Lockerbie terrorist bomber freed to return to Lybia

A man holds a placard as the convoy carrying Libyan bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi leaves Greenock prison near Glasgow on Aug 20. (REUTERS/Nigel Roddis)

Scotland today released a former Libyan agent jailed for life eight years agon for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, 189 of them Americans, because he is dying of prostate cancer.

Are you f-ing kidding me?

As a result, he ended up serving two weeks for each person he killed.

Am I missing something here? A terrorist gets released from prison because of cancer--how is that fair or right or whatever you want to call it from a judicial standpoint?

Getting cancer does not erase the devastation this man caused to hundreds of families, to an entire nation, when he blew up a plane killing almost 300 people.

And while he's rewarded for getting sick, the average person dying of cancer gets to suffer and die in utter agony--many alone and away from home--even though they haven't killed anyone or blown up any planes.

W-TF?!

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who has less than three months to live (boo, hoo), is being returned to Libya on compassionate grounds, a decision strongly criticized by the U.S., which campaigned to keep him in prison, Reuters reported.

"He is a dying man, he is terminally ill," Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill told a news conference. "My decision is that he returns home to die."

He's sick and dying. So what? At least he's not being blown up to pieces, plus he has free healthcare in jail.

A Libyan government spokesman said Megrahi was being flown home with a son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, according to news reports.

Television pictures showed him being driven out of the gates of Greenock Prison in western Scotland, with a small crowd of locals booing as his convoy departed for the airport.

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi walks up the stairs to a waiting jet at Glasgow airport. (REUTERS/David Moir)

The U.S. government, which opposed Megrahi's early release, said it "deeply regrets" the decision, Reuters reported.

"As we have expressed repeatedly to officials of the government of the United Kingdom and to Scottish authorities, we continue to believe that Megrahi should serve out his sentence in Scotland," the White House said in a statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released the following statement on the matter:

"The U.S. is deeply disappointed by the decision of the Scottish Executive to release Abdel Basset Mohamed al-Megrahi who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which took the lives of 270 persons, including 189 Americans. We have continued to communicate our long-standing position to UK government officials and Scottish authorities that Megrahi should serve out the entirety of his sentence in Scotland. Today, we remember those whose lives were lost on December 21, 1988 and we extend our deepest sympathies to the families who live each day with the loss of their loved ones due to this heinous crime."

Megrahi, 57, is the only person convicted for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in mid-air above the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

He lost an appeal against his conviction in 2002, but a Scottish review of his case ruled in 2007 that there might have been a miscarriage of justice. "Might have been"? What does that mean? Is he innocent? If so, then why was he still in prison?

No hero's welcome

Right: A military helicopter flies overhead as a Scottish policeman stands near the cockpit of Pan Am flight 103 in a farmer's field east of Lockerbie, in December 1988. (REUTERS/Greg Bos)

Relatives of many of the 189 American victims thought Megrahi should have served his full life sentence in prison after being convicted of Britain's deadliest terrorist attack, Reuters reported

Frank Duggan, president of the Victims of Pan Am 103, a group that represents the families of U.S. victims, said he understood the Libyan government had promised that Megrahi would not "go back to a hero's welcome."

"There is going to be no dancing in the end-zone, as the expression goes," he told Reuters.

So what if he doesn't get a parade? He's still being released from a life sentence because of cancer and not because he turned out to be innocent.

The families of many of the Britons killed in the bombing were never convinced by the strength of the evidence against him and thought he should be allowed to go home to die.

Megrahi is likely to be warmly welcomed by Gaddafi, who has moved closer to the Western mainstream since dropping his nuclear weapons program in 2003.

I'm sorry, folks, but I'm as shocked by Scotland's decision as the U.S. government.

I think compassion is a noble, wonderful thing. However, while my compassion for the sick is unmeasurable, how can I empathize with terrorists who destroy people's lives and turn nations into victims? Call me unChrist-like, but I can't.

Maybe I'm just a bad person.

Sources: Reuters, CNN, BNO
Copyright © 2009, Primetime Oracle
All Rights Reserved

Popularity contest in cancer funding sucks

Cancer survivors like Rick Bans, inset, say some high-profile cancers get an unfair share of funding per patient. (ABC News Photo Illustration)

Kudos to ABC for doing this story. Just yesterday I was thinking about writing about this issue (and probably will, eventually) because, like the man in this story, I'm irked by this situation--not only when dealing with the attention different types of cancer get, but even more so when it comes to other devastating diseases that get next to no attention because it's all about the cancer and the heart disease and diabetes.

By Lauren Cox
ABC News Medical Unit
July 30, 2009

Of all things you don't want to turn into a popularity contest, cancer funding is one of them.

Rick Bangs, 51, likes to point out that the cancer he survived is the fifth most common cancer in the U.S. and the fourth most common cancer among men. But back in 2006 when he saw blood in his urine, neither he, nor his primary care doctor, considered bladder cancer for several months.

