Jennifer Smith with her new book at her home in Champaign.
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CHAMPAIGN ? Every three months, Jennifer Smith undergoes a new scan that will give her an update on a disease she calls her "own murderer."
She's talked to her 6-year-old son about death, written her own obituary and made arrangements for her ashes.
And now, in a new book, "What you Might not Know: My life as a Stage IV Cancer Patient," Smith has shared the raw reality of what life is like for a woman living with stage four metastatic breast cancer.
This book was written as a follow-up to her first book, "Learning to Live Legendary," says Smith, 36, of Champaign, and a former student services counselor at Parkland College.
The first book was a thank-you to people who helped her "truly live" with a terminal diagnosis, but she later thought it might have misled people a bit about the reality of living with a terminal illness.
Smith was first diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer when she was 30.
She underwent surgery and treatments, but at her first scan in 2008 she learned the cancer had recurred in her breast and spread to her bones, and her diagnosis shifted to stage 4 cancer.
Since then, she's been on some form of treatment ? including 17 different kinds of chemotherapy ? Smith says.
With cancer currently in her bones and liver, she's never been in remission, she says.
"Our best hope is to slow it down and buy me some time," she adds.
In her new book, Smith writes about the anxieties before each three-month scan, and the need to create special memories now with her son.
Some moms want to go to spas for mother's day, she says, but she just wants to have fun with her son, Corbin. Mother and son just took their fifth Mother's Day trip to an amusement park, with this year's destination King's Island in Ohio.
There are chapters about grieving, believing, celebrating, coping, understanding and educating, and one called "pink-washing" focuses on the realities behind pink ribbon campaigns for breast cancer.
Friends and family members also share some reflections in this book, and Smith closes it with her "top 10" list of cancer charities "that don't have million-dollar marketing budgets" that she believes are worth supporting.
Smith says she's been preparing her son for the end of her life by sharing with him her deep faith and belief in God and heaven and the importance of living each day.
"I know once I'm in heaven, I won't want to come back," she says.
Don't tell Smith she's "battling" or "fighting" cancer, because that term doesn't fit her, she says, and she especially doesn't like the notion that dying means she lost a battle.
"Fighting and losing make it sound like I didn't do everything I could," she said.
The cover and interior layout the book were created by a Parkland College typographical class, and the picture of Smith on the cover shows her only from the shoulders down.
"I don't want my face to be the face of metastatic breast cancer," she said.
The book was written with help from Teri Fuller, an English professor and breast cancer survivor and patient advocate. It will be launched at the following four locations this month:
? 7-9 p.m. May 24 at Cream & Flutter, 114 N. Walnut St., C, featuring sparkling rose and mini cupcakes.
? 9-11 a.m. May 25 at Stephen's Family YMCA, 2501 Fields South Drive, C.
? 4-6 p.m. May 25 at Meatheads Burgers and Fries, 1305 S. Neil St., C.
? 9-11 a.m. May 26 at Faith United Methodist Church, 1719 S. Prospect Ave., C.
May 17, 2013 ? Materials belonging to the family of dilute magnetic oxides (DMOs) -- an oxide-based variant of the dilute magnetic semiconductors -- are good candidates for spintronics applications. This is the object of study for Davide Sangalli of the Microelectronics and Microsystems Institute (IMM) at the National Research Council (CNR), in Agrate Brianza, Italy, and colleagues.
They recently explored the effect of iron (Fe) doping on thin films of a material called zirconia (ZrO2 oxide). For the first time, the authors bridged the gap between the theoretical predictions and the experimental measurements of this material, in a paper about to be published inThe European Physical Journal B.
Spintronics exploit an intrinsic property of the electrons found in semi-conductors called spin, akin to the electrons' degree of freedom. This determines the magnetic characteristics, known as magnetic moment, of the material under study. The challenge is to create such material with the highest possible temperature, as this will ensure that its magnetic properties can be used in room-temperature applications.
To study iron-doped zirconia, they examined its magnetic properties and its electronic structure from both a theoretical and experimental perspective. They then compared theory and experiments to find the most stable configuration of the material. Theoretical work included first-principles simulations. In parallel, their experimental work relied on many different well-established analytical techniques, including X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and alternating gradient force magnetometer measurements.
Sangalli and colleagues therefore gained a better understanding of doped zirconia, which features oxygen vacancies, playing a crucial role in providing its unique electronic and magnetic characteristics. They have also predicted theoretically how the deviation from the standard structure influences this material's properties. They are currently investigating, experimentally, how the magnetism evolves with changing concentrations of iron and oxygen vacancies to confirm theoretical predictions.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Springer Science+Business Media.
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Journal Reference:
Davide Sangalli, Elena Cianci, Alessio Lamperti, Roberta Ciprian, Franca Albertini, Francesca Casoli, Pierpaolo Lupo, Lucia Nasi, Marco Campanini, Alberto Debernardi. Exploiting magnetic properties of Fe doping in zirconia. The European Physical Journal B, 2013; 86 (5) DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2013-30669-3
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
I once saw a TV show where a woman was walking down a busy sidewalk, not doing anything in particular, not even bumping into the people she passed. ?She seemed innocent, but she had a RF reader in her bag that was scanning the RFID-enabled cards inside the wallets of everyone she passed, and she [...]
BEIRUT (AP) ? Syrian government troops on Thursday flushed out rebels who had stormed a prison compound in the northern city of Aleppo in a bid to free hundreds of political prisoners inside.
The forced retreat was the latest setback for fighters seeking to topple President Bashar Assad, whose forces have been gaining ground in the country's civil war.
In Washington, President Barack Obama and the Turkish prime minister projected a united front on Syria, despite sharp differences about how much the U.S. should intervene.
"There's no magic formula for dealing with an extraordinarily violent and difficult situation like Syria," Obama said at a joint news conference with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which he pledged that the U.S. and Turkey would ramp up pressure to oust Assad from power.
Forces loyal to Assad have recently made advances in strategically important locations across the country, including in areas around the capital, Damascus, and in the country's south, near the border with Jordan.
The troops have been bolstered by the world's reluctance to take forceful action to intervene in the fighting, as well as the continued support from key allies, including Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Assad has also benefited from the rapid rise of al-Qaida-linked extremists among the rebels, which has raised alarm in the West. Militant groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, which is designated a terrorist group by the United States, have emerged as one of the most potent fighting forces in the uprising against Assad.
A video emerged Thursday showing a Nusra Front commander killing 11 regime soldiers execution-style for alleged crimes they committed against the Syrian people.
Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose group distributed the video, confirmed the killings took place late last year in eastern Deir el-Zour province and identified the Nusra commander as a Saudi known by the name Qusoura al-Jazrawi. He said the man was killed in March in battles with local gunmen in the tribal area.
The video shows the soldiers, blindfolded and kneeling in a row, as the masked commander shoots each one in the back of the head with what appears to be a pistol as other fighters shout "Allahu Akbar," or "''God is great."
"The Shariah court of Jabhat al-Nusra ... has sentenced to death these apostate soldiers that committed massacres against our brothers and families in Syria," the executioner says before firing at the men.
The video appeared authentic and consistent with AP reporting on the incident.
Thaer al-Deiri, an activist working with the Sham News Network in Deir el-Zour, said the execution-style killings occurred five months ago in a remote area in the western part of the province. It was not clear why the video only appeared Thursday, but al-Deiri said the Nusra Front apparently had released it.
Videos of executions and torture have become increasingly common in Syria's conflict, in which more than 70,000 people have been killed. Thursday's video follows a number of others purporting to show execution-style killings by rebels that have emerged in recent days in a war that largely plays out online due to the restrictions placed on journalists in Syria.
International rights groups have accused the rebels of routinely capturing and sometimes killing soldiers and suspected regime informers
Rebel abuses have increased in frequency and scale in recent months, according to a report by Amnesty International in March, which said the most common abuses on the rebel side are summary executions of those rebels suspected of being government soldiers.
The abuses by the Assad regime remain far more deadly, systematic and widespread, particularly attacks on civilians with imprecise battlefield weapons, including widely banned cluster bombs, rights group say.
On Thursday, the Obama administration added Jabhat al-Nusra leader Muhammad al-Jawlani to the U.S. terrorist backlist, along with four Syrian government ministers. Assets they have in the U.S. are blocked and Americans are prohibited from doing business with them.
Meanwhile, activists said the rebels were forced to retreat from the prison in Aleppo a day after they broke into the sprawling facility by setting off two simultaneous car bombs before dawn. By nightfall, the rebels had not dislodged regime forces or freed some 4,000 prisoners held inside.
The Observatory said Syrian warplanes bombarded areas around the prison causing casualties among rebels. State news agency SANA denied opposition fighters entered the prison compound, saying regime troops had repelled the attack.
But activists said fighting near the prison continued with rebels firing locally-made rockets at regime forces inside the facility late Thursday.
Also Thursday, four people were killed and 25 others wounded by mortar shells that struck residential areas in the town of Jaramana near Damascus, the state-run news agency said.
In Washington, Erdogan was looking for stepped-up action on Syria as he met with Obama just days after a twin car bombing killed 51 people on the Turkish side of the two countries' common border. Turkey blamed Syrian intelligence for the attacks.
The bombings Sunday in the border town of Reyhanli were the biggest incident of cross-border violence since the start of Syria's bloody civil war, raising fears of Turkey being pulled deeper into a conflict that threatens to destabilize the region.
But the Obama administration remains reluctant to take the kind of action Turkey would like to see, including establishing a no-fly zone in Syria.
The only way to resolve the crisis is for Assad to hand over power to a transitional government, Obama said.
"We both agree that Assad needs to go," the U.S. president said.
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Associated Press writer Desmond Butler in Washington contributed to this report.
Can dolphins detect cancer in people? To some scientists, it?s not even a legitimate hypothesis; and to many animal-rights activists, ?swim-with-the-dolphin? cancer diagnostic centers would be no less objectionable than any other form of captivity.
?Thank God to this little dolphin, Keppler. He saved my life,? Stoops says.
But what if the rather far-fetched idea were true? What if we tested dolphins and discovered they can detect tiny tumors and abnormal growths in humans, perhaps even those missed by state-of-the-art technology? Instead of x-rays, MRIs and CAT scans, will patients one day be clamoring for cetacean-grams?
Probably not. But I, for one, believe the hypothesis is plausible. Others are positively convinced it is fact, including Patricia Stoops of Panama City, Florida, who claims that a captive dolphin named Keppler saved her life after a chance meeting at a swim-with program in the Caribbean.
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Stoops was on a Carnival cruise in the British Virgin Islands when she eagerly signed up for the ?dolphin excursion? on the island of Tortola.?
She and about 15 others entered the water as a group of captive dolphins approached them and began interacting as normal. But one dolphin, Keppler, took a keen interest in Stoops and refused to leave her alone.
?He did a flip in front of me,? she told WJHG-TV news in Panama City. ?He kept running into me and I explained to the trainer that the dolphin had hit me. He said, ?Oh, that's unusual.? The dolphin trainer said the dolphin detected something wrong with me.?
Stoops was taken aback by what the trainer?s said next: He asked if her trip was sponsored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, to fulfill a final wish of swimming with dolphins.
?He asked if I'd ever had cancer. I said, ?no way!?? she said. In fact, she had never been healthier in her life. But, she would soon discover, that was not true.
A week after returning home, Stoops noticed some pain in her chest. Thinking it had something to do with the dolphin encounter, she went to the doctor, who discovered a spot on her lung and diagnosed her with lung cancer. Now cancer free, she hopes to visit the animal in the fall.
?Thank God to this little dolphin, Keppler. He saved my life,? Stoops says.
Of course, the chain-of-events are likely coincidental, even though eerily similar, unverified accounts are posted online. Michael T. Hyson, PhD, research director at the Hawaii-based Sirius Institute, which advocates captive dolphins as therapy for people with autism and other disorders, writes about a dolphin named Dreamer possessed with seemingly miraculous abilities to heal and diagnose humans.
?A woman swimming with Dreamer thought she had been rammed,? Hyson writes. ?The woman was taken to hospital for examination. The woman had a large bruise. X-ray revealed that under the ribs, near the center of the bruised area, there was a small tumor.? It is my feeling that Dreamer likely "zapped" the tumor with a powerful sound pulse, perhaps to heal it, and the high intensity sound left bruising from hydrostatic shock. At the least, the bruising called medical attention to the tumor.?
Meanwhile, ?Dolphins have been known to detect certain types of cancer and pregnancy in some people,? WJHG reports, ?But experts say there is no clinical research to back up those behaviors.
There has been no research in this regard, though it would be fairly simple. Dolphins could be put in the water with people with various stages of cancer and healthy controls. You could have, say, 15 controls and one patient. If a dolphin displayed unusual behaviors around that person, it?s possible the animal detects something.
Most experts I asked didn?t really know how to answer the question, ?Is this possible??
Michael Miller, spokesman at the National Cancer Institute, tells TakePart that NCI ?has never conducted research of this type and I don?t know of anyone we could point you to for more information.? A search of the published literature turns up nothing.
Neuroscientist and dolphin expert Dr. Lori Marino of Emory University and The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, rules out the idea.
?This is all a coincidence and nothing more,? says Marino, an outspoken opponent of dolphinariums and other forms of captivity.??Despite the mythology, there is no evidence that dolphins can detect cancers and other diseases in the human body,? she says.??Why was the dolphin ramming the woman and getting excited? It could be for a number of reasons?agitation, play, but none of them show the dolphin detected the cancer.?
There is evidence to suggest that dogs, and cats, can be trained to detect certain forms of cancer in the breath or urine of people, though the science on that is slim. ?We are not aware of any convincing evidence to show that dogs can detect cancer in patients,? says Andrew Becker, director of media relations at the American Cancer Society.
There are few published studies on dogs, cancer and diagnosis. A literature review?published last year in an ?effort to determine whether dogs have a role to play in modern health care as an alert tool or screening system for ill health,? especially cancer, seizures and hypoglycemia, highlighted ?weaknesses in the work? and proposed ?directions for future studies,? hardly a decisive conclusion.
As for low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), in one study of 138 diabetes patients with dogs, 65.1% of respondents said their pet ?had shown a behavioral reaction to at least one of their hypoglycemic episodes, with 31.9% of animals reacting to 11 or more events.??
If dogs can detect human cancer, they do so with their keen sense of smell. But dolphins have little or no ability to smell. Underwater, their world is informed primarily by sound and electric waves.
The ability of whales and dolphins to emit and receive high-frequency sounds, called echolocation, has long baffled and awed scientists. Even today, we do not fully understand the remarkable process, which literally lies outside our own brains? ability to perform.
I became fascinated by echolocation when researching Death at SeaWorld,?a book about killer whales, the world?s largest dolphins.
Dolphins have a sac atop their skulls called the ?melon,? filled with a fine, waxy oil. They can manipulate nasal sacs behind their melon to make clicking noises, which sound like fingers running over a comb and each last from one to five milliseconds. As I wrote in the book:
Sound travels through water about four and a half times faster than air - around one mile per second. When each click pings off an object, part of the sound wave is sent back toward the dolphin, where it is received through fatty tissue located in the lower jaw. From there it is transmitted to the middle ear and the brain.
Each click is exquisitely synchronized so that outgoing sounds do not interfere with incoming ones: each echo is received before the next sound is dispatched. The amount of time that lapses between a sound and its echo tells the dolphin how far away an object is. By sending and receiving a continuous string of clicks, all dolphins can follow moving objects (like food) and home in on them. ???????
The visual and auditory regions of dolphin brains are highly integrated, allowing them to construct visual images based on echoes. Their accuracy is astonishing.
Dolphins can differentiate between objects with less than 10 percent difference in size, down to a few millimeters. They can do this in a noisy environment, even while vocalizing. And they can echolocate on near and distant targets simultaneously, something that boggles the imagination of human sonar experts. ?? Even a modern supercomputer using thousands of times more energy could never produce such an accurate visual image based merely on the echoes of pings.
For example, resident orca populations in the Pacific Northwest covet Chinook salmon, which are large and energy-rich. Thanks to echolocation, they can ?distinguish a species of salmon by its size, or by echolocating inside the fish?s body to determine the dimensions of its air bladder,? I wrote in the book.
Researchers wonder how female dolphins discover they?re pregnant, and some believe other dolphins detect the fetus through echolocation and communicate that to the mother. In killer whales, such information would be crucial for mothers to prevent sexually mature daughters from mating with the bulls who sired them.
Even Marino agrees that, ?There is some anecdotal evidence that dolphins may be able to detect pregnancy.? But, she adds, ?in that case, it is plausible because they can use echolocation to examine a woman's anatomy and determine if there is another body inside of her moving about. That is not the case with cancer and disease.?
