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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
9/7/2016 5:08:30 PM
Pistol

Judge, jury and executioner: Graphic body cam shows cops kill man after he put his hands up and pointed at them

© Evansville Police body camera footage
The Evansville Police released the body camera footage on Friday from a March officer-involved shooting that killed Daniel Wooters, 38.
Daniel Wooters, 38, was homeless and likely mentally ill when he was killed by Evansville police. In March of this year, Wooters stole a police cruiser, led cops on a chase, crashed the car, and was then killed as he held a knife in the air — over 30 feet away from the nearest officer.

In spite of the incident happening in March, the body cam video was not released until this month, likely due to the reason that it does not fit their narrative.

As the Courier Press Reports:
Police were in route to TGI Friday's at the Eastland Mall March 15 to look for a man who, according to a mall security guard, "threatened to kill people."

By the time police arrived, Wooters had walked to the Fifth-Third Bank parking lot, where a uniformed officer approached him. According to police, Wooters advanced at the officer with a knife and stole the officer's car, leading other arriving officers on a chase up Morgan Avenue.
Video of this first "advance" is unavailable and, given the reaction to the second advance, is very unlikely.

According to the police report, as the chase came to an end, Wooters "advanced" toward officers with a knife, causing multiple officers, all armed with guns, 30 feet away, to all fear for their lives and open fire on the man. However, as the video shows, Wooters got out of the stolen car, put his hands in the air, barely took two slow steps, stopped, gestured with his hand, and was executed.

Wooters was not moving forward when cops opened fire.

"With the totality of the circumstances, he just carjacked a marked police car at knifepoint," Police Sgt. Jason Cullum said. "We do try to do things to de-escalate the situation. ... This is not a situation where we walked up to a guy holding a knife."

Cullum said that Wooters refused the officers' commands to drop the knife, but the shots came almost immediately after the orders.

According to the Courier Press, three officers fired 11 shots at Wooters. He was hit seven times. The officers who discharged their weapons were Jason Thomas, 16 years of service; Zach Elfreich, 10 years of service; and Dexter Wolf, two years of service.

"The video verifies the information we put out initially," Cullum said Friday. But it simply does not.

Cullum went on to praise his department for not charging the media $150 for the body cam footage. Under a new and ridiculous state law, police departments can now charge the media exorbitant fees for requesting body cam or dash camera footage. But, this was a moot point as the Courier Press requested the video in March — four months before the law was passed.

"When the police take someone's life, that is the most controversial thing, if you will, that can happen. A lot of people have a lot of questions," Cullum said. "We want to be transparent in what happened that night. We don't want there to be an obstacle in our transparency."

Wooters was a troubled man, who more than likely needed to be taken off the streets that fateful night. However, it was not up to the police to play the role of executioner.


(sott.net)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
9/7/2016 5:24:59 PM



09-06-16

Are We in the Midst of a Second Cold War with Russia?

The profound rift between Obama and Putin over crises in Syria and Ukraine was frighteningly palpable at the G20 summit in China this week. How will it impact the looming U.S. presidential election?


Instead of grappling with global crises, the G20 summit taking place in Hangzhou, China, is revealed as having been turned into a platform for a further plunge in the cold war revived afresh between the United States and Russia.

Obstacles and sticking points summed up the umpteenth bid on Sunday, Sept. 4, by US Secretary of State John Kerry to agree with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on a way forward in the Syrian conflict, or even on a short humanitarian truce.

President Barack Obama blamed President Vladimir Putin for refusing to bring all his clout to bear on Assad to force him to accept US truce terms, especially a halt in Syrian aerial bombardment.

The profound rift between the American and Russian leaders was sharply marked, but it also arose from the deep divisions among the cooks who are stirring the Syrian conflict.

Much has been made of the hopelessly fragmented anti-Assad rebel movement into some 1,000 militias, and the divisions in the Iranian and Hizballah camp backing the Syrian dictator. But very little is heard about the controversies among the bodies in charge of US policy for Syria, namely, the White House, the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

This internal dissent, which is strongly reflected on the battlefield, is one reason why Obama vetoed any further cooperation with Russia in the Syrian conflict – and not just the “gaps of trust” remaining between the two powers.

Even less attention has focused on the internal debates in the Kremlin among the presidential office, the foreign ministry and the generals on the handling of Russia’s formidable military intervention in the conflict.

This week, the two leaders took widely diverse steps to ratchet up the “cold war” between them.

Putin had his defense minister launch the large-scale 10-day Caucasus 2016 military exