Attacker killed at Paris police station one year after Charlie Hebdo massacre

Pathankot attack: India says talks only if Pakistan acts

Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 12:16 PM

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India has said that planned talks with Pakistan would go ahead only if Islamabad took action against militants that Delhi said were behind the deadly assault on the Pathankot air base.

A foreign ministry spokesman said the "ball is in Pakistan's court" and the "immediate issue" was their response.

Indian troops killed six militants during a four-day battle at the base in Punjab, close to the Pakistan border.

Foreign secretaries of the two sides are due to hold peace talks next week.

Although India has not officially announced any dates, Indian media reports say the meeting is due to take place on 14-15 March in Islamabad.

The assault on the Pathankot base started on Saturday, when a group of gunmen - wearing Indian army uniforms - entered residential quarters on the air base.

Seven Indian troops and six militants were killed in the gun battle.

Hopes for Delhi-Islamabad detente were raised in late December after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid an unexpected visit to his counterpart Nawaz Sharif on his way back from Afghanistan and the two sides announced plans to resume peace talks.

But the attack has come as a blow to the peace initiative.

"Pathankot terror attack has put renewed focus on cross-border terrorism," Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Vikas Swarup told a press conference in Delhi on Thursday.

"The government's policy towards Pakistan is clear and consistent. India wants friendly relations with all its neighbours including Pakistan," he said, adding that "India will not tolerate cross-border terror".

On Tuesday, Mr Modi urged an "immediate" response to the Pathankot attack after Mr Sharif telephoned him to discuss the incident.

Mr Sharif promised that Pakistan would take "prompt and decisive action against the terrorists", Indian officials said.

India's Press Information Bureau said India had provided Pakistan with "specific and actionable" information on the attack.

Earlier in the week, the United Jihad Council - a coalition of more than a dozen militant groups fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir - claimed that its "national highway squad" was behind the attack.

The council, based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, is headed by Syed Salahuddin who also leads Hizb-ul Mujahidin, the longest surviving Kashmiri militant group.

Some Indian security officials have suggested the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed was to blame. India says the group is backed by Pakistan, but Islamabad denies this.

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Monkey Naruto Loses Selfie Copyright Bid

Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 11:46 AM

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A monkey who took a selfie that went viral can’t be considered the copyright owner of the photo, a federal judge said Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said that while copyright protection could be extended to animals by Congress and the president, current copyright laws do not cover animals.

The animal protection group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals brought the case to court seeking to manage all the proceeds from the photos for the 6-year-old crested macaque named Naruto and other macaques living on a reserve in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Naruto snapped a famous photo in 2011 when he snagged the camera of a British nature photographer who sought to dismiss the case, saying his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd., owned the copyright.

The company published a book of animal photos, including the monkey selfie. It has been circulated widely, with some contending that since photo was taken by a monkey, no one owns the copyright.

PETA vowed to keep fighting for the copyright.

“We have the moral imperative to continue the evolution of the law that has proved so vital to the progress and betterment of our society,” the group wrote in a press release. “All animals deserve basic legal rights that reflect their complex traits and needs.”

Attacker killed at Paris police station one year after Charlie Hebdo massacre

Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 11:40 AM

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The Paris prosecutor's office announced Thursday that it was opening a terrorism investigation after police shot and killed a knife-wielding man outside a police station in northern Paris on the anniversary of the terror attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Paris prosecutors said the man's body was found with a cell phone and a piece of paper with an emblem of the Islamic State group and a claim of responsibility written in Arabic. The statement did not provide more details about the claim.

Police shot the unidentified man, who a police union official said was shouting "Allahu Akbar" as he tried to enter the police station.

Alexis Mukenge, who saw the shooting from inside another building, told the network iTele that police told the man, "Stop. Move back." Mukenge said officers fired twice and the man immediately dropped to the ground.

The Goutte d'Or neighborhood in Paris' 18th arrondissement, a
multi-ethnic district not far from the Gare du Nord train station, was locked down, as were two metro lines running through the area, though they later reopened.

Police cleared out hundreds of people who had gathered at a subway station and along nearby streets. Shops were ordered shuttered along neighboring streets, and shop owners hastily rolled down metal shutters.

