Woman charged in death of pregnant woman

HILLSBORO, Ore. – Authorities in Oregon say they have arrested a woman after a newborn she claimed was hers died and the body of a woman who had been pregnant was found at her home.

Washington County officials said 27-year-old Korena Elaine Roberts was being held without bail Sunday on a murder charge.

The county sheriff’s office said police went to a home in Hillsboro on Friday after a report that a newborn was not breathing.

Officials said Roberts told them she had recently delivered the baby boy.

Roberts and the child were taken to a hospital, where doctors were unable to revive the boy. Authorities said the doctors also determined that Roberts had not given birth.

Officers searched Roberts’ home and found the body of 21-year-old Heather Megan Snively in a crawl space.

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Arab world sees positive shift in Obama speech

CAIRO – Muslim shopkeepers, students and even radical groups such as Hamas praised President Barack Obama’s address Thursday as a positive shift in U.S. attitude and tone. But Arabs and Muslims of all political stripes said they want him to turn his words into action — particularly in standing up to Israel.

Obama impressed Muslims with his humility and respect and they were thrilled by his citing of Quranic verses. Aiming to repair ties with the Muslim world that had been strained under his predecessor George W. Bush, he opened with the traditional greeting in Arabic “Assalamu Aleikum,” which drew applause from his audience at Cairo University.

His address from Cairo touched on many themes Muslims wanted to hear in the highly anticipated speech broadcast live across much of the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. He insisted Palestinians must have a state and said continued building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not legitimate. He assured them the U.S. would pull all it troops out of Iraq by 2012 and promised no permanent U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

“He spoke about the issues I wanted to hear about — the Palestinians, Iraq and Islam. I think he was very good,” said Hisham Deeb who spoke with Tom Aspell, an NBC News correspondent, in Cairo.

Deeb and other men gathered inside the Wadi Nile Cafe, as they quietly watched the speech that was translated simultaneously into Arabic. Men nodded their heads of approval when Obama said, “I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

When the speech ended there was no applause or overt celebration inside the cafe, yet each man returned to their daily life with his own Obama impression.

“One feels hope in the new American administration,” said Mohammed Mahrous, another Wadi customer.

Battle against militants
But at the top of his priorities, Obama put the battle against violent extremism. And he was faulted for not apologizing for U.S. wars in Muslim countries.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said there was change in tone. But he complained that Obama did not specifically note the suffering in Gaza following the three-week Israeli incursion earlier this year that killed more than 1,000 Palestinians.

“There is a change between the language of President Obama and previous speeches made by George Bush,” he said. “So all we can say is that there is a difference in the statements, and the statements of today did not include a mechanism that can translate his wishes and views into actions,” said Barhoum, whose group the U.S. considers a terrorist organization.

A joint statement by eight Syrian-based radical Palestinian factions, including Hamas, was harsher in its assessment.

“Obama’s speech is an attempt to mislead people and create more illusions to improve America’s aggressive image in the Arab and Islamic world,” it said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate who rivals Hamas for leadership of the Palestinians, welcomed Obama’s words.

“The part of Obama’s speech regarding the Palestinian issue is an important step under new beginnings,” his spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh said. “It shows there is a new and different American policy toward the Palestinian issue.”

Before the speech, many Muslims said one of the things they wanted to hear most from Obama was respect for Islam. And many said he delivered that in his speech.

“It was very good of him to address Muslims by quoting from holy Quran, something I did not expect in his speech,” said Osama Ahmed Sameh, a 45-year-old Iraqi government employee at the Ministry of Higher Education.

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Boy finds $8,160 stuffed in charred backpack

ALTON, N.H. – A 10-year-old boy picking up litter in New Hampshire found a charred backpack stuffed with more than $8,000 in cash.

Arie Johnston of Dover was helping his grandmother with her town’s annual roadside cleanup when he spotted the backpack Saturday. He told Foster’s Daily Democrat his first thought was that a person had been killed for the money.

Arie’s grandmother called the Alton town clerk, who identified the bag’s owner based on the passports and other documents found with the money. The owner was a woman who had lived across the street until a fire damaged her apartment last year.

Police say the woman has since moved to Maine and has asked that her belongings be given to her sister who lives in Alton. Arie’s grandmother says a reward may be coming.