But maybe dolphins can ?read? our electromagnetic waves, and tell if something is wrong. The new issue of Science News?reports on the recently discovered ability of dolphins to sense electrical signals from other animals in the water, such as those emanating from heartbeats, muscle contractions or gills. Believed to be the only mammals capable of ?electroreception,? dolphins are equipped with unusual sensory organs on their rostrums (snouts) called crypts that can detect electric impulses.
One former dolphin researcher, who asked not to be identified because it?s sensitive, ?and I put it in the highly suspect category,? did admit that cancer detection by cetaceans was ?possible,? albeit through intelligent observation, not echolocation or electroreception.
?If Make-a-Wish takes people down there, the dolphin could?ve figured out that some people get special treatment and attention from others, such as help in swimming, and decided to figure out what sets the special people apart,? my source said.??The dolphin may have made a game of seeing what is different about the swimmers, then pointing it out.?
The ex-researcher, and many other cetacean activists, couldn?t justify captive dolphins for detecting human illness. I have not made up my mind. If I knew my mother might be saved through early detection by a dip with some dolphins, would I try to stop her? It?s a hypothetical topic for another day.
We may never know if dolphins can ?hear? our cancers. But we do know their echolocation is exquisite enough to copy. Researchers at Tel Aviv University are studying echolocation in bats, moles and dolphins to help develop sophisticated ultrasound machines for prenatal care and cancer detection.
?But,? they caution in a press release, ?when it comes to more accurate sonar and ultrasound, animals' ?biosonar? capabilities still have the human race beat.?
Related Stories on TakePart:
? Can Dolphin Self-Healing Save Human Lives?
? Dolphin Pod Saves Woman and Her Dog From Drowning (VIDEO)
? Taiji, Notorious Dolphin-Hunting Town, Plans Dolphin Amusement Park
David Kirby, a regular?contributor to the Huffington Post has been a professional journalist for 25 years and was a contracted writer for?The New York Times, where he covered health and science, among other topics.?He has written for national magazines and was a correspondent in Mexico and Central America from 1986-1990. His third book,??Death at SeaWorld,??was published by St. Martin?s Press.?He is also an experienced writing coach and media trainer: For more info visit?www.davidkirbycoaches.com
LAS VEGAS (AP) ? His leg shackles rattling as he shuffled to and from the witness stand, O.J. Simpson made his own case Wednesday for a new trial on armed robbery charges with testimony that he relied on the advice of his trusted attorney when he tried to reclaim mementos from his football glory days.
"It was my stuff. I followed what I thought was the law," the 65-year-old former NFL star and actor said. "My lawyer told me I couldn't break into a guy's room. I didn't break into anybody's room. I didn't try to muscle the guys. The guys had my stuff, even though they claimed they didn't steal it."
Simpson said he took the advice of his longtime former lawyer, Yale Galanter, and didn't testify in his Las Vegas trial at which he was convicted in 2008 of armed robbery, kidnapping and other charges and sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison.
His fall from long-ago fame and fortune was on display as a grayer, bulkier Simpson made his way through the courtroom. The Heisman Trophy college running back and NFL record-setter once made TV commercials running through airports. As Nevada prison inmate No. 1027820, he's been handcuffed and chained at the ankles during a hearing on his claim that he was poorly represented by his attorney during the trial.
His physician, Henry Johnson, watched and said Simpson appeared to be in good health.
H. Leon Simon, attorney for the state, conducted a brief cross-examination that focused on some of the same details Simpson attorney Patricia Palm raised about advice Simpson received from his trial lawyers, Galanter and co-counsel Gabriel Grasso.
"Mr. Galanter advised me not to testify," Simpson reiterated.
"You made a decision to follow Mr. Galanter's advice, rather than Mr. Grasso's, and not testify?" Simon asked.
"Yes," Simpson said.
Simpson did acknowledge that he didn't have a legal right to take some things from the Palace Station hotel room where he and five men confronted two sports memorabilia dealers ? including baseballs signed by Pete Rose and Duke Snyder and lithographs of football great Joe Montana. Simpson said he thought those items would be returned later. He said he didn't remember taking a hat from one of the dealers.
Earlier, under detailed questioning by Palm, Simpson seemed to describe every minute of a weekend that began with plans for a friend's wedding and ended with him under arrest.
He said he knew the memorabilia dealers, had no fear of them and certainly didn't need guns.
"There was no talk of guns at all," he said. Simpson declared he never even saw guns during the confrontation.
During the trial, two former co-defendants who testified for the prosecution said they had guns.
Simpson's bid for freedom hinges on showing that Galanter had conflicted interests and gave him bad trial and appellate advice.
Galanter, of Miami, is due to testify Friday. He has declined comment ahead of that appearance.
"He was my guy," Simpson said of his long friendship and professional relationship with Galanter.
He said Galanter told him he was within his legal rights to take back possessions as long as there was no violence or trespassing.
Grasso has said it was Galanter who convinced Simpson not to testify.
While the trial prosecutor testified earlier that there were preliminary discussions with Galanter about a plea bargain, Simpson testified he was never told a bargain was under consideration and that he did not remember any offer being given to him at trial.
Asked by Palm if he knew he could have gotten as little as 30 months in prison if he pleaded guilty to robbery, Simpson said no, and that he would have considered it if he had known.
Simpson also said Galanter led him to believe he could not be convicted on the charges.
"If you understood you could be convicted on the state's evidence, would you have testified?" Palm asked.
Simpson said yes.
Dressed in a drab blue prison uniform, Simpson spoke clearly as he recounted events leading to the hotel room where the dealers had the memorabilia. His voice cracked a bit as he told of recognizing items on the bed, including framed photos that used to hang on the wall of his Los Angeles home.
"Look at this stuff. Some of the stuff I didn't really realize was gone. These were things I hadn't seen in 10 years," he said. "You know, you get a little emotional about it."
There is no jury in the hearing and Simpson's fate will be determined by District Judge Linda Marie Bell. It remained unclear Wednesday whether the judge plans to make an immediate ruling or issue a written order later.
While Simpson's previous court cases were media events, including his 1995 acquittal in the Los Angeles killings of his ex-wife and her friend, there were empty seats in the Las Vegas courtroom for the first two days of the hearing.
But on Wednesday, the courtroom was full, with Simpson family members and friends in the second row. A marshal turned people away, sending them to an overflow room where video was streamed live.
Still, the scene was much tamer than in the past.
"This is less hoopla than I expected. It's real toned down," said Wyatt Skaggs, a retired defense attorney visiting from Laramie, Wyo.
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Find Ken Ritter on Twitter: http://twitter.com/krttr
LAS VEGAS, NV - MAY 14: O. J. Simpson (R) talks to his defense attorney Patricia Palm during a break in an evidentiary hearing in Clark County District Court on May 14, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. ... more? LAS VEGAS, NV - MAY 14: O. J. Simpson (R) talks to his defense attorney Patricia Palm during a break in an evidentiary hearing in Clark County District Court on May 14, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison as a result of his October 2008 conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping charges, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial, claiming he had such bad representation that his conviction should be reversed. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) less?
Unprocessed raw cotton may be an ecologically friendly, lower cost solution to clean up oil spills, according to a report published in the American Chemical Society journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
The report, Crude Oil Sorption by Raw Cotton, describes research by scientists at Texas Tech University and includes some of the first scientific data on unprocessed, raw cotton?s use in crude oil spills. The scientists focused on the oil sorption properties of low micronaire cotton (pictured), a form of unprocessed cotton with less commercial value.
Researchers found each pound of the low micronaire, or immature, cotton has the ability to sop up and hold more than 30 pounds of crude oil. The cotton fibers take up oil in multiple ways, including both absorption and adsorption, which means the oil sticks to the outer surface of the cotton fiber, according to the report.
The low micronaire cotton can absorb higher amounts of oil than regular-grade cotton because of its finer structure and wax content, the report says.
The environmental and ecological problems caused by oil spills illustrates the need for oil-spill sorbents that are abundant, available at relatively low cost, sustainable and biodegradable, the report says. Current cleanup technologies, such as in situ burning and the use of chemical dispersants and sorbents, including booms and skimmers, don?t meet those environmentally friendly standards.
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Disaster, which killed 11 workers and caused the worst offshore oil spill in US history, sent an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Conventional cleanup technologies, including floating booms, skimmer ships, controlled burns and chemical dispersant were used to clean up the spill. BP pleaded guilty last year to federal felony charges and agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines for its role in the disaster.
Earlier this month, The Obama administration announced almost $600 million in funding for 28 projects to address damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Louisiana barrier islands will receive about $320 million for restoration of beaches and marshes.
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A small ensemble of musicians can produce an infinite number of melodies, harmonies and rhythms. So too, do a handful of workhorse signaling pathways that interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body. In fact, crosstalk between two of those pathways?those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) receptors?occurs over and over in processes as diverse as forming a tooth, sculpting a heart valve and building a brain.
A new study by Stowers Institute for Medical Research Investigator Ting Xie, Ph.D., reveals yet another duet played by Notch and BMP signals, this time with Notch calling the tune. That work, published in this week's online issue of PNAS, uses mouse genetics to demonstrate how one Notch family protein, Notch2, shapes an eye structure known as the ciliary body (CB), most likely by ensuring that BMP signals remain loud and clear.
In vertebrates, the CB encircles the lens and performs two tasks essential for normal vision. First, it contains a tiny muscle that reshapes the lens when you change focus, or "accommodate". And it also secretes liquid aqueous humor into the front compartment of the eye where it likely maintains correct eye pressure. Understanding CB construction is critical, as excessive pressure is one risk factor for glaucoma.
Eye development is a relatively new field for Xie, a recognized leader in the study of adult stem cells in the fruit fly: only recently did he branch out into mouse studies. "A few years ago I was asked to participate in a think tank-type meeting to discuss the potential application of cell therapy to treat glaucoma," he says. "I became interested in using retinal progenitor cells to treat diseases like glaucoma or macular degeneration. But I realized that first we needed to understand eye disease at the molecular level." The new study is an important step in that direction.
Previously, investigators knew that once cells that form the CB are established in an embryo, the BMP pathway drives their "morphogenesis", the term used by developmental biologists to describe the process of expanding and then sculpting a committed population of cells into a unique structure. "The Notch2 receptor was previously shown to be expressed in the developing mouse eye," explains Chris Tanzie, M.D., Ph.D., a former graduate student in the Xie lab and the study's co-first author. "But its function was unknown, and no one connected how various signaling pathways direct CB morphogenesis."
To determine what Notch2 was doing in the developing eye, the Stowers team constructed a conditional knockout mouse, meaning that the Notch2 gene is deleted from the genome only in eye cells that give rise to the CB. In normal newborn mice a series of cellular "folds" that characterize the CB emerges over the first 7 days of life. But the mutant knockout mice showed a complete absence of folds, dramatic evidence that Notch2 is required to elaborate a CB.
Furthermore, in normal mice a protein called Jagged-1, which activates Notch2, was expressed in cells adjacent to Notch2-expressing CB cells during the same developmental period. Strikingly, the team's collaborators in Richard Libby's laboratory at the University of Rochester Medical Center, were able to demonstrate that just like the Notch2 mutants, Jagged-1 conditional knockout mice showed almost total loss of CB fold structures, a major hint that Notch2 was switched on by Jagged1 to drive CB formation.
Biochemical and microarray analysis provided further explanation for defects observed after Notch2 loss. Comparison of normal and Notch2-mutant eye cells revealed that not only did cells of mutant mice lose BMP signaling but that expression of two proteins known to interfere with BMP increased in those cells.
"Up-regulation of BMP antagonists following Notch2 loss is an important observation," says Xie. "In other systems people often observe that Notch and BMP cooperatively regulate common targets by transcription factor collaboration at the transcriptional level, but this is a unique mechanism. We find that Notch2 keeps BMP signaling active by inhibiting its inhibitors."
The study's second co-first author is Yi Zhou, a University of Kansas Medical Center graduate student earning his Ph.D. in Xie's lab. "Our work reveals a novel link between Notch and BMP pathways potentially involved in the pathogenesis of glaucoma," says Zhou, noting one more tantalizing implication of the paper. "In addition, mutations in Jagged-1 and Notch2 are thought to underlie the human genetic disease known as Alagille Syndrome. Our work may lead to a better understanding of both."
Alagille Syndrome is an inherited childhood disorder causing defects in organ systems including liver, heart and the skeleton. Xie is equally intrigued by potential connections between his group's observations in the mouse eye and Alagille outcomes in humans. Nonetheless, he remains focused on nailing down how perturbation of the Jagged1-Notch2-BMP axis might cause eye disease.
"We now know how to build better mouse mutants to study CB development. In this work we show that Notch regulates BMP signaling but have not yet determined whether alterations in CB structure actually change interocular pressure," he says. "Answering that question is our future goal."
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Stowers Institute for Medical Research: http://www.stowers-institute.org
Thanks to Stowers Institute for Medical Research for this article.
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May 14, 2013 ? The newest public health threat in Africa, scientists have found, is coming from a previously unknown source: the banded mongoose.
Leptospirosis, the disease is called. And the banded mongoose carries it.
Leptospirosis is the world's most common illness transmitted to humans by animals. It's a two-phase disease that begins with flu-like symptoms. If untreated, it can cause meningitis, liver damage, pulmonary hemorrhage, renal failure and death.
"The problem in Botswana and much of Africa is that leptospirosis may remain unidentified in animal populations but contribute to human disease, possibly misdiagnosed as other diseases such as malaria," said disease ecologist Kathleen Alexander of Virginia Tech.
With a grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program, Alexander and colleagues found that the banded mongoose in Botswana is infected with Leptospira interrogans, the pathogen that causes leptospirosis.
Coupled Natural and Human Systems is part of NSF's Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability investment and is supported by NSF's Directorates for Biological Sciences; Geosciences; and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
"The transmission of infectious diseases from wildlife to humans represents a serious and growing public health risk due to increasing contact between humans and animals," said Alan Tessier, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology. "This study identified an important new avenue for the spread of leptospirosis."
The results are published today in a paper in the journal Zoonoses and Public Health. The paper was co-authored by Alexander, Sarah Jobbins and Claire Sanderson of Virginia Tech.
The banded mongoose, although wild, lives in close proximity to humans, sharing scarce water resources and scavenging in human waste.
The disease-causing pathogen it carries can pass to humans through soil or water contaminated with infected urine.
Mongoose and other species are consumed as bushmeat, which may also contribute to leptospirosis exposure and infection in humans.
"I was convinced that we were going to find Leptospirainterrogans in some species in the ecosystem," said Alexander.
"The pathogen had not been reported previously in Botswana, with the exception of one cow more than a quarter of a century ago.
"We looked at public health records dating back to 1974 and there were no records of any human cases of leptospirosis. Doctors said they were not expecting to see the disease in patients. They were not aware that the pathogen occurred in the country."
Alexander conducted a long-term study of human, wildlife and environmental health in the Chobe District of Northern Botswana, an area that includes the Chobe National Park, forest reserves and surrounding villages.
"This pathogen can infect many animals, both wild and domestic, including dogs," said Jobbins. "Banded mongoose is likely not the only species infected."
The researchers worked to understand how people, animals and the environment are connected, including the potential for diseases to move between humans and wildlife.
"Diseases such as leptospirosis that have been around for a very long time are often overlooked amid the hunt for the next newly emerging disease," Alexander said.
Leptospirosis was first described in 1886, said Jobbins, "but we still know little about its occurrence in Africa."
With the new identification of leptospirosis in Botswana, Alexander is concerned about the public health threat it may pose to the immunocompromised population there. Some 25 percent of 15- to 49-year-olds are HIV positive.
"In much of Africa, people die without a cause being determined," she said.
"Leptospirosis is likely affecting human populations in this region. But without knowledge that the organism is present in the environment, overburdened public health officials are unlikely to identify clinical cases in humans, particularly if the supporting diagnostics are not easily accessible."
The researchers looked for Leptospirainterrogans in archived kidneys collected from banded mongoose that had been found dead from a variety of causes. Of the sampled mongoose, 43 percent tested positive for the pathogen.
"Given this high prevalence in the mongoose, we believe that Botswana possesses an as-yet-unidentified burden of human leptospirosis," said Jobbins.
"There is an urgent need to look for this disease in people who have clinical signs consistent with infection."
Because banded mongoose have an extended range across sub-Saharan Africa, the results have important implications for public health beyond Botswana.
"Investigating exposure in other wildlife, and assessing what species act as carriers, is essential for improving our understanding of human, wildlife, and domestic animal risk ofleptospirosisin this ecosystem," the scientists write in their paper.
