Crews Try to Control Wildfires in Arizona

 

GREER, Ariz. (AP) — Authorities ordered more eastern Arizona residents to evacuate their homes Sunday as a 225-square-mile blaze that has grown into the third-largest in state history crept toward more buildings.

The Apache County sheriff's office told an unknown number of people east of the town of Alpine along U.S. Highway 180 to get out as the forest fire crept closer.

Alpine itself has been under mandatory evacuation orders since Thursday night, along with the community of Nutrioso and several lodges and camps in the scenic high country.

Subdivisions close to the New Mexico border that were ordered emptied Sunday included Escudilla Mountain Estates, Bonita, Dog Patch, and the H-V Ranch east of Highway 180, fire information officer Eric Neitzel said.

People packed up their belongings as smoke covered the mountain vacation towns in a smoky fog, and wind blew smoke from the burning pine forest well into nearby New Mexico and Colorado.

Crews have zero containment of the fire, which has been burning for a week.

In the vacation town of Greer, which has fewer than 200 year-round residents, many people voluntarily left Saturday. Those who remained, mostly business owners, dealt with haze heavily tinged with smoke. Among them was the owner of the 101-year-old Molly Butler Lodge, who was hauling out his most valuable items.

Allan Johnson spent Sunday morning getting antiques, including an 1886 table brought by covered wagon from Utah and a 1928 Oldsmobile the lodge uses for weddings, out of the fire's path. He said he was not taking reservations but was keeping the restaurant open, mainly as a meeting place.

Greer is within miles of the fire, which officials expect will grow given a windy forecast and expected dry lightning Sunday and Monday. If the blaze comes within two miles of a containment line nearby, the town will be evacuated.

"We're all waiting for the word," Johnson said. "It could be 24 hours, could be eight hours. It might not happen at all — that's what we're all rooting and praying for."

Winds died down overnight, allowing crews to burn 30 miles of containment lines between active and unburned areas that create a buffer from the most violent wind-driven runs.

"It gives a much greater chance of it having diminished fire behavior as it approaches the lines," fire information officer Peter Frenzen told The Associated Press. "And that's the concern, that you might get intense fire activity that might throw embers over the line and spot beyond our control lines."

On Saturday, Gov. Jan Brewer called the blaze "horrific" following an aerial tour and said it was "the likes of a fire of which I have never experienced from the air."

In Nutrioso, the blaze came within two miles of homes, and heavy yellowish smoke in Alpine reduced visibility to about a quarter mile. Heavy smoke drifted into northwestern New Mexico towns such as Fence Lake and Zuni Pueblo, said National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Fetting, and it was expected to reach as far north as Gallup. The haze could reach as far as Albuquerque by Monday as winds shift to the east.

Spokesman Brad Pitassi said 1,300 firefighters were at the blaze, including some "from Oregon all the way to New York."

Since the blaze started May 29, four summer rental cabins have been destroyed, the U.S. Forest Service said. No serious injuries have been reported.

The fire is the state's third-largest, behind a 2002 blaze that blackened more than 732 square miles and one in 2005 that burned about 387 square miles in the Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek.

The state also was contending with another major wildfire, its fifth-largest, in far southeastern Arizona that threatened a church camp and two communities. Air crews dumped water and retardant near the Methodist church camp Saturday as the 156-square-mile blaze burned around the evacuated camp in the steep Pine Canyon near the community of Paradise.

Paradise, as well as East Whitetail Canyon, was evacuated in advance and the nearby Chiricahua National Monument was closed as a precaution. Crews set backfires and kept the blaze from about a dozen occupied homes and other vacation residences Saturday.

"Paradise, even though they did protect it from the initial fire that passed by the day before yesterday, it's still not totally out of the woods," said Dave Killebrew, an information officer for the team battling the blaze.

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Ecuador Votes on Bid to Give More Control to President

Campaigning ahead of the vote further polarized the Andean country, which went through a decade of political instability before Mr. Correa was elected in 2006, emerging as the country’s strongest leader in decades while drawing criticism for his consolidation of power. Mr. Correa, a left-leaning economist, pushed for the referendum after he survived a chaotic police rebellion in Quito in September and his approval ratings climbed. He and his supporters described the revolt as a coup attempt.

That rebellion, during which Mr. Correa opened his shirt and dared police officers to kill him, accentuated tensions between the president and his critics, including some in the news media.

