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Patients who first seek physical therapy or chiropractic care have better outcomes and shorter episodes of acute care for low back pain, according to research. The findings show that for patients with acute episodes of low back pain, the first point of entry to the health care system is associated with utilization and total cost of care in the following year. Clinical practice guidelines prioritize nonpharmacologic and nonsurgical treatments. Patients are often prescribed opioid pain medications or referred to specialists for procedures—including surgery, imaging or steroid injections—that do not address the root causes of their pain. By combing through nearly...

A historic World War II boat that survived dozens of operations -- and a few near-misses -- on the other side of the Atlantic is finally heading home to the waters where its journey began more than 70 years ago. PT-305, fresh off a multi-year restoration project at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, is traveling atop a barge set to reach the Industrial Canal near Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain by midday Tuesday. “This is a big deal for all of us, but especially for the men and women for the last ten years who put blood, sweat...

Target Corp. said Tuesday that it will stop offering health insurance to its part-time employees because new online health exchanges offer workers an opportunity to buy coverage. The Minneapolis-based retailer will give each worker $500 to help buy health insurance, and has arranged for one-on-one consultations with benefits manager Towers Watson to help with the transition. The retailer announced the decision through its online site, “A Bullseye View: Behind the Scenes at Target,” in a Q&A with Jodee Kozlak, Target’s executive vice president of human resources. In the article, Kozlak acknowledged the disruption to workers. But she said the exchanges...

A friend sent me an article in Reuters today that claims Little evidence yet that Obamacare costing full-time jobs. One in five businesses in the service sector think President Barack Obama's signature healthcare reform has hurt employment at their firms over the last three months, a National Association of Business Economics survey showed on Monday. But there is little discernible impact in the employment figures released in recent months, including the September numbers out on Tuesday. The number of people with part-time jobs who want full-time work, for example, was essentially flat in September at 7.9 million. The number of...

Federal Brazilian police and military personnel, some wearing UN insignia, are forcibly relocating communities in Brazil at gunpoint under the guise of returning land to Indians. Amid Federal Land Grab in Brazil, Whole Towns Evicted at Gunpoint The New American 07 January 2013 Federal Brazilian police and military personnel, some wearing United Nations insignia, are forcibly relocating whole communities in Brazil at gunpoint under the guise of returning huge tracts of land to a small group of Indians whose ancestors were allegedly there at some point. Thousands of local residents who have lived in the area for decades or...

O'Donnell has trouble airing 30-minute TV ad in Delaware By Philip Rucker Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, November 1, 2010; 11:12 AM Christine O'Donnell is taking a page from the playbook of Barack Obama. The Republican Senate candidate has produced a 30-minute television advertisement in the form of a documentary chronicling her connection with the people of Delaware. But unlike Obama's ad at the end of the 2008 race, the tea party insurgent's campaign has run into obstacles getting it in front of voters before Election Day. The campaign did not purchase advance time on networks in the Philadelphia or...

FORT JACKSON, S.C. — (Adapting to battlefield experience, the Army nixes 5-mile runs and bayonet drills in favor of zigzag sprints and honing core muscles. ) New soldiers are grunting through the kind of stretches and twists found in "ab blaster" classes at suburban gyms as the Army revamps its basic training regimen for the first time in three decades. Heeding the advice of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans, commanders are dropping five-mile runs and bayonet drills in favor of zigzag sprints and exercises that hone core muscles. Battlefield sergeants say that's the kind of fitness needed to dodge across...

FORT JACKSON, S.C. – New soldiers are grunting through the kind of stretches and twists found in "ab blaster" classes at suburban gyms as the Army revamps its basic training regimen for the first time in three decades. Heeding the advice of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans, commanders are dropping five-mile runs and bayonet drills in favor of zigzag sprints and exercises that hone core muscles. Battlefield sergeants say that's the kind of fitness needed to dodge across alleys, walk patrol with heavy packs and body armor or haul a buddy out of a burning vehicle. Trainers also want to...

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — Even as the Air Force prepares to toughen physical fitness standards for airmen, it’s proposing to do away with mandatory physical training. That means commanders no longer would have to provide airmen at least 270 minutes per week to exercise during duty hours. But airmen would still have to be prepared to pass more stringent PT tests twice a year. If approved, the Air Force would be the first of the military services to eliminate mandatory PT. An internal audit last year found the Air Force’s fitness program did not promote year-round fitness. Thirty-five percent...

The PT showed that it does not believe in the so-called democratic regime as an end in itself but merely as an instrument to advance their totalitarian project. This was shown in the following ways: - the impetus with which the PT attacked the structures of the state; - its attempts to achieve partisan-ideological control of state agencies and companies; - its creation of councils to control the Judiciary Branch, the media, culture, universities and so on; - its pronounced and public support for movements like MST that violate public order and disrespect private property; - its failure to provide...

