Belgian doctors implant windpipe into woman’s throat

Linda De Croock has been living in pain and discomfort for over 2 ½ years after being in a car accident that smashed her windpipe. Doctors had to install two metal stents propping her windpipe to keep her stay alive.

Today, De Croock seems to be living a normal life again as doctors at Belgium’s University Hospital Leuven implanted a new windpipe replacing the damaged one.

“This is a major step forward for trachea transplantation,” said Dr. Pierre Delaere, the surgeon who led the team that treated De Croock.

What the doctors did was take the windpipe of a dead man, who was a suitable donor, and implanted it first into De Croock’s lower left arm where it was connected to a large artery to re-establish its blood supply as a first step in getting her body to accept the organ.

Ten months after, when enough tissues were growing normally around it and De Croocks had no longer need for anti-rejection drugs, the windpipe was transferred to its proper place.

Patrick Warnke, a tissue-engineering expert at Bond University in Australia, after hearing the success of De Croock’s case said: “This shows us that we may one day be able to use patients’ own bodies as bioreactors to grow their own tissue.”

Google takes on China

Google has vowed to defy Chinese Internet censors and risk banishment from the lucrative market in outrage at “highly sophisticated” cyberattacks aimed at Chinese human rights activists.

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered — combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web — have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a statement posted on the company’s blog.

“We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

The announcement was made amid growing tensions between China and the United States where US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Beijing to explain cyberattacks on the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists using its Gmail service, and that more than 20 other companies were similarly attacked.

Human rights activists hailed Google, voicing hope it would lead Western companies to reconsider their compromises in doing business in China.

“Through international pressure, finally a big business in the West has come to realize its own conscience,” said prominent Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, who spent 18 years in prison before seeking refuge in the United States.

Jordan demands return of Dead Sea Scrolls from Israel

Claiming that the Israelis took away from Jordan the Dead Sea Scrolls during the 1967 Six-Day war, Rafea Harahsheh, Jordan’s antiquities department official, said the government has initiated a move in the United Nations to get the ancient texts back from the Jewish state.

“Israel seized the scrolls and other antiquities from the Palestinian Museum, which was managed by Jordan, in East Jerusalem when it occupied this part of the city in 1967,” Mr. Harahsheh said.

“The government has legal documents that prove Jordan owns the scrolls.”

The scrolls, which is also called the Qumran manuscripts, are of great historical significance to biblical scholars as it ascribes the earliest origins of Judaism and Christianity.

It will be remembered that East Jerusalem was captured from Jordan during the Six-Day war and Israel later took possession of it, a move not recognized by the international community.

Government should help OFWs in distress instantly

It bothers me no end every time I read about oversea Filipino workers (OFW) who are in distress, yet help is being held hostage by our own government.

Recently an organization of migrant workers in the Middle East said that on a daily basis, they receive an average of three to five cases of distressed OFWs from various countries in the region.

What is appalling is that Filipino labor and welfare officers in the Middle East appear to be sleeping on the numerous cases of distress OFWs.

“Complaints from distressed OFWs and their plea for assistance just fall on deaf ears of Philippine Overseas Labor Office (POLO) and Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) officials in the Eastern region despite numerous calls and emails for their appropriate action,” the group said.

I get distressed myself when I read about lowly Filipinos continuously leaving and trying their luck in foreign lands, uncertain about their fate, yet trusting in God that their sacrifice will pay off someday when they could have their own lot where they could build their own house and have all their children go to school.

But, there is totally nothing that I can do. I am just one of the over 90 million Filipinos belonging to a government that has shown nothing but ineptitude all these times in making these nation move forward, in lifting the people from the morass of poverty and deprivation, in providing jobs to the citizenry and in making sure that we, as a nation and people, are respected.

Yet, it mortifies me to think that instead of government using its tools and resources to strengthen the financial and economic condition of this country, the task now is left in the hands of the OFWs to ensure that the economy of this nation won’t collapse.

I am obviously referring to the remittances by our OFW workers.

Their remittances are what made them the country’s modern day heroes.

I am embarrassed at how government is taking for granted the OFWs’ patriotic fervor.

I am confounded at the way government is despicably repaying the OFWs heroism.

Unless and until government can offer the millions of striving, common “tao” working abroad a decent job here, government should assist the distressed OFWs the instant the receive the complaint and treat them with the dignity they deserve.

Crime lord’s fake penis falls off in raid

It was an embarrassing encounter that Fat Murphy, an alleged tough guy and suspected crime lord, had with the South African police.