Mr. Correa has long had a tense relationship with Ecuador’s news media over criticism of his policies, which have aligned the country with leftist allies like Venezuela and overhauled its political institutions.

Included in the 10 measures of the referendum is a controversial proposal to create a state panel to regulate media content, a proposal that is heightening concern among many Ecuadorean journalists. “This is the concretion of a threat,” said Arturo Torres, head of the investigative unit of El Comercio, a daily newspaper in Quito. “Investigative journalism will suffer severe limitations due to its scrutiny of power.”

The president’s critics say other measures are intended to weaken Ecuador’s judiciary. They would allow citizens to be detained longer without charges being filed against them; the appointment of judges by a commission influenced by Correa supporters; and the creation of a so-called Transitional Judiciary Council, expected to be dominated by the president’s supporters, to speed certain judicial reforms.

“Correa is holding this referendum with the purpose of consolidating the powers of the executive branch,” said Fabián Corral, dean of the law department at San Francisco University in Quito. “Judicial reform is necessary, but dependence of judges upon the executive branch is not going to help.”

Some voters in Ecuador, however, said they were voting out of their admiration for Mr. Correa, an ally of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. Mr. Correa’s support is based at least in part on a nationalist focus that chafes at foreign interference.

Last month, Mr. Correa, 48, expelled the American ambassador, Heather M. Hodges, over comments made public in a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, in which she referred to high-level police corruption in Ecuador and possible knowledge of it by Mr. Correa.

“Correa is a great fighter,” said Oswaldo Pazmi?o, 64, a Quito resident who campaigned in favor of the proposed measures. “Nobody can stop him; he is the reincarnation of Eloy Alfaro,” he said, referring to an Ecuadorean leader in the early 20th century who is associated with antiestablishment rebellion.

Official results were not expected to be available on Saturday.

Media rights groups in Ecuador and abroad expressed concern over some ballot measures.

One would prohibit owners of media companies from having financial interests in other industries, presumably to prevent the formation of media conglomerates.

A measure similar to the media regulation efforts in Venezuela and Bolivia would create the oversight panel that would hold “communicators or broadcasters responsible” for messages considered violent, sexually explicit or discriminatory.

Mr. Correa has already clashed with some Ecuadorean journalists. He filed a lawsuit this year against El Universo, Ecuador’s top opposition newspaper, seeking criminal libel penalties of three years in prison each against an editorial writer at the newspaper and three members of its board of directors.

The lawsuit, which seeks as much as $80 million in fines from the individual defendants and El Universo’s parent company, was filed in response to a column that contended Mr. Correa ordered security forces to open “discretionary fire” at a hospital during the police revolt. Several people were killed as the rebellion unfolded and was put down.

Simon Romero reported from Caracas, and Irene Caselli from Quito, Ecuador.

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In WikiLeaks’ Growth, Some Control Is Lost

WikiLeaks’ latest release — files related to the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — took place Sunday in partnership with eight news organizations in the United States and other countries, including The Washington Post and the McClatchy newspapers and The Telegraph of London. The “official” release was sped up when WikiLeaks learned that two news organizations that were collaborators with WikiLeaks in the past but were explicitly shut out this time — The New York Times and The Guardian — were preparing their own Guantánamo stories anyway, having obtained the information independently.

This resulted in a mad scramble to be first online with secrets that would never have leaked so quickly if WikiLeaks had not possessed the documents to begin with. For journalism, it was a recalibration of the traditional relationships among competitors and sources. And for WikiLeaks, it was a lesson in how hard it is to steer news coverage rather than be buffeted by it.

In its first prominent collaboration with newspapers, last July, WikiLeaks gave exclusive access to a secret archive of Afghan war logs to The Times, The Guardian in Britain, and Der Spiegel in Germany. Now, as it gradually releases 250,000 United States diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks says it has more than 50 local partners, most of them newspapers, from the Daily Taraf in Turkey to Expresso in Portugal to The Hindu in India. Some of those newspapers describe the relationship with WikiLeaks as a contract.

WikiLeaks’ intent has always been to maximize its impact, but its media strategy has changed significantly since it began in 2007, with the idea that if it posted important documents to its site — come one, come all — journalists would eagerly report the news there. Since then, it has learned the value of an “exclusive” to journalists, creating partnerships with publishers that impose a collective embargo on when the material can be published in return for privileged access to the material.

