CALL FOR MALALA YOUSAFZAI

Nobel Peace Prize call for Malala Yousafzai

A 15-year-old education campaigner shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in Pakistan is the subject of a petition signed by more than 60,000 people calling for her to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Malala Yousafzai was flown to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, after being shot on a school bus in October.
Her father Zianuddin Yousafzai said she wanted to thank well-wishers for helping her "survive and stay strong".

Weight Training Program Safe for Pregnant Women

Weight Training Program Safe for Pregnant Women

Despite decades of doctors’ reluctance to recommend weight training to pregnant women, a study has found that a supervised, low-to-moderate intensity weight training program is safe and beneficial.
The research measured progression in the amount of weight used, changes in resting blood pressure and potential adverse side effects in 32 pregnant women over a 12-week period. After a total of 618 exercise sessions, none of the pregnant women in the study experienced a musculoskeletal injury.
“Doctors often have been unwilling to prescribe weightlifting, in part, because there was little evidence that it is safe and effective,” said study author Patrick O’Connor. “I think that the appropriate conclusion of this study is that the adoption of a supervised, low-to-moderate intensity weight training exercise program can be safe for women with a low-risk pregnancy.”
The 32 participating women did a series of six exercises twice a week that targeted muscles that play an important role in back pain and function. The group increased the amount of weight lifted in all of the exercises by an average of 36 percent over the 12-week period. “The data shows women can increase their strength even though they are pregnant and have never done weight training before,” O’Connor said. “And their body is changing over the 12-week period as the baby grows.”
One reason physicians have been reluctant to prescribe weight training to pregnant women is that they produce high amounts of a hormone called relaxin, which makes connective tissue become more lax so that the body is ready to give birth, explained O’Connor. Increased laxity could be associated with orthopedic injury. The research focused on low-to-moderate exercise so as to avoid injury associated with increased relaxin in the body, said O’Connor.
Thirteen incidents of potentially problematic symptoms were reported after the 618 workout sessions, all of which involved headache, pelvic pain and dizziness. Some pelvic pain can be expected in pregnant women with back pain, said O’Connor. “The one thing you have to be a little careful about is dizziness,” he added.Rates of dizziness went down after the first few workouts, as the women learned to lift weights while maintaining proper breathing techniques for exercise, he said.
The researchers also monitored blood pressure over the course of the study. “We wanted to see if a weight training program would lower blood pressure, which would be beneficial, or if potentially on the other side it would raise blood pressure, which would be of concern to a pregnant woman,” said O’Connor. People often experience a small reduction in blood pressure immediately after a workout, but the researchers found no change in the 32 pregnant women after each individual session or after the entire 12-week program. “So the weight training program was neither good nor bad for blood pressure,” he said.
Now that O’Connor and his colleagues have provided evidence that a supervised, low-to-moderate intensity weight training program is safe and effective, he plans to study whether or not the weight-training program can help reduce back pain in pregnant women.

Fertility 'predicted by mother's age at menopause'

Fertility peaks between 18 and 31 years of age, say experts.

Women may be able to better gauge their own fertility based on the age their mother went through the menopause, a study has concluded.

Women whose mothers had an early menopause had far fewer eggs in their ovaries than those whose mothers had a later menopause, a Danish team found.
Women with fewer viable eggs have fewer chances to conceive.
The study, of 527 women aged between 20 and 40, was reported in the journal Human Reproduction.
Ovarian reserve Researchers looked at two accepted methods to assess how many eggs the women had - known as their "ovarian reserve" - levels of anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) and antral follicle count (AFC).

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Currently there is no test that can accurately predict fertility”

Dr Valentine Akande British Fertility Society

Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. These are released from the ovary cyclically, usually one every month after puberty, until menopause.

The AFC and AMH give readings doctors an idea of how many yet-to-be released eggs remain in the ovary.
In the study of female healthcare workers, the researchers found both AMH and AFC declined faster in women whose mothers had an early menopause (before the age of 45) compared to women whose mothers had a late menopause (after the age of 55).
Average AMH levels declined by 8.6%, 6.8% and 4.2% a year in the groups of women with mothers who had early, normal or late menopauses, respectively.
A similar pattern was seen for AFC, with annual declines of 5.8%, 4.7% and 3.2% in the same groups, respectively.
Start young Past research suggests there is about 20 years between a woman's fertility starting to decline and the onset of menopause. So a woman who enters the menopause at 45 may have experienced a decline in her fertility at the age of 25.
Lead researcher Dr Janne Bentzen said: "Our findings support the idea that the ovarian reserve is influenced by hereditary factors. However, long-term follow-up studies are required."
Also, having fewer eggs does not necessarily mean that the woman will go on to have fewer babies.
Dr Valentine Akande, a consultant gynaecologist and spokesman for the British Fertility Society, said the findings were helpful, but that women should not be overly concerned if their mother did have an early menopause.
"There is a huge amount of variation among women. Some will have more eggs and some will have less.
"Whilst it is assumed that lower egg number is associated with more challenges at getting pregnant this study did not look at that.
"Currently there is no test that can accurately predict fertility.
"The advice remains the same - the younger you start trying for a baby the more likely you are to be successful."
He said, in general, women are most fertile between the ages of 18 and 31.

