10.22am: Welcome to day nine of the welfare reform bill live blog.

Today, we’ll be mulling over last night’s dramatic government defeat on the benefit cap and examining the reaction to it.

We’ll also be looking forward to Wednesday’s Lords debate – including the possibility of another defeat for the government, led by rebel Tory peers – over its proposals to charge single parents for using the Child Support Agency.

Proposals to abolish the social fund – read Polly Toynbee’s excellent piece for a flavour of why the fund, used for emergency loans by families and individuals in crisis, is seen by many as so important – will also be on our agenda.

As ever, please eave comments below the line or tweet me at

11.09am: Could the government be heading for a sixth defeat in the Lords over its welfare reform bill?

The bill includes proposals to charge single parents to use the Child Support Agency (CSA) in order to access payments from their former partners. This

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Quick Weight Loss Diet Tips 1 Only Eat When Youre Physically Hungry

Many people eat when they think they are hungry, but the truth is they are bored. If you are not sure that you are hungry, then wait and see what happens.

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SALEM – A 12-year-old boy who suffered a sudden cardiac arrest at basketball practice earlier this month is out of the hospital and recovering at home.

Isaac Arzate had surgery to fix a previously undetected heart problem, after he collapsed at practice at a Salem elementary school January 6. His coaches called 911 and preformed CPR until paramedics arrived. Arzate had a simple message for his first responders.

“Just thank you for doing that, because it saved my life,” he said.

Arzate’s mother said the past few weeks have been a mixture of faith and fear.

“I don’t think I really believed anything bad was going to happen,” said Lindsay Wiens. “Then there

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The Rapid Assessment Chest Pain Clinic is a first of its kind in Victoria and provides fast, same-day assessment and diagnosis and rapid access to treatment for patients who experience chest pain.

A patient who comes in with chest pain can be assessed with narrowing of the coronary artery, have an angioplasty procedure and return home within days.

Patients are often scared and anxious; however, the MonashHeart clinic’s fast and simple entry to assessment, diagnosis and treatment can put their minds at ease, and most importantly, prevent serious cardiac damage from occurring.

The Rapid Assessment Chest Pain Clinic’s quick treatment is important to meet the needs of the growing population in the southeast corridor of Melbourne.

Southern Health’s MonashHeart provides a vital service in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac conditions, and provides care to over 7,500 patients each year.

Southern Health is Victoria’s largest health service provider, providing health services to over one million residents of Melbourne’s south and southeast.

The Rapid Assessment Chest Pain Clinic has assessed 385 people with chest pain since it opened in July 2011 and is currently seeing about 20 patients a week.

To find out more about the clinic, visit the MonashHeart website.

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Hi Parenting Post readers! Just dropping in for a quick hello, and to update you on some exciting news. Ready? Drum roll please…

I’m moving again! No, no, not yet across national borders (though I’m seriously tempted by Finland’s educational system, and by the family allowance in France…)— we’re really feeling very settled, for now, at home in Tejas. What I mean to say is that I’m moving on over from The Parenting Post to a new Natural Parenting blog that’s currently under construction right here on Parenting.com. I’ll post the lin

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“When they quit their sport, a weight-management program coupled with psychotherapy and resilience training would help,” Ott said.

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The award for Best Diet Overall went to “The DASH Diet.” This was a surprise to me because DASH is not a diet. DASH stands for Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension. It is an “Eating Plan” that was developed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to prevent high blood pressure and help lower it if you have it. 

The NHLBI chose to call it an eating plan instead of a diet to avoid the stigma associated with that four letter word. T

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Sometimes that extra chin and neck flab is genetic, sometimes it’s due to age or weight gain, but whatever the reason, who really wants a turkey neck? Not Lynda West. She says she never saw it coming. “It was one of those where I’d seen several pictures of me and I was mortified to see, you know, this giant, you know, turkey neck and I just thought it was very aging,” she said. But Lynda was reluctant to go the surgical route. “You’re changing the way you look, for better or worse,” she said. “If you start doing facelifts when you’re in your forties, you’re doomed to having to do them in your fifties and your sixties.” But now there are non-evasive options. One is Exilis. It uses radio frequency. “We can actually heat the skin to tighten it and we can heat the fat to make the fat cells leaky,” said Dr. Robert Weiss. That also stimulates more collagen to form. “In heated or maybe slightly altered in some way and so it needs to be replaced,” said Dr. Weiss. And while heat is involved it’s usually not uncomfortable. “Patients describe this as a warm massage most people tend to want to just close their eyes and sit back and relax,” said Dr. Weiss. Most patients need a series of treatments.   “What we’re thinking is that after this series of three or four that there’ll be tightening that lasts for a year or two. And that she may need to come back maybe once a year or once every other year for maintenance,” said Dr. Weiss.   The treatment is available locally at Seattle Skin and Laser. The cost depends on what part of the body is being treated and how many sessions are needed to achieve results.    One website reports the price for a single neck treatment is about $400.

