Saturday, October 19, 2013

NBC News clips

Mom of girl charged in Florida bullying suicide arrested on child abuse charges

The mother of one of the two girls facing charges over the suicide of a bullied 12-year-old Florida girl was jailed Friday on child abuse charges in a case authorities say is unrelated to the felony case against her daughter.
Vivian Lee Vosburg, 30, of Lakeland was being held without bond in the Polk County Jail on two counts of child abuse with bodily harm and four counts of child neglect, the sheriff's office said.

Both girls have been released into their parents' custody, and authorities stressed that the case announced Friday is unrelated to that investigation.
Polk County, Fla., Sheriff Grady Judd discusses the two counts of child abuse and four counts of child neglect brought Friday against Vivian Vosburg.
According to the sheriff's affidavit, deputies acting on several tips identified Vosburg on a video posted to Facebook showing a woman punching and screaming profanities at two 12-year-old boys who had been fighting.
Four other children are seen in the video, which was posted in July by one of the children, investigators said. The sheriff's office said Vosburg has "access" to all six children.

According to the affidavit, Vosburg told investigators Thursday that she was the woman in the video and acknowledged punching one of the boys in the face and the other in the back of the head and shoulders. She said she knew she shouldn't have hit them, according to the affidavit.
Sheriff Grady Judd said the was still on Facebook as recently as Friday morning.
"This clearly indicates to us that this appears to be a normal way of life," Judd said at a news conference. "They're laughing and cussing and throwing the F-bomb around, then they're posting that conduct for all to see."
Of Vosburg's daughter, he said: "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

I always wonder what kind of background these abusive children have, and in this case, it isn't surprising that she turned out as she did. She has probably been beaten at home. The Facebook video was taken on an average day at home in July and put on Facebook by one of the children. The mother's face has a scowl on it, and she looks like she weighs 250 pounds, so being hit by her would hurt. It's still no excuse for turning into a merciless bully, but it may be part of the reason. You still have to punish the child, though, because when they stray into the criminal area there should be legal consequences.

A companion article on the NBC site today is about punishing the parents when a child becomes a problem, but the article said that experts don't think it's effective, since it is so difficult to keep track of what the kids are doing on their cell phones and Facebook. I think criminalizing cyberstalking is the best, because then there is a law in place which can be used to give proper punishment to the kids in question. I have often thought that some of the things that kids get away with on the school property, such as carrying knives and administering beatings to other students, should be punished as a criminal offense and not a school discipline problem. They are too serious to ignore, and they are not a “normal” part of being a teenager.



Oops! That Etruscan warrior prince was actually a warrior princess

A 2,600-year-old grave unearthed in Tuscany, thought to hold the remains of a warrior prince, actually contains the remains of a middle-aged warrior princess holding a lance.

Last month, archaeologists announced a stunning find: a completely sealed tomb cut into the rock in Tuscany, Italy. The untouched tomb held what looked like the body of an Etruscan prince holding a spear, along with the ashes of his wife. Several news outlets reported on the discovery of the 2,600-year-old warrior prince.
But the grave held one more surprise. A bone analysis has revealed the warrior prince was actually a princess.
Judith Weingarten, an alumna of the British School at Athens, noted the switch on her blog, titled "Zenobia: Empress of the East." [See Photos of the Unsealed Etruscan Tomb]
Etruscan tomb
Historians know relatively little about the Etruscan culture that flourished in what is now Italy until its absorption into the Roman civilization around 400 B.C. Unlike their better-known counterparts, the ancient Greeks and the Romans, the Etruscans left no historical documents, so their graves provide valuable insights into their culture.
The new tomb, unsealed by archaeologists in Tuscany, was found in the Etruscan necropolis of Tarquinia, a UNESCO World Heritage site where more than 6,000 graves have been cut into the rock.
"The underground chamber dates back to the beginning of the sixth century B.C. Inside, there are two funerary beds carved into the rock," Alessandro Mandolesi, the University of Turin archaeologist who excavated the site, wrote in an email.
When the team removed the sealed slab blocking the tomb, they saw two large platforms. On one platform lay a skeleton bearing a lance. On another lay a partially incinerated skeleton. The team also found several pieces of jewelry and a bronze-plated box that researchers said might have belonged to a woman.
"On the inner wall, still hanging from a nail, was an aryballos [a type of flask] oil-painted in the Greek-Corinthian style," Mandolesi said.
Initially, the lance suggested that the skeleton on the biggest platform was a male warrior, possibly an Etruscan prince. The jewelry probably belonged to the second body, the warrior prince’s wife.
But bone analysis revealed that the prince holding the lance was actually a 35- to 40-year-old woman, whereas the second, partially incinerated skeleton belonged to a man.
Given that, what do archaeologists make of the spear?
"The spear, most likely, was placed as a symbol of union between the two deceased," Mandolesi told Viterbo News 24 on Sept. 26.
Weingarten, however, doesn't believe the symbol of unity explanation. Instead, she thinks the spear shows the woman's high status. The other explanation is "highly unlikely," Weingarten told LiveScience. "She was buried with it next to her, not him."
Gendered assumptions
The mix-up highlights just how easily both modern and old biases can color the interpretation of ancient graves.
In this instance, the lifestyles of the ancient Greeks and Romans may have skewed the view of the tomb. Whereas Greek women were cloistered away, Etruscan women, according to Greek historian Theopompus, were more carefree — working out, lounging nude, drinking freely, consorting with many men and raising children who did not know their fathers' identities.
Instead of using objects found in a grave to interpret the sites, archaeologists should first rely on bone analysis or other sophisticated techniques, Weingarten said.
"Until very recently, and sadly still in some countries, sex determination is based on grave goods. And that, in turn, is based almost entirely on our preconceptions. A clear illustration is jewelry: We associate jewelry with women, but that is nonsense in much of the ancient world," Weingarten said. "Guys liked bling, too."

