GUADALUPE DISTRITO BRAVOS, Mexico — Her uncle, the mayor who gave her the job nobody else wanted, warned her to keep a low profile, to not make too much of being the last remaining police officer in a town where the rest of the force had quit or been killed.

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Jesus Alcazar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Érika Gándara, police chief of Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, Mexico, disappeared in December.

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Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

A wave of terror has turned Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, near Texas, into a frightened outpost of the drug war. Nearly half of its 9,000 residents have fled.

“I am the only police in this town, the authority,” she told reporters.

Then, two days before Christmas, a group of armed men took her from her home, residents say, and she has not been seen since.

It was an ominous punctuation mark on the wave of terror that has turned this cotton farming town near Texas into a frightened outpost of the drug war. Nearly half of its 9,000 residents have fled, local officials say, leaving block after block of scorched homes and businesses and, now, not one regular police officer.

Far from big, infamous cities like Ciudad Juárez, one of the most violent places in the Americas, the war with organized crime can batter small towns just as hard, if with less notice.

The cotton towns south of Juárez sit in territory disputed by at least two major drug trafficking groups, according to government and private security reports, leading to deadly power struggles. But the lack of adequately trained police officers, a longstanding crisis that the government has sought to address with little resolution, allows criminal groups to have their way.

“Small cities and towns are really highly impacted,” said Daniel M. Sabet, a visiting professor at Georgetown University who studies policing in Mexico. “They offer strongholds organized crime can hold and control.”

Some towns consider themselves so vulnerable that they have gone out of their way not to antagonize criminals. Believing that those involved in organized crime would be less inclined to harm women — and because fewer men are willing to take the job — local officials have appointed a handful of women in the past year to senior police ranks in small cities and towns here in Chihuahua, the country’s most violent state.

After a spate of violence in a neighboring town, Praxédis Guerrero, local officials selected a 20-year-old college student in November as police chief to run the force of nine women and two men, hoping that criminal networks would see her as less threatening.

Marisol Valles, the young police chief, has made it clear that she leaves major crimes to state and federal authorities to investigate. Really, she said, she just reviews civil infractions issued by other officers and rarely leaves the office. “I am more like an administrator,” said Ms. Valles, who does not carry a gun or wear a uniform.

But the criminals have not discriminated. Hermila García, the woman appointed police chief of Meoqui, a small city in central Chihuahua, was killed on Nov. 30 after only a month in the job.

Guadalupe tried to put a nonthreatening face on law enforcement by appointing Ms. Gándara chief in October. But it appears that she tried — or at least talked about — taking the job more seriously, to the regret of her uncle, Mayor Tomás Archuleta. He had good reason to counsel a low profile: He took office after his predecessor was killed last summer, part of a wave of assassinations of local officials across Mexico.

“I told Érika, ‘Be careful,’ to not make waves,” Mr. Archuleta said, openly frustrated by the picture of her with the rifle. Like Ms. Valles, her role is more to issue citations, leaving serious crimes to state and federal authorities.

Guadalupe has plenty of them to investigate. There are as many abandoned homes and businesses — several of them gutted — as occupied ones. One recent morning, four homes smoldered from an attack and two people had been shot dead with high-powered weapons, the bullets leaving several gaping holes in cinder-block walls.

Few people here leave their homes after 5 p.m., and see soldiers and police officers only briefly after a major crime or when they are guarding the monthly delivery of government pension checks for retirees.

“We lock ourselves in most of the time,” said Eduardo Contreras, 26, as he watched residents douse and pick through the embers of their smoldering homes.

In a voice choked with tears, María Torres, 70, who grew up here, said, “This is so sad what has happened here,” as she carried a sign for a church service.

Mr. Archuleta, the mayor, said the town mainly gets its protection from soldiers based at a recreation center in Praxédis Guerrero. Maybe, Mr. Archuleta suggested, not having local police officers is better. He said local residents had told him that common crimes like burglary had dropped out of fear of drawing the attention of a military patrol.

“There aren’t any” minor crimes, he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper.

But townspeople disputed that, complaining that the soldiers or state and federal police officers were rarely seen except after major violence had occurred.

“There is no police, no fire department, no social services, nothing here,” said the middle-aged matriarch from one burned-out home, declining to give her name for fear of reprisals. “People get away with everything here. Nothing gets investigated, not even murders.”

