Alien Faces
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NOTE: These 2 videos have been floating around the internet...supposed 'alien' faces. I have very sincere doubts, but fun to look at...you decide. Lon
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Jeweler Promote Pre-Rapture Sale
duluthnewstribune - Larry Falter, owner of Superior’s LTD Jewelers, hit upon a novel idea for his latest TV commercial — blending a storewide sale with his belief that the second coming of Jesus is near.
After opening with the trumpeting of horns and a glimpse of a land assailed by fire and lighting, the 30-second ad shows Falter in his store, stating his belief that as he reads the news “we are really close” to the Day of the Lord and the return of Jesus Christ to Jerusalem.
“Nonetheless, here and now, if you want jewelry, I have access to millions,” he then says. And it’s all on sale at 50 percent off during his Second Coming sale.
“I thought, ‘I am going to have some fun here, be bold about my faith position and make a commercial that would tell people how I believe things are in the world’ ” before transitioning into a sales ad, Falter, 65, said Wednesday.
“I’m trying to be upfront with my faith and my position,” he said. “If anybody wants to see my jewelry or talk about the Lord’s coming, I’m here.”
Falter, the head elder for Beth Yeshaa Twin Ports, a Messianic Congregation, made the ad after returning from a trip to Israel earlier this year. It began airing on two Duluth stations in early November. It will continue to air through most of December.
The blend of apocalyptic imagery with a jewelry sale has raised eyebrows.
“The first thing that crossed my mind was the line ‘Diamonds are forever,’ and I thought, ‘Is he going to go there with that?’ And he didn’t,” Michael Gatlin, Vineyard Christian Fellowship senior pastor, said after viewing the commercial.
“For me, from a theological prospective, I don’t find it helpful at all,” he said.
Gatlin worked in marketing for years as an art director.
“At that level, I can’t picture anyone rushing out to buy jewelry because the Day of the Lord is imminent,” he said. “Other than that, I just find that stuff kind of sadly humorous.”
Falter has received a few calls and store visits from people wanting to talk about the commercials.
“If Jesus really is coming back, why would I want diamonds?” Falter said one person asked. But so far he’s only received one negative comment. It came from a Buddhist who was uncomfortable with Falter mixing faith and selling jewelry in an ad.
In addition to the TV ad, Falter is using a large banner outside his Tower Avenue store to advertise his Second Coming sale.
“It’s giving me the opportunity to talk to people about things that maybe I wouldn’t have normally mixed in during my business day,” he said of the campaign.
The campaign is attracting attention beyond the Twin Ports area. The ad has been posted on YouTube and at least one other website. Bloggers and Minnesota Public Radio have mentioned it or interviewed a somewhat surprised Falter.
“I wasn’t expecting to get any attention,” he said.
So far, no one has asked Falter why, if he believes the Second Coming is near, he just doesn’t give the jewelry away. But he has a ready answer.
“I have ethical obligations to people I owe money to,” he said. “If I couldn’t discharge those ethical responsibilities, I wouldn’t be giving a very good witness. I don’t want to profit at someone else’s expense.”
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Haitian Mob Kills 12 Over Fear of Cholera Spread by Witchcraft
afp - Tensions simmered in Haiti Thursday with its political future hanging in the balance, as protesters renewed charges of vote-rigging and cholera fears led to deadly mob violence.
As vote-counting continued ahead of the expected release of preliminary results on Tuesday, candidates in last weekend's presidential and legislative elections remained split over whether to endorse the outcome.
With the impoverished Caribbean nation in limbo, several hundred opposition demonstrators peacefully took to the streets of Port-au-Prince seeking annulment of the vote to determine the successor to Rene Preval.
"Arrest Preval!... Cancel the Election!" the protesters shouted as they made their way to the headquarters of the election commission, which was guarded by blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers and Haitian anti-riot police.
"Our message is clear: We want Preval to go and we do not want elections with him in power," said candidate Jacques Edouard Alexis.
Twelve of the 18 contenders rejected Sunday's election shortly after polls closed, but the following day longtime opposition leader and pre-election favorite Mirlande Manigat and popular musician Michel Martelly, another leading candidate, reversed their calls for the polls to be scrapped.
An unexpected admission from the ruling INITE (UNITY) party that its candidate Jude Celestin may have lost has fueled a sense that Haiti could experience a political watershed if the dysfunctional, failing nation is able to manage a relatively peaceful transition of power.
International monitors -- while acknowledging widespread problems including violence and claims of fraud -- declared the elections valid. Final results are expected on December 20.
But the stubborn cholera epidemic, which has claimed more than 1,800 lives since mid-October, cast a shadow over the first election since a massive earthquake tore the country apart in January, killing some 250,000 people.
The epidemic took a ghastly turn Thursday when officials revealed that at least 12 people had been stoned or hacked to death in the last week by angry mobs accusing them of trying to spread cholera through witchcraft.