This is my favorite article in the last few weeks. The good news is that this was an untouched grave with everything in its place since the burial, so the archeologists can make a better judgment of what they find. Many old tombs have been found before at some time by grave robbers and looted. About the spear, it could be as Weingarten the archeologist said, a symbol of high status, but within recorded history female heads of state have gone to war. They did in some cases during the Middle Ages in Europe and the women of the Celtic people of the United Kingdom fought. According to the historian Theopompus, quoted above, the women of Etruria were highly liberated and sexual “free spirits,” so societal restrictions probably wouldn't prevent such a thing.



Community health centers get ready for their Obamacare close-up

Physician assistant Mable Dunn examines Jaqueline Lopez at Mary's Center, a community health center in Washington, D.C.
Editor's note: This story is the latest in NBC's series "Quest for Care", exploring the shortage of health-care providers as the Affordable Care Act rolls out.
From the outside, Mary’s Center doesn’t look like much. The cheerful yellow paint does little to make the small shabby building stand out from the other run-down shops and homes on the transitional fringes of Washington, D.C.’s Adams-Morgan neighborhood.
And, quite frankly, it doesn’t look much better on the inside. The waiting room is clean but functional, half-full but not overflowing with families waiting for care. The examination rooms are cramped. Nothing surprising for a community health clinic that primarily serves people who don’t have a way to pay for the service.
The surprise comes in watching Mable Dunn examine Franchesca Varela, a 19-year-old baker and college student who’s in for a run-of-the-mill prescription renewal. It’s an interaction that might take 10 minutes in a private physician’s office, and it demonstrates just why the Obama administration and many health experts believe these grassroots centers that sprang up to help those in the greatest need just might be models for the future of the U.S. health-care system.
Dunn spends a good 20 minutes with Varela, double-checking her health history and asking careful questions to ferret out any health issues Varela may have failed to mention.
Dunn renews two prescriptions, and then suggests a Mary’s Center clinic closer to Varela’s home. “I am just looking out for your transportation costs,” she says. She chats about Varela’s employment prospects and about school.
It’s far more than many doctors would do in a single visit. But then, Dunn isn’t a physician. She’s a physician’s assistant, with the special training needed to enable her to examine patients and prescribe medications. And she’s working not in an office where patients must be run through at a brisk pace to pay overheads, but at a nonprofit community health center where the focus is on the total well-being of the patients.
Mary’s Center is one of more than 1,100 federally qualified community health centers. The federal government started giving them money in 1965, when it became clear these grass-roots organizations were filling big gaps in the U.S. health-care system.
With the expansion of health insurance that’s now underway due to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, these centers are gearing up to play an even bigger role. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of 90,000 doctors over the next decade, just as millions of newly insured people start looking for them. The biggest need is for primary care physicians: the old-fashioned family doctors who do a little bit of everything and who typically make far less money than specialists.
Most clinics try to attract patients with Medicare, Medicaid and even private insurance, to bring in cash that can help pay for patients who don’t have any insurance.
On the same street as Mary’s Center, run-down row houses are being snapped up and spruced up by young professional families looking to live within walking distance of the city center. They are far wealthier than the mostly Hispanic clients who make up the bulk of the 30,000 patients Mary’s Center treats each year, and the clinic aims to attract them as patients. “We call it get care to give care,” Dunn says. Right now, just 4 percent of the clinic’s clients have private health insurance, while 44 percent have Medicaid and 37 percent have no insurance at all.
Community health clinics had been ready for a windfall from the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Not only did the law make it easier for people to buy health insurance, but it was supposed to expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance plan for the low-income, to cover about 16 million more people than are already covered.
Quest for Care -Nurse practitioners take on more