Not long afterward, a four-truck caravan of federal police officers arrived from another town, hopping down from their vehicles, taking notes and asking her and other family members for a word. The family refused even to open the gate for the police, apparently out of fear of being seen talking to them, and the officers moved on. The officers appeared to be taking stock, driving from crime scene to crime scene and taking notes, but not mounting a forensic investigation.

At the site of the double murder in the morning, one officer dabbed at a pool of blood and body fluid on the driveway with a stick; another picked up a piece of flesh and playfully tossed it at a companion.

Ms. Gándara may not have investigated much deeper. Local police officers in small towns usually play a mostly preventive role, refereeing minor disputes, handling the town drunk and quieting rowdy teenagers, city managers said. Many are not armed.

Mr. Archuleta would say little else about his niece, Ms. Gándara, citing an investigation by the state prosecutor’s office, which would not comment on a motive. But he noted that he had turned to her when nobody else would take the job. She had experience as a security guard and appeared not to be involved in any criminal activity, he said.

“Who knows what people do in their private lives,” he said, “but I did not think she was involved in anything.”

Jeremy Lasko
Food Freedom

High dose Vitamin C’s impact on a man in New Zealand is stunning and wonderful news being heard around the world. The behavior of the hospitals and medical establishment, on the other hand, is causing outrage.

In August 2010, 60 Minutes reported on Intravenous Vitamin C curing a New Zealander’s swine flu just as life support was to be terminated. Dairy farmer Allan Smith had been in the hospital for weeks.

Doctors felt certain he would die and wanted to take him off life support. This dramatic 18-minute report shows his “clouded out” lungs indicating “white out pneumonia”:

Despite doctor disbelief in Vitamin C efficacy, the family finally convinced them to treat Smith with high-dose IV Vitamin C.  This is what his lungs looked like after two days of treatment:

The show reveals that when doctors stopped the high dose Vitamin C treatment, he deteriorated. Again, the treatment was started, and again he improved. But doctors later reduced his Vitamin C intake from 50 grams a day to 2 grams a day. His recovery reduced to a snail’s pace.  Finally, the family directly provided Smith with Lyposomal-Encapsulated Vitamin C orally, and his recovery became complete, well ahead of predictions.

In 2006, the National Institutes of Health confirmed Vitamin C’s efficacy in treating cancer, something Linus Pauling attempted to share with the world decades ago, for which he was attacked, rather than lionized.  Intravenously administered Vitamin C as cancer therapy: three cases.

“We found 3 well-documented cases of advanced cancers, confirmed by histopathologic review, where patients had unexpectedly long survival times after receiving high-dose intravenous vitamin C therapy. We examined clinical details of each case in accordance with National Cancer Institute (NCI) Best Case Series guidelines. Tumour pathology was verified by pathologists at the NCI who were unaware of diagnosis or treatment. In light of recent clinical pharmacokinetic findings and in vitro evidence of anti-tumour mechanisms, these case reports indicate that the role of high-dose intravenous vitamin C therapy in cancer treatment should be reassessed.” [Emphasis added.]

Yet S 510 and S 3767, “food safety” bills in the US and C-36, a “product safety” bill in Canada, would remove access to this treatment and to all supplements in adequate enough doses to treat disease.

Even prior to the “food safety” bills, the FDA has been working for years to remove information on the scientific value of supplements, even very recently threatening health stores and websites that they may not even mention the word “flu” or “H1N1″ in advising customers about what products could be helpful.

Twenty-year-old criminology student, Marisol Valles, has become director of municipal public security in Guadalupe / AFP Source: AFP

Marisol Valles became director of municipal public security of Guadalupe "since she was the only person to accept the position", the mayor's office of the town of some 10,000 people near the US border told local media yesterday.

Ms Valles is studying criminology in Mexico's most violent city of Ciudad Juarez, some 60km west of Guadalupe.

Raging turf battles between rival drug gangs have left some 6500 people dead in Ciudad Juarez alone in the past three years.

Much of Chihuahua state has suffered from the spiral of drug violence, including in Guadalupe, where the mayor was murdered in June and police officers and security agents have been killed, some of them beheaded.

