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Medici philosopher's mystery death is solved By Malcolm Moore, Rome Correspondent Last Updated: 2:35am GMT 07/02/2008 After 500 years, one of Renaissance Italy's most enduring murder mysteries has been solved by forensic scientists. Ever since Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a mystical and mercurial philosopher at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, suddenly became sick and died in 1494, it has been rumoured that foul play was involved. Scientists display the bones of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Pico's fame has faded, but he was a celebrated figure at the Medici court. He gained notoriety when, at the age of 23, he...

Navajo Nation residents have long been exposed to uranium, arsenic and other heavy metals in drinking water and soil. Now the “Thinking Zinc” clinical trial led by University of New Mexico researchers is studying whether dietary zinc supplements can help repair metals-induced damage in Navajo participants. “We know from molecular and cellular and animal studies that both arsenic and uranium can displace zinc in proteins that function in immune responses, as well as DNA repair processes,” said Dr. Debra MacKenzie, deputy director of UNM’s Community Environmental Health Program. “And these are two areas that we’ve seen where metals can cause...

Federal authorities arrested a 27-year-old accused white supremacist who allegedly planned to bomb a synagogue in Colorado over the weekend. Richard Holzer had brought a knife and a mask to a motel room and was examining inert pipe bombs prepared by undercover agents moments before he was arrested late Friday night, according to a criminal complaint. He also said he paid a "witch doctor" $70 to put arsenic in the water pipes of the synagogue and "hex" the place last year, according to the complaint.

When you pay premium prices, you expect a premium product — but that’s not necessarily the case with bottled water. California nonprofit Center for Environmental Health has revealed that water bottle brands Peñafiel, owned by Keurig Dr. Pepper, and Starkey, owned by Whole Foods, contain levels of highly toxic arsenic that are above the legal limit. The United States Environmental Protection Agency says that long-term exposure to arsenic can lead to reproductive harm, circulatory, nervous system and disorders and cancer. The Centers for Disease Control also note an increased risk of diabetes and hypertension. Other symptoms of arsenic poisoning include...

The Carlin-type gold deposits in Nevada, U.S., are the origin of five percent of the global production and 75 percent of the U.S. production of gold. In these deposits, gold does not occur in the form of nuggets or veins, but is hidden—together with arsenic—in pyrite, also known as "fool's gold." A team of scientists from the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam—German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ has now shown experimentally, for the first time that the concentration of gold directly depends on the content of arsenic in the pyrite. The results were published in the journal Science Advances. In the Earth's...

Pila'a, Kauai -- Last Sunday morning, more than a dozen cars were parked along a six-foot wall built around Mark Zuckerberg's vast retreat on the northeast corner of Kauai, a small, remote Hawaiian island that's home to 70,000 people. The gate, which is almost always locked shut, was open, so you could walk right past the Facebook-blue sign that reads "PRIVATE PROPERTY Thank you for not trespassing." The lava rock wall, which Zuckerberg started building in 2016, inflamed some of his neighbors. It's built on a bluff a mile from the ocean and now stretches for nearly a mile along...

...author Jeff Guinn, who wrote the 2017 book The Road to Jonestown. ...Guinn expressed some regret that the Jonestown massacre has become such a ubiquitous reference point, inspiring such oft-heard phrases as, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” “First of all, it wasn’t Kool-Aid,” he notes. “And second, let’s face what the connotation is; it’s used to mean, ‘Don’t be a mindless zombie who just automatically follows orders from an obviously demented leader.’... ...We spoke with Guinn about the details that are often left out when Jonestown is discussed, and what parallels he sees between Jim Jones and a leader like Donald...

A host of historic artifacts, including a lock of Napoleon’s hair, will be up for auction in the U.K. on Saturday. The unusual object is in an early 19th-century composite locket frame with a lock of hair from Napoleon’s wife, Empress Josephine. “These are remarkable history,” auctioneer Andrew Aldridge of Henry Aldridge & Son told Fox News. A manuscript note accompanying the locket frame states: “The Emperor Napoleon's hair cut off after his death given to the Countess of Ranfurly by Madame La Croix housekeeper to the Empress Josephine from the time when she was Madame De Beauharnais to her...

(Javonnie McCoy and Atlanta attorney Catherine Bernard after his acquittal) Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his Middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine. The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison. The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Ga., may have been due to a...

Nearly 200 years after Jane Austen‘s untimely death, crime novelist Lindsay Ashford has come up with a new explanation: arsenic poisoning. Austen, the English author of such classic novels as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility,” died in 1817 at age 41. Her death has been attributed to everything from cancer to Addison’s disease. But Ashford, who moved to Austen’s village of Chawton three years ago and started writing her new crime novel in the former home of Austen’s brother, stumbled across another possibility — that Austen died of arsenic poisoning. ... Ashford recognized that Austen’s symptoms could be...