On its Twitter page, WikiLeaks suggested that it did not mind that it had lost control of its cache of secrets, saying it was pleased that its former partner publications had “added their weight to increasing our impact.”

Yochai Benkler, the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said he thought that WikiLeaks’ anti-secrecy quest was “enhanced, not undermined, by the intensification of competition to cover the documents.” The Guantánamo files, he said, confirmed what the earlier releases already suggested: that “the future of the networked Fourth Estate will involve a mixture of traditional and online models, cooperating and competing on a global scale in a productive but difficult relationship.”

In an essay this month in the British magazine New Statesman, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, explained his reasoning. While he described WikiLeaks as “firmly in the tradition of those radical publishers who tried to lay ‘all the mysteries and secrets of government’ before the public,” he added that “for reasons of realpolitik, we have worked with some of the largest media groups.”

While the exclusive-access strategy has had obvious advantages in getting the news out, WikiLeaks faced criticism for allowing only a few news organizations to have access to the cables, said Greg Mitchell, a blogger for The Nation who published “The Age of WikiLeaks.” “Now,” he said, “it’s busting loose and other people are getting them.”

That owes partly to the falling out between Mr. Assange and The Times and The Guardian.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said Mr. Assange seemed to sour on the newspaper after he read both a front-page profile of himself and an article about the Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking information to WikiLeaks. The profile he deemed unflattering and the other article inadequate. He also complained to Mr. Keller that the newspaper’s Web site had not linked to the WikiLeaks site. “Where’s the respect?” he asked Mr. Keller.

Mr. Keller said Monday, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had any communication with Julian Assange.”

In essays and interviews Mr. Assange has complained that The Times had worked too closely with the United States government before publishing its material and had a “hostile attitude” toward WikiLeaks.

 

Libyan Rebels Say They Have Control of Misurata

 

Government spokesmen asserted that Libyan forces had withdrawn from the city voluntarily on Saturday to allow for a 48-hour cease-fire, during which tribal leaders could negotiate the rebels’ surrender.

There was no sign of a cease-fire, however, or negotiations.

The shelling diminished Sunday, but it still killed eight people and wounded 38, according to a rebel spokesman in Misurata, reached by Internet telephone and identified only as Mohammed for his security. On Saturday, as government forces withdrew, he said, 36 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded.

Mohammed said that among those killed Saturday night was his father, Ali. He said his father died along with a cousin who was trying to rescue him when their neighborhood came under heavy shelling.

“The shelling was unprecedented yesterday, both in the intensity and the size of the shells,” he said Sunday, describing the bombardment as using heavy artillery, Grad missiles and Katyusha rockets.

Mohammed said he continued to work as a spokesman after burying his father on Sunday. “It is very tough, but we are in a war and it’s my duty, it’s my way of taking revenge for my father,” he said.

Rebel leaders disputed claims that forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had withdrawn voluntarily, insisting that they had been defeated in battle.

Besieged by government forces for the past two months, Misurata is the third largest city in Libya and the only major rebel stronghold in the west. Mohammed said the rebels had captured 180 government soldiers in the past week of fighting and were treating them as prisoners of war.

“They even left their wounded behind,” said Jalil el-Gallal, spokesman for the rebels’ de facto governing body, the Transitional National Council. “They were fleeing, not withdrawing.”

Mr. Gallal and Mohammed said rebel forces had taken complete control of the city, and accounts from journalists there generally confirmed that account. “There are none and absolutely none of them in the city now,” Mohammed said of Colonel Qaddafi’s troops.

A reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian reported seeing six destroyed tanks in the vegetable market, the scene of particularly heavy fighting last week. The market was where the first American Predator strike in Libya took place on Saturday.

The Guardian also confirmed that the last two buildings held by Qaddafi forces in the city on Saturday had been cleared, and that green Libyan military uniforms had been found that were discarded by retreating troops.

A ship chartered by the International Organization for Migration arrived in Benghazi on Sunday from Misurata, carrying 995 more stranded migrant workers, most of them from Niger, as well as 17 wounded civilians.

The organization said it planned to make at least two more trips into Misurata to rescue 1,500 more migrants, many of whom have been camped near the port in hopes of fleeing. The group said that it expected that other migrants who had been hiding in parts of the city previously controlled by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces might swell that number, now that they could move safely.