Police said that they were searching the crime lord, feared on the streets of Cape Town’s notorious Cape Flats suburb, when a strap-on dildo fell off his body.

Murphy tried to bribe the police by offering them 9,100 rand ($1300) not to search him during the raid.

Fat Murphy told the court he was a hermaphrodite who went under two names Fadwaan and Hilary. “I had a vagina that could not be penetrated. But I also had male organs, testes. But I always knew I was really a man and that was what I wanted to be.”

“God created me with both sexual organs. It was God’s decision, not mine,” he added.

Police has found no records of his sex change surgery.

Murphy has been released on 300 rand ($43) bail.

Slugger McGuire admits steroid use

Mark McGwire finally came clean, admitting he used steroids when he broke baseball’s home run record in 1998.

“I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era,” McGwire said in a statement on the Cardinals website.

Big Mac, the moniker given him by fans, was summoned to a congressional hearing in 2005 to testify on the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in Major League Baseball, but repeatedly deflected questions that honed in on his personal use.

The burly Cardinal slugger captured the imagination of American sports fans in 1998 when he out-slugged Chicago Cubs Sammy Sosa in their head-to-head battle to break Roger Maris’s 61 coveted home-run record that stood since 1961. McGuire finished the 1998 season with 70 home runs against Sosa’s 66 runs.

The newly hired St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach, by his admission, has now settled for good the issue surrounding his use of steroids during his battle for the home run record

Last surviving helper to hide Anne Frank dies

The Anne Frank Museum, through its spokeswoman, Maatje Mostart, has confirmed the death of  Miep Gies, the last of the surviving non-Jews who helped the teenage diarist’s family hide from the Nazis.  She was 100.

Gies and several other employees of Anne Frank’s father provided food and other necessities to the Jewish family while they hid in a concealed apartment for 25 months.

Anne Frank called them the Helpers.

Mrs. Gies is said to have found and save Anne’s diary of their life in hiding after the family was arrested in 1944. She kept the diary, one of the most famous records of the Holocaust, in a safe until after the war. She later gave it to Anne’s father Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.

Mrs. Gies died in a nursing home from a brief illness after suffering a fall just before Christmas

Porn industry going 3D

Adult film-makers are riding on the success of James Cameron’s stereoscopic Avatar that drew 3D fanatics to the big screen in 2009.

Visitors at the hi-tech AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas were treated with the special presentation of the Bad Girls in 3D by donning the 3D “active shutter glasses” to try out the virtual film.

Film producer Lance Johnson said: “For several decades, the adult entertainment industry has driven adoption of every significant new entertainment delivery system – the VHS home-video craze in the 1980s, the satellite television mania in the 1990s and the present day Internet.

“2010 and beyond will be all about 3D.”

The firm’s futuristic show pieces of 3D package consists of a 60-inch (152-centimeter) 3D TV, a compact computer server, and shutter glasses that sync with the screen to trick eyes into viewing in 3D.

Israel to build fence along Egypt border

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered to construct a fence at a cost of 1 billion shekels (163 million pounds) along two segments of Israel’s border with Egypt, in an attempt to stem the infiltration of migrant workers as well as of terrorist elements into Israel.

The bold project is estimated to be completed in two years, where the first segment will be near the southern city of Eilat and the second segment near Israel’s border with Gaza strip.

“I took the decision to close Israel’s southern border to infiltrators and terrorists. This is a strategic decision to secure Israel’s Jewish and democratic character,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

Netanyahu said Israel would “remain open to refugees” from conflict zones but added, “we cannot let tens of thousands of illegal workers infiltrate into Israel through the southern border and inundate our country with illegal aliens.”

The barrier will not be erected along the whole border, but advanced surveillance equipment will be installed to help border control officers spot the infiltrators.

Worker tombs suggest Egyptian pyramids not built by slaves

The discovery of workers’ tombs on the Giza plateau on the western edge of Cairo and at the entrance of a one kilometer-long necropolis is now debunking the belief that the Great Pyramids were built by slaves.

What made this belief even more realistic are the films shown to the public where slaves toiled to build the mammoth pyramids and in their struggle some meet horrifying end to their lives.

“These tombs were built beside the king’s pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves,” Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.

“If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king’s.”

According to Hawass, the group of workers’ tombs found in the 1990s belonged to workers who helped built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre. This was indicated by the graffiti found on the walls of the tomb site, saying, “ friends of Khufu,” which simply implied that they were not slaves.