Last week alone there were at least eight murders in Guadalupe, in an area deemed a high-traffic transit point for illegal drugs across the border into the US state of Texas.

More than 28,000 people have died nationwide in suspected drug violence since December 2006, when the Mexican government launched an offensive against its criminal gangs with the deployment of some 50,000 troops.

The Guadalupe mayor's office has only one police patrol car and receives security assistance from the army.

If you didn't vaccinate your kids, you too could find yourself partly responsible for the resurgence of a disease thought eliminated in 2000.

Measles—a highly contagious disease-causing virus—is making a comeback in the U.S., thanks to parents fears over vaccines. Fifteen children under 20, including four babies, have been hospitalized and 131 sickened by the red splotches since the beginning of this year in 15 states and the District of Columbia, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC had announced in 2000 that the disease was eliminated in the U.S. thanks to a vaccine that can completely control it. But fears of autism have led some parents to forego this treatment and at least 63 of the sickened children were unvaccinated.

Peditrician Pauline Filipek of the University of California, Irvine told ScientificAmerican.com this spring that parents who don't vaccinate their kids are putting the tykes at risk of long-forgotten diseases, like measles. What they're not doing: preventing autism.

"Many, if not most, of the younger siblings [of autistic children] never have any vaccinations," says Filipek, who believes that autism is not caused by vaccines. "And they are as autistic as the day is long."

Because the disease is highly contagious, it is the first to come back when vaccination falters. This is in part due to travel to other countries, such as Italy, Switzerland and the U.K., where similar outbreaks are occurring among children who have not been vaccinated. In previous years, such imported cases had petered out due to widespread vaccination but now the disease can spread.

So far, Illinois has the most cases, with 32 cases, followed by New York and Washington. In all of 2006, the latest year with full figures, there were only 55 cases total and an estimated 93 percent of U.S. children had been vaccinated. In fact, this is the most cases in such a short time span since 1996 and is due to "viral transmission after importation," according to the CDC.

It remains unclear whether vaccination levels overall are dropping or not, but at least 95 percent of children must be vaccinated to prevent measles from returning. The disease has become endemic to the U.K., for example, thanks to a vaccination rate that has fallen to 85 percent. Already one child has died in the U.K.

Prior to the vaccine's introduction in the 1960s, as many as 4 million people came down with measles each year and as many as 450 died as well as 4,000 who developed permanent disabilities when the measles inflamed their brains.

(Photo: John Heseltine/CORBIS)

The state of California's recent step toward fully decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana with Prop 19 has reignited one of the more contentious flash points in modern society—where, if anywhere, marijuana has a place.

Few things illustrate the controversy better than a comparison of the web pages that purport to separate myth from fact published by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). They are almost mirror images of one another, addressing the very same points, but drawing on different studies to reach their preferred conclusions. It's stunning to see how differently these agencies can interpret the same information.

There is a single salvation from this cherry-picking point-counterpoint: the seminal report "Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base." This comprehensive summary of marijuana was written in 1999 by the most highly regarded nongovernmental medical organization in the country, the Institute of Medicine, and it serves as the primary source for the information in this article concerning the risks and benefits of marijuana.

Health Risk Myths & Realities

The essential questions are whether the active ingredient in marijuana, a cannabinoid (chemical compound) known as THC, has any medicinal value; whether the risks associated with its use outweigh the benefits; and whether THC answers a need not currently met by any other medications on the market. In the course of that debate, several health risks are often cited:

Marijuana overdose

There is no existing evidence of anyone dying of a marijuana overdose, but this doesn't preclude the possibility of experiencing adverse or unpleasant effects when it is consumed in large amounts. For comparison's sake, alcohol overdoses claim approximately 5,000 casualties per year.This is often cited as a reason that marijuana is safer than other drugs, like alcohol.

Memory

Marijuana does impair short-term memory, but only during intoxication. THC has been shown to have a negative effect on memory, and chronic abuse of marijuana will cause permanent impairment.

Addiction

The DEA's general opposition to marijuana is comprised of 1) that whatever medical value it has is already fulfilled by other, equally effective drugs on the market, and 2) that marijuana is highly addictive.