The paper also cites predictions that the region will become more arid, concentrating humans and animals around limited water supplies and increasing the potential for disease transmission.
"Infectious diseases, particularly those that can be transmitted from animals, often occur where people are more vulnerable to environmental change and have less access to public health services," said Alexander.
"That's particularly true in Africa. While we're concerned about emerging diseases that might threaten public health--the next new pandemic--we need to be careful that we don't drop the ball and stop pursuing important diseases like leptospirosis."
Alexander is working to identify immediate research and management actions--in particular, alerting frontline medical practitioners and public health officials to the potential for leptospirosis in humans.
The research was also funded by the WildiZe Foundation. Jobbins and Sanderson were supported in part by Virginia Tech's Fralin Life Science Institute.
What has your calendar done for you lately? Just reminding you of the day isn't going to cut it anymore?that's why god gave us smartphones. So if traditional calendars want any hope of staying relevant, it's time to start pulling double-duty. Which is exactly why we love this ingenious?if perhaps mildly unsanitary?drinkable tea calendar from H?lssen & Lyon.
The governments of the United States and Russia can sometimes be at odds.
Americans and Iranians rarely see eye to eye on anything.
But the possibility of wrestling losing its Olympic spot has given these three often-divergent nations a cause to rally around.
The U.S., Russian and Iranian wrestling teams will meet on Wednesday for an historic exhibition in New York. It's a showcase event for what the sport's international governing body has dubbed "World Wrestling Month."
The IOC in February recommended that wrestling be dropped from the Olympic program starting in 2020. Wrestling now has to plead its case to the IOC to be included as a provisional sport in St. Petersburg, Russia on May 29.
The New York exhibition, known as "The Rumble on the Rails" and to be held at Grand Central Terminal, is designed to highlight the sport's international appeal and popularity. The pre-meet news conference is even being held at the United Nations, and the meet will be televised live by the NBC Sports Network and Universal Sports ? a rarity for a sport struggling for ways to make itself more viewer-friendly.
The Iranians, who will be competing in the U.S. for the first time in 10 years, will also compete against the Americans at an exhibition in Los Angeles on May 19.
"In this crisis, we all stick together. Wrestlers maybe can do, sometimes, what politicians cannot," said Nenad Lalovic, the acting president of FILA, the sport's governing body. "We love our sport, and we are united to save it."
If there's one thing that the U.S., Russian and Iran have in common, it's a proud tradition of wrestling success and a deep passion for the sport that's been re-ignited by the IOC.
The Americans have won more Olympic medals in wrestling than any other country. When put in certain context, it can be argued that the U.S. wrestling team has been more successful than any other American Olympic team.
The Russians are now the world's premier wrestling nation. They won 11 medals in the recent London Olympics, including four golds, when no other nation claimed more than six medals.
The Russians were furious at the IOC's recommendation, and their angst over the sport's Olympic future stretches all the way to the top.
"The removal from the Olympic program of traditional forms of sports, which were its basis from the beginning and were in the program of the Olympic Games even in the time of ancient Greece ... is unjustified," Russian president Vladimir Putin said in March.
But wrestling holds a place in Iranian culture that likely exceeds that of even the U.S. and Russia.
It's often been said that wrestling is the national sport of Iran, where it doesn't have to compete with the likes of baseball, American football and hockey. The Iranians won three golds in London, backed by a fan section more boisterous than any other nation.
Tehran also served as the first place for the international wrestling community to come together and start formulating a plan to save its Olympic status.
The first major meet of the year, the World Cup, was held in Tehran roughly a week after the IOC decision, and the world's top 10 wrestling nations ? including the U.S., Russia and Iran ? met to discuss how to respond to the IOC.
U.S. Olympic champion Jordan Burroughs said the fans inside the arena were overwhelmingly supportive of the competitors, regardless of what country they wrestled for.
"It was probably the best wrestling venue, in terms of fan support and excitement, that I've ever been a part of," Burroughs said after the World Cup. "We're competitors on the mat. But with the decision by the IOC, now everyone is coming together."
The New York and Los Angeles exhibitions highlight a busy week for wrestling. FILA, the sport's international governing body, will meet in Moscow on Saturday to discuss major changes designed to improve wrestling's standing with the IOC.
The matches in New York and Los Angeles won't count for much more than pride. But wrestling officials are hoping to show the IOC and the world that a sport which can bring three such powerful but often clashing nations together is one worthy of a spot in the Olympic Games.
In fact, a photo of Burroughs and Iranian wrestler Sadegh Saeed Goudarzi locked arm-in-arm on the medal stand in London has become a symbolic image on social media sites for the movement to save Olympic wrestling.
"It is an exciting opportunity for wrestling to show the world its ability to bring together nations of different political, cultural and geographic backgrounds," USA Wrestling Executive Director Rich Bender said in announcing the New York meet last month.
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Follow Luke Meredith on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LukeMeredithAP
By Paul Kiel, ProPublicaThis story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.
One day late last year, Katrina Sutton stood at a gas pump outside Atlanta and swiped her debit card. Insufficient funds. But that couldn?t be. She?d been careful to wait until her $270 paycheck from Walmart had hit her account. The money wasn?t there? It was all she had. And without gas, she couldn?t get to work.
She tried not to panic, but after she called her card company, she couldn?t help it. Her funds had been frozen, she was told, by World Finance.
Sutton lives in Georgia, a state that has banned payday loans. But World Finance, a billion-dollar company, peddles installment loans, a product that often drives borrowers into a similar quagmire of debt.
World is one of America?s largest providers of installment loans, an industry that thrives in at least 19 states, mostly in the South and Midwest; claims more than 10 million customers; and has survived recent efforts by lawmakers to curtail lending that carries exorbitant interest rates and fees. Installment lenders were not included in a 2006 federal law that banned selling some classes of loans with an annual percentage rate above 36 percent to service members 2014 so the companies often set up shop near the gates of military bases, offering loans with annual rates that can soar into the triple digits.
Installment loans have been around for decades. While payday loans are usually due in a matter of weeks, installment loans get paid back in installments over time 2014 a few months to a few years. Both types of loans are marketed to the same low-income consumers, and both can trap borrowers in a cycle of recurring, expensive loans.
Installment loans can be deceptively expensive. World and its competitors push customers to renew their loans over and over again, transforming what the industry touts as a safe, responsible way to pay down debt into a kind of credit card with sky-high annual rates, sometimes more than 200 percent.
And when state laws force the companies to charge lower rates, they often sell borrowers unnecessary insurance products that rarely provide any benefit to the consumer but can effectively double the loan?s annual percentage rate. Former World employees say they were instructed not to tell customers the insurance is voluntary.
When borrowers fall behind on payments, calls to the customer?s home and workplace, as well as to friends and relatives, are routine. Next come home visits. And as Sutton and many others have discovered, World?s threats to sue its customers are often real.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new federal agency charged with overseeing consumer-finance products and services, has the power to sue nonbank lenders for violating federal laws. It could also make larger installment lenders subject to regular examinations, but it hasn?t yet done so. Installment companies have supported Republican efforts to weaken the agency, echoing concerns raised by the lending industry as a whole.
The CFPB declined to comment on any potential rule-making or enforcement action.
Despite a customer base that might best be described as sub-subprime, World comfortably survived the financial crisis. Its stock, which trades on the Nasdaq under the company?s corporate name, World Acceptance Corp., has nearly tripled in price in the last three years. The company services more than 800,000 customers at upward of 1,000 offices in 13 states. It also extends into Mexico, where it has about 120,000 customers.
In a written response to questions for this story, World argued that the company provides a valuable service for customers who might not otherwise qualify for credit. The loans are carefully underwritten to be affordable for borrowers, the company said, and since the loans involve set monthly payments, they come with a ?built-in financial discipline.?
The company denied that it deceives customers, saying that it trains its employees to tell borrowers that insurance products are voluntary and that it also informs customers of this in writing. It said it contacts delinquent borrowers at their workplace only after it has failed to reach them at their homes and that it resorts to lawsuits to recoup delinquent payments in accordance with state laws.
?World values its customers,? the company wrote, ?and its customers demonstrate by their repeat business that they value the service and products that World offers.?
The installment industry promotes its products as a consumer-friendly alternative to payday loans. Installment loans are ?the safest form of consumer credit out there,? said Bill Himpler, the executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, of which World and other major installment lenders are members.