And millions will be covered in states like Maryland as well as the District of Columbia. “All of a sudden, all these people are going to be insured,” says Maria Gomez, president and CEO of Mary’s Center.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the Medicaid expansion requirement went too far. Now, only 20 states have said for sure they’ll expand Medicaid.
And because the law operated on the assumption that Medicaid would expand to cover everyone making up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level — $30,000 or so for a family of four — it leaves out the poorest of the poor in states that won’t expand. The law provides generous federal subsidies for people making anything more than that, up for four times the federal poverty level or $94,000 for a family of four.
Fully a million people now being treated in community health centers who should have been able to go on Medicaid starting in January now will not, a team at George Washington University reported this week. 
"Our analysis shows that if you are poor and live in one of the 25 opt-out states, you are likely to have been left out when it comes to health reform," says Peter Shin, an associate professor of health policy who led the study. "Community health centers in the opt-out states will be faced with waiting rooms filled with uninsured patients, many with serious and costly health problems."
It’s bad news for centers, which scramble to pay their bills and those of their patients with a combination of federal and state grants, donations and cash drummed up via fundraisers. It makes patients like Varela, who’s covered under her mother’s private Blue Cross policy, valued customers. The reimbursement the clinic gets from Varela’s insurance will have to help pay for many of these left-out patients.
Despite the hardship, Legacy, like many community health centers, is flourishing. A sparkling new clinic went up in 2011 in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood. It provides a convenient full continuum of care, from vaccines to vision and dental services, in a single building. With an on-site fitness center, it’s so nice that Garnet Coleman, the state representative for that part of Houston, gets his health care there.
“We’re getting ready to launch another campaign to build another clinic in southwest Houston and also a clinic on the east side of Houston,” Ellis says.
Quest for Care - Nursing shortage double whammy
In fact, clinics like the Montrose Center look so good that large, commercial hospital systems are eyeing the model. It worries Gomez.
“We have a big corporate entity like MedStar, which runs a hospital, and they run an emergency room and now they are opening all these community health centers like ours in the same area where we are,” says Gomez. MedStar is planning to build an urgent care clinic just blocks away from Mary’s Center’s Adams Morgan locations. Gomez fears they’ll poach everyone with health insurance.
“I think competition is good,” Gomez said. “But what I am afraid of is that people will be like, ‘Wow this is a big institution, they have money, let me go over there instead’.”

I have gone to community facilities like this one several times over my years, since I didn't have health insurance unless my job provided it. For daily, ordinary needs, I have found them to be good. If I were to develop cancer or a heart condition, I would want a specialist who had a demonstrable background in the field. If you are going to have heart surgery, you want a surgeon who has done the operation a number of times before. I have a family history of heart problems, but not at my age, and my overall health is good, so I don't worry about developing serious problems. I like the convenience of going to a health clinic, since they usually take walk-ins. Now that I have Medicare I will keep going to my family doctor's office for most things.



New York mom steps on a skull, and opens a murder case

The car skidded to a stop in the highway median’s thick underbrush, and the young mother behind the wheel realized that she and her 3-year-old son had survived the accident unscathed. Her sedan was stuck on top of some early spring brambles, and she’d need to borrow a cellphone to call a tow-truck and her husband, but she’d run off one of Long Island’s busiest roads, the Northern State Parkway, at high speed without striking any cars or trees.
Relieved, she opened the driver’s side door to get out and flag down help – and stepped directly onto a human skull.
Within hours, on that March day in 2004, investigators from the New York State Police were unearthing the fully clothed skeleton of an unknown male, partially stuffed into a plastic bag just inside the eastern border of Nassau County. Before long, however, they had to admit they were stumped. Who was this man and how did he die? And who dumped his body?