If you live in a place where recreational pot use is legal, you’re probably wondering whether you need to start worrying about getting prosecuted for it. The answer is probably not, at least according to initial indications from the dozen or so U.S. attorneys general who get to make that call. [...] Of the 13 U.S. attorneys presiding in the eight states with laws making recreational use legal, several have indicated they’re interested only in going after marijuana distributors or users with ties to crime or violence. [...]

Dame Sally Davies has written to all GPs and pharmacies to ensure they are prescribing the correct drugs after the rise of "super-gonorrhoea" in Leeds. Her warning comes after concerns were raised that some patients were not getting both of the antibiotics needed to clear the infection. Sexual health doctors said gonorrhoea was "rapidly" developing resistance. A highly drug-resistant strain of gonorrhoea was detected in the north of England in March.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Anger was mounting Monday at the federal Environmental Protection Agency over the massive spill of millions of gallons of toxic sludge from a Colorado gold mine that has already fouled three major waterways and may be three times bigger than originally reported. An 80-mile length of mustard-colored water -- laden with arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum and cadmium -- is working its way south toward New Mexico and Utah, following Wednesday's accidental release from the Gold King Mine, near Durango, when an EPA cleanup crew destabilized a dam of loose rock lodged in the mine. The crew was...

Much of a Pre-Columbian population in ancient Chile was poisoned by arsenic, say researchers. According to a recent study conducted by Jaime Swift of the Australian National University and colleagues from several other institutions in Australia and Chile, a significant part of a pre-Columbian population in northern Chile suffered from slow poisoning due to the intake of arsenic from water sources. The researchers performed plasma mass spectrometry trace element analysis of human bone and tooth samples from 21 burials excavated at the site of Caleta Vitor on the Pacific coast of northern Chile, a part of the ultra-dry Atacama Desert...

The wines named in the lawsuit are primarily inexpensive white or blush varietals including moscato, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc.Many popular, inexpensive brands of wine made and distributed in California, including Trader Joe's famed "Two Buck Chuck," contain illegal and dangerously high levels of poisonous inorganic arsenic, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles. Plaintiffs Doris Charles, Alvin Jones, Jason Peltier and Jennifer Peltier allege in their complaint that dozens of wineries are violating state law by knowingly producing, marketing and selling arsenic contaminated wine and failing to warn consumers about the potential danger. The suit, filed in...

A lawsuit is expected to be filed in California today over the amount of arsenic in some of the best-selling wines in the country. CBS News reports laboratory testing by Denver's BeverageGrades found some wines have as much as time times the maximum level of arsenic the Environmental Protection Agency allows for drinking water. The EPA doesn't regulate wine as it does water, and there are no federal labeling requirements to disclose what's in wine.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgian prosecutors said on Thursday they had detained a man of Iraqi nationality after a series of letters containing a nerve gas ingredient were sent to the prime minister's office and the U.S. and British embassies. A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office told a news conference the 45-year-old man was arrested late on Wednesday in the western Belgian town of Deinze. Two postal workers were taken to hospital after being exposed to the chemicals in the letters at mail depots. No one else was hurt by the 10 letters sent to a variety of targets, including...

June 4 — By Gilles Castonguay BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgian investigators found a nerve gas ingredient in letters addressed to the Belgian prime minister's office, and the U.S., British and Saudi Arabian embassies, officials said on Wednesday. Two postal workers were briefly hospitalized after being exposed to the chemicals. The brownish-yellow powder contained phenarsazine chloride, an arsenic derivative used in nerve gas, as well as hydrazine, an agent used as a rocket propellant, said Health Ministry spokeswoman Anne-Francoise Gally said. In the amounts contained in the letters, the two chemicals are not life threatening, but can cause irritation to the...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's first emission standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants. In its ruling, the court rejected state and industry challenges to rules designed to clean up chromium, arsenic, acid gases, nickel, cadmium as well as mercury and other dangerous toxins. The EPA’s determination in 2000 that regulating emission standards is appropriate and necessary, and the agency’s reaffirmation of that determination in 2012, “are amply supported by EPA’s findings regarding the health effects of mercury exposure,” said the court. Congress did not specify what...

I don’t know of any other food that harms us more than rice, which despite its many benefits is unhealthy if consumed in large quantities. There are only a few countries in the world whose people eat rice in large quantities like Saudis, and they include people in countries in South Asia and in Japan and Indonesia. But these people eat rice in a healthy way - either boiled or steamed. We, on the other hand, eat rice in an unhealthy way by preparing it in oil, butter or ghee and other unhealthy ingredients, all of which are high in...