Out of Africa with Iris unguicularis

Several years ago I made a conscious effort to add more perennials that would bloom at times of the year when few other plants were blooming. I added?gallardia, cestrum and cuphea to cover the hot gap from late June until fall. For winter I already had color from camellias, hellebores and my edgeworthia, but I wanted more, especially since winter is my least favorite season. Anything I can get to bloom then delights me.

Iris unguicularis?(commonly known as Algerian iris) is native to North Africa, Greece and parts of the Middle East. I?planted mine?two falls ago, and last?winter I think it bloomed once or twice. This year it? first opened?in November, had a couple?of?blossoms?in December and has now bloomed twice in January. I have read that it is a opportunistic bloomer waiting for warmer spells of weather during the winter months and should continue until March. The buds are apparently freeze-proof, but the open flowers are not. They are?typically shades of blue, but white and pink cultivars exist as well. The strap-like evergreen foliage?reaches?12-15" tall, and the flowers tend to open a little below that. They are sweetly fragrant, but aging knees make you think twice about getting down to enjoy the aroma.?This iris prefers full to part sun, lean?soil with smart drainage, likes dry summer weather and is hardy from in zones 7-9. These conditions are not a?problem for me.

Source: http://atidewatergardener.blogspot.com/2012/01/out-of-africa-with-iris-unguicularis.html

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Analysis: Republican Romney back on track in White House race (reuters)

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?The legal investigator should not rely upon pretext or subterfuge??

Get your copy today! My new book tackles the question of why so many bad ideas come from the law schools. "Cutting-edge commentary, hard-hitting, witty, astute." -- Publisher's Weekly. "Excellent... A fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions" -- Wall Street Journal.

Source: http://overlawyered.com/2012/01/the-legal-investigator-should-not-rely-upon-pretext-or-subterfuge/

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UK judge: Social network sites differ from press (AP)

LONDON ? The British judge presiding over a wide-ranging inquiry into media ethics and practices has suggested that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter should be seen differently than traditional publishers.

Lord Justice Brian Leveson said Thursday that there was a distinction between what he described as "pub chatter" between friends on such sites and organizations which publish material for public consumption.

Leveson's inquiry was set up in the wake of Britain's phone hacking scandal and has the power to recommend far-reaching changes to the way the country's media are regulated.

The judge also is considering whether nontraditional forms of media, such as blogs, should be submitted to any eventual new rules.

___

Online:

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120126/ap_on_hi_te/eu_britain_media

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Baltimore man tricked by FBI pleads guilty to trying to bomb recruiting site

Antonio Martinez, who attempted to detonate a car bomb at a Maryland recruiting station as an act of holy war against the United States, did not know the bomb was inert.

A Baltimore man entered a guilty plea on Thursday to attempting to use a car bomb to destroy a military recruiting office and kill the six service members in the building in an effort to wage Islamic holy war on US soil.

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Antonio Martinez agreed to drive an SUV laden with what he thought was an active bomb to the front entrance of a recruiting station in Catonsville, Md. on Dec. 8, 2010.

After parking the car bomb, Mr. Martinez traveled to a safe distance where he attempted to detonate the explosives.

What Martinez did not know was that his co-conspirators in the bombing were working undercover with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bomb was inert and the triggering device was rigged to fail.

Law enforcement officials stress that they gave Martinez multiple opportunities to back out of the bombing plot, including a chance four days before the planned attack.

?I came to you about this, brother,? Martinez said to an undercover FBI agent posing as a militant Muslim with connections in Afghanistan.

Under terms of a plea agreement, prosecutors are asking that Martinez be sentenced to 25 years in prison. He faces up to life in prison.

US District Judge Frederick Motz has set sentencing for April 6.

Martinez is a US citizen and was a recent convert to Islam at the time of the plot. He had come to admire the writings of Anwar Awlaki, the US-born militant cleric who had called on American-based Muslims to attack inside the US. The cleric was killed by an American missile in Yemen last year.

Martinez called him ?a real inspiration.? He once wrote: ?I love Sheikh Anwar al Awlaki for the sake of ALLAH.... I don?t care if he is on a terrorist list!?

According to court documents, the bomb plot began in the fall of 2010 when Martinez began attempting to recruit fellow Muslims for a violent operation against the US military in Maryland.

He told an associate that he wanted to send a message that American soldiers would be killed as long as the US continued its ?war? against Islam.

But Martinez admitted that he did not know how to conduct an attack with explosives. At one point he suggested that perhaps they could stuff socks in the exhaust pipes of the soldiers? cars with the hope that they would suffocate as they drove home.

By November, Martinez expressed a willingness to die in an attack, if necessary. ?I have a desire to die in the cause of Allah? And if I got to hell for that, then I?ll be happy ? we blow one recruiting center up ? people ain?t gonna be able to get recruited at that one,? he told an associate, according to court documents. ?Then we hit another one, then we hit another one.?