In all, the migration group has gotten 4,100 migrant workers from 21 nations out of Misurata.

In Benghazi, the rebel capital, opposition leaders were upbeat about their financial situation. While they have not yet gained access to $30 billion in Libyan money in frozen accounts abroad, as some countries have suggested they should, they have found donors to tide them over.

On Sunday, officials announced that Kuwait had donated about $180 million to the governing council. And Wahid Bugaighis, the interim government’s oil minister, said that while the rebels had not been able to pump any oil from fields in eastern Libya, Qatar had stepped in with an open-ended commitment to finance their fuel and energy needs “with whatever we need during this transition period, with no fees attached.”

 

Japan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。 Japan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant | News | English/* Voice of America ?

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April 17, 2011 Latest News: Select Your LanguageAfan OromoAlbanianAmharicArmenianAzerbaijaniAzeriBanglaBosnianBurmeseCantoneseChineseCreoleCroatianDariEnglish WorldwideFrenchGeorgianGreekHausaIndonesianKhmerKhmer (English)KinyarwandaKirundiKoreanKurdiKurdishLaoLearning EnglishMacedonianMandarinNdebelePashtoPashto - DeewaPersian PortugueseRussian SerbianShonaSomaliSpanishSwahiliThaiTibetanTibetan (English)TigrignaTurkishUkrainian UrduUzbekVietnameseZimbabwe - EnglishNewsProgramsVideoLearning EnglishLive Streams:Latest Newscast|Africa Live|Global LiveNews USA Africa Americas Asia Europe Middle East Arts and Entertainment EconomyMore TopicsEducationEnvironmentHealthNews AnalysisReligionScience and TechnologySports Web FeaturesSpecial ReportsPhoto GalleriesGoing Green Money In MotionNow You KnowOff the Beaten PathThe LinkInteractive YouTubeFacebookTwitter Web ServicesPodcastsRSSMobileNewsletterWebcastsLinks About the USEditorialsRFE/RLRFAPronunciation Guide NewsNewsRSS FeedJapan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant Steve Herman|Tokyo?April 16, 2011

Photo: VOA - S. HermanPolice herd marchers along the curb as the streets arenot blocked off for the demonstration in Tokyo, Japan, April 16, 2011

Share ThisFacebookYahoo! BuzzRelated ArticlesVOA Correspondent Reaches Crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear PlantJapan Nuclear Plant Operator to Pay Damages Japan's Kan Faces Calls to Quit Over Handling of Disasters

Small and peaceful anti-nuclear protests continue to be staged in Japan. The demonstrations are being held as troubles continue at and around the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant in the northeastern part of the country. It has been leaking radiation into the air and sea since it was severely damaged by a magnitude 9.0 quake and resulting tsunami more than a month ago.

The operator of the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima has begun dropping into the Pacific Ocean sandbags filled with an absorbent to try to reduce the danger from radiation. The bags are filled with zeolite, better known as the active material sprinkled in cat litter boxes to absorb odors. In this case, zeolite is meant to take up cesium that has been detected at high levels along the Fukushima coast.

On shore, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, is still struggling, more than a month after the Fukushima-1 plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami, to restore automatic cooling facilities for several reactors.

In Tokyo on Saturday, several hundred demonstrators peacefully marched past a TEPCO building. Some were dressed as vegetables, others were adorned with or carried produce.

The protesters chant "vegetables are more important than nuclear power. We don't need nuclear plants, we don't need radiation."

One of the participants, Naomi Saito from neighboring Saitama prefecture, lamented the small number of people who have taken to the streets in protest since March 11.? But Saito said she understands why that is the case in a resource-poor country heavily reliant on atomic energy where more than 50 nuclear plants have been built in the past 45 years.

"We're all in a very dangerous situation because of atomic [power]. But other Japanese think nuclear [power] is very important, so I feel very sad," said Saito.

Japan's government on Saturday ordered 13 nuclear plant operators to inspect and reinforce outside power links to avoid earthquake-triggered outages similar to one on March 11 in Fukushima.

The urgency of that directive was highlighted when a 5.9 magnitude earthquake jolted eastern Japan on Saturday.