"Their corpses were burned in the streets" in the far southwest area of Grand Anse, the region in Haiti least affected by the disease, local prosecutor Kesner Numa told AFP.
"These people were accused (by the mobs) of witchcraft related to cholera," said Numa, adding that their attackers believed the victims were trying to "plant a substance that spreads the disease in the region."
Local communities were refusing to cooperate with investigations of the killings there, officials said.
Suspicion about the outbreak has swept through Haiti, where many accuse UN peacekeepers of having imported the disease.
According to the latest official cholera tally, 1,817 people have died and a total of 80,860 cases have been recorded, with 36,207 hospitalizations.
On Wednesday the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said the epidemic continued to spread throughout the country but was less lethal.
"We went from nine percent of cases dying in the early days to 2.3 percent now," said Donna Eberwine-Villagran, a spokeswoman for PAHO, a local branch of the World Health Organization.
She warned, however, that the official toll was an underestimation, and that Haiti could see up to 400,000 infections over the next 12 months.
Amid the epidemic and the election tensions, the president's already tarnished image suffered further with the release of a leaked US diplomatic cable that portrayed him as seeking to "orchestrate" the vote.
"Close friends speculate that many of Preval's actions during the past year... stem from his very real fear that politics will prohibit him from returning to private life in Haiti after his presidency," a June 2009 cable by Washington's then-ambassador said.
"Thus, they argue, his overriding goal is to orchestrate the 2011 presidential transition in such a way as to ensure that whoever is elected will allow him to go home unimpeded."
Haiti has been plagued by dictatorships and political upheaval, and several past leaders have fled or been forced into exile, including Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president.
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Spray-On Stem Cells Heal Burns Fast
ksl - A spray solution of a patient's own stem cells is healing their severe burns. So far, early experiments under a University of Utah pilot project are showing some remarkable results.
What was once a serious burn on Kaye Adkins foot is healing nicely now because of a topical spray. With diabetes as a complication, the small but open wound had not healed after weeks of failed treatments.
Dr. Amalia Cochran with the university's Burn Care Center says, "With a wound that is open for several months, as this patient suffered prior to seeing us in our burn clinic, we worry about a pretty heavy bacterial load there."
But enter the evolutionary world of regenerative medicine, using almost a bedside stem cell technique that takes only about 15 minutes. With red cells removed, a concentrate of platelets and progenitor cells is combined with calcium and thrombin. The final mixture looks almost like Jello.
"I woke up and saw them with this big thin, looked like a needle, and I said you're going to put that in my foot? And they said NO, we're going to spray," Adkins said.
Though her own skin graft had failed before, the topical spray was used during a second graft. It "took" and healed. "I had never heard of anything like that. It was just amazing," Adkins said.
Adkins burn is healing and so is her heart. Coincidentally, stem cells were used during her bypass surgery five weeks ago to hasten healing for that procedure as well. While hundreds of heart patients have had stem cell treatments, burn patients are still few in numbers.
Cardiothoracic surgeon Amit Patel and burn care surgeon Amalia Cochran are experimenting on small burns for now. But down the road, both are hoping for large scale clinical trials on patients with much larger burns.
Patel asks, "Can we accelerate healing or improve healing. Then it's the quality of healing. And then, we hopefully advance to decreasing the scarring process completely."
"It's my hope that in my career," Cochran adds, "stem cells will completely revolutionize how we're able to take care of patients. Not just with small burns that are challenging to heal, but with massive burn injuries as well."
The military is keeping a close eye on the Utah project. The future for treating burns on soldiers could stagger the imagination even more. Patel says "regrowing your own skin in a bioreactor is very realistic and that's not five years away even. We start with a biological band aid and hope to end up with basically synthetic skin that's still derived from your own cells."
In this dream of regenerative medicine, Patel believes we can only imagine a day when sheets of pristine skin might be available to any patient off the shelf.
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An electronic crosswalk sign near the Maple Street Bridge in Spokane, WA is apparently showing its disapproval of either the weather and / or local drivers by giving people the middle finger.
The crossing sign, located in downtown Spokane in the northbound lanes of Maple south of the Maple Street Bridge, has been somehow modified so when the ‘Don’t Walk’ hand is displayed, only the upraised middle finger is visible.
City of Spokane spokesperson Marlene Feist says that street department personnel think the electronic sign may have snow somehow wedged into the sign, obscuring all but the palm and raised middle finger.
Feist added that clearly the display is “unintentional.”
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Poultry Firm Under Review After Man Decapitated
abc.net.au - Already under investigation by the Fair Work Ombudsman, Australia's largest poultry manufacturer, Baiada, has now been cited by WorkSafe Victoria over the death of a contract worker at one of its plants.
In August this year Sarel Singh, 34, died instantly when fast moving machinery he was cleaning decapitated him.
A preliminary report on the workplace death, obtained by Lateline, has found Baiada breached occupational health and safety laws by not controlling the risks at the plant.
Six weeks ago, Lateline revealed how Baiada poultry was under investigation over claims of unlawful and unethical treatment of its majority migrant workforce.
Tim Kennedy from the National Union of Workers is horrified by the incident.
"It is absolutely horrific in a civilised society that we have now the fact that these things still occur, it is just not acceptable," he said.
Four years ago, Sarel Singh risked everything to find his fortune in Australia.
His brother, Harry Singh, says Sarel took out a large bank loan in his home state of Punjab to fund the relocation.
"Yes he was excited at that time. He was looking for a job - he can't get it here. Then he tried to get to Australia and have some study over there afterwards and have a job over there, for a better life," he said.
After graduating, Sarel worked as a taxi driver before getting married.
He then joined the Ecowize company, which has a contract to clean the production areas of the Baiada poultry processing plant in Melbourne's west.
"He used to say that life working at that place was like a hell. It's a very hard job and he was tired of that job. But due to the burden of the loans and debts over here and in Australia too, he had to work over there and he was struggling hard," Harry Singh said.
However, Sarel Singh was ready to give up and go back to India. But on August 12 he was killed at work.
Sarel had actually finished his four-hour shift when he was told to go back and re-clean the pack line area.
Mr Kennedy from the National Union of Workers says Sarel was not familiar with the line.
"Now the line he went to was not a line that he normally cleaned. He did not have his full protection gear on in terms of glasses and helmet," he said.
According to the union, as Sarel was standing on a ladder hosing down the line, his jacket was hooked. He was swept into the next machine and decapitated.
The union says the chain line should be stopped while it is cleaned.
"Over time what has happened is the company, to maintain production, to maintain the returns they want to get, has pushed the risk to workers by speeding that chain up so they have run the chain 20 to 40 birds per minute and people have been asked to clean it," Mr Kennedy said.
"The night on which Mr Singh was killed the chain was running at absolute capacity ... 180 birds per minute."
Harry Singh cannot believe that he has lost his brother.
"How can I believe it? My brother, he was my real brother and only brother. I have no brothers else ... and just a great shock to me," he said.
"My mother is feeling shock. Very upset with this because she has lost her older son. She has gone, gone through lot of things throughout [her] life and sacrificed a lot. Sacrificed the pension on his loans. So tough life for her now."
WorkSafe Victoria was soon at the scene of Sarel Singh's death.
Its report, obtained by Lateline, found that the production line posed an injury risk.
It also confirmed the line was operating at the top speed of 183 birds per minute, and that "by not adequately controlling the risks associated with this plant [Baiada poultry] is in contravention of the requirements of section 21(1) and 21(2)(A) of the occupational health and safety act."
Baiada poultry was issued with a prohibition notice, informing the company it must assess and control the risk to workers.
WorkSafe Victoria inspectors returned the next day and found the risk assessment prepared by Baiada was inadequate.
After assuring WorkSafe there would be changes to the production line's power system, the plant was allowed to resume operations.
WorkSafe Victoria has told Lateline the entire meat and poultry industry is now under review.
It says when it comes to work safety, employers should do more than the bare minimum and has reminded employers they are responsible for all employees whether they are staff or on contract.
Lateline has sought comment from both Baiada and Ecowize about Sarel Singh's death.
Both declined an on-camera interview.
Lateline also submitted a series of questions to Baiada about the death and work safety conditions at its plants, but there has been no reply.
The National Union of Workers has more general concerns about the treatment of workers at Baiada, particularly contract workers.
"Baiada is a major poultry processor company - we think that in large part Baiada tend to engage in a way that moves risk from them to people, where risk should not reside in terms of the employer relationship, we think that needs to change," Mr Kennedy said.
Bullying allegations
A separate investigation by the Fair Work Ombudsman into rates of pay and working conditions is still underway after snap inspections at Baiada plants around the nation.
Workers at Baiada's Adelaide plant had complained about being bullied into accepting below-award wages and long hours - often beyond working or student visa conditions.
The National Union of Workers is campaigning to improve safety and working conditions at Baiada's various plants.
Mr Kennedy says management told workers to renounce their union membership this week or they could face reduced hours.
"The workers are expressing great concern, some are in tears, that not only have they been asked to resign from the union, but also being threatened [that] if they don't resign from the union, maybe their hours will change," he said.
"These reports concern us."
But Baiada has rejected the union's allegations.
The company says it has not threatened to cut staff hours or asked workers to resign from the union.
Sarel Singh's family wants answers.
"Yes it should be investigated and if there is a culprit he should be punished as per laws of the Australian Government," Harry Singh said.
The family is also seeking compensation.
