Americans marking Sept. 11
with moments of silence


Americans are preparing to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, deaths of nearly 3,000 people killed when terrorists crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and a Pennsylvania field.

Ceremonies in New York and at the Pentagon will begin with moments of silence marking the exact moments 12 years ago when the airliners crashed. A 9/11 museum is nearing completion at the site where the twin towers of the trade center once stood.

In Costa Rica, workers at the U.S. Embassy will observe a moment of silence at the embassy at 9 a.m. but no formal events are planned, said a spokesman.

President Barack Obama will attend a private Pentagon ceremony with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Families of those killed in the attack will attend.

At the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, relatives of the victims joined the National Park Service Tuesday in a groundbreaking ceremony for a visitor center at the site where 33 passengers and seven crew members were killed. The center is being built on a ridge overlooking the crash site.

The White House says the president's national security team is taking measures to prevent 9/11 related attacks on the anniversary Wednesday, and to ensure that the American people and overseas facilities are protected.

Wednesday also is the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomats were killed. The White House says it continues to mourn their deaths and remains committed to bringing those responsible for the Benghazi attack to justice.


Lawyer recalls his escape
from crashing Twin Tower


Washington-based lawyer Frank Razzano is one of several people who escaped from New York's World Trade Center complex after the Twin Towers collapsed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
 
He was staying in the Marriott World Trade Center, a 22-story hotel that was one of 10 buildings destroyed in the attacks in the area that became known as Ground Zero.
 
Razzano was in New York Sunday to attend what he called an emotional reunion lunch for several dozen Marriott guests, employees and firefighters who made dramatic escapes from the hotel. He said the survivors and family members also got a tour of two memorials for the estimated 50 people who died at the hotel, most of them firefighters.
 
On the morning that two hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers, Razzano was sleeping in his 19th floor suite, which he had booked to prepare for a trial in New York. He says he awoke at the sound of the first impact, but returned to bed after looking out of a window and seeing some papers fluttering in the air. Minutes later, the second plane hit the South Tower, just opposite his suite.

"I turned the television on, and they were saying that two planes had hit the North Tower and the South Tower. There was a little bit of confusion at that time as to what had happened. This may sound crazy, but I wasn't really concerned. This was something that was going on 80 stories above me. I figured the fire department would come and put out the fires and that would be the end of it."
 
Razzano said his thoughts were focused on a meeting scheduled for later that morning as he took a shower, got dressed and gathered his belongings. But then the collapse of the South Tower adjacent to the hotel changed everything.
 
"I felt the building beginning to break up, as if it was being bombarded by artillery fire," he said. "I looked out the window and I could see a mountain of concrete and steel just falling past the window, almost like in slow motion, like a curtain going down at a theater. I ran to the opposite side of the room and pressed myself against the wall and thought that those were the last few minutes that I was going to have on Earth.
 
"I distinctly remember thinking to myself that my daughter had just gotten engaged, and I would never see her get married. The other thought that went through my head was, I knew I was going to die, but I was just hoping that something would hit me in the head and that I go quickly. And then all of a sudden, everything stopped."
 
Razzano said he moved through the room, opened the door, and yelled out, "Is there anyone there?"
 
"Just five feet away from me, I hear a voice, 'Come this way'. On the ground, under some debris, I find a fireman," Razzano said. "I said, 'Are you OK?' He says, 'I'm OK, don't worry about me. Just go down the stairs.'"
 
The collapse of the South Tower created a huge gash in the middle of the hotel, but left its southern stairwell intact. Razzano managed to make it down to the stairwell's third floor, where he, another guest, a hotel worker and two firemen crawled down a narrow beam through an opening in the wall to the second floor.

Moments later the North Tower fell, demolishing almost all of what remained of the Marriott except for a few floors at the southern edge where Razzano and the other survivors were located.
 
"All I kept thinking to myself was, 'This can't be happening to me twice in one day!'" Razzano said.
 
"I thought I was going to die, because I couldn't breathe. Every breath you took, you drew in dust and dirt and you couldn't get any oxygen," he said. "And I remember convulsively coughing, as did all the other people in the group. After a few minutes of coughing and hacking, the dust started to settle down, and we were able to get some oxygen."