Both points can be turned upside down: There is already an abundance of drugs that do the same job as products already on the market, and they receive approval anyway. This seems to run contrary to the DEA's first argument. And even a cursory look at many of the Schedule II opiates and amphetamines shows that high addiction potential is not a basis for legal classification of drugs. The point is that marijuana is not physically addictive, and even if it was, the DEA would appear to be quite hypocritical arguing this point.

The immune system

If smoked marijuana were to inhibit the activity of T-lymphocytes in the blood, it would compromise the body's ability to fight infection. This would put some people at the mercy of opportunistic infections and diseases, notably those who have immunosuppressive conditions like HIV or lymphoma.

However, the data does not support this. What it does support -- barely -- is the compromised immunity of the lungs due to the smoke from marijuana.

Heart problems

It is accepted in medical circles today that marijuana use causes no evident long-term cardiovascular problems for normal persons. The DEA aggressively goes after this point, claiming that according to Harvard researchers, in the hour after having smoked marijuana, one's heart attack risk goes up five fold. However, this 'fact' is not properly cited and is indicative of the DEA's sloppy attempts to cite its sources. Marijuana's effects on blood pressure are complex and inconsistent as of yet.

The United States currently ranks 49th in the world in overall life expectancy, according to a study published in the academic journal Health Affairs, slipping dramatically during the last decade.

"As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined," concludes the study, conducted by Columbia University health policy professors Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied, which will appear in the November edition of the influential peer-reviewed journal.

The noteworthy decline is highlighted by the fact that in 1999, the World Health Organization ranked the US as 24th in the world in the same category, life expectancy.

The report by Muenning and Glied found the prime culprit of the plunge to be America’s deteriorating health care system, marred by ever-rising costs and growing numbers of uninsured and under-insured individuals.

Noting that the United States spends over twice as much per capita on health care than other industrialized nations, it adds: "The observation that Americans are spending relatively more on health but living relatively shorter, less healthy lives has led some critics to allege that the US health care system is 'uniquely inefficient.'"

The findings present a stark contrast to the claim – today an article of faith in the American conservative movement – that the United States has the best health care system in the world.

The United States, as is widely known, remains the only advanced democracy without a universal health care program. But sweeping reform legislation enacted by this March, while limited in its capacity for cost controls, offers a significant step towards universality – it is projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to insure 94 percent of Americans in ten years, up from 83 percent today.

The authors of the report also posited that high rates of obesity, smoking, homicides and traffic fatalities may have contributed to the decline.

The study was flagged by a Daily Kos blogger and elevated by Glenn Greenwald of Salon. Apart from coverage in some blogs, medical journals, and an article by Reuters, it received scant attention in the mainstream US press.

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Disease/antibiotic_use_linked_to_breast_cancer_1510100718.html

In the Pink month - the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we publish below a report to share with readers a recent study which suggests that taking antibiotics may increase risk of breast cancer. 

The study published in Sept 15, 2010 issue of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety shows a slightly increased risk of breast cancer in women who ever used antibiotics compared with those who did not take them. 

Sergentanis T.N. and colleagues from the University of Athens in Athens, Greece, authors of the study, said some, but not all early studies have already found an association between use of antibiotics and elevated breast cancer risk.  

For the study, the researchers identified five case-control studies involving 13,069 cases and 73,920 controls from major medical databases like Medline, Cochrane, and EMBASE databases, which they believed were eligible for their meta-analysis. 

They found those who had ever taken antibiotics were 17.5 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer. A meta-regression analysis also shows a borderline dose-response effect of antibiotics on the risk of breast cancer. 

The researchers concluded "this is a finding with potentially important public health implications, which should be further examined in the literature." 

One explanation is that women who have ever used antibiotics may have a weaker immunity against cancer.  It is well known by some researchers that a person's immunity can be a big determinant for cancer risk. 

Early in 2003, Velicer C.M. and colleagues from the University of Washington cited a hypothesis proposed by others in Cancer Causes & Control, which states that antibiotics destroy intestinal microflora that would otherwise metabolise phytochemicals from edible plants into compounds that may protect against cancer. 

Velicer et al. extended the hypothesis by proposing that antibiotic use affects breast cancer risk through their effects on immune and inflammatory factors such as cytokines, T lymphocytes, prostaglandins and matrix metalloproteinases, in addition to their disruption of phytochemical and estrogen metabolism involving the intestinal microflora. 