Nora Borrias, who lives in the area, could not get home because of the barricades. Shaken, she said "it's like the Charlie Hebdo affair isn't over."

Pictures posted on social media showed a man in jeans and a grey jacket lying with his arms out at his sides on the pavement, yards from the entrance to the police station.

Two French officials told The Associated Press that the man had wires extending from his clothing and an explosives squad was on site. But police later said an explosive vest the man was wearing was fake.

A Paris police official said police were investigating the incident as "more likely terrorism" than a standard criminal act. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be publicly named according to police policy.

Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told The Associated Press that at this stage of the investigation, police believe only one person was involved and are not looking for other suspects.

The attack came minutes after French President Francois Hollande warned that the threat of terrorism will continue to weigh on the country amid an ongoing state of emergency.

On Jan. 7, 2015, two French-born brothers killed 11 people inside the building where Charlie Hebdo operated, as well as a Muslim policeman outside. Over the next two days, an accomplice shot a policewoman to death and then stormed a kosher supermarket, killing four hostages. All three gunmen died.

In a speech to police forces charged with protecting the country against new attacks, Hollande said the government was passing new laws and ramping up security, but the threat remained high.

Hollande especially called for better surveillance of "radicalized" citizens who have joined ISIS or other militant groups in Syria and Iraq when they return to France.

"We must be able to force these people --and only these people-- to fulfill certain obligations and if necessary to put them under house arrest ... because they are dangerous," he said.

Following the January attacks, the government announced it planned to give police better equipment and to hire more intelligence agents.

France has been on high alert ever since, and was struck again Nov. 13 in a series of coordinated attacks by ISIS extremists that killed 130 people.

Survivors of the January attacks, meanwhile, are continuing to speak out.

Cartoonist Laurent Sourisseau, the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, who is known as Riss, told France Inter radio "security is a new expense for the newspaper budget."

"This past year we've had to invest nearly 2 million euros to secure our office, which is an enormous sum," he said. "We have to spend hundreds of thousands on surveillance of our offices, which wasn't previously in Charlie's budget, but we had an obligation so that employees feel safe and can work safely."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Sky News.

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Talks uncertain as India says Pakistan must first hunt militants

Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 11:24 AM

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By Krista Mahr and Douglas Busvine

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India called on Pakistan on Thursday to take "prompt and decisive" action against militants it blames for an attack on an air base, days before fraught peace talks between the nuclear-armed neighbors are scheduled to resume.

A meeting between the foreign secretaries of both nations had been tentatively scheduled for Jan. 15, but it is unclear if it will still happen after the weekend attack on the Indian Air Force base near the Pakistan border. India's foreign ministry said Islamabad has been given actionable intelligence that those who planned the assault came from Pakistan.

"As far as we are concerned the ball is now in Pakistan's court," spokesman Vikas Swarup told reporters when asked if the talks were on. "The immediate issue in front of us is Pakistan's response to the terrorist attack."

A senior Pakistani official said India provided intelligence that included telephone numbers, call intercepts, and locations where they believe the attackers or their handlers were.

Pakistan is following up the leads, the official said, and hopes that the talks would not be canceled while it explores them.

Prime ministers Narendra Modi of India and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan are struggling to keep their renewed dialogue on track after the militant attack killed seven Indian military personnel and wounded 22.Modi made a surprise stopover in Pakistan last month, the first time an Indian premier has visited in over a decade.

Truck bomb kills nearly 50 at Libyan police training center

Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 11:18 AM

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By Ayman El-Sahli

MISRATA, Libya (Reuters) - At least 47 people were killed on Thursday when Libya's worst bomb attack since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi hit a police training center as hundreds of recruits gathered for a morning meeting.

No group immediately claimed the attack in the town of Zliten, but suicide blasts and car bombings have increased in Libya as Islamist militants have taken advantage of the North African country's chaos to expand their presence.

Mayor Miftah Hamadi said the bomb detonated as around 400 recruits were gathering in the early morning at the police center in Zliten, a coastal town between the capital Tripoli and the port of Misrata.

"It was horrific, the explosion was so loud it was heard from miles away," Hamadi told Reuters by telephone, his voice choked with emotion. "All the victims were young, and all about to start their lives."

