Wednesday, 20 April 2011 00:00Written by Spencer Iowa
RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - Three days of severe storms and tornadoes in the southern United States have killed at least 43 people while downing power lines and wrecking hundreds of buildings, officials said on Sunday. North Carolina accounted for the bulk of casualties and property losses, with 22 people killed and about 130 others injured. Significant damage was reported in at least 26 counties and power outages affected more than 200,000 people. "Despite all the damage, the thing we heard the most today was how grateful people are to be alive," North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue told reporters after touring storm-damaged areas on Sunday. She spoke with President Obama, who pledged "whatever it takes to rebuild North Carolina," Perdue said.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011 00:00Written by Spencer Iowa
HOPE, Arkansas (Reuters) - Former President Bill Clinton returned to his childhood home on Saturday to celebrate its dedication as a national historical site. Clinton was born in Hope's Julia Chester Hospital in 1946 and lived the first four years of his life in the two-story wood frame house with his grandparents, who owned the house, and his mother, the late Virginia Kelley. His father, William Blythe, died before Clinton was born. During his 1992 campaign, Clinton used the name of his home town as a campaign slogan, saying he grew up in a "place called Hope." He was often called "The Man From Hope" and used the word 10 times in his 1992 Democratic Party acceptance speech.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011 00:00Written by Spencer Iowa
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Brain scans of healthy people showed signs that the brain was shrinking in Alzheimer's-affected areas nearly a decade before the disease was diagnosed, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The finding, published in the journal Neurology, may offer a new way to detect the disease early, an advance that could help in the development of effective treatments for Alzheimer's, a brain-wasting disease that affects up to 26 million people globally. "The magnetic resonance measurements could be very important indicators to help identify who may be at risk of developing Alzheimer's dementia," Leyla deToledo-Morrell of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who worked on the study, said in a statement.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011 00:00Written by Spencer Iowa
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Diet soda and other artificially-sweetened drinks - previously implicated in raising the chance of developing diabetes - are not guilty, suggests a new study from Harvard University researchers. In a large group of men followed for 20 years, drinking regular soda and other sugary drinks often meant a person was more likely to get diabetes, but that was not true of artificially-sweetened soft drinks, or coffee or tea. Replacing sugary drinks with diet versions seems to be a safe and healthy alternative, the authors said in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011 00:00Written by Spencer Iowa
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The death toll of at least 45 people from a nasty series of tornadoes and severe storms across the southern United States over the weekend was the highest in more than three years, experts said on Monday. The storms killed 22 people in North Carolina, seven each in Arkansas and Alabama, five in Virginia, two in Oklahoma and one each in Mississippi and Tennessee, according to state emergency officials. Greg Carbin, meteorologist at the National Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma City, said it was too early to say for sure, but the storms appeared to be the worst in terms of deaths since February 5 and February 6 of 2008. The tornadoes struck during the night in some states such as Arkansas, knocking over trees and killing many people while they slept. But the death toll