One of their best clues to his identity and how long he’d been lying under the leaves was an item of clothing, an iconic artifact from the era of Pac-Man and MTV – his 1980s Members Only jacket. The coat helped establish that the man had probably been hidden in the lonely strip of woods between the east and westbound lanes of a freeway more than two decades before Willis found him.

Almost ten years since the body’s discovery, however, detectives still haven’t identified the victim or figured out who might have killed him, and now they’re asking for the public’s help in solving a mystery they call the Members Only case.

“We want to identify him to give somebody, somewhere, closure,” said Senior Investigator Thomas Hughes, when asked why the state police are taking a fresh look at the long-cold case. “Maybe there’s a kid out there who wants to know what happened to his father.” 
Hughes, who caught the case when the body was first found, says the 2004 investigation was “painstaking,” and that it was frustrating not to have resolution.
“When it went cold,” he said, “I kept working on it myself.” He’s now been paired with a new investigator to take another pass at the evidence.
Do you have information on the Members Only cold case? Call the New York State Police Troop “L” Major Crimes Unit at (631) 756-3300.
No bullets or casings were found at the crime scene, and no identification was found on the body. But investigators have used his facial structure, his clothing and some of the items from his pockets to make educated guesses about who he was, when he died and where he lived.
A computer generated reconstruction of the victim shows a high-cheekboned face with dark hair and a slightly dark complexion. During the original investigation, the Medical Examiner believed the victim to be Caucasian, based on his cheekbones, but Hughes says that now he’s not so sure. A 1970s-style “Afro-pick” comb was found with the body, and police renderings of his possible appearance include both straight and curly hair. 
The victim was wearing a white button-down shirt, bellbottoms, tube socks and the Members Only jacket. Bellbottoms were popular in the 1970s, and the jacket had its heyday in the 1980s.
There were coins in the pocket of the bellbottoms, and the date on a dime, the newest coin, was 1974, meaning the crime couldn’t have happened any earlier.

After the jacket had been taken to a laboratory, some chemical cleaning and a microscope revealed a serial number. Hughes called the factory in Sri Lanka, where he learned that a coat with that number had been manufactured in 1982.
The man’s money clip was empty, but the clip was a promotional item emblazoned with the logo of a New York City heating oil company called Paragon Oil.
Despite his unglamorous clothing, he was also wearing a fancy Bulova watch. The timepiece had been manufactured by the Queens, N.Y., based company in 1960, when it had carried a retail price of $500.
The single most distinctive thing about the dead man, however, was his height. When his skeleton was first pulled from the leaves, police thought he might have been a child, because he was only 5 foot 1. But dental examination by a forensic anthropologist put his age at anywhere from 35 to 55. 
During the original investigation, the combination of a fancy watch and the unusually small stature gave one of the investigators an idea. Two major horseracing tracks, Aqueduct and Belmont, are within 30 miles of Plainview, where the body was found. Was the dead man a jockey?
But calls to racetracks in the New York and New Jersey came up empty. No jockeys had gone missing.
With the case getting new eyes, however, investigators still believe the man’s height is the key to his identity. They have decided to scrap the idea that he had to have died in 1982 or after, just in case the serial number on his jacket or the Sri Lankan factory records were wrong, and focus on identifying a missing person who was shorter than 99 percent of American adult males.
Hughes said he and his partner will also restart his probe in the New York City borough of Queens, because of the watch and the Paragon Oil money clip and because Queens lies at the western end of the Northern State Parkway. That means their next step is to head to Queens and get another taste of what life was like in the 1980s.

Few of the missing persons cases from the early 1980s and before have been computerized. “Back then missing persons cases were filed and put in a box,” explained Hughes. “We’ll literally be looking through warehouses full of boxes in Queens.”

Well, here is a real-life murder mystery. It would be hard to match his ordinary clothing with a source, but the wristwatch might be traced? It's an interesting theory that he might have been a jockey. What about dental records? They are always finding identities based on that. The computer-generated picture looked very realistic, so maybe someone will claim him as a relative. They could also go into one of his teeth and take a sample for DNA testing. Maybe they would find some interesting characteristics that they could trace to someone living. With DNA they could prove whether he was Afro-American or not, and maybe some inherited medical condition.




