warming: Beyond Scientific Consensus

IMAGE:This is Dr. Armen Goenjian. view more

Credit: UCLA

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.

Continued here:
UCLA study IDs two genes that boost risk for post-traumatic stress disorder

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

While severe trauma can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, not everyone who experiences such events develop PTSD, and now UCLA scientists believe they know why.

Dr. Armen Goenjian, a researcher at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and his colleagues report in the February edition of the Journal of Affective Disorders that they have linked to gene variants to the trauma-related anxiety disorder.

The findings, they explained, could provide a biological basis for diagnosing and treating PTSD more effectively in the future. It could also lead to faster diagnoses for patients, they added.

Many people suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder after surviving a life-threatening ordeal like war, rape or a natural disaster, Dr. Goenjian explained. 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.

Dr. Goenjian, an Armenian American, travelled to that country after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake leveled towns and cities and killed over 25,000 people in 1988. He and his colleagues, with the assistance of the Armenian Relief Society, established a pair of psychiatric clinics that provided treatment to survivors of the earthquake for more than two decades.

Twelve multigenerational families in northern Armenia gave permission to have their blood samples sent to UCLA, where Dr. Goenjian and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of 200 men and women in search of genetic clues to psychiatric vulnerability.

In April 2012, research by his team revealed that that PTSD was more common in survivors who carried two gene variants associated with depression. Now, along with UCLA Fielding School of Public Health adjunct assistant professor of epidemiology Julia Bailey, Dr. Goenjian focused on two genes (COMT and TPH-2) known to play key roles in the function of the brain.

COMT, the researchers explain, is an enzyme that degrades the neurotransmitter dopamine, which controls the reward and pleasure center of the brain and helps regulate mood. Too much or too little dopamine can influence various neurological and psychological disorders, they said.

TPH-2, on the other hand, controls the production of the brain hormone serotonin, which regulates mood, sleep and alertness. All three are affected by PTSD, and a type of antidepressant known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) target the hormone to treat depression. An increasing number of doctors are prescribing them to treat PTSD, the study authors noted.

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Two genes linked to predisposition for PTSD