A week later in November 2010, he expressed similar views. ?Every soldier that we see in uniform will be killed on the spot, God willing,? he said. ?They will be killed until they stop waging war against Islam. We won?t stop, God willing, until they kill us or they lock us up. This is for Allah.?

The US Attorney in Maryland, Rod Rosenstein, said investigators relied on individuals coming forward from within the Muslim community to make the case.

?We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike, and we are investigating them in a way that maximizes the liberty and security of law-abiding citizens,? Mr. Rosenstein said.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/_Igv0o_X3wg/Baltimore-man-tricked-by-FBI-pleads-guilty-to-trying-to-bomb-recruiting-site

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Obama courts Latino vote on economic tour (AP)

BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. ? President Barack Obama is courting Hispanics in politically important states, setting himself up as a champion of the crucial Latino voting bloc and as a foil to Republican candidates fighting for a share of support from the same groups.

With Latino voters voting overwhelmingly Democratic, Obama is not in danger of losing the support of a majority of Hispanics. But he does need their intensity, and a Gallup tracking poll shows that while a majority of Hispanics approve of Obama, that approval is not as high as it is among black voters.

Pitching his economic agenda during a three-day, five-state trip this week, Obama has not ignored the fact that three of the states ? Nevada, Arizona and Colorado ? all have Hispanic populations of 20 percent or more. A majority of them are Democratic, but they also could be a factor in upcoming nominating contests in those states. Nevada and Colorado hold caucuses within two weeks and Arizona has a primary Feb. 28.

In Arizona Wednesday, where he was drawing attention to his efforts to increase manufacturing, Obama playfully interacted with a supporter who shouted out: "Barack es mi hermano! (Barack is my brother!)"

"Mi hermano ? mucho gusto (My brother, a real pleasure)," Obama shouted back.

And it was no accident that he scheduled an interview with Univision, the Spanish language network that reaches a broad swath of the U.S. Latino population, while he was in Arizona and with local Telemundo affiliates Thursday in Las Vegas and in Denver. All that while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the rest of the Republican presidential field were battling in Florida, another state with a key Latino voting bloc.

"It's an important community in this country and he will continue to have those interactions," White House spokesman Jay Carney said of Obama's efforts to reach out to Spanish language media.

No issue reverberates more in the appeal to Latinos than immigration.

For Obama, it reared up suddenly for him Wednesday when Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican who signed one of the toughest laws to curtail illegal immigration, greeted him at the airport tarmac in Mesa, Ariz., with a handwritten invitation for the president to join her in a visit to the Mexican border.

Obama replied coolly, noting that he did not appreciate the way she had depicted him in a book she published last year, "Scorpions for Breakfast." In the book, Brewer writes that Obama was condescending and lectured her during a meeting at the White House to discuss immigration. "He was a little disturbed about my book," Brewer told two reporters shortly after the encounter.

Obama continued to promote his economic plan Thursday in Nevada and Colorado, focusing on energy policy and his attempts to expand oil and gas exploration while also emphasizing clean energy.

"Doubling down on a clean energy industry will create lots of jobs in the process," the president said at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado, where the Air Force has installed solar panels and tested jets that run on biofuels.

As such, he was indirectly pitching to Hispanics as well. A new Pew Research Center poll found that 54 percent of Latinos believe that the economic downturn has been harder on them than on other groups in the U.S.

"There is no question that Latinos were hard hit, especially by the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting steep decline in construction work," Carney said Thursday. "Latinos are overrepresented in the construction industry. It's one of the reasons why, certainly, Latinos would greatly benefit from infrastructure investments that put construction workers back to work."

In 2008, Obama beat Republican John McCain by a 2-1 margin among Hispanics.

To win again, he will need that level of enthusiasm to make up for weaknesses elsewhere in his voter support. In a bright spot for Obama, the Pew poll found that even though Hispanics believe their economic condition is poor, two-thirds of those polled said they expect their financial situation to improve over the next year, whereas 58 percent of the overall population expect the same.

In his interview with Univision, Obama made a point of noting that both Romney and Gingrich have said they would veto legislation, known as the DREAM Act, that would give a pathway to citizenship to children who came to the United States illegally but who attend college or enlist in the military.

"They believe that we should not provide a pathway to citizenship for young people who were brought here when they were very young children and are basically American kids but right now are still in a shadow," Obama said. "They've said that they would veto the DREAM Act. Both of them."

At a debate Monday on NBC, however, both Gingrich and Romney said they would support modified legislation that only applied to young people who joined the military. "I would not support the part that simply says everybody who goes to college is automatically waived for having broken the law," Gingrich said.