Chimps catch yawns from humans, study shows


Chimpanzees catch yawns from humans just like humans catch yawns from humans, new research shows.
Chimpanzees are amongst several primate species — including baboons and macaques — that have been shown to catch yawns from individuals within their own species. Researchers think this uncontrollable reaction helps communicate a sense of empathy that strengthens group bonds in both humans and primates.
To determine whether this phenomenon — known as contagious yawning — crosses species lines in chimpanzees, researchers at Lund University in Sweden studied 33 orphaned chimps between the ages of 13 months and 8 years, and observed each individual's reaction to yawns from two different humans: one who they knew well (their surrogate mother), and one who they did not know at all (a researcher). [8 Humanlike Behaviors of Primates]
The researchers designed the study in this way, because previous studies have shown that chimps catch more yawns from chimps they know well than from others in different social groups.
To their surprise, the team found that study chimps responded similarly to both humans, suggesting the primates do not discriminate amongst familiar and unfamiliar humans in the way they do with other chimps.

The team also found that chimps do not become susceptible to the contagion until later in life, after about age 5, suggesting innate empathy progresses and becomes more complex with age.
The same is the case in humans — children do not generally start catching yawns until about age 4, the researchers said.
This is the first time that scientists have proven that chimps catch yawns from humans, though past research has found that dogs catch yawns from their owners.
The team now plans to investigate why chimps treat unfamiliar humans different than unfamiliar chimps, study co-author Elainie Madsen said in a statement.
"A reason for this may be that chimpanzees may apply 'targeted empathy' to interactions with members of their own species — and selectively catch yawns from familiar chimpanzees — while they apply a more generalized form of empathy to interactions with humans," Madsen said in the statement.
In general, chimps develop more cooperative relationships with humans than with unfamiliar chimps, with whom they tend to be more competitive and hostile, the team said.
The findings were detailed online Oct. 16 in the journal PLOS ONE. 
Follow Laura Poppick on Twitter. Follow LiveScience

This business of “catching yawns” is something that I had never noticed until I heard it mentioned, sometime within the last ten years or so. If I “catch yawns,” I'm unaware of it, though if I hear someone cough I tend to want to cough. My throat almost constantly feels irritated due to allergy problems, and the yen to cough is always there. From this article, though, it states that dogs, too, will catch yawns from their owners. Could it be that the impulse to yawn goes down the line through time immemorial to the early mammals, and occurs without conscious control, forming some kind of function which we can't identify so far? One article I read was talking about why we yawn. The article said that it doesn't seem to have to do with wanting to breathe more deeply, but the desire to stretch. Also, the article above says that the catching of yawns starts around the age of four or five when their level of empathy is developed, so maybe it only happens among highly social mammals like dogs and primates. Maybe a cat, being by nature more solitary, wouldn't do it.


Dog survives eating two pounds of onion rings, wins prize
Winnie, a mixed-breed dog from Mass., ate two pounds of frozen onion rings while her family was out. When they returned, they found both the empty bag and a very guilty-looking dog.
Had Winnie known better, a look of worry might’ve also crossed her face. Onions are toxic for dogs, and once the family realized it they rushed her to the vet.
Winnie made a full recovery, and this week also got something a little extra for making it through her trauma — a special bronze trophy in the shape of a ham bone.
The Hambone Award is given annually by VPI Pet Insurance as a way to educate pet owners about unexpected mishaps that befall household pets. (Past winners include Peanut, a dachshund-terrier who was buried alive by a skunk.)
This year, the competition for the award was fierce. The 11 nominees were chosen from more than the 1.1 million claims VPI receives annually, and the runners-up scored their own swag bags filled with toys, treats and an emergency pet kit.

VPI
Natasha was only six months old when she accidentally went through the wash.
Natasha, a Siberian Forest cat from Oakland, Calif., came in second place. The curious kitty survived an entire wash cycle in a washer and dryer. She was treated for shock and hypothermia, but survived to tell the tale.
Third place was awarded to Macie, a Labrador from El Cajon, Calif., who was out on a bike ride with her owner’s son when the leash became caught on the bike, causing it to run over her leg and cause a fracture.
Winnie’s survival could save the lives of other pets. The vet hospital that treated her will be awarded $10,000, which will be used to treat pets whose owners could not otherwise afford treatment.


I imagine life as a veterinarian is really very interesting. They see such a “slice of life” and in many cases miraculous recoveries. The cat who went through the washer and drier is the most startling. It seems to me that, even if the owner missed the cat as it went into the washer, he shouldn't have picked the cat up from there and put her in the dryer, too. I'm afraid this story may have a darker side --- such as a cruel child who did it on purpose just out of curiosity to see if the cat would die.