About 5 percent of World?s customers, approximately 40,000, are service members or their families, the company said. According to the Defense Department, active-duty military personnel and their dependents comprise about 1 percent of the U.S. population.
The Starter Loan
Back in August 2009, Sutton?s 1997 Crown Victoria needed fixing, and she was ?between paychecks,? as she put it. Some months, more than half of her paycheck went to student-loan bills stemming from her pursuit of an associate degree at the University of Phoenix. Living with her mother and grandparents saved on rent, but her part-time job as a Walmart cashier didn?t provide much leeway. She was short that month and needed her car to get to work.
She said she happened to pass by a World Finance storefront in a strip mall in McDonough, Ga. A neon sign advertised ?LOANS,? and mirrored windows assured privacy. She went inside.
A credit check showed ?my FICO score was 500-something,? Sutton remembered, putting her creditworthiness in the bottom 25 percent of borrowers. ?But they didn?t have no problem giving me the loan.?
She walked out with a check for $207. To pay it back, she agreed to make seven monthly payments of $50 for a total of $350. The loan papers said the annual percentage rate, which includes interest as well as fees, was 90 percent.
Sutton had received what World employees call a ?starter loan.? That?s something Paige Buys learned after she was hired to work at a World Finance branch in Chandler, Okla., at the age of 18. At that point, she only had a dim notion of what World did.
At 19, she was named branch manager (the youngest in company history, she remembered being told), and by then she had learned a lot. And the more she understood, the more conflicted she felt.
?I hated the business,? she said. ?I hated what we were doing to people. But I couldn?t just quit.?
The storefront, which lies on the town?s main artery, Route 66, is very much like the one where Sutton got her loan. Behind darkened windows sit a couple of desks and a fake tree. The walls are nearly bare. Typical of World storefronts, it resembles an accountant?s office more than a payday loan store.
Buys said any prospective borrower was virtually guaranteed to qualify for a loan of at least $200. Low credit scores are common, she and other former employees said, but World teaches its employees to home in on something else: whether at least some small portion of the borrower?s monthly income isn?t already being consumed by other debts. If, after accounting for bills and some nominal living expenses, a customer still has money left over, World will take them on.
In its written response, World said the purpose of its underwriting procedures was to ensure that the borrower has enough income to make the required payments.
With few exceptions, World requires its customers to pledge personal possessions as collateral that the company can seize if they don?t pay. The riskier the client, the more items they were required to list, former employees say.
Sutton offered two of her family?s televisions, a DVD player, a PlayStation and a computer. Together, they amounted to $1,600 in value, according to her contract. In addition, World listed her car.
There are limits to what World and other lenders can ask borrowers to pledge. Rules issued in 1984 by the Federal Trade Commission put ?household goods? such as appliances, furniture and clothing off limits 2014 no borrower can be asked to literally offer the shirt off his back. One television and one radio are also protected, among other items. But the rules are so old, they make no mention of computers.
Video game systems, jewelry, chainsaws, firearms 2014 these are among the items listed on World?s standard collateral form. The contracts warn in several places that World has the right to seize the possessions if the borrower defaults.
?They started threatening me,? a World customer from Brunswick, Ga., said. ?If I didn?t make two payments, they would back a truck up and take my furniture, my lawn mower.? (In fact, furniture is among the items protected under the FTC rule.) The woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared the company?s employees, was most upset by the prospect of the company taking her piano. She filed for bankruptcy protection last year.
In fact, former World employees said, it was exceedingly rare for the company to actually repossess personal items.
?Then you?ve got a broken-down Xbox, and what are you going to do with it?? asked Kristin, who worked in a World branch in Texas in 2012 and, from fear of retaliation, asked that her last name not be used.
World supervisors ?would tell us, ?You know, we are never going to repossess this stuff? 2014 unless it was a car,? Buys said.
World acknowledged in its response that such repossessions are rare, but it said the collateral played a valuable role in motivating borrowers. ?World believes that an important element of consumer protection is for a borrower to have an investment in the success of the transaction,? the company wrote. When ?borrowers have little or no investment in the success of the credit transaction they frequently find it easier to abandon the transaction than to fulfill their commitments.?
?Real Gibberish?
Sutton?s loan contract said her annual percentage rate, or APR, was 90 percent. It wasn?t. Her effective rate was more than double that: 182 percent.
World can legally understate the true cost of credit because of loopholes in federal law that allow lenders to package nearly useless insurance products with their loans and omit their cost when calculating the annual rate.
As part of her loan, Sutton purchased credit life insurance, credit disability insurance, automobile insurance and non-recording insurance. She, like other borrowers ProPublica interviewed, cannot tell you what any of them are for: ?They talk so fast when you get that loan. They go right through it, real gibberish.?
The insurance products protect World, not the borrower. If Sutton were to have died, become disabled, or totaled her car, the insurer would have owed World the unpaid portion of her loan. Together, the premiums for her $200 loan total $76, more than the loan?s other finance charges.
The insurance products provide a way for World to get around the rate caps in some states and effectively to charge higher rates. Sutton?s stated annual percentage rate of 90 percent, for example, is close to the maximum that can legally be charged in Georgia.
ProPublica examined more than 100 of the company?s loans in 10 states, all made within the last several years. A clear pattern developed: In states that allowed high rates, World simply charged high interest and other finance fees but did not bother to include insurance products. For a small loan like Sutton?s, for example, World has charged a 204 percent annual rate in Missouri and 140 percent in Alabama, states that allow such high levels.
In states with more stringent caps, World slapped on the insurance products. The stated annual rate was lower, but when the insurance premiums were accounted for, the loans were often even more expensive than those in the high-rate states.
?Every new person who came in, we always hit and maximized with the insurance,? said Matthew Thacker, who worked as an assistant manager at a World branch in Tifton, Ga., from 2006 to 2007. ?That was money that went back to the company.?
World profits from the insurance in two ways: It receives a commission from the insurer, and, since the premium is typically financed as part of the loan, World charges interest on it.
?The consumer is screwed six ways to Sunday,? said Birny Birnbaum, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Economic Justice and a former associate commissioner at the Texas Department of Insurance.
Industry data reveal just how profitable this part of World?s business is. World offers the products of an insurer called Life of the South, a subsidiary of the publicly traded Fortegra Financial Corp. In Georgia in 2011, the insurer received $26 million in premiums for the sort of auto insurance Sutton purchased as part of her loan. Eighteen million dollars, or 69 percent, of that sum went right back to lenders like World. In all, remarkably little money went to pay actual insurance claims: about 5 percent.
The data, provided to ProPublica by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, paint a similar picture when it comes to Life of the South?s other products. The company?s credit accident and health policies racked up $20 million in premiums in Georgia in 2011. While 56 percent went back to lenders, only 14 percent went to claims. The pattern holds in other states where World offers the products.
Fortegra declined to comment.
Gretchen Simmons, who managed a World branch in Pine Mountain, Ga., praised the company for offering customers loans they might not have been able to get elsewhere. She said she liked selling accidental death and disability insurance with loans, because many of her clients were laborers who were ?more prone to getting their finger chopped off.?
According to several contracts reviewed by ProPublica, losing one finger isn?t enough to make a claim. If the borrower loses a hand, the policy pays a lump sum (for instance, $5,000). But, according to the policy, ?loss of a hand means loss from one hand of four entire fingers.?
Simmons took out a loan for herself from a World competitor 2014 and made sure to decline the insurance. Why? ?Because I knew that that premium of a hundred and blah blah blah dollars that they?re charging me for it can go right into my pocket if I just deny it.?
In its written response, World alleged that Simmons had been fired from the company because of ?dishonesty and alleged misappropriation of funds,? but it refused to provide further details. Simmons, who worked for World from 2005 to 2008, denied that she left the company on bad terms.
Federal rules prohibit the financing of credit insurance premiums as part of a mortgage but allow it for installment and other loans. Installment lenders can also legally exclude the premiums when calculating the loan?s annual percentage rate, as long as the borrower can select the insurer or the insurance products are voluntary 2014 loopholes in the Truth in Lending Act, the federal law that regulates how consumer-finance products are marketed.
World?s contracts make all legally necessary disclosures. For example, while some insurance products are voluntary, World requires other types of insurance to obtain a loan. For mandatory insurance, Sutton?s contract states that the borrower ?may choose the person or company through which insurance is to be obtained.? She, like most customers, wouldn?t know where to begin to do that, even if it were possible.