Witnesses said residents were ferrying victims to Misrata hospitals in ambulances and cars, many with shrapnel wounds and some bodies too damaged to be identified.

Medical sources had initially said 65 people had been killed, including some civilians. But Fozi Awnais, head of the crisis committee for the health ministry in Tripoli, said later that 47 people had died and 118 more were wounded.

Since a NATO-backed revolt ousted Gaddafi, Libya has slipped deeper into turmoil with two rival governments and a range of armed factions locked in a struggle for control of the OPEC state and its oil wealth.

In the chaos, Islamic State militants have grown in strength, taking over the city of Sirte and launching attacks on oilfields. Islamic State fighters this week attacked two major oil export terminals.

The Zliten blast was the worst since an attack in February last year when three car bombs hit the eastern city of Qubbah, killing 40 people in what officials described as a revenge attack for Egyptian air strikes on Islamist militant targets.

Western powers are pushing Libya's factions to back a U.N.-brokered national unity government to join forces against Islamic State militants, but the agreement faces major resistance from several factions on the ground.

For more than a year, an armed faction called Libya Dawn has controlled Tripoli, setting up its own self-declared government, reinstating the former parliament and forcing the recognized government to operate in the east of the country.

Western officials say forming a united government would be the first step in Libya seeking international help to fight against Islamic State, including training for a new army and possible air strikes against militant targets.

(Reporting Ayman El Sahli in Misrata and Hani Amara in Tripoli and Aziz El Yaakoubi in Rabat; Writing by Aidan Lewis and Patrick Markey; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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Igor Sergun was killed - Google Search

Tuesday January 5th, 2016 at 6:46 AM

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Russia's top military spook dies unexpectedly

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MOSCOW - Russia's Defense Ministry says the head of the military's main intelligence service, Col.-Gen. Igor Sergun, has died at age 58.

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Начальник ГРУ России был убит? « Русский Еврей

Tuesday January 5th, 2016 at 6:26 AM

Русский Еврей

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Січень 5th, 2016

Российская газета “Вести” в срочном порядке сменила заголовок новости, в котором было указано, что начальник ГРУ Игорь Сергун погиб.

Как известно, Игорь Сергун, согласно сообщениям российских СМИ внезапно умер. Пока не известно при каких обстоятельствах произошла смерть высокопоставленного генерала, который был одним из организаторов аннексии Крыма, а также принимал активное участие в войне на Донбассе.

Начальник разведки России Игорь Сергун “внезапно” умер « Русский Еврей

Monday January 4th, 2016 at 10:07 AM

Русский Еврей

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Січень 4th, 2016

В России внезапно умер начальник военной разведки. Обстоятельства смерти главного ГРУ-шника до сих пор неизвестны.

Начальник Главного разведывательного управления (ГРУ) Игорь Сергун скоропостижно скончался. Об этом говорится в телеграмме с соболезнованиями, опубликованной на сайте президента России Владимира Путина.

Игорь Сергун был назначен начальником ГРУ — заместителем начальника Генерального штаба 26 декабря 2011 года. Его предшественник Александр Шляхтуров был уволен в запас в связи с достижением предельного возраста нахождения на военной службе.

31 августа 2012 года Сергуну было присвоено звание генерал-лейтенанта, а 21 февраля 2015 года — звание генерал-полковника.

Согласно биографии Сергуна, приведенной на сайте Минобороны, он родился 28 марта 1957 года, окончил Московское суворовское военное училище, Московское высшее общевойсковое командное училище имени Верховного Совета РСФСР, Военную академию Советской Армии и Военную академию Генерального штаба Вооруженных Сил РФ.

В 1984 году Сергун поступил на службу в военную разведку. Как отмечает «Интерфакс», в 1998 году он имел звание полковника и работал военным атташе России в столице Албании.

<a href="http://www.rbc.ru/politics/04/01/2016/568a76239a794784c88b6ac1" rel="nofollow">http://www.rbc.ru/politics/04/01/2016/568a76239a794784c88b6ac1</a>

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начальник гру игорь сергун - Google Search

Monday January 4th, 2016 at 10:05 AM

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Умер начальник ГРУ Игорь Сергун

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder From 9/11 Still Haunts

Saturday January 2nd, 2016 at 11:09 AM

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In the safety of her therapist’s office in late 2001, Dr. Margaret Dessau made a tape reliving what it was like to look out her living room window after she heard the boom of a hijacked plane eight blocks away.