Radiation leaking from the Fukushima plant has forced tens of thousands of people in the prefecture to flee their homes. It has also contaminated crops and fishing waters, and regenerated global concern about the safety of nuclear power plants.

Listen? Email? Print? Comments?Comments (8)16-04-2011Vaméri(US)

Radiation leak crisis in not under firm control yet, the ground is still shaking due to aftershocks. But no new troubles reported on top of crisis. It looks like OK for everybody else except Japanese themself. Chinese and Korean can stop crying foul now.

16-04-2011Joe(USA)

Banning nuclear power in Japan is like banning electricity in Japan. With no electricity, Japan basically dies. So, don't be so quick to eliminate nuclear. For the future, an alternate safe, clean cheap and efficient source of energy should be used. For now, Japan must concentrate on fixing, securing and minimizing.

16-04-2011Bert Savage(Canada)

Containment seawalls should be immediately increased to the 45' ft. Level around all nuke plants that are vulnerable.

16-04-2011claudia(colombia)

I feel for the Japanese people. How could the world nuclear authorities allow such a small country on a big fault line have so many nuclear plants?

16-04-2011wizardteo(malaysia)

using zeolite, I call this as "mass vacuum" ,new word? means in mass quantity to vacuum the radioactive, so is safe for live to continue. At the same time, I would like every1 to pray together with me the restoration so situation an restore to before the radioactive crisis at japan and politic stabil at the west asia.

17-04-2011sue(england)

Japanese people, please try to find an alternative to nuclear energy there is NO safe nuclear energy! You of all nations understand the devastation of the nuclear devil. We in Britain don't want any more reactors built, (there is no where to put the waste products) Japan is amazing at inventing new technology, invent something that will save the world..please. We are thinking of you constantly.

17-04-2011Robin Davies(Japan)

I doubt Japan's economic success since the war would have been so great without nuclear power. So do you play with God or not? As man has learnt how, I still believe he may as long as he understands the overwhelming power of his opponent. No problem IF you are 120% sure you have been humble enough. Make reactors yes, but build them to stand earthquakes of magnitude 11 or 12 and tsunami of more than 35 or 40 metres. Then you can play with God.

17-04-2011Sugi pula(Romania)

Invest in solar stocks people !!

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Patient Money: Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control Over Your Illness

So the news that she needed brain surgery again was hardly welcome. Determined to make her second operation a better — or at least less traumatic — experience, Ms. Ritchie, an insurance marketing representative in Cleveland, turned to an unusual treatment.

At the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine, she had four hypnosis sessions in the month before her procedure, during which she addressed her fear of the coming surgery. She also practiced self-hypnosis every day.

Eventually, she said, “I got to a place where I felt a sense of trust instead of fear.”

In February, doctors removed a plum-sized tumor from her brain. But there the similarity to her previous experience ended. Ms. Ritchie woke up from the procedure, she said, feeling “alert and awesome.” She ate a full dinner that night and went home in two days.

“My neurosurgeon was stunned at how little medication I required before and after surgery, and how quickly I bounced back,” she said.

Ms. Ritchie attributes her speedy recovery and calm state to her hypnosis sessions. Used for more than two centuries to treat a host of medical problems, particularly pain management and anxiety, hypnosis is now available to patients at some of the most respected medical institutions in the country, including Stanford Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai Medical Center and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

Some critics find the research into mind-body therapies unconvincing, but their skepticism has not deterred patients like Ms. Ritchie. And there are researchers who say they believe that by helping patients feel in better control of their symptoms, hypnosis can reduce the need for medication and lower costs.

“It is an effective and inexpensive way to manage medical care,” said Dr. David Spiegel, director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine and a leading authority on hypnosis.

A study by radiologists at Harvard Medical School, published in 2000, found that patients who received hypnosis during surgery required less medication, had fewer complications and shorter procedures than patients who did not have hypnosis. In a follow-up study in 2002, the radiologists concluded that if every patient undergoing catheterization were to receive hypnosis, the cost savings would amount to $338 per patient.

“When patients are groggy from anesthesia drugs, it costs more to recover them,” said Dr. Elvira Lang, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a lead author of both studies. “Hypnosis calms patients.”

If you have a medical condition for which conventional medicine is not working, or you’d like to try a gentle mind-body alternative, hypnosis may be worth considering. Here are some things to keep in mind.