Bin Laden unit Seal Team Six punished over video game

It is not clear what military secrets have been divulged

Seven US Navy Seals have been disciplined for revealing secrets during work as paid consultants on a video game, officials say.

They received reprimand letters and had half of their pay docked for two months for work on Medal of Honor: Warfighter.
The active-duty troops reportedly include one member of the team that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
The game, published by Electronic Arts, does not recreate the Bin Laden mission but purports to show realistic raids.
Those punished were two Senior Chief Special Operators and five Chief Special Operators.
They were charged with violation of orders, misuse of command gear, dereliction of duty and disclosure of classified material.
The seven troops worked for two days during the spring and summer on the recently released video game,
The game's maker has boasted that real commandos, both on active duty and retired, were involved with the process of designing the game to make it as realistic as possible.

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We do not tolerate deviations from the policies that govern who we are and what we do”

Rear Adm Garry Bonelli Dep Cmdr of Naval Special Warfare Command

It is not clear what classified secrets were divulged by the troops while they were consulting for Electronic Arts. But they reportedly used material from the US Navy.

"We do not tolerate deviations from the policies that govern who we are and what we do as sailors in the United States Navy," Deputy Commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, Rear Admiral Garry Bonelli told the Associated Press.
He added that the disciplinary action would "send a clear message throughout our force that we are and will be held to a high standard of accountability".
Four other Navy Seals are also under investigation, US reports said. They are said to have left Team Six but are still said to be on active duty.
Unit in demand The Navy Seals usually respect an unwritten code of staying out of the public eye.
But the BBC's Jane Little, in Washington, says Seal Team Six is now a household name, celebrated on T-shirts and immortalised in film.
The unit was the subject of a recent TV movie about the Bin Laden raid in Pakistan and will feature in another film, about the rescue of a ship's captain kidnapped by Somali pirates.
Meanwhile, another member of the team on the Bin Laden raid wrote a book, No Easy Day, giving his account of that operation.
Some details of Bin Laden's death offered in the book differed from the official version of events.
The content of the book was not reviewed first by the Pentagon, and officials warned that criminal charges could have resulted from the improper disclosure of secret information.

 Barack Obama

President Barack Obama has been re-elected for a second term as president of the United States, beating his rival, Republican Mitt Romney.

Polls predicted a very tight race, but Mr Obama managed to secure the required 270 electoral college votes - and more - before the clock struck midnight on the east coast.
Mr Obama has one big thing going for him: voters seem to like him personally, and many remain loyal to him even while frustrated by the nation's lingering hangover from the recession.
His campaign team appears to have enticed many of his 2008 supporters back to the polls, while also persuading undecided voters that Mr Romney was not the man they wanted to lead the country.
Oratory, charm, background Mr Obama took office amid one of the worst recessions in decades. And as the nation went back to the polls, the US unemployment rate hovered stubbornly just below 8%.

Barack Obama's CV

• Born 4 Aug 1961 in Hawaii
• Studied law at Harvard
• Worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago
• Served in Illinois state senate 1996-2004
• Elected to the US Senate in 2004
• Bested Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic presidential nomination
• Won the 2008 presidential election, defeating Republican Senator John McCain

The Democratic Party suffered historic losses in the mid-term polls in November 2010, with the Republicans emerging energised and more determined than ever to promote their conservative agenda and stymie the president's plans.

Mitt Romney and the Republicans hoped that Mr Obama would be unable to inspire the same enthusiasm that carried him to the White House and that independent voters would dump him amid a still-lagging economy.
Barack Hussein Obama made history on 4 November 2008 when he easily defeated Republican rival John McCain to become the first black president of the United States.
Aged 47 when he was inaugurated, Mr Obama was also the first urban president since Harry Truman, and the first president born in Hawaii.