Running naked from her bath, she saw pigeons and paper flying through the air. “It’s kind of beautiful in a way,” she recalls on the recording she made and listened to over and over as part of her treatment. “There’s these silver pieces just floating in the air.”

Her gaze met the hole in the tower. “The flames get worse, and then I start seeing all these people hanging out there. The guy with this white towel, and he’s waving it.”

He jumps. Children at a nearby school scream.

“How are you feeling?” her therapist, David Bricker, is heard asking on the tape.

“I start crying,” she replies.

Dr. Dessau’s husband yells at her, “Stop looking at it, stop looking at it.” But, she says, “I can’t tear myself away from it.”

One measure of the psychological impact of 9/11 is this: At least 10,000 firefighters, police officers and civilians exposed to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center have been found to havepost-traumatic stress disorder, and in a kind of mass grieving, many of them have yet to recover, according to figures compiled by New York City’s three 9/11 health programs.

In interviews over the last several months, Dr. Dessau and others revealed a wide-ranging but consistent body of symptoms. They cannot sleep. They replay the disaster in their minds, or in theirnightmares. They have trouble concentrating. They are jittery and overreact to alarms or loud noises. They feel helpless, hopeless, guilty and cut off from the people who are close to them. They avoid anything that reminds them of that terrible day.

Millions of dollars will be spent treating them over the next few years through the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, passed by Congress in December, which provides $4.3 billion to compensate and treat people with 9/11-related illnesses.

Some are emergency responders and others who vainly searched the debris for survivors. But some were residents, commuters and office workers caught in the dust cloud. And others were passive witnesses with no direct connection to the attack other than proximity.

Because of lingering questions about the bounds of the PTSD diagnosis, which is only three decades old, people with mental problems are eligible only for treatment assistance, whereas people with physical ailments, in most cases breathing difficulties, qualify for both treatment and compensation. And money available to treat patients with the stress disorder might decline if the government concludes there is a link between certain cancers and 9/11, which would give cancer patients access to the same pool of money. Doctors are expecting a surge in PTSD patients with the coming 10th anniversary, as they have on each Sept. 11.

Charles Figley, professor of disaster mental health at Tulane University’s School of Social Work and a former Marine, advanced the concept of PTSD in a 1978 book on Vietnam War veterans. He said one reason the trauma had been so hard to shake was that it ripped at the most ordinary fabric of daily life.

The landmark is not a distant hill in Afghanistan that one will never see again. “It’s the places you see every day, where you proposed to your wife, where you remember getting the news that you got promoted, where your young children played,” Dr. Figley said.

“You go into a combat zone and then you leave,” he added. “You don’t leave home. You return all the time.”

Ancient but Evolving Illness

“The Iliad” described warriors consumed by feelings of guilt, rage and grief. World War I had “shell shock,” and World War II had “combat fatigue.” PTSD has been found in survivors of Nazi concentration camps, fires and railway accidents. But it was not until 1980, after the Vietnam War, that post-traumatic stress disorder was added to the psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The current manual, the DSM-IV, says PTSD can develop through a range of exposures to death or injury: direct personal involvement, witnessing it or, if it concerns someone close, just learning about it. Almost no other psychiatric diagnosis has generated as much controversy, according to Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, a retired psychiatry professor from Columbia University and an expert in mental disorder classifications. It has become so vague that stressed-out college students and people who watched horror movies could fit the profile, he and two other experts wrote in a professional journal article.

“It’s a way of saying something terrible has happened to me and I’ve been damaged in some way, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an illness,” Dr. Spitzer, who advocates tightening the criteria, said in an interview.

Some experts have been skeptical of studies finding that people suffered the disorder from watching television coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks. (Congress effectively excluded TV watchers from its treatment program by requiring that victims had lived or worked within certain geographic boundaries.)

Amy Cushing-Savvi, a social worker at Mount Sinai Medical Center, which runs the largest program, said a frequent topic at staff meetings was, “What’s 9/11 and what isn’t?” — in other words, the exquisitely vexing question of how to separate the effects of 9/11 from the traumas of everyday life.