Having located another hole in the building, the group used a rug to climb down to a huge debris pile on the ground. A policeman noticed Razzano was bleeding from the head and put him on a boat to Ellis Island, where he was taken by ambulance to a New Jersey hospital. After three days of treatment for bleeding in his brain cavity, the bleeding stopped and he was released from the hospital without surgery.
 
Razzano said he plans to return to New York Sept. 29, when his daughter and some of her friends will do a charity run in honor of Ruben Correa, one of the firefighters killed at the Marriott.
 
He said the courage of the firefighters and police who responded to the 9/11 attacks is more important than his personal story and deserves to be remembered.



U.S. richest earned more
of total income in 80 years


The richest 1 percent of Americans last year earned their highest share of the nation's household income in more than eight decades.

The last time that group took in more than 19 percent of overall earnings was in 1928, just one year before the stock market crash that helped trigger the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans earned nearly half (more than 48 percent) of the nation's household income in 2012, their highest share since 1917 when the record-keeping began.

The news comes from an independent analysis of Internal Revenue Service figures. Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley is one of the economists who looked at the data. He says the incomes of the wealthiest Americans surged last year, in part because they cashed in stock holdings to avoid the higher capital gains taxes that took effect this past January.

The figures highlighted by the analysis show U.S. income inequality has been rising for nearly 30 years.

From 2009 to 2012, the initial years of recovery from the 2008-2009 recession, Saez says the top 1 percent of Americans captured 95 percent of the nation's income gains.

In 2012, for example, the incomes of the top 1 percent rose nearly 20 percent compared to a not even 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

The anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street movement singled out the wealthiest 1 percent in protests beginning in 2011. The group said it represented the “99 percent,” the people outside the top 1 percent of wealth holders.



There is no shortage
of volunteers for Mars


Over 200,000 people from around the world have applied to be the first human settlers on Mars according to Mars One, a not-for-profit foundation that says it will establish a permanent human settlement on the red planet in 2023.

The foundation, which began receiving applications in April, said it received applications from 202,586 people from around the world. Nearly a quarter of the applicants are from the United States, 10 percent from India and 6 percent from China.

Over the coming months, the applicants will be pared down and those selected will be notified by the end of the year.

Selected candidates will undergo intense physical and mental testing, as teams from different regions of the world will compete against each other until 24-40 make the final cut by 2015.

These future Martians will then begin seven years of training. Those who do go to Mars will spend the rest of their lives there.

Mars One says the initial mission will cost $6 billion, sourced from the private sector and a television reality show.

According to the Mars One Web site, “human settlement on Mars is possible today with existing technologies.”



New blood test can spot
resistant malaria parasites


Scientists have developed a simple, rapid blood test to determine the malaria parasite's resistance to artemisinin, currently the most effective drug available to treat the mosquito-borne infection. Unfortunately, the drug is becoming less effective. But researchers are hoping the test will eventually help patients with drug-resistant malaria. 
 
More than 200 million people are infected with malaria each year, with a death toll as high as 1.2 million.  Most of the infections occur in sub-Saharan Africa.

While artemisinin-containing drugs are currently the most effective weapon in the fight against malaria, the parasite that causes it is beginning to develop resistance.

Rick Fairhurst, a clinical investigator with the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Maryland, says most malaria patients used to be cured with three doses of artemisinin taken over a three-day period.

“And now what we are seeing is that patients, like for example in Pursat where I work, we have about 60 percent of people still have parasites at 72 hours, which suggests that these parasites could persist in the patient, which results in them not being cured," said Fairhurst.

Pursat province is an area in western Cambodia. 

Fairhurst, along with a team of Cambodian and French researchers, developed a rapid blood test that measures how quickly the malaria parasites in blood samples were killed or weakened by the active ingredient in artemisinin.

The parasites’ survival was measured 72 hours after exposure to the artemisinin. If the parasite was still active at that point, the researchers determined that it was unlikely to respond to the drug.

Researchers confirmed the finding in patients infected with malaria. Parasites in blood samples taken from people with drug-resistant infections had only a tepid response to artemisinin.

Such a test could help public health officials identify pockets of drug resistance and map its spread.

Fairhurst says the blood test could also be used to follow individuals treated with artemisinin.

“And if eventually we find if parasites are at a certain level of resistance in the laboratory, they have a certain probability of coming back in the patient, we can then say, 'Okay, this person is not likely to be cured and we can come on top with a second drug," he said.

