An American man at his camp in Los Angeles.

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits “tent city“, a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.
The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the US housing crisis, Reuters said.
The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of “The Grapes of Wrath,“ John Steinbeck’s novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.
As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.
While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it’s just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.
“They don’t hit the streets immediately,“ said activist Jane Mercer. Most families can find transitional housing in a motel or with friends before turning to charity or the streets. “They only hit tent city when they really bottom out.“
Steve, 50, who declined to give his last name, moved to tent city four months ago. He gets social security payments, but cannot work and said rents are too high.
“House prices are going down, but the rentals are sky-high,“ said Steve. “If it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t have a place to go.“
Nationally, foreclosures are at an all-time high. Filings are up nearly 100 percent from a year ago, according to the data firm RealtyTrac. Officials say that as many as half a million people could lose their homes as adjustable mortgage rates rise over the next two years.

Many African countries now have more doctors and nurses working in richer countries abroad than they have at home, research shows.
There has long been concern about the exodus of African medics, but the Human Resources for Health study suggests the problem may be greater than assumed.
Several countries, including Mozambique and Angola, have more doctors in one single foreign country than at home, BBC reported.
And for every doctor in Liberia, there are two working abroad.
The study, carried out by the Center for Global Development in Washington, looked at census records collected between 1999 and 2001.
It examined nine receiving countries: the UK, the US, France, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and South Africa.
The study is one of the first to count doctors who are born in Africa, not just those who are trained there.
Focusing on training location, the researchers argue, seriously underestimates the impact of losing people who want to become doctors has on a country’s health service.
The report suggested the loss of doctors often went hand-in-hand with civil strife, political instability and economic stagnation.
Angola, Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Sierra Leone all experienced civil war in the 1990s and all had lost 40 percent of their doctors by 2000.
Countries such as Kenya which experienced economic stagnation in the late 20th century and Zimbabwe, which saw political repression as well as economic problems, saw more than half of their doctors leave.
At the same time countries with greater stability and prosperity, such as Botswana managed to keep many of their doctors, but so did very poor countries such as Niger.

Older people have deficits in their prefrontal cortex which is crucial in making decisions.

Some elderly adults may be more susceptible to fraud because of changes in their brain that affect judgment and decision-making, researchers said.
In a series of tests they tried to identify common traits among seniors who had difficulty making decisions and spotting anything misleading to determine what makes them vulnerable to deception.
“Our research suggests that elders who fall prey to fraudulent advertising are not simply gullible, depressed, lonely or less intelligent. Rather, it is truly more of a medical or neurological problem,“ said Natalie Denburg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, Reurets reported.
“Our work sheds new light on this problem and perhaps may lead to a way to identify people at risk of being deceived,“ she added in a statement.
Denburg and her colleagues studied 80 healthy seniors with no apparent neurological problems to see how they make decisions. Their findings were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Up to 40 percent of the seniors performed poorly in a computerized decision-making test. The same sub-group was also less likely than other adults to detect misleading advertising and they showed abnormal bodily responses, such as sweating, while making decisions.
Denburg said another group of adults who did not do well on the computerized test and had abnormal responses had suffered damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is crucial in making decisions.
“Our hypothesis is that older poor decision-makers have deficits in their prefrontal cortex,“ she explained.
The researchers are planning to do structural and functional brain-imaging studies to see if they can identify differences in the brain structure or how it functions in poor and good decision makers.

More than two million people in Britain regularly buy prescription drugs on the internet, in spite of the risk that they could be sold fakes, research revealed.
The extent of Britain’s online pill habit was exposed in a survey commissioned by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, which warned that millions of Britons could be playing Russian roulette with their health because up to 50 percent of all drugs seized prove to be counterfeit, the Guardian reported.
“The internet presents a real danger to people’s health,“ said David Pruce, the society’s director of practice and quality improvement. “Dishonest traders are selling medicines online without any professional qualifications or healthcare expertise.
The products they sell can be poor quality at best and dangerous at worst.“
Some legitimate pharmacies run online services, but many of the websites are set up by people with no medical or pharmacy expertise and their products may be fakes.
In the last two years, the medicines watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), has seized £5.8m worth of drugs of which it estimates around half have been counterfeit.
Some fake drugs are harmless in themselves. But others are dangerous because they contain a smaller amount of the active ingredient than the patient needs.