“Taxpayers could end up paying for psychotherapy for Woody Allen and half of Manhattan,” Theodore H. Frank, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in April 2008, when he was a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Ultimately, federal financing for PTSD treatment was limited to firefighters, police officers, employees of the New York City medical examiner’s office who handled body parts, and other rescue, recovery, cleanup and support workers at ground zero, on the barges that carried debris and at the Staten Island landfill where the twin towers rubble was entombed; responders at the attack sites at the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa.; and people exposed to 9/11 dust when the buildings collapsed or who lived, worked or attended school south of Houston Street in Manhattan and in parts of Downtown Brooklyn where the dust may have extended.

Family members of New York City firefighters who died are covered as a continuation of an existing Fire Department counseling program, but family members of other victims are not. Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the lead sponsor of the Zadroga Act in the House, said that since victims’ families had been covered by the original 9/11 compensation fund, which paid an average of $2.1 million to each family, the goal was to look after others who suffered. “We were focusing on covering the people who did not die on 9/11, but those who were dying and sick because of 9/11,” she said.

The law was named after a New York police detective who took part in the rescue efforts and later developed breathing complications. The cause of his death in 2006 became a source of debate.

Dr. John Howard, who oversees 9/11 programs as the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said in an interview that he was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt about PTSD, even if they had other stresses. “Collapsing 220 stories of a lot of material in one of the most densely populated cities in the world is a very unique event,” Dr. Howard said.

“In mental health you have to treat the whole person, and you can’t really separate out some of these other influences, personal stressors, economic issues. People are living their lives.”

“It sounds squishy,” he added, “but it really isn’t squishy.”

Her World Collapses

For Dr. Dessau, who is now 64, listening to the tapes she made during therapy conquered her fears for a while, “like cod liver oil,” she said. But in 2009, her sense of tragedy was compounded when her husband, Bob Wheeler, died just four months after being told he had lung cancer.

Dr. Dessau, a youthful, athletic blonde with blue-rimmed green eyes, still lives in the same airy loft on Greenwich Street, decorated with souvenirs of 35 years of travel with Mr. Wheeler — shells arranged in bowls, a child-size winged Hermes, a many-limb stone goddess, a terra cotta Chinese statue of a man. There is also a green plastic box containing her husband’s ashes.

Mr. Wheeler, a lawyer, never smoked, so Dr. Dessau, a pulmonologist, suspected that his disease was related to his exposure to the falling buildings. His quick death revived the sense of helplessness she had felt watching people jump from the towers. “As a doctor you always think you can fix it,” she said.

She lost 20 pounds. She stopped seeing friends. She was “on red alert,” sure that something bad would happen at any second. She avoids looking at the skyline outside her window, though her reaction is not as bad since buildings have begun to fill in the space where the World Trade Center used to be.

A city fund set up before the Zadroga Act was enacted provided $9,000 to Dr. Dessau to cover therapy expenses not handled by her insurance. The city sent a letter encouraging her to seek further treatment through a public program that would allow the Zadroga money to cover her out-of-pocket expenses, but she prefers her own therapist.

She sees 9/11 and her husband’s death as part of a continuum, along with her parents’ escape from Nazi Germany, the suicide of a close relative and her time preparing bandages as a student in Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. “It confirms my sense of pessimism,” she said. “It’s corroboration of the evil of human beings.”

That sense of 9/11 as a catalyst is common. In June, Stanley Mieses, 58, a freelance writer and editor, lined up with other psychiatric patients at the city-run Elmhurst Hospital Center under a sign that said, as if testing his sanity: New  atient Registrati n.

During a screening, he circled the maximum, “nearly every day,” to a question about how often he had been “feeling bad about yourself — or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down.”

Mr. Mieses, who is receiving treatment under the Zadroga Act, lived six and a half blocks from the trade center and watched the buildings collapse. The police evacuated him, but he returned every few days to feed his cats. “Dead people were blowing into my apartment off the windowsills,” he said, remembering the ash, “because the landlord was too cheap to clean it.”