The researchers suggested that some mechanisms may boost breast cancer risk while others may increase the risk, depending upon the type of antibiotic used. 

Celiver et al said in their report that an earlier study linked long-term use of antibiotic for recurrent urinary-tract infections with an increased risk of breast cancer. 

Breast cancer is expected to be diagnosed in more than 175,000 women and kill 50,000 each year in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute.  One in eight women in this country is expected to develop the disease in their lifetime. 

More reports will be published here in the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month to help readers understand risk factors for breast cancers so that they may come away with practical ideas to help diminish said risk..

Would you feel comfortable being injected with a vaccine that contains a substance that has been strongly linked to infertility?  Well, if you take the Fluarix swine flu vaccine manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline or any of the other swine flu vaccines that contain Polysorbate 80 that is exactly what you will be doing.  If you are considering getting the swine flu vaccine, or any other vaccine for that matter, perhaps you should educate yourself about EXACTLY what is in these vaccines before you allow them to be injected into your body.

Perhaps you think that linking the swine flu vaccine with infertility is quite a stretch.  Well, let's take this one step at a time.

#1) Polysorbate 80 is in the Fluarix swine flu vaccine manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline according to the CDC.  This is confirmed by the CDC in the document below..... 

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/B/excipient-table-2.pdf

#2) A medical study done in Slovakia injected newborn female rats with Tween 80 (Polysorbate 80).  These newborn female rats were injected with Polysorbate 80 at days 4 to 7 after birth.  The researchers found that Polysorbate 80 accelerated the maturation of the female rats, damaged the vagina and womb lining, caused significant hormonal changes, severe ovary deformities and ultimately rendered the young female rats infertile.

In fact, Dee Nicholson, the National Communications Director for Freedom in Canadian Health Care is not shy about saying that Polysorbate 80 is "linked to infertility in mice".

#3) In the package insert for Fluarix, GlaxoSmithKline specifically mentions that they cannot guarantee that their flu vaccine will not damage your fertility: "FLUARIX has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or for impairment of fertility."  Thanks to foolishly passed laws by the U.S. government, you will not be able to sue anyone if it does leave you infertile.

#4) GlaxoSmithKline is not alone in using Polysorbate 80.  It is being reported that Novartis is using the adjuvant MF59 in its swine flu vaccine. The MF59 adjuvant contains Tween80 (Polysorbate 80) and squalene among other things.

#5) On the World Intellectual Property Organization, a patent application for a "fertility impairing vaccine".  The University of Georgia Research Foundation is listed as the patent applicant.  

In the description section of the patent application, Tween 80 (Polysorbate 80) is listed as a preferred ingredient:

"In a preferred embodiment the vaccine comprises oil, preferably a biodegradable oil such as squalene oil, in an amount of about 2.5% to about 15%, preferably about 8% to about 12%. In preparing the vaccine it is advantageous to combine a concentrated oily adjuvant composition with an aqueous solution of the antigen, pZP glycoprotein. Typically, the vaccine is prepared using an adjuvant concentrate which contains lecithin (about 5% to about 15 % wt/vol, preferably about 12% wt/vol) and STDCM (preferably about 25 mg/mL to about 50 mg/mL) in squalene oil. The term % wt/vol means grams per 100 mL of liquid. The aqueous solution containing the isolated pZP glycoprotein is typically a phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) solution, and additionally preferably contains Tween 80 (about 0.2% vol/vol to about 0.8% vol/vol, preferably about 0.4% vol/vol)."

#6) The United Nations is actively seeking ways to limit and control population growth around the globe.  An incredibly shocking U.N. population division policy brief from March 2009 asked this very disturbing question: 

What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?

You can read this almost unbelievable document here:

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/UNPD_policybriefs/UNPD_policy_brief1.pdf

The reality is that for the super wealthy global elite and the majority of the social engineers at the United Nations, population control is a major obsession.  If you doubt this fact, just read this article:

http://signsofthelastdays.com/archives/the-radical-population-control-and-eugenics-agenda-of-the-global-elite

The truth is that the more people learn about what is in these vaccines, the less likely they are to take them.  It is important to do your own research before letting anyone inject anything into your body.  Those who blindly trust the government or world health authorities are likely the ones to end up being extremely disappointed in the end.