Older people have deficits in their prefrontal cortex which is crucial in making decisions.

Riding bikes can help put a brake on global warming.

Don’t eat meat, ride a bike, and be a frugal shopper--that’s how you can help brake global warming, the head of the United Nation’s Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change said.
The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued last year, highlights “the importance of lifestyle changes,“ said Rajendra Pachauri at a press conference in Paris, according to AFP.
“This is something that the IPCC was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.“
A vegetarian, the Indian economist made a plea for people around the world to tame their carnivorous impulses.
“Please eat less meat--meat is a very carbon intensive commodity,“ he said, adding that consuming large quantities was also bad for one’s health.
Studies have shown that producing one kilo (2.2 pounds) of meat causes the emissions equivalent of 36.4 kilos of carbon dioxide.
In addition, raising and transporting that slab of beef and lamb requires the same amount of energy as lighting a 100-watt bulb for nearly three weeks.
In listing ways that individuals can contribute to the fight against global warming, Pachauri praised the system of communal, subscriber-access bikes in Paris and other French cities as a “wonderful development.“
“Instead of jumping in a car to go 500 meters, if we use a bike or walk it will make an enormous difference,“ he told journalists at a press conference.
Another lifestyle change that can help, he continued, was not buying things “simply because they are available.“ He urged consumers to only purchase what they really need.

Spain’s athletes will finally be able to sing along to their national anthem after a special committee chose lyrics to go with the country’s official tune, a newspaper said.
The words to the “Royal March“ were dropped in 1975 because of their links to the right-wing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
Since then, Spain’s sports men and women have been left to hum or gaze at the sky as it was played.
The ABC newspaper said a six-member panel assembled by Spain’s Olympic Committee has now chosen lyrics to go with the 18th century up-tempo military tune.
It said the four verses were selected from among about 7,000 entries, although the name of the winner was not revealed.
It said the anthem, which must still be approved by the parliament, is to be officially unveiled on January 21 when Spanish tenor Placido Domingo will sing it in Madrid accompanied by an orchestra.
In 1770 King Carlos III ordered the “Royal March“ to be played at public events attended by the royal family and Spaniards soon came to see it as their national anthem.
Franco added lyrics, including the line “raise your arms, sons of the Spanish people who are rising again“, to the tune, but they were dropped following his death in 1975.

Considered the world’s tallest people, the Dutch appear to have stopped growing and average heights have hardly increased, if at all, since 2001, the Central Bureau for Statistics said.
From the early 1980s to 2000, the height of the average Dutch men increased by more than an inch (0.0254 m), to just under 5 foot, 11 inches (1.8034 m) in 2000, according to a new study.
But since 2001, heights have been unchanged at slightly above 5’11“. Dutch women gained slightly to around 5’6“ (1.6764 m), the agency said, Xinhua reported.
Study author Frans Frenken thinks the Dutch may be reaching a natural peak.

A swimmer climbs out of an icy pool in Songhua River.

With temperatures plunging well below freezing for weeks, even thinking about winter in northern China is enough to make the average citizen shiver.
But for some, the bone-chilling cold is the prime season to get fit and make a splash in icy-cold water, reported Reuters.
Every day a handful of mostly senior residents in the northern city of Harbin, one of China’s coldest, gather for a dip in the icy waters of the Songhua River, which in 2005 suffered a huge toxic spill leading to tap water being cut for millions.
While they delight crowds that gather to cheer them on, winter swimming is more than just a show of bravado for amazed tourists, the swimmers say.
Recording an annual average temperature of 6.6 degrees Celsius (44 Fahrenheit) last year, Harbin, perched on the edge of Siberia, is famous for its annual ice sculpture contest and winter festivals.