?Nobody is going to sell you insurance that protects your loan, other than the lender,? said Birnbaum. ?You can?t go down the street to your State Farm agent and get credit insurance.?
When insurance products are optional 2014 meaning the borrower can deny coverage but still get the loan 2014 borrowers must sign a form saying they understand that. ?We were told not to point that out,? said Thacker, the former Tifton, Ga., assistant manager.
World, in its response to ProPublica, declined to offer any statistics on what percentage of its loans carry the insurance products, but it said employees are trained to inform borrowers that they are voluntary. As for why the company offers the insurance products in some states and not in others, World said it depends on state law and if ?it makes business sense to do so.?
Buys, the former Chandler, Okla., branch manager, said she found the inclusion of the insurance products particularly deceitful. In Oklahoma, World can charge high interest rates and fees on loans under $1,000 or so, so it typically doesn?t include insurance on those loans. But it often adds the products to larger loans, which has the effect of jacking up the annual rate.
?You were supposed to tell the customer you could not do the loan without them purchasing all of the insurance products, and you never said ?purchase,? ? Buys recalled. ?You said they are ?included with the loan? and focused on how wonderful they are.?
It was not long into her tenure that Buys said she began to question whether the products were really required. She asked a family friend who was an attorney if the law required it, she recalled, and he told her it didn?t.
World trained its employees to think of themselves as a ?financial adviser? to their clients, Buys said. She decided to take that literally.
When a customer took out a new loan, ?I started telling them, ?Hey, you can have this insurance you?re never going to use, or you can have the money to spend,?? she recalled. Occasionally, a customer would ask to have the disability insurance included, so she left it in. But mostly, people preferred to take the money.
One day, she remembered, she was sitting across from a couple who had come into the office to renew their loan. They were discussing how to cover the costs of a funeral, and Chandler being a small town, she knew it was their son?s. On her screen were the various insurance charges from the original loan. The screen ?was blinking like I could edit it,? she recalled.
At that moment, she realized that she could advise customers renewing their loans that they could drop the insurance from their previous loans. If they did so, they?d receive several hundred dollars more. The couple excitedly agreed, she recalled, and other customers also thought it was good advice and dropped the products.
Buys? regional supervisor threatened to discipline her, Buys said. But it was hard to punish her for advising customers that the products were voluntary when they were. ?All they could do was give me the stink eye,? Buys said.
But World soon made it harder to remove the insurance premiums, Buys said. She couldn?t remove them herself but instead had to submit a form, along with a letter from the customer, to World?s central office. That office, she said, sometimes required borrowers to purchase the insurance in order to get the loans.
World, in its response to ProPublica?s questions, said Buys? assertions about how it handled insurance were ?false,? but it declined to provide further details.
Eventually, Buys said, her relationship with management deteriorated to the point that she felt she had no choice but to quit. By the time she left in 2011, she had worked at World for three years.
World, in the answers provided to ProPublica, said that when Buys quit, she was ?subject to being terminated for cause including dishonesty and alleged misappropriation of funds.? The company declined to provide any details about the allegations, but after Buys quit, World filed suit in county court, accusing her of stealing money from the company. Buys retained an attorney and responded, maintaining her innocence and demanding proof of any theft. World withdrew the suit.
?It?s All About Keeping Them?
Sutton?s original loan contract required her to make seven payments of $50, at which point her loan would have been fully paid off.
But if World can persuade a customer to renew early in the loan?s lifespan, the company reaps the lion?s share of the loan?s charges while keeping the borrower on the hook for most of what they owed to begin with. This is what makes renewing loans so profitable for World and other installment lenders.
?That was the goal, every single time they had money available, to get them to renew, because as soon as they do, you?ve got another month where they?re just paying interest,? says Kristin, the former World employee from Texas.
Sure enough, less than four months after taking out the initial loan, Sutton agreed to renew.
In a basic renewal (the company calls it either a ?new loan? or a ?refinance?), the borrower agrees to start the loan all over again. For Sutton, that meant another seven months of $50 payments. In exchange, the borrower receives a payout. The amount is based on how much the borrower?s payments to date have reduced the loan?s principal.
For Sutton, that didn?t amount to much. She appears to have made three payments on her loan, totaling $150. (The company?s accounting is opaque, and Sutton does not have a record of her payments.) But when she renewed the loan, she received only $44.
Most of Sutton?s payments had gone to cover interest, insurance premiums and other fees, not toward the principal. And when she renewed her loan a second time, it was no different.
The effect is similar to how a mortgage amortizes: The portion of each payment that goes toward interest is at its highest the first month and decreases with each payment. As the principal is reduced, less interest is owed each month. By the end of the loan, the payments go almost entirely toward paying down the principal.
World regularly sends out mailers, and its employees make frequent phone calls, all to make sure borrowers know they have funds available. Every time a borrower makes a payment, according to the company, that customer ?receives a receipt reflecting, among other information, the remaining balance on the borrower?s loan and, where applicable, the current new credit available for that borrower.? And when a borrower visits a branch to make a payment, former employees say, employees are required to make the pitch in person.
?You have to say, ?Let me see what I can do to get you money today,?? Buys recalled. If the borrower had money available on the account, it had to be offered, she and other former employees said.
The typical pitch went like this, Kristin said: ??Oh, by the way, you?ve got $100 available, would you like to take that now or do you want to wait till next month???
Customers would ask, ??Well, what does this mean??? Buys said. ?And you say, ?Oh, you?re just starting your loan over, you know, your payments will be the same.??
The company often encourages customers to renew the loans by saying it will help them repair their credit scores, former employees said, since World reports to the three leading credit bureaus. Successively renewing loans also makes customers eligible for larger loans from World itself. After renewing her loan twice, for instance, Sutton received an extra $40.
?We were taught to make [customers] think it was beneficial to them,? Buys said.
?Retail (i.e., consumer) lending is not significantly unlike other retail operations and, like those other forms of retail, World does market its services,? the company wrote in its response to questions.
About three-quarters of the company?s loans are renewals, according to World?s public filings. Customers often renew their loans after only two payments, according to former employees.
The company declined to say how many of its renewals occur after two payments or how many times the average borrower renews a loan. Renewals are only granted to borrowers who can be expected to repay the new loan, it said.
Lawsuits against other major installment lenders suggest these practices are common in the industry. A 2010 lawsuit in Texas claimed that Security Finance, a lender with about 900 locations in the United States, induced a borrower to renew her loan 16 times over a three-year period. The suit was settled. In 2004, an Oklahoma jury awarded a mentally disabled Security Finance borrower $1.8 million; he had renewed two loans a total of 37 times. After the company successfully appealed the amount of damages, the case was settled. Security Finance declined to respond to questions about the suits.
Another 2010 suit against Sun Loan, a lender with more than 270 office locations, claims the company convinced a husband and wife to renew their loans more than two dozen times each over a five-year period. Cary Barton, an attorney representing the company in the suit, said renewals occur at the customer?s request, often because he or she doesn?t have enough money to make the monthly payment on the previous loan.
The predominance of renewals means that for many of World?s customers, the annual percentage rates on the loan contracts don?t remotely capture the real costs. If a borrower takes out a 12-month loan for $700 at an 89 percent annual rate, for example, but repeatedly renews the loan after four payments of $90, he would receive a payout of $155 with each renewal. In effect, he is borrowing $155 over and over again. And for each of those loans, the effective annual rate isn?t 89 percent. It?s 537 percent.
World called this calculation ?completely erroneous,? largely because it fails to account for the money the customer received from the original transaction. World?s calculation of the annual percentage rate if a borrower followed this pattern of renewals for three years: about 110 percent.
A Decade of Debt
In every World office, employees say, there were loan files that had grown inches thick after dozens of renewals.
At not just one but two World branches, Emma Johnson of Kennesaw, Ga., was that customer. Her case demonstrates how immensely profitable borrowers like her are for the company 2014 and how the renewal strategy can transform long-term, lower-rate loans into short-term loans with the triple-digit annual rates of World?s payday competitors.
Since being laid off from her janitorial job in 2004, Johnson, 71, has lived primarily on Social Security. Last year, that amounted to $1,139 in income per month, plus a housing voucher and food stamps.
Johnson could not remember when she first obtained a loan from World. Nor could she remember why she needed either of the loans. She can tell you, however, the names of the branch managers (Charles, Brittany, Robin) who?ve come and gone over the years, her loans still on the books.
Johnson took out her first loan from World in 1993, the company said. Since that time, she has taken out 48 loans, counting both new loans and refinancings, from one branch. In 2001, she took out a loan from the second branch and began a similar string of renewals.