Fairhurst says there are a couple of newer, more expensive anti-malarial agents that could be used but which experts fear could also eventually become ineffective against the parasite.

An article on the rapid blood test for artemisinin-resistant malaria is published in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

 

Bilingual speakers move
seamlessly in languages


Bilingual speakers can switch languages seamlessly, likely developing a higher level of mental flexibility than monolinguals, according to Penn State linguistic researchers.

"In the past, bilinguals were looked down upon," said Judith F. Kroll, professor of psychology, linguistics and women's studies. "Not only is bilingualism not bad for you, it may be really good. When you're switching languages all the time it strengthens your mental muscle and your executive function becomes enhanced."

Fluent bilinguals seem to have both languages active at all times, whether both languages are consciously being used or not, the researchers report in a recent issue of Frontiers in Psychology. Both languages are active whether either was used only seconds earlier or several days earlier.

Bilinguals rarely say a word in the unintended language, which suggests that they have the ability to control the parallel activity of both languages and ultimately select the intended language without needing to consciously think about it.

The researchers conducted two separate but related experiments. In the first, 27 Spanish-English bilinguals read 512 sentences, written in either Spanish or English alternating language every two sentences. Participants read the sentences silently until they came across a word displayed in red, at which point they were instructed to read the red word out loud, as quickly and accurately as possible. About half of the red words were cognates, words that look and sound similar and have the same meaning in both languages.

"Cognate words were processed more quickly than control words," said Jason W. Gullifer, a graduate student in psychology, suggesting that both languages are active at the same time.

Participants in the second experiment performed the same tasks as those in the first experiment, but this time were presented one language at a time. The second experiment's results were similar to the first, suggesting that context does not influence word recognition.

"The context of the experiment didn't seem to matter," said Gullifer. "If you look at bilinguals there seems to be some kind of mechanistic control."



Hollywood marks anniversary
of controversial director


This month, Hollywood celebrates the 100th birthday of producer and director Stanley Kramer, who made controversial films and explored the unpopular topics of his time.  Kramer not only challenged American society, he challenged powerful movie studios of the day by becoming an independent filmmaker.  Kramer died more than 10 years ago, but his legacy and his films live on.

Kramer made movies that got people’s attention and, at times, made them angry. His wife, Karen Sharpe Kramer, remembers the opening night of the film "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner."

“There were lines around the block, 15 blocks long," said Mrs. Kramer.

The film explores the issue of interracial marriage, a risky subject in the 1960s.

“Stanley and I both had a lot of hate mail, we were threatened in restaurants," she said. "We’d go to dinner and somebody would come to the table and say, "You’re that Mr. Kramer that made that film 'Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?' Well you better watch your back Kramer, we don’t like it.'"

Jan-Christopher Horak directs UCLA's Film and Television Archive.

“The time that film was made, in 60 to 80 percent of the states in this country there were still laws on the books. It made you a criminal if you married interracially," said Horak.

Black actor Sidney Poitier starred in that film.

“He was a remarkable person and he was probably one of the most amazing filmmakers in America and we never had moments for anything but teaching each other. We learned from him occasionally, once in awhile he learned from us," said Poitier.

Kramer explored race relations even before "Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner," often in secret said Mrs. Kramer, recalling how the film "Home of the Brave" was made.

“And he hid this wonderful African American actor James Edwards on the floorboard of his car going to and from work everyday," she said.

Kramer addressed other controversial issues, for example the Holocaust in the movie "Judgment At Nuremberg," a fictionalized account of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal that prosecuted top Nazi leaders for genocide in World War II. At a time when the country was not discussing the Holocaust, this film shocked audiences. 
 
Kramer also directed "Inherit the Wind," taking on another controversy, the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The movie was based on the famous Scopes Monkey trial in which a school teacher in Kentucky was tried for teaching evolution and found guilty.

It was nominated for four Academy Awards but, UCLA's Horak says:

“He was criticized for focusing too much on messages you know, that his messages were a little too obvious that he was making films for the message instead of making a great film and have the message somehow kind of slip in along the side," he said.

Kramer retired in his 60s, but his films won 16 Oscars and their subject matter had an impact on how Americans think and act on issues still relevant today.