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Drug combos may increase breast cancer risk

According to MSNBC news in ORLANDO, Florida – Breast cancer survivors risk having their disease come back if they use certain antidepressants while also taking the cancer prevention drug tamoxifen, worrisome new research shows.

About 500,000 women in the United States take tamoxifen, which cuts in half the chances of a breast cancer recurrence. Many of them also take antidepressants for hot flashes, because hormone pills aren’t considered safe after breast cancer.

Doctors have long known that some antidepressants and other medicines can lower the amount of tamoxifen’s active form in the bloodstream. But whether this affects cancer risk is unknown.

The new study, reported Saturday at a cancer conference in Florida, is the largest to look at the issue. It found that using these interfering drugs — including Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft — can virtually wipe out the benefit tamoxifen provides.

Many doctors question the magnitude of harm from combining these medicines, and a second, smaller study suggests it may not be very large.

But the bottom line is the same: Not all antidepressants pose this problem, and women should talk to their doctors about which ones are best.

“There are other alternatives we can consider” that are safer, said Dr. Eric Winer, breast cancer chief at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston.

He had no role in the study, which was done by Medco Health Solutions Inc., a large insurance benefits manager. Researchers used members’ medical records to identify 353 women taking tamoxifen plus other drugs that might interfere with it, and 945 women taking tamoxifen alone. Those taking a drug combo did so for about a year on average.

Next, researchers checked to see how many were treated for second cancers in the following two years. Breast cancer recurred in about 7 percent of women on tamoxifen alone, and in 14 percent of women also taking other drugs that could interfere — mainly the antidepressants Paxil and Prozac, and, to a lesser extent, Zoloft.

If women want to take an antidepressant, “you probably want to stay away from those three,” said Medco’s chief medical officer, Dr. Robert Epstein.

No greater breast cancer risk was seen in women taking the antidepressants Celexa, Lexapro or Luvox with tamoxifen, and there are reasons to think that other antidepressants may be safe as well, Epstein said.

A second study led by Dr. Vincent Dezentj of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands found little risk from combining tamoxifen and popular antidepressants. However, only 150 women in the study took such combos for more than two months, and they were compared to women taking combos for a shorter time — not to women using tamoxifen alone.

The Dutch and Medco studies were presented at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has been considering a change to tamoxifen’s label to warn about the antidepressants drugs and a gene variation some women have that can make tamoxifen less effective. An advisory panel unanimously recommended a change in 2006, but the agency is still considering it.

“This is a very controversial area,” said Dr. Claudine Isaacs, a breast specialist at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Until these data are absolutely clear, I would avoid drugs that impact on tamoxifen metabolism.”

Breast cancer is the most common major cancer in American women. More than 182,000 new cases were diagnosed last year, and it caused nearly 41,000 deaths.

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Diabetes soars in Asia especially in the young

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Diabetes is spiraling in Asia but — unlike the West — those affected are relatively young and less likely to be struggling with obesity, a new study shows.

Research published in the Journal of American Medical Association on Wednesday said the disease has turned into a global problem, with the number of victims expected to grow from 240 million in 2007 to 380 million in 2025.

More than 60 percent of those will be in Asia, the world’s fastest growing region, with low- and middle-income countries hardest hit.

India will see its numbers grow from 40 million to nearly 70 million; China 39 million to 59 million; and Bangladesh 3.8 million to 7.4 million, the authors wrote, citing figures from the International Diabetes Federation. Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and others will also see their figures skyrocket.

Frank Hu, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, noted the disease is associated with serious complications such as heart disease, stroke and renal failures — all of which are expensive to treat.

Without strong government policy, education and good clinical care, Asia’s escalating epidemic could “erase economic gains made in recent decades,” said Hu, one of the authors.

Trends of diabetes in the region are influenced by everything from genetic makeup and cultural differences to smoking and degrees of urbanization, the JAMA study showed. But the most startling findings — which tended to vary from country to country — related to body mass and age.

Being overweight has long been seen as a major factor leading to type 2 diabetes in nations across Europe and North America.

But while obesity rates are much lower in Asia, the rapid pace of economic development, changing diets and more sedentary lifestyles have resulted in expanding waistlines — seen as particularly detrimental to this disease. It is around the abdomen that fat stores excess energy and releases chemicals that control metabolism and the use of insulin.

