U.S. researchers say they found using copper objects in hospital intensive care unit rooms cuts healthcare-acquired infections by more than half.
Copper -- and brass -- don't spread germs because they kill microbes on their surfaces continuously.
Healthcare-acquired infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus often contaminate items within hospital rooms, allowing bacteria to transfer from patient-to-patient.
Copper on ICU surfaces reduces infections such as MRSA by half
Jackie Robinson to JFK in 1963 telegram: Rev. King needs more protection in Miss.
On June 15, 1963, Jackie Robinson sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy urging him do everything within his power to protect Martin Luther King Jr.
"The world cannot afford to lose him to the whims of murderous maniacs," Robinson said in the telegram. At the time, King was in Mississippi for the funeral of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who was shot and killed three days earlier. Evers played an important role in the desegregation of the University of Mississippi.
U.S. ranks near bottom of UNICEF report on child well-being
The United States ranked in the bottom four of a United Nations report on child well-being. Among 29 countries, America landed second from the bottom in child poverty and held a similarly dismal position when it came to “child life satisfaction.”
Keeping the U.S. company at the bottom of the report, which gauged material well-being, overall health, access to housing and education, were Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, three of the poorest countries in the survey.
Embattled Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad quits
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad quit on Saturday after months of tension with President Mahmoud Abbas, leaving the administration in disarray just as the United States tries to revive peace talks with Israel.
Abbas, who has been unhappy with Fayyad's handling of the cash-strapped government, accepted the resignation and asked Fayyad to stay on as caretaker until a new government is formed, according to official Palestinian news agency WAFA.
Scientists predict arctic could be free of sea ice in summer by 2050
Two U.S. scientists say it's not a question of "if" there will be nearly ice-free summers in the arctic but "when," and sooner than many think.
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration scientists James Overland and Muyin Wang say several different methods for predicting when the arctic will be nearly ice free in the summer show it could happen before 2050 and possibly within the next decade or two.
Pentagon reportedly gave Afghan contracts to Taliban
A Pentagon audit indicates that due to a lack of oversight, some Afghan contracts went to the Taliban. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction compiled the audit report.
The SIGAR audit detailed that the agency found significant weaknesses in the oversight intended to keep the U.S. Department of Defense from giving contracts to Taliban and other terrorists, adding that that the Pentagon is failing to implement fail-safes designed to prevent contracts from being given to terrorists, or following up on them afterwards to apprehend them.
In Just Three Months, States Proposed An Astonishing 694 Provisions About Reproduction
In the first quarter of 2013, states have proposed 694 provisions related to a woman’s body, how she gets pregnant, or how she chooses to end that pregnancy.
A new report released on Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute takes a comprehensive look at how the War on Women has continued past the election cycle and into 2013. It shows that the new legislatures across the country are still very much dedicated to restricting sex education, availability of medication, and abortion access for women. Indeed, 47 percent of the 694 provisions were directly related to abortion:
Mayflower, meet Exxon: When oil spilled in an Arkansas town
The incident in Mayflower, 25 miles north of Little Rock, pales in comparison to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude spilled from an Exxon oil tanker into Alaskan waters. It's too early to estimate the financial cost from Mayflower to Exxon, but it is likely to be a drop in the bucket for the $400 billion company.
But the spill has stoked a national debate about the safety of carrying crude in pipelines across the United States just as politicians weigh whether to approve the mega Keystone XL pipeline that will help to link the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, with oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
And although significant pipeline spills happen every three days on average in the United States, according to federal data, rarely do they occur in a town and rarely in these volumes.
U.S. secret: CIA collaborated with Pakistan spy agency in drone war
Even as its civilian leaders publicly decried U.S. drone attacks as breaches of sovereignty and international law, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency secretly worked for years with the CIA on strikes that killed Pakistani insurgent leaders and scores of suspected lower-level fighters, according to classified U.S. intelligence reports.
Dozens of civilians also reportedly died in the strikes in the semi-autonomous tribal region of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan that is a stronghold of al Qaida, Afghan militants, other foreign jihadists and a tangle of violent Pakistani Islamist groups.
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