"I didn't push it," said Bangs. "At the time, I was back to what the general practitioner said and the urologist said, 'yeah, it could have been from your prostate'. It never crossed my mind that it might be cancer. That's kind of naive, but that's the way it is," he said.

Five weeks after his diagnosis, Bangs had his bladder removed and a neobladder made from intestinal tissue. He has to empty it every four hours--day or night--for the rest of his life.

But what irks Bangs isn't the hassle with a neobladder. After researching his cancer, Bangs discovered that bladder cancer fell into some of the silent cancers in America--ones that are common and deadly, but don't receive the same amount of attention and money as some highly publicized cancers.

Take, for example, lung cancer. It is the most common cancer in the U.S. and a very deadly one, but it gets an average amount of funding-- $1,128 per new person diagnosed last year--from the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Breast cancer, on the other hand, is ranked No. 3 in new cases last year and received $2,976 per new case. Leukemia ranks ninth in new cases and got $4,831 per new case in 2008. However, bladder cancer, which ranks fifth, got around $340 per new case. That means the fifth most common cancer ranks 19th in funding.

Exactly.

I'm grateful for breast cancer research and the countless of lives that have been saved because of it, yet at the same time I'm kind of sick of pink ribbons. I'm tired of hearing so much about breast cancer and so little about other conditions.

Rallies and walks (like the one shown in the photo below), awareness weeks, celebrities and politicians sponsoring association after association, asking for donations, doing TV ads...breast cancer this, breast cancer that, breast cancer songs, even a breast cancer dance. One of last week's dance routines on So You Think You Can Dance was a contemporary piece about, you guessed, breast cancer. All the judges were crying, and viewers politically correctly voted for the two dancers involved, resulting in the best female dancer--who didn't get to dance in a cancer piece--getting kicked out.

To me, breast cancer has become too cliche.

Oh, by the way, my sister got diagnosed with breast cancer last year. So it's not like I'm insensitive to it. It just bothers me to see so much attention and resources going to this one type of cancer just because that's what's in, while others equally or more deadly ones are ignored.

In private money and special funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and the disparities between number of cancer victims and number of dollars grows.

"Bladder cancer doesn't have a strong patient advocacy group unlike the Komen foundation for breast cancer or Lance Armstrong's foundation for testicular cancer," said Dr. Edouard J. Trabulsi, associate professor of urology in the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

Chicken or the Egg: Who Gets Cancer Research Funding?

"There's nothing all that new or exciting on the treatment front. Is that the chicken or the egg, where if there was more money there would be more research, I don't know," Trabulsi added. "But bladder cancer is sort of an orphan stepchild at least in urology-oncology."

Bangs, and other bladder cancer advocates say the difference is unfair. But those at cancer funding centers say doling out dollars cancer by cancer is not the best model. Rather, paying by scientific promising ideas saves the most lives in all cancers.

"Obviously, as a survivor, I think at least it should be equitable. There has been no forward progress in the treatment of bladder cancer in quite some time," said Bangs, who is a volunteer for the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network.

But Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, points out that when it comes to funding cancer, funding the most promising ideas can help any cancer.

"You actually pursue the easiest scientific opportunities because you don't want to be criticized of wasting the money," said Brawley. "You need to realize how you label something for one disease or another disease is not exactly not written in stone."

For example, Brawley said an attempt in the 1960s to treat breast cancer by attaching an estrogen molecule to a leukemia drug never ended up helping breast cancer. But for the next 40 years the drug, estramustine, turned out to be the only effective drug for treating non-hormone responsive metastatic prostate cancer.

Brawley said the examples continue from prostate cancer research helping excessive menstrual bleeding or a leukemia drug helping breast cancer. But that's not to say marketing is the only part of it.

In Brawley's former career as an assistant director at the NCI, he noticed how certain efforts in cancer research promotion have paid off--from a politician who gets the disease funding to the well-organized advocacy groups that get people into clinical trials.

On the government side, Brawley said politicians can use what's called the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill to get money for disease research through the Department of Defense. Unlike the NCI, politicians choose to allocate money for a pet cause.

How Some Cancers Get More Research Funding

"Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa wanted to increase breast cancer funding by $200 million in 1990 and Ted Stevens from had prostate cancer, and so he decided to get some money for it," said Brawley.

In addition to having a member of Congress concerned about a disease, Brawley said the activism within certain cancer organizations can attract more federal money by default.

"The National Breast Cancer Coalition under Fran Visco started doing this early. They organized themselves, and their advocates actually go take classes where they learn the science," said Brawley.

Brawley said the initiatives got women into more clinical trials, helped the coalition lobby for funds and ultimately led to a thriving research field that attracted ambitious doctors.