THE THERAPIST There is no uniformly accepted definition of hypnosis, but most experts generally agree that it is an altered mental state in which a patient becomes highly focused and more receptive to social cues.

During a session, the practitioner guides the subject into a relaxed state and then makes specific suggestions to help change a behavior, a perception or a physiological condition. Someone who is trying to quit smoking, for instance, might be told under hypnosis that cigarettes are poisons and that it’s important to care for and respect his body.

Some patients find that hypnosis is a helpful adjunct to traditional psychotherapy.

“Talk therapy engages the conscious mind, which is overwhelmingly facile at creating blocks to avoid hurtful problems,” said Dr. Tanya Edwards, director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “In hypnosis, the therapist is dealing with the subconscious mind and can get at core problems more quickly.”

Whatever the approach, it’s important to find a highly skilled practitioner.

“Hypnosis is like a surgeon’s knife,” said Edward Frischholz, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who has written more than 50 papers on clinical and experimental hypnosis. “In the right hands it can be life-saving, but in the wrong it could cause harm.”

There is no universal licensing process for practitioners who do hypnosis, so look for a licensed health professional — for instance, a psychologist, medical doctor or social worker — who has been trained in hypnosis. Ask your doctors and therapists for recommendations, or go to the Societies of Hypnosis Web site, which allows you to search by ZIP code and specialty.

THE SESSION At your first session, the practitioner will discuss your condition and may administer a short test to assess how hypnotizable you are.

Most people are susceptible to hypnosis. But if someone is clearly not, then the therapist or doctor may try another technique or suggest a different approach to the patient’s problem. Most sessions last about 50 minutes.

Specific conditions — like smoking, a fear of dogs or flying or temporary insomnia — may require just one session. In 2008, the personal health columnist Jane E. Brody recalled in this newspaper that her husband was able to stop smoking after just one session of hypnosis.

“For very circumscribed disorders, hypnosis works very quickly or not at all,” said Dr. Frischholz.

If your problem is more complex, like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, it may require multiple sessions. “I might spend the first two sessions taking a history and learning about someone’s background,” said Carol Ginandes, an assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School who uses hypnosis in her private practice. “Then I would work with the patient in a very individualized way.”

A session costs between $75 and $200, depending on where you live and the credentials of the practitioner. If the therapist or doctor is in your insurance network, then you may pay only a standard co-payment. Insurers do not cover hypnosis itself, however; it will have to be billed as a part of your counseling, or as an office visit.

THE DO-IT-YOURSELF APPROACH If the thought of someone putting you in a trancelike state makes you uncomfortable, hypnosis with tape or CD at home may be a practical alternative.

CDs made for a general audience, available at Web sites like HypnosisNetwork.com or HealthJourneys.com, may not be able to help you with a particular or complicated condition, like a lifelong struggle with depression, but they may help train you to calm down before a big test or surgical procedure.

Some practitioners may send you home with a custom-made CD or tape that you can use on your own.

Your therapist or doctor may also teach you self-hypnosis, as Ms. Ritchie’s therapist did. You learn how to put yourself in a deeply relaxed, receptive state in which you repeat statements such as “My body is strong and can handle this surgery,” or “I feel calm and relaxed.”

“People think hypnosis is about giving up control,” said Dr. Spiegel. “But it’s actually giving control back to the patients.”

 

Test subjects with electrode implants use mind control to move a cursor

 By Dana Wollman posted Apr 8th 2011 9:25PM As trippy as mind-control still seems to us, we've already seen it implemented in everything from wheelchairs to pricey gaming (and car driving!) headsets. But the problem is that they measure brain activity outside the skull -- you know, the thing we've evolved to shield the murky goings-on in our minds from prying EEG sensors.

Now, though, a team of Washington University researchers appears to have happened upon a more effective -- albeit, invasive -- approach. The researchers got some brave specimens to move a mouse cursor by implanting plastic pads containing electrodes underneath their skulls, with the sensors sitting on the surface of the brain. That, they say, gives them access to more telling, high-frequency waves that say a lot more about cognitive intentions. In the end, the subjects moved the cursors by thinking one of these sounds: "ee," "ah," "oo," and "eh." Brain-computer interfaces ain't new, of course, but the scientists say the subjects with electrode implants had more success than people wearing electrode-studded EEG caps, which could translate to less frustration for people with severe disabilities.