Going For Galt's Gulch by David MacGregor Galt's Gulch is a high-tech retreat in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged—a place where all the "disappearing" productive people can meet, relax and recharge. John Galt, the hero of "Atlas", is a brilliant engineer who has decided he will not support a corrupt system. He will not allow his mind, his talent, or his efforts to prop it up. He plans a strike like no other—a strike of all those who are the engine of civilisation, the creative producers in every field. His mission is to persuade each and every one to...

While the Lula government cautiously maintains a relative stability, particularly in economic matters, they are conniving with and even favoring movements and initiatives that threaten that very stability. A case in point is the complacent attitude toward the invasions of farms and the reckless disrespect for the law by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and the Pastoral Commission on Land (CPT). Prof. Denis Lerrer Rosenfield of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul notes that many government agencies are in cahoots with a movement trying to destroy democratic institutions. He concludes: "In fact, the present government destroys with...

It is general knowledge that the PT has its roots in that other party who no longer dares to utter its own name. Everybody also knows that the party who no longer dares to say its name has its origins in that 19th century philosophy that says the ends justify the means. Considering that the virtual prime-minister of our government (chief of staff José Dirceu) is a former guerrilla member who went to Cuba to specialize in democracy-demolishing techniques and sees in Fidel Castro a hero, nothing happening in Planalto today should be a surprise. A good portion of the...

"Richard Nixon famously remarked, ‘As goes Brazil, so goes Latin America,’" recalled Brazilian political activist Gerald Brant in the May issue of Brazzil. Under the reign of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — commonly called "Lula" — Brazil is fulfilling "Fidel Castro’s wildest revolutionary ambitions … right under the nose of the Bush administration," Brant warns. According to Brant, "anti-American sentiment has grown so high in Brazil that President Bush received a lower approval rating among Brazilians than Saddam Hussein...." While there are many sound reasons for opposing the war in Iraq, Brazilian public opinion appears to be following...

Does anyone remember the 1970s, when you could be labeled an 'imperialist pig' for denouncing Cuba as the financier of the so-called 'revolutionary movements' in Brazil? The connections between Cuba and the Brazilian left—not only Cuba, by the way, but also Moscow, Beijing, Algiers and Prague—were obvious, but one was doomed and immediately blacklisted by the Left for daring to state the obvious. If you wrote for a living, publishing houses suddenly vanished. If you were a journalist, newspapers disappeared. A literary genre was actually born at the time—Cuban travel journals. Bookstores built special shelves to welcome it. The vein...

The Workers’ Party (PT) now governing Brazil is a party of socialist bent that pretends to be moderate while implementing a radical agenda. The director of one of the largest Brazilian newspapers leaves no doubt where the PT’s socialist roots began. He writes of the “three currents that came together to form the PT. The party’s driving force was the labor union movements. Its nationwide tentacles were leftist Catholic communities imbibed with Liberation Theology. And the ideological ‘whipped cream topping’ comes from their intellectual activists. These latter emerged from the devastating military defeat of the guerrilla movement. Another group, largely...

While Washington’s attention is focused on the Middle East, communism and communist terrorism are threatening America's security in Latin America, where another Axis of Evil is spreading its tentacles throughout the region. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is getting credit from the Internatinal Monetary Fund and Wall Street's useful idiots for following the orthodox economic policies of former president Fernando Cardoso while plunging his nation into communism and allying himself with Fidel Castro and Castro's puppet in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. So radical is the regime under Lula that the Rio de Janeiro city council recently declared President Bush...

Implementing an agrarian land reform in Brazil is a major goal of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration. To do this, the President chose Trotskyite-leaning Miguel Rossetto, the most radical member in his cabinet, as Land Reform Minister. This issue of Lulawatch will deal with the present status of land reform in Brazil. 1. Brazilian land reform before 2003 The left has always been obsessed with land reform. They cannot conceive a platform without a land reform plank which would deeply undermine and eventually destroy rural private property. French sociologist Alain Touraine, a well-known Brazilianist, says “the ideological share...

We can say that Brazil is undergoing a revolutionary process because the history of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), and the left wing in Brazil, is the story of communist strategy in action. Those who know the communists can see what is happening. Those who do not know, see nothing. For them the revolution is invisible. And the more time passes, the stronger it becomes. Father Lula, Brazil's revolutionary leader In the Jan. 25 edition of O Globo - the greatest journal in Brazil - psychoanalyst Fernando Coutinho perceived that "Lula is using the same image as Tito and Stalin...

1. Lula da Silva’s Government Is Losing its Luster Just over two months into the new presidency, there are signs that the image of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) and his administration is beginning to lose its luster. The media now present Lula and some of his closest aides as tired, anguished, and under pressure. Writing on the challenges the government faces, political analyst Gaudêncio Torquato affirms: “Those who thought the PT era would be paradise are now beginning to realize there is a detour through purgatory. The president is thus left to grapple with a fading public...