"As a whole, the prostate cancer groups had not been as committed and loyal to understanding the science as the breast cancer groups have," said Brawley. "I heard 'to hell with the science' so many times in prostate cancer groups."

Brawley said prostate cancer clinical trials failed while numerous clinical trials in breast cancer treatment were revolutionizing the standard of care from an extreme mastectomy, into less extreme mastectomies, into lumpectomies, where women keep most of their breast tissues. But the difference was a problem with finding male volunteers.

"Three times we had to shut trials down because men won't go into the studies," he said.

Doctors advocating for more bladder cancer research dollars are well aware of these social and logistical hurdles. But they're still fighting.

"It's not something that Ryan Seacrest is going to get," said Dr. Gary Steinberg, chairperson on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network. Steinberg said about 80 percent of his bladder cancer patients are blue-collar workers in industrial fields.

That lack of publicity, Steinberg said, ultimately leads to later diagnoses.

"Patients will have blood in their urine, and they'll be treated with an antibiotic. Their physician might say, 'Oh, it's a urinary tract infection,' and they'll give more antibiotics without examining them," he said.

"All too often by the time patients have been diagnosed with bladder cancer, there's been a 12-13 month delay after the symptoms."

Source: ABC News
Copyright © 2009, Primetime Oracle
All Rights Reserved

Today's Non-News: Sunbeds cause cancer, study

(DailyMail photo)

Um...duh!

Decades after this became common knowledge, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) evidently thought it necessary to conduct a study looking into whether or not frying oneself in a sunbed can cause cancer.

Sunbeds pose a similar cancer risk as cigarettes and asbestos, and tanning machines should be moved to "the highest cancer risk category" and be labeled as "carcinogenic to humans," concluded the groudbreaking study by the IARC, which previously had classified sunbeds as being a "probable" cause of cancer.

According to the study's findings, the risk of melanoma--the most deadly form of skin cancer--is 75% higher in people who started using sunbeds regularly before the age of 30, CNN reported. The IARC also concluded that there's a link between melanoma of the eye and the use of sunbeds.

Predictably, the UK's Sunbed Association maintains there's no proven link between using sunbeds and cancer. What else are they supposed to say?

"We would dispute the IARC classification that sunbeds are "carcinogenic to humans," the organization wrote on its website. "The relationship between UV exposure and an increased risk of developing skin cancer is only likely to arise where over-exposure and burning in particular has taken place."

Um...let's see. People go into tanning booths to get tanned, that is, to expose themselves to UV radiation that leads to changes in skin pigmentation and, more often than not, burning of the skin. That's the purpose of a sunbed, which would not work unless one is over-exposed to UV rays while using it. Right?

The World Health Organization estimates that some 60,000 people worldwide die each year from skin cancer, with 48,000 of these due to melanoma, and 90% of the cancers are caused by ultraviolet light from the sun, CNN reported.

Sources: CNN
Copyright © 2009, Primetime Oracle
All Rights Reserved

Farrah Fawcett dies of cancer at 62

1947-2009

I had a feeling last night it would happen today...

At around 2 a.m. today, we learned Farrah was moved to an intensive care unit (see story). Given her medical condition and the fact that there was nothing else medicine could do for her, the end had to be near.

Farrah was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006. She was determined to beat this disease and fought it with astonishing determination. The documentary Farrah's Story about her three-year battle with cancer, aired last month, was extremely moving. It opened my eyes to her strength and courage, as well as the spiritual journey she's been on since cancer took over her life.

May you rest in peace, Farrah.

LIFE magazine: Remembering Farrah

Source: CNN, Me
Copyright © 2009

Farrah Fawcett moved to intensive care unit

Farrah Fawcett has been moved to an intensive care unit after being hospitalized, Extra reported in the early hours of Thursday. Family and friends have gathered to say their "final farewells," according to the report.

She was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, which later spread to her liver.

Farrah Fawcett became an icon of American pop culture in the 70s with her role in the very successful TV series Charlie's Angels, produced by Aaron Spelling, who was on his way to be one of the most prolific and successful producers of dramatic series and made-for-television films in American TV.

Also famous was her heavily layered hairstyle--which was copied by millions of women just as Jennifer Aniston's "Rachel hair" spread from head to head in the 90s--and a picture of her in a red bathing suit taken by photographer Bruce McBroom in 1976 before she was famous actress but around the time she was featured in ads for Wella Balsam shampoo.

While women couldn't get enough of her hair, men couldn't get enough of that picture. A record 12 million copies of the Swimsuit Poster were sold and affixed to walls and gym or school lockers, captivating the fantasies of 70s men not unlike Betty Garble's pin up poster stole the hearts of men during World War II.

We send good wishes your way, Farrah--may your last moments be as pain free and peaceful as possible, and may your loved ones, especially partner Ryan O'Neill and son Redmond, be comforted during this trying time.

Sources: BNO headlines, Me
Copyright © 2009