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Pakistan has monitored more than 20 Britons believed to have spent time with radical militant groups and then returned to the UK, Sky News has learned.

WEDNESDAY, March 4 (HealthDay News) -- Many teens today, especially black teens, aren't getting enough of vitamin D, the so-called sunshine vitamin that is essential for cells to function, say researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to many chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, immune system problems and inflammatory diseases. "There is evidence that the levels of vitamin D we have been using in the past may have been too low," said lead researcher Dr. Sandy Saintonge, a fellow in general preventive medicine at Weill Cornell. Vitamin D is measured...

Vitamin D can help people live longer says study By Graham Tibbetts Last Updated: 1:34AM BST 24/06/2008 People with normal levels of vitamin D in their body are more likely to live longer than those with a deficiency, researchers have discovered. People with normal levels of vitamin D in their body are more likely to live longer than those with a deficiency, researchers have discovered. The vitamin, produced when the skin is exposed to sunlight, helps the body absorb calcium and is considered important for bone health. A team in Austria has found that it can also have an impact...

The claims have been sensational. Martin Mittelstaedt checks up on the research behind the hypeIn the summer of 1974, brothers Frank and Cedric Garland had a heretical brainwave. The young epidemiologists were watching a presentation on death rates from cancer county by county across the United States. As they sat in a lecture hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore looking at the colour-coded cancer maps, they noticed a striking pattern, with the map for colon cancer the most pronounced. Counties with high death rates were red; those with low rates were blue. Oddly, the nation was almost neatly divided...

A Ray Of Sunshine In The Fight Against Cancer: Vitamin D May HelpDalhousie's Dr. Lousie Parker holds a vitamin D pill. (Credit: Danny Abriel.) ScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2008) — It sounds too good to be true … a little inexpensive pill that could block the development of some cancers, strengthen bones, prevent multiple sclerosis and alleviate winter depression. But it’s not science fiction. The “new aspirin” could be Vitamin D. Just as we discovered that aspirin can guard against heart disease, Vitamin D could become a useful weapon in the fight against MS, osteoporosis, mild depression and one of the...

Vitamin D Deficiency Study Raises New Questions About Disease And Supplements ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2008) — Low blood levels of vitamin D have long been associated with disease, and the assumption has been that vitamin D supplements may protect against disease. However, this new research demonstrates that ingested vitamin D is immunosuppressive and that low blood levels of vitamin D may be actually a result of the disease process. Supplementation may make the disease worse. In a new report Trevor Marshall, Ph.D., professor at Australia’s Murdoch University School of Biological Medicine and Biotechnology, explains how increased vitamin D intake affects...

Lack Of Vitamin D May Increase Heart Disease Risk ScienceDaily (Jan. 8, 2008) — The same vitamin D deficiency that can result in weak bones now has been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, Framingham Heart Study researchers report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. "Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased cardiovascular risk, above and beyond established cardiovascular risk factors," said Thomas J. Wang, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. "The higher risk associated with vitamin D deficiency was particularly evident among individuals with high blood pressure." In a...

Can Vitamin D Save Your Life?New studies highlight the importance of the forgotten vitamin. by Mariana Gosnell For years doctors believed that vitamin D, sometimes called the “sunshine vitamin” because sunlight triggers the body to produce it, was important primarily in preventing rickets (a softening of the bones) in children. Once milk became fortified with vitamin D, rickets pretty much disappeared, and the problem of vitamin D deficiency seemed to have been solved. But according to Michael F. Holick, director of the Vitamin D, Skin, and Bone Research Laboratory at Boston University Medical Center, who has spent 30 years studying...

In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would...

The Antibiotic VitaminDeficiency in vitamin D may predispose people to infection Janet Raloff In April 2005, a virulent strain of influenza hit a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital for men that's midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. John J. Cannell, a psychiatrist there, observed with increasing curiosity as one infected ward after another was quarantined to limit the outbreak. Although 10 percent of the facility's 1,200 patients ultimately developed the flu's fever and debilitating muscle aches, none did in the ward that he supervised. WINTER WOES. Cold-weather wear and the sun's angle in the winter sky limit how much ultraviolet...