Al Shabaab's glossy ads for global jihad aimed directly at Westerners

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – The jihadist speaks with an unmistakable London accent, railing against “disbelievers who dominate our lives and our lands” in a glossy propaganda video for al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamic extremist group that claimed responsibility for last month’s attack on Kenya's premier shopping mall.
The masked militant who appears to have featured in similar videos in the past makes a well-rehearsed argument about the evils of the “disbelievers.”
The remarkable thing about these glossy infomercials for global jihad is that they are being directly aimed at potential recruits from the West.
This video released Wednesday, along with mounting evidence that al Shabaab has dozens of American and British fighters in its ranks, underlines the threat that this group poses not only in countries like Kenya, but also the United States and Western Europe. Indeed, intelligence experts estimate that al Shabaab counts a larger contingent of Americans that any other al Qaeda offshoot.

Against a backdrop of sweeping shots of the London skyline, the narrator names ten militants – men with apparent links to Britain – who he says have been killed in armed struggle, becoming “martyrs.”
He lists British cities that he claims recruits have come from: London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Bristol and Birmingham. He names a militant called Asmat, calling him “an Indian brother from London” who tried to go to Afghanistan before traveling to Somalia to fight.
He introduces another fighter called Talha, saying he’s “a towering figure” from London’s East End.
Talha then turns towards the camera and delivers a call to arms.
“I call on you today – all the Muslim men in Britain, especially the city of Tower Hamlets,” referring to an impoverished part of East London with a large Muslim population. 
At the end of the hour-long film that appears to have been filmed over several years and refers to terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe, violent, computer-generated imagery invites viewers to join al-Shabaab.

The group has released dozens of such highly-produced propaganda videos over the last few months – even trying to recruit Americans and members of the Somali community in Minneapolis.
Alongside the guns and grenades of its daily battles, the militant group is known to have used YouTube and Twitter in its long-term propaganda war. 
This newest version is just more evidence of Western links to the militant group behind last month’s attack at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, in which at least 67 people were killed.
As if to underline the threat felt in the West, on Oct. 5 U.S. Navy SEALs launched an operation on the Somali coast – days after the Westgate attack and almost 20 years to the day after “Black Hawk Down’ – in what intelligence insiders say was a failed attempt to capture a senior al Shabaab commander, a Kenyan man known as “Ikrima.” 
A leaked Kenyan intelligence report, seen by NBC News, also names British woman Samantha Lewthwaite – the daughter of an English soldier – as a logistician in a terror cell that Ikrima led. Kenyan officials have said she was part of a foiled plot planning multiple attacks towards the end of December 2011 and early 2012. Among the alleged targets were Kenyan parliament buildings, United Nations office in Nairobi and Kenyan political and security officials.

Lewthwaite is the widow of Germaine Lindsay – one of four terrorists who blew themselves up in London on July 7, 2005, killing 52 civilians. She is now one of the world’s most wanted women after Interpol issued a global “red notice” to find her.
Lewthwaite is thought to have gone on the run from Mombasa, a coastal town in Kenya, in 2011. She left little behind at a sprawling villa where she had lived, which NBC News has visited, except a birth certificate and some hand written notes that appear to form the first draft of a book outlining her radical ideology.
In that draft, she appears to have recorded proposed chapter headings, which include “guidance to jihad” and “your reasons for fighting and leaving all you love behind.” She also celebrates her former husband for living “a life terrorising [sic] the disbelievers as they have us.”
Lewthwaite’s notes offer an insight into the mind of a suspected jihadist. But counter-terrorism officials on Kenya’s coast believe that there are many more westerners who see East Africa as a potential battlefield in their war against Europe and the United States.
But perhaps the most pressing concern for the security services in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, is not what those home-grown militants might be doing abroad, but how they might use that knowledge if they return home.
This is a point the masked militant in al Shabaab’s latest video seems intent on driving home when he asks: “Where do you, the Muslim in the West, see yourself in this bigger struggle?”


I wonder how many recruits they get and who they are? Are they Muslim to begin with, or are they young people who don't have a strong sense of belonging in this culture and who become attracted to the ideology? Some people who are of high intelligence and who can absorb complex thoughts are attracted to philosophy, and not all philosophies are free of dark thoughts. Many emotionally vulnerable young people, too, want the large group attachment to feel protected. They say the teenaged gang members in our culture join gangs for that reason. They accept the fact that they have to commit a crime or even kill someone to become a part of the group, and they are willing to do it. I think a firm grounding in a positive and warm background including good community ties such as church, will provide protection against that kind of rebellion and espousal of violence. I doubt that a really healthy young person will join a wildly different religious group or go off to another country to fight.