So while people from Japan in the east to Pakistan in the west generally have lower body mass indexes, figures based on height to weight ratios, the study said, “they can have a similar or even higher prevalence of diabetes than Western countries.”

Stephen Corbett, a professor at the school of Public Health at the University of Sydney, said all developing countries that are starting to have relatively stable food supplies — and Western lifestyles — are seeing diabetes in epidemic proportions.

“For thousands of years, most people in China, India, Indonesia, were subsistence farmers,” he said, noting it was a marginal existence for most, with food shortages often occurring several months a year.

“It took 150 or 200 years for Europeans to make the dietary transition that happened in Asia in the last 40 to 50 years,” said Corbett, who is not connected with the study. “I think that diabetes epidemic is a direct result of that.”

The study also noted while the disease most often affects people between the ages of 60 and 79 in North America and Europe, the age in Asia tends to be disproportionally lower, ranging between 20 years to 59.

This appears to be the result of both low birthrates and over-nutrition in later life.

The report says this may be partly because Asian women are two-to three-times as likely to have gestational diabetes as their white counterparts.

“Their offspring exhibit early features of metabolic syndrome, thus setting up a vicious cycle of diabetes begetting diabetes,” Hu and the other authors wrote.

The findings were based on analysis of hundreds of articles, data and studies published between January 1980 and March 2009.

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Mother charged with murder in boy’s drowning

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Refugees survive on food ‘cows won’t eat’

JALOZAI REFUGEE CAMP, Pakistan (CNN) — It’s an exodus on an almost biblical scale. And it has produced a mosaic of plastic and canvas that is now home to more than 93,000 people — with more arriving each day.

This is Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar, suddenly almost a city in its own right as thousands flee the violence raging between the Pakistani army and Taliban fighters.

The United Nations estimates that it’s the biggest movement of people in Pakistan since the country was formed in 1947. Officials say up to 1.8 million people have been forced from their homes.

Food is available at this camp — fruit traders work their way through the avenues of tents. But people here can’t afford to buy much.

They make bread with flour handed out by the United Nations, but they say it’s not enough. “It’s very difficult, there’s lots of jostling,” says Mehboob Shah, a man at the camp. When there is food, he says, “it’s very poor quality — even the cows won’t eat it.”

Sar Bari Khan arrived 15 days ago with his wife and three children. He says his family walked almost 62 miles to escape the fighting. They had to leave his father behind.

There are eight field hospitals in this camp. On a recent morning, 380 new patients registered for treatment — most of them women and children, suffering from diarrhea and heat stroke. Some have signs of mental trauma.

“They are complaining of fear, phobias, palpitations and all symptoms seem to have started since they arrive in this camp,” said Abid Farooqi, with the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences.

Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik underlined the seriousness of the situation. “I feel that this is even worse than the earthquake in Kashmir,” he said, referring to the 2005 disaster. He noted that most of the people are from an area with relatively cold weather, and are unprepared for the heat here. Officials, he said, “are making all possible arrangements” to help.

And on the edge of the camp, workers are clearing the ground for more tents. There is no sign of this influx ending any time.

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Elephants suffering in Mali drought

 The bodies of young elephants covered in the brown dirt of dried-up wells tell a heartrending story.

Reaching desperately for drops of water, they had lowered their trunks, toppled in, remained trapped and died in Mali’s scorching heat.

The “last desert elephants in West Africa” have “adapted to survive in the harsh conditions” they face, Save the Elephants said Monday. But now, the group says, conditions have gone from bad to worse, and they are living “on the margin of what is ecologically viable.”

Save the Elephants distributed new pictures Monday that depict the devastating drought and the struggle for survival in Mali, one of the poorest nations in the world.

“Six elephants have already been found dead,” the group wrote in a news release accompanying the photos.

“Four others, including three calves, were recently extracted from a shallow well into which they had fallen when searching for water. Only the largest survived.”

The youngest are in the most danger, since their smaller trunks can’t reach deep into the few remaining wells, the group said.

The worst drought years is threatening the existence of the “last desert elephants in West Africa,” the northernmost herds in the continent, Save the Elephants said.