For a while he sublimated his anxiety, filing reports for NPR from his stunned neighborhood. But in short order, his mother, a World War II German refugee with what he said were her own PTSD issues, died; his girlfriend left him; work dried up; and he was forced by his finances to move to Jackson Heights, Queens.

These psychic blows led, he said, to “a change in my attitude, a change in my — I don’t know — joie de vivre.”

His pulmonologist at Elmhurst says his shortness of breath could be from the dust, or the 20 years he smoked. The origins of his mental wounds are also ambiguous. “I tend to think of 9/11 as the trapdoor that opened up,” Mr. Mieses said. “Whatever else I’m doing past that, is climbing back up.”

A Number Unknown

It is impossible to say how many people have 9/11-related PTSD. The city’s three official programs do not count people, like Dr. Dessau, who use private physicians — or those who have not been treated at all.

According to figures provided by the programs, run by the Fire Department, which treats its own employees; a consortium of hospitals led by Mount Sinai Medical Center, which treats police officers and other rescue and recovery workers; and the city’s public hospital system, which treats civilians, at least 10,000 patients have met the criteria over the last decade, and at least 3,600 of them still have symptoms. But even those rounded numbers have an asterisk: 3,000 of the 10,000 patients were treated by the public hospitals, whose statistics do not differentiate among PTSD, depression and anxiety. The Zadroga program covers all three, along with panic disorder, substance abuse and a few other conditions.

Extrapolating from a registry of people exposed to the attack, the city’s health department has estimated that 61,000 of the 409,000 in the disaster area experienced “probable” PTSD within six years of 9/11. But these numbers were produced by institutions and a city government with two main goals: to make as many people as possible feel better, and to try to persuade Congress to provide a steady stream of treatment money. The city’s 9/11 health programs have created a huge intake system that screens every patient for mental as well as physical illness, and the public hospitals reached out to New Yorkers with subway advertisements that said: “Lived there? Worked there? You deserve care.”

No one can say exactly how many people were exposed to the attack, and how many will eventually become physically or mentally sick. The federal government will allow the Mount Sinai and public hospitals programs to grow by 25,000 patients each over the next five years. It will be up to each program to decide who qualifies for treatment, but they will have to use uniform criteria approved by the government. Therapy can cost $135 for a 45-minute weekly session with a psychologist or $165 with a psychiatrist.

If the government finds a link between 9/11 dust and cancer, there is some concern about running out of money, though the Zadroga fund is to be a secondary payment source, covering what insurance and workers’ compensation do not.

Dr. Howard, the federal 9/11 health administrator, said the government “will treat people as they come in to the extent possible.”

Alarms, Over and Over

Patients at Mount Sinai find a busy warren of rooms where they are divided into three categories: green (no further assessment needed), yellow (potentially symptomatic) and red (symptoms so severe that they might be suicidal). They begin the screening at home, filling out an 11-page questionnaire that asks about their level of energy, how often they feel “calm and peaceful,” and about recent life experiences like losing a job or having a relationship break up. In a section called “Reminders of 9/11,” they are asked whether they have recurring thoughts of the disaster and whether they feel emotionally cut off from those close to them.

In an interview with a clinician, they are asked whether “you often believe it would be better if you were dead,” “you feel worthless” or “you feel guilty even though you didn’t deserve to feel that way.”

If they have PTSD, patients are usually given a combination of psychotherapy and pills, typicallyantidepressants, and sometimes sleeping pills. Many patients are encouraged to make recordings of their memories, as Dr. Dessau did, or to write about them until the memories lose their power. This is called exposure therapy.

Once a month, Earl Holland drives from his home in Flatlands, Brooklyn, to Mount Sinai for meditation classes. “You get in a room, the chimes are going, it’s fantastic,” Mr. Holland said. He also takes Wellbutrin, an antidepressant, and Ambien, a sleeping pill.

Mr. Holland, 48, was a paramedic supervisor for North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System when he responded to the disaster after the second tower collapsed. In his dreams, he still hears the alarms — attached to each firefighter’s mask — that signal that a firefighter has stopped moving. “There were hundreds of alarms going off,” he said, grabbing a tissue to wipe away the tears as he sat in his kitchen, remembering.

“I kept the list” of the missing, he said.

Two months after the attacks, he responded to the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Belle Harbor, Queens.

He started shutting himself in his bedroom, refusing to talk to his wife and children. He spent hours staring at photographs of the burning rubble and had flashbacks of responding to murders during the 1980s crack epidemic.

“Toward the end, I didn’t want to do my calls,” he said. “It was like, enough. I actually thought it was burnout, but it wasn’t burnout.”

Mr. Holland’s diagnosis of PTSD was made in 2009 through a Mount Sinai outreach program, and his costs will be covered by the Zadroga Act.

He has recovered enough that he hopes to return to work, but not on the front lines. “I don’t know if I’ll go to the memorial any time soon,” he said. “I look at that kind of as closure, if I’m able to do that.”

Read the whole story

 

· · · · · · · · · · ·

The Lingering Mental Health Effects of 9/11

Saturday January 2nd, 2016 at 11:05 AM

World Of Psychology

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On this 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. in New York City and Washington, DC, we are reminded not only of the sacrifice of the hundreds of first-responders — firemen, police, and emergency medical personnel — but also of the long-term impact of the tragedy on those who survived.

Those who survived didn’t do so in a vacuum; they had to relive the tragedy on the news day in and day out for weeks thereafter.

As the weeks turned into months turned into years, some of the effects of 9/11 could be felt long after the initial destruction. They weren’t always physical effects either — many people suffered from mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for years after.

About a year ago, a research study examined some of these effects. Here’s what they found.

The study was conducted by Perlman et al. and looked at all of the health and psychology research literature in PubMed related to the 9/11 attacks. The researchers found more than 150 studies looking at the mental health effects alone.

While the attacks occurred in two specific geographical areas in the U.S., the entire U.S. population felt the impact of the attacks:

Measurements taken 3–5 days after 9/11 suggested that 44% of the adult US population experienced substantial stress. Findings from subsequent national studies also showed that individuals across the country experienced fear and insecurity, and had increased rates of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) symptoms 2 months later.

Most people who lived and worked in New York City around the World Trade Center felt the impact of the attacks. But those who immediately responded to the tragedy bore the highest burden:

[The] prevalence of PTSD 2-3 years after 9/11 was 12.4% in rescue and recovery workers and volunteers, with a range from 6.2% for police to 21.2% for unaffiliated volunteers.

The children of New York City were also impacted:

The severity of children’s reactions has been positively correlated with parental distress (parental post-traumatic stress and crying in front of the child) and with the number of graphic images seen on television.

This could argue for parents working to limit their children’s access to graphic images of a future tragedy. Although in today’s age of mobile connectivity, such limits may be practically impossible to enforce.

The mental health effects of 9/11 can be felt long after the attacks… and even intensify over the years:

In people […] who did not report a PTSD diagnosis before 9/11, the prevalence
of the disorder was higher 5-6 years after the attacks (19%) than after 2-3 years (14%). Late-onset PTSD (a report of symptoms consistent with PTSD in the 2006-07 survey, but not in the 2003–04 survey) had developed in 10%.

And of course, in the real world, disorders rarely occur by themselves. A diagnosis of PTSD often brings additional diagnoses along with it:

In enrollees in the WTC Health Registry who screened positive for chronic PTSD symptoms after the disaster, a third also reported a diagnosis of depression since 9/11.

Responders with probable PTSD had 13.9 times higher odds for probable depression and 9.2 times higher odds of panic disorder than those without PTSD; comorbid responders were 40–86 times more likely to have emotional disruption of function […] than were those without PTSD, panic disorder, or depression.

All of this speaks to the impact such a human tragedy can have on the people who live through it, experience it through the media, and have to remember it on days like today.

Our hearts go out to all of those who lost family members in the attacks, and those who are still re-living the events of that day like they occurred yesterday.

Peace.

Footnotes:

Read the whole story

 

· · · ·

Russian espionage in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Saturday January 2nd, 2016 at 10:53 AM

Wikipedia - Recent Changes [En]

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Doctrine[edit]

The Foundations of Geopolitics, initially published in 1997 when Vladimir Putin became FSB chief, is a military training textbook which has influenced key Russian decision-makers. It states that Russia should use its special forces within the borders of the United States to:[2]

introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.

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