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President-elect Barack Obama's 2008 victory speech

And unlike John McCain, George Bush and Bill Clinton, his background was not steeped in the Vietnam War or the cultural conflicts of the 1960s.
During his challenging first term in office, Mr Obama and his fellow Democrats scored several historic achievements.
They overcame stiff Republican opposition to pass an economic stimulus programme, overhauled the US healthcare system, laid down new rules for Wall Street and the banking industry, and rescued the US auto industry from collapse.
Later, he and the Democrats overturned a two-decade-old law banning openly gay Americans from serving in the US military.
Wielding his presidential authority, Mr Obama also acted without the consent of Congress to grant temporary legal status to some young illegal immigrants brought to the US as children.
International upbringing Mr Obama despatched a team of commandos to kill Osama Bin Laden, brought the US war in Iraq to a close and struck a new nuclear arms treaty with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

A White House image of President Obama in the situation room as US commandos killed Bin Laden

Early in his presidency he escalated the US-led war in Afghanistan. But Mr Obama has since brought home the 33,000 extra troops he sent to that theatre of conflict.
He also committed the US to turn the security mission over to Afghan troops by the end of 2014, in an attempt to end a war that began more than a decade ago.
Mr Obama was born in 1961 and named after his father, a Kenyan intellectual who met the future president's mother, Ann, a white teenager from Kansas, while studying at the University of Hawaii.
When Mr Obama was a toddler, his father abandoned the family and the couple divorced. Father and son were to meet only once more, during a brief visit to Hawaii in 1971 by the elder Barack Obama. He died in a car crash in 1982 in Nairobi.
When Mr Obama was six, his mother married an Indonesian man and the family moved to Jakarta. Then known as "Barry", Mr Obama later moved back to Hawaii, where he was raised mainly by his grandparents.
Mr Obama's upbringing in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country by population, and his Kenyan-Muslim heritage fuelled right-wing conspiracy theories that he was not born in the US, or that he was a secret Muslim.
In 2008 and 2011, Mr Obama produced two separate copies of his birth certificate to prove that he had been born in the US state of Hawaii.
After graduating from Columbia University in New York, Mr Obama worked for three years as a community organiser in poor neighbourhoods in Chicago.
He then attended Harvard Law School, becoming the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
While working at a Chicago law firm, he met Michelle Robinson. The couple married in 1992 and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha; the Obamas became the first couple since Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter to live in the White House with young children.
After Harvard, Mr Obama returned to Chicago to practise civil rights law, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination.

"Barry" Obama only met his father once after Barack Obama Sr left the family to study at Harvard

He joined the law faculty at the University of Chicago, where he was lauded as a popular teacher and an exceptional legal thinker.
In 1995 he published his first book, Dreams from My Father, a memoir, and the following year he was elected to the Illinois state senate.
As a state senator, he spoke out strongly against the coming Iraq war, a position that later helped him win early support in the Democratic primary race.
Mr Obama tried to run for Congress in 2000, but was thrashed by the incumbent in a Democratic primary.
But four years later he was back, running for the US Senate. He won that campaign after electrifying the Democratic National Convention with a speech about self-reliance, aspiration and national unity.
After his landslide election to the Senate a few months later, he became one of the most visible figures in Washington, and soon published a second best-selling book, a politics-and-policy tract entitled The Audacity of Hope.

On Capitol Hill, Mr Obama established a liberal voting record, but also worked with Republican colleagues on HIV/Aids-education and prevention and nuclear weapons proliferation.
When he embarked on his presidential campaign in February 2007, he had been in the Senate only two years, and his opponents sought to cast him as ill-prepared for the presidency.
But his campaign excited millions of liberals - especially young voters - who were yearning for something new in Washington after two terms under George W Bush.
Mr Obama clinched the Democratic nomination after a long and gruelling battle against former first lady Hillary Clinton, whom he later appointed secretary of state.
Economic dissatisfaction His victory over septuagenarian Republican Senator John McCain was aided in part by public perceptions that Republican policies had contributed to the economic tumble - and that Mr McCain was not the candidate to steer the nation to recovery.
Now, Mr Obama and his team of strategists and advisers have secured four more years in office.
Employment figures have slowly climbed, the housing market is showing signs of a comeback and consumer confidence is up.
But there lingers among the electorate a widespread sense of unease and dissatisfaction with the way things are going.
Mr Romney, his vice-presidential running mate Paul Ryan, and the Republican Party had their campaign bolstered by big-spending patrons eager to despatch Mr Obama to political oblivion.
They blamed Mr Obama's policies for the ongoing economic malaise, and hoped voters would overcome their fondness for - and political investment in - him. The electorate judged otherwise.