The animals, now numbering only about 350 to 450, have been called “the last elephants of Timbuktu,” said Jake Wall, a scientist with Save the Elephants. But they’re south of Timbuktu, Wall told CNN in a phone interview from Bamako, Mali. “We tend to refer to them as ‘the last Sahelian elephants.

Each year, the elephants trek farther on the fringes of the Sahara to find water. They have the longest migration route of any in the continent, traveling “in a counterclockwise circle” of about 700 kilometers (435 miles), Save the Elephants said.

The images are signs of the crisis gripping the northwest African nation.

The U.N. Development Programme ranks Mali near the bottom of its Human Development Index. It cites a 56 percent poverty rate in the country, with nearly a third of the population unlikely to live past age 40, and an illiteracy rate of 77 percent.

The World Food Programme says the majority of infant deaths in Mali are due to malnutrition.

The drought, combined with soaring temperatures, has also led to deaths of cattle, Save the Elephants said. “The stench of rotting corpses fills the air, and what little water remains is putrid and undrinkable by all standards.”

In areas where the elephants live and search for water, “the normal peaceful coexistence between the elephants and herdsmen is starting to break down and giving way to conflict over access to water,” Wall said.

There is some hope for the weeks and months ahead. “We’re hoping the rains start in June, and that will allow the elephants to start drinking out of shallow ponds until the really heavy rains begin” in July or August, Wall said.

But “urgent action” is needed in the interim “to secure water for the elephants,” Wall’s group said in its news release.

Save the Elephants, which focuses on helping elephant populations worldwide, said it has partnered with a foundation and the Mali government in its fundraising appeal.

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Arrests at Moscow gay parade ahead of Eurovision Song Contest

Dozens of gay and lesbian rights activists planning a parade in southwestern Moscow Saturday have been detained, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.

The arrests included Nikolai Alexeyev, a prominent gay activist in Russia, and his associate Nikolai Bayev, Interfax said, adding that more people trickling into the location were being arrested without explanation.

Officials of Moscow’s gay community had announced earlier plans to rally at Novopushkinsky Park in central Moscow, Interfax said.

The arrests came ahead of Saturday night’s Eurovision Song Contest, which is being held in Moscow. The contest has a strong following among the gay and lesbian community.

Journalists from various countries gathered at the scene, as police barricaded the park with metal bars. Trucks with soldiers onboard were parked on nearby streets, Interfax said.

UK gay human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, in a statement on his Web site ahead of the march, said it was being held to coincide with the final of the Eurovision Song Contest.

“This parade is in defense of human rights. We are defending the often violated human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Russians. They want legal protection against discrimination and hate crimes. I support their cause.

“Not all Russians are homophobic, but many are. Gay Russians suffer queer-bashing attacks, blackmail, verbal abuse and discrimination in education, housing and employment. This shames the great Russian nation.”

The Eurovision Song Contest, which began in 1956, sees singers and groups from a short list of European nations perform a specially written song before telephone votes from each nation decide the winner.

In western Europe, the contest is regard as a light entertainment spectacular, with a strong following among the gay and lesbian community. Many fans dress up, hold parties and gather round the TV to watch the three-hour-plus televised marathon.

In recent years, however, eastern European nations, which take the contest much more seriously, have come to dominate.

The contest is also known for its political edge, as nations either give zero points to traditional enemies — or, if they are enjoying good relations, the maximum number of points, as a sign of friendship.

The most famous winners of the contest were ABBA, who came to attention as the Swedish entry with “Waterloo” in 1974. In 1988, Celine Dion won the contest while singing on behalf of Switzerland. The dance show Riverdance first came to attention as an interval act when the contest was held in Dublin, Ireland, in 1994.

The organizers of the contest estimate it is watched by 100 million people worldwide.

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41 killed in attack on Turkish wedding party

(CNN) — An attack Monday on a wedding party in Turkey’s southeastern Mardin province killed at least 41 people, according to the office of Mardin’s governor, Mehmet Kiliclar.

Three people were critically wounded, Kiliclar’s office said.

Assailants attacked the party in the village of Mazidagi Bilge with bombs and automatic weapons, according to the Cihan news agency.

Police blocked access to the village while they investigated.

Mardin Mayor Besir Ayanoglu told Turkish television network NTV that the incident was not terrorism-related.

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