When Johnson finally declared bankruptcy early this year, her two outstanding loans had face values of $3,510 and $2,970. She had renewed each loan at least 20 times, according to her credit reports. Over the last 10 years, she had made at least $21,000 in payments toward those two loans, and likely several thousand dollars more, according to a ProPublica analysis based on her credit reports and loan documents.
Although the stated length of each loan was about two years, Johnson would renew each loan, on average, about every five months. The reasons varied, she said. ?Sometimes stuff would just pop out of the blue,? she said. This or that needed a repair, one of her children would need money.
Sometimes, it was just too enticing to get that extra few hundred dollars, she acknowledged. ?In a sense, I think I was addicted.?
It typically took only a few minutes to renew the loan, she said. The contract contained pages of disclosures and fine print, and the World employee would flip through, telling her to sign here, here and here, she recalled.
Her loan contracts from recent years show that the payouts were small, often around $200. That wasn?t much more than the $115 to $135 Johnson was paying each month on each loan. The contracts had stated APRs ranging from about 23 percent to 46 percent.
But in reality, because Johnson?s payments were largely going to interest and other fees, she was taking out small loans with annual rates typically in the triple digits, ranging to more than 800 percent. World also disputed this calculation.
As she continued to pay, World would sometimes increase her balance, providing her a larger payout, but her monthly payment grew as well. It got harder and harder to make it from one Social Security check to the next. In 2010, she took out another loan, this one from an auto-title lender unconnected to World.
Eventually, she gave up on juggling the three loans. By the end of each month, she was out of money. If she had to decide between basic necessities like gas and food and paying the loans, the choice, she finally realized, was easy.
?Chasing? Customers
At World, a normal month begins with about 30 percent of customers late on their payments, former employees recalled. Some customers were habitually late because they relied on Social Security or pension checks that came later in the month. They might get hit with a late fee of $10 to $20, but they were otherwise reliable. Others required active attention.
Phone calls are the first resort, and they begin immediately 2014 sometimes even before the payment is due for customers who were frequently delinquent. When repeated calls to the home or cell phone, often several times a day, don?t produce a payment, World?s employees start calling the borrower at work. Next come calls to friends and family, or whomever the borrower put down as the seven ?references? required as part of the loan application.
?We called the references on a daily basis to the point where they got sick of us,? said Simmons, who managed the Pine Mountain, Ga., store.
If the phone calls don?t work, the next step is to visit the customer at home: ?chasing,? in the company lingo. ?If somebody hung up on us, we would go chase their house,? said Kristin from Texas.
The experience can be intimidating for customers, especially when coupled with threats to seize their possessions, but the former employees said they dreaded it, too. ?That was the scariest part,? recalled Thacker, a former Marine, who as part of his job at World often found himself driving, in the evening, deep into the Georgia countryside to knock on a borrower?s door. He was threatened a number of times, he said, once with a baseball bat.
Visits to the borrower?s workplace are also common. The visits and calls at work often continue even after borrowers ask the company to stop, according to complaints from World customers to the Federal Trade Commission. Some borrowers complained the company?s harassment risked getting them fired.
ProPublica obtained the FTC complaints for World and several other installment loan companies through a Freedom of Information Act request. They show consistent tactics across the industry: the repeated phone calls, the personal visits.
After she stopped paying, Johnson remembered, World employees called her two to three times a day. One employee threatened to ?get some stuff at your house,? she said, but she wasn?t cowed. ?I said, ?You guys can get this stuff if you want it.?? In addition, a World employee knocked on her door at least three times, she said.
The goal of the calls and visits, former employees said, is only partly to prod the customer to make a payment. Frequently, it?s also to persuade them to renew the loan.
?That?s [World's] favorite phrase: ?Pay and renew, pay and renew, pay and renew,?? Simmons said. ?It was drilled into us.?
It?s a tempting offer: Instead of just scrambling for the money to make that month?s payment, the borrower gets some money back. And the renewal pushes the loan?s next due date 30 days into the future, buying time.
But the payouts for these renewals are often small, sometimes minuscule. In two of the contracts ProPublica examined, the customer agreed to start the loan all over again in exchange for no money at all. At other times, payouts were as low as $1, even when, as in one instance, the new loan?s balance was more than $3,000.
Garnishing Wages
For Sutton, making her monthly payments was always a struggle. She remembered that when she called World to let them know she was going to be late with a payment, they insisted that she come in and renew the loan instead.
As a result, seven months after getting the original $207 loan from World, Sutton wasn?t making her final payment. Instead, she was renewing the loan for the second time. Altogether, she had borrowed $336, made $300 in payments, and now owed another $390. She was going backward.
Not long after that second renewal, Sutton said, Walmart reduced her hours, and there simply wasn?t enough money to go around. ?I called them at the time to say I didn?t have money to pay them,? she said. World told her she had to pay.
The phone calls and home visits followed. A World employee visited the Walmart store where she worked three times, she recalled.
World didn?t dispute that its employees came to Sutton?s workplace, but it said that attempts to contact ?any borrower at her place of employment would occur only after attempts to contact the borrower at her residence had failed.?
In Georgia, World had another path to force Sutton to pay: suing her.
World files thousands of such suits each year in Georgia and other states, according to a review of court filings, but the company declined to provide precise figures.
Because Sutton had a job, she was a prime target for a suit. Social Security income is off limits, but with a court judgment, a creditor can garnish up to 25 percent of a debtor?s wages in Georgia.
?When we got to sue somebody, [World] saw that as the jackpot,? Buys said. In her Oklahoma store, collecting the junk people had pledged as collateral was considered useless. Garnishment was a more reliable way for the company to get its money, and any legal fees were the borrower?s problem.
World said 11 of the states where it operates permit lenders to ?garnish customers? wages for repayment of loans, but the Company does not otherwise generally resort to litigation for collection purposes, and rarely attempts to foreclose on collateral.?
The sheriff served Sutton with a summons at Walmart, in front of her co-workers. Sutton responded with a written note to the court, saying she would pay but could only afford $20 per month. A court date was set, and when she appeared, she was greeted by the branch manager who had given her the original loan. The manager demanded Sutton pay $25 every two weeks. She agreed.
For five months, Sutton kept up the payments. Then, because of taxes she had failed to pay years earlier, she said, the IRS seized a portion of her paycheck. Again, she stopped paying World. In response, the company filed to garnish her wages, but World received nothing: Sutton was earning too little for the company to legally get a slice of her pay. After two months, World took another step.
Sutton?s wages are paid via a ?payroll card,? a kind of debit card provided by Walmart. World filed to seize from Sutton?s card the $450 it claimed she owed. By that point, she?d made more than $600 in payments to the company.
The immediate result of the action was to freeze Sutton?s account, her only source of income. She couldn?t gas up her car. As a result, she couldn?t drive to work.
Sutton said she called a number for World?s corporate office in a panic. ?I said, ?You?re gonna leave me with no money to live on??? The World employee said the company had had no choice because Sutton didn?t hold up her end of their agreement, Sutton recalled, and then the employee made an offer: If Sutton?s available wages in her account hadn?t covered her total debt to World after 30 days, the company would unfreeze her account and allow her to start a new payment plan.
Desperate, she gave up trying to deal with the company on her own and went to Georgia Legal Services Program, a nonprofit that represents low-income clients across the state.
?Her case is terribly egregious,? said Michael Tafelski, a lawyer with GLSP who specializes in collections cases and represented Sutton. World had overstated the amount Sutton legally owed, he said, and circumvented laws limiting the amount of funds creditors can seize. In effect, the company was garnishing 100 percent of her wages. It?s ?unlike anything I have ever seen,? Tafelski said, ?and I have seen a lot of shady collectors.?
After Tafelski threatened to sue World, the company beat a quick retreat. It dismissed all open cases against Sutton and declared her obligation satisfied.
In its response to ProPublica, World claimed that Tafelski had bullied the billion-dollar company: ?Mr. Tafelski used abusive out of court threats to accomplish an end he knew he could not obtain through legal process.?
?It?s common practice among lawyers to contact the opposing party to attempt to resolve problems quickly, without filing a lawsuit, especially in emergency cases like this one,? Tafelski said.
As for Sutton, she had missed several days of work, but her account was unfrozen, and she was done with World Finance forever.
?If I?d known then what I know now,? she said, ?I?d never have fooled with them.?