Knee-jerk reactions to disasters, keeping voters satisfied, the powerful leverage of interest groups, and the skewing of debate through ideology and the media are each considered in turn. These processes render policy far from rational or at least require a much broader approach for considering policy ‘logic’, one that is open to different rationalities of values, norms and pragmatism. The Read full post…

Phthalates are a commonly used industrial compound found in everything from canned and prepackaged foods to toiletries and shower curtains. Their use has drawn criticism across the board because they mimic hormones and have been linked to cancer, neurological damage, and problems with fetal development.

A new study published by the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in has found that prenatal exposure to phthalates can cause problems with early development of mental and motor skills.

According to :

The study followed the children of 319 non-smoking inner-city women who gave birth between 1999 and 2006.

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The vaccine, described this week in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , reveals a promising new strategy for treating cancers that share the same distinct carbohydrate signature, including ovarian and colorectal cancers

When cells become cancerous, the sugars on their surface proteins undergo distinct changes that set them apart from healthy cells For decades, scientists have tried to enable the immune system to recognize those differences to destroy cancer cells rather than normal cells But since cancer cells originate within the body, the immune system generally doesn’t recognize them as foreign and therefore doesn’t mount an attack

The researchers used unique mice developed by Sandra Gendler, PhD , the David F and Margaret T Grohne Professor of Therapeutics for Cancer Research at Mayo Clinic in Arizona and co-senior author on the study Like humans, the mice develop tumors that overexpress a protein known as MUC1 on the surface of their cells The tumor-associated MUC1 protein is adorned with a distinctive, shorter set of carbohydrates that set it apart from healthy cells

“This is the first time that a vaccine has been developed that trains the immune system to distinguish and kill cancer cells based on their different sugar structures on proteins such as MUC1,” Dr Gendler says “We are especially excited about the fact that MUC1 was recently recognized by the National Cancer Institute as one of the three most important tumor proteins for vaccine development”

“This vaccine elicits a very strong immune response,” says study co-senior author Geert-Jan Boons, PhD, Franklin Professor of Chemistry and a researcher in the UGA Cancer Center and its Complex Carbohydrate Research Center in Athens

Dr Gendler says MUC1 is found on more than 70 percent of all cancers that kill Many cancers, such as breast, pancreatic, ovarian and multiple myeloma, express MUC1 with the shorter carbohydrate on more than 90 percent of cases

She explains that when cancer occurs, the architecture of the cell changes and MUC1 is produced at high levels, promoting tumor formation A vaccine directed against MUC1 has tremendous potential to prevent recurrence or as a prophylactic in patients at high risk for particular cancers, Dr Gendler says A vaccine also can be used together with standard therapy such as chemotherapy in cancers that cannot be cured by surgery, such as pancreatic cancer

For the immune system to recognize MUC1 on the tumor cells, it required a special vaccine that had three parts One part tricks the body into thinking that the cancer cell is a bacterial infection, one part stimulates an antibody response, and one part stimulates a lymphocyte response If any of the three components were omitted, the vaccine did not work as well

Dr Boons notes that MUC1 is also overexpressed in 90 percent of the subset of patients who are not responsive to hormonal therapy, such as tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors, or the drug Herceptin These so-called triple-negative tumors are extremely aggressive and difficult to treat, Dr Boons says, and a new treatment option is urgently needed

“In the US alone, there are 35,000 patients diagnosed every year whose tumors are triple-negative,” Dr Boons says “So we might have a therapy for a large group of patients for which there is currently no drug therapy aside from chemotherapy”

Dr Gendler and her colleagues are currently testing the vaccine’s effectiveness against human cancer cells in culture and are planning to assess toxicity If all goes well, phase I clinical trials to test the safety of the vaccine could begin by late 2013

OLYMPIA, Wash. — One million residents in the state don’t have health insurance and unpaid costs have risen to $1 billion a year, insurance commissioner Mike Kreidler said Tuesday. The number of uninsured has grown by at least 180,000 since 2008, and 31 of the state’s 39 counties saw an increase in the number of uninsured, according to a report issued by Kreidler’s office. Kreidler said that 14.5 percent of the state’s more than 6.7 million people are without health insurance. That percentage jumps to 20 percent or higher in five counties: Adams, Franklin, Grant, Okanogan and Yakima. Six counties saw a decline in the number of uninsured people: Clallam, Cowlitz, Jefferson, Wahkiakum, Whatcom and Whitman.

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Black and white images flicker across absorbed young faces as timeless stories unfold. To the delight of the education charity Filmclub, classic films are captivating children as young as seven.

In the past year, a quarter of all the films watched by its members have been pre-1979 movies and some, such as The Electric Edwardians (1900), date right back to the birth of cinema.

Launched in 2008 by film director Beeban Kidron and educationist Lindsay Mackie, Filmclub (@filmclub) helps schools set up film clubs and supplies a huge range of thoughtfully curated films.

Libby Serdiuk, aged 10, was “pleasantly surprised by The General (1926):

“I had never watched a film without sound or colour. B

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Did you believe in Santa when you were a kid? I’m guessing that most of us did, at least we did if our families enacted the whole Santa ritual, with the lists, cookies, stockings and whatnot. My family did this, and I have fond memories of waking up at five a.m. on

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But further gains may be difficult to achieve because certain subgroups of people are highly unlikely to exercise, such as those with arthritis, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Many of the roughly 50 million U.S.

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