Lower vitamin D levels, more hip fractures HONOLULU, Sept. 21 (UPI) -- A U.S. researcher found an increased risk of hip fractures in women with low levels of vitamin D. Jane Cauley of the University of Pittsburgh evaluated patient data on 400 women enrolled in the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study Cohort, who had experienced hip fracture. "The risk of hip fractures was 77 percent higher among women whose 25 hydroxyvitamin D levels were at the lowest concentrations,"Cauley said in a statement. "This effect persisted even when we adjusted for other risk factors such as body mass index, family history...

[Lamm] told us in mid-June 2005: Yes, it is a speech I gave a year and a half ago in Washington D.C. It was a 5 minute speech, and I am amazed and gratified it has received so much coverage. He also passed along to us the following "revised version" of his speech: I HAVE A PLAN TO DESTROY AMERICA RICHARD D. LAMM I HAVE A SECRET PLAN TO DESTROY AMERICA. IF YOU BELIEVE, AS MANY DO, THAT AMERICA IS TOO SMUG, TOO WHITE BREAD, TOO SELF-SATISFIED, TOO RICH, LETS DESTROY AMERICA. IT IS NOT THAT HARD TO DO. HISTORY...

Ayman al-Zawahiri Says Al Qaeda Wants to Spill More U.S. Blood Before America Leaves In a new video posted today on the Internet, al Qaeda's number two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, mocks the bill passed by Congress setting a timetable for the pullout of U.S. troops in Iraq. "This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him an interviewer. Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, "We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing...

For decades, researchers have puzzled over why rich northern countries have cancer rates many times higher than those in developing countries — and many have laid the blame on dangerous pollutants spewed out by industry. But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations. Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are "looking for...

WASHINGTON - Rudolph Giuliani's wife - joined by the ex-mayor himself - takes to the airwaves tomorrow in an interview the campaign hopes can put to rest questions about their public courtship and life together as presidential candidate and wife. Judith Giuliani's interview with Barbara Walters is set to air tomorrow, one week after disclosures that she has been married three times, not twice as previously believed. Giuliani aides refused to divulge what the Giulianis said in the pretaped interview and ABC News also was being tight-lipped, except for a news release promising that Judith Giuliani answers questions about whether...

A 62-year-old woman known as the "Black Widow" is being held in a North Carolina jail on $1.5 million bond for relatively petty charges, while police race to unravel a web of mysteries — including the deaths of her two husbands and a female "best friend" — before time runs out and "she's outta here."

For those who want to pull out of Iraq I ask this: Why is it that when it came to a mass murdering tyrant, you wanted to give him more time to come clean with the world despite 17 UN sanctions that he had previously ignored over the space of 13 years and yet now, when it comes to this fledgling Democracy in Iraq, you will give it less than 5 years? Why such patience with a man who killed thousands of his own people each year? Why the rush to abandon the people of Iraq? Why not give Iraqi's...

So how far back does the Free Republic archive articles and how can I go back and find some of the first threads that started the whole thing off ? It struck me I've hung out for a while and it was well established when I joined. Be fun to see what we were focused on day one. For me anyway.

Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff who is on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice, claims he doesn’t remember, or mis-remembers, some of the conversations he had with reporters concerning the former CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson. That, Libby says, accounts for the differences between his testimony about talks with journalists like Tim Russert and Matthew Cooper and the accounts of Russert and Cooper themselves. -snip-

We are asking you to please assist in getting the following information out to EVERYONE YOU HAVE ON AN EMAIL LIST. There are two missing children who because of there age are not cover by the Amber Alert System. WE are hoping that by sending this information to the widest number of people perhaps they can be found. PLEASE HELP SEND THIS TO ALL OF YOUR LISTS! TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE Thank you, June K. Gutterman, Ed.D., Director Daniel S. Robins, Chair We received the below today from RAVSAK, the national organization of Jewish Day Schools. Rachel Smith (one...