Skeptical reporter @ 2013-05-10

Skeptical Reporter for May 10th, 2013 Announcement: Romania will host the first international humanist conference in Eastern Europe, on the 25th of May. The conference „Education, Science and Human Rights” is hosted by the Romanian Humanist Association in partnership with the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the European Humanist Federation. The event will take place at the Parliament Palace and has speakers such as PZ Meyers and Richard Wiseman. So, if interested, don’t hesitate to purchase a ticket now. After three women were freed in Cleveland, a decade after they disappeared, it was revealed that psychic Sylvia Browne declared that one of them, Amanda Berry, was dead. Amanda Berry’s mother traveled to New York to tell her story to psychic Sylvia Browne on the Montel Williams Show. Amanda Berry’s mother wanted to know if her daughter was still alive. “Can you tell me…Is she out there?” Berry’s mother Louwana Miller asked. “I hate when they’re in the water,” Browne said. “She’s not alive honey.” “It hurts my mind but it eases it; now I know,” Miller explained after hearing the prediction by the world-renowned psychic. Years later, Amanda Berry was found alive, together with two other women who had been held captive for a decade. Unfortunately, Amanda’s mother passed away and never got to see her daughter again. The long-running saga of San Francisco's proposed cell phone warning labels appears to finally be coming to a close. The law would have required cell phone makers to place labels on their devices that detail the typical energy they transfer to the human body. According to Reuters, the city government has now settled the lawsuit by accepting that the law will never come into effect, after an injunction  The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, which sued the city, argued that the law was a bit of a mess. The Federal Communications Commission has established a safety level for wireless radiation exposure, and no phones sold in the US are allowed to exceed it. The ordinance was forcing companies to disclose numbers that were all below the legal limit. Complicating matters further, the exact dose users receive would vary depending on the wireless network the device was on and the manner in which it was being used. More generally, there are no clear indications that wireless hardware creates any health risks in the first place, which raises questions of what, exactly, the legislation was supposed to accomplish. Although a number of small, preliminary studies have suggested potential dangers, larger, more comprehensive works indicate that any potential risks take decades to be felt, and cell phones simply haven't been in use long enough for us to know for sure. Childcare centers should have the right to ban unvaccinated kids from childcare centers and preschools under a "no jab, no play" policy proposed in Australia. The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph launched a campaign to stop the rise in the number of children succumbing to preventable diseases because parents are failing to have them fully immunized  Although only 1.5 per cent of parents are "vaccine refusers" or conscientious objectors, many parents are forgetful, leaving areas of New South Wales with vaccination rates below 85 per cent - despite the inarguable scientific proof that the vaccination program has saved thousands of lives and eradicated diseases that crippled children just a generation ago, including polio. Despite effective vaccines, Australia has been unable to eradicate diseases such as whooping cough because some parents do not immunize  leaving small babies and children with cancer and other immune-compromising conditions vulnerable. The Australian Medical Association believes tougher measures - potentially including bans for non-immunized children - should be introduced to make life harder for "free-riding" parents who refuse or forget to vaccinate.