Obama, in the interview, explicitly connected the Republican presidential field to congressional Republicans, who suffer from bottom-dwelling approval ratings right now. Asked why he had been unable to deliver on his promise for overhauling the immigration system, Obama replied:

"Well, it's very simple. We couldn't get any Republican votes. Zero. None," he said. "So this is the kind of barrier that we're meeting in Congress. We're just going to keep on pushing and pushing until hopefully we finally get a break."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/economy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120126/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama

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Study of freakish mystery illness finds no cause

FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2006 file photo, Verna Gallagher, who claims to be suffering from a rare infliction called, Morgellons, points to a sore on her skin that she believes bugs related to the condition emerged from, at her Roseville, Calif., home. Like others with the condition, Gallagher, 48, said she has a crawling sensation on her skin, that is caused by bugs that emerge from the skin but do not act like they are alive. Results of Centers for Disease Control study released Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2006 file photo, Verna Gallagher, who claims to be suffering from a rare infliction called, Morgellons, points to a sore on her skin that she believes bugs related to the condition emerged from, at her Roseville, Calif., home. Like others with the condition, Gallagher, 48, said she has a crawling sensation on her skin, that is caused by bugs that emerge from the skin but do not act like they are alive. Results of Centers for Disease Control study released Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

ATLANTA (AP) ? Imagine having the feeling that tiny bugs are crawling on your body, that you have oozing sores and mysterious fibers sprouting from your skin. Sound like a horror movie? Well, at one point several years ago, government doctors were getting up to 20 calls a day from people saying they had such symptoms.

Many of these people were in California and one of that state's U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, asked for a scientific study. In 2008, federal health officials began to study people saying they were affected by this freakish condition called Morgellons.

The study cost nearly $600,000. Its long-awaited results, released Wednesday, conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds.

"We found no infectious cause," said Mark Eberhard, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was part of the 15-member study team.

The study appears in PLoS One, one of the Public Library of Science journals.

Sufferers of Morgellons (mor-GELL-uns) describe a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, erupting sores, crawling sensations on their skin and ? perhaps worst of all ? mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. Some say they've suffered for decades, but the syndrome wasn't named until 2002, when "Morgellons" was chosen from a 1674 medical paper describing similar symptoms.

Afflicted patients have documented their suffering on websites and many have vainly searched for a doctor who believed them. Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.

Last May, Mayo Clinic researchers published a study of 108 Morgellons patients and found none of them suffered from any unusual physical ailment. The study concluded that the sores on many of them were caused by their own scratching and picking at their skin.

The CDC study was meant to be broader, starting with a large population and then went looking for cases within the group. The intent was to give scientists a better idea of how common Morgellons actually is.

They focused on more than 3 million people who lived in 13 counties in Northern California, a location chosen in part because all had health insurance through Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, which had a research arm that could assist in the project. Also, many of the anecdotal reports of Morgellons came from the area.

Culling through Kaiser patient records from July 2006 through June 2008, the team found ? and was able to reach ? 115 who had what sounded like Morgellons. Most were middle-aged white women. They were not clustered in any one spot.

That led to the finding that Morgellons occurred in roughly 4 out of every 100,000 Kaiser enrollees. "So it's rare," Eberhard said.

Roughly 100 agreed to at least answer survey questions, and about 40 consented to a battery of physical and psychological tests that stretched over several days.

Blood and urine tests and skin biopsies checked for dozens of infectious diseases, including fungus and bacteria that could cause some of the symptoms. The researchers found none that would explain the cases.

There was no sign of an environmental cause, either, although researchers did not go to each person's house to look around.

They took fibers from 12 people, which were tested at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Nothing unusual there, either. Cotton and nylon, mainly ? not some kind of organism wriggling out of a patient's body.

Skin lesions were common, but researchers concluded most of them were from scratching.

What stood out was how the patients did on the psychological exams. Though normal in most respects, they had more depression than the general public and were more obsessive about physical ailments, the study found.

However, they did not have an unusual history of psychiatric problems, according to their medical records. And the testing gave no clear indication of a delusional disorder.

So what do they have? The researchers don't know. They don't even know what to call it, opting for the label "unexplained dermopathy" in their paper.

But clearly, something made them miserable. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," said Felicia Goldstein, an Emory University neurology professor and study co-author.

She said perhaps the patients could be helped by cognitive behavioral therapy that might help them deal with possible contributing psychological issues.

The study is not expected to be the last word on the subject.

Among those with additional questions is Randy Wymore, an Oklahoma State University pharmacologist who for years was the most reputable scientist to look into it and who has concluded Morgellons is not a psychiatric disorder.

On Wednesday, Wymore said he had not seen the CDC paper and was unable to comment on it. But when the study began, he questioned whether Kaiser patients with Morgellons would participate, especially if they were unhappy with how they were previously handled by their Kaiser doctors.

"There is always the question: How many of the study participants actually have Morgellons Disease?" he said, in an email.

The CDC is not planning additional study, however. The agency's expertise is in infectious diseases and environmental health problems, and the researchers saw no evidence of that.

"We're not mental health experts," one CDC spokeswoman said.

___

Online:

PLoS One: http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2012-01-25-US-MED-CDC-Morgellons-Study/id-a58d3f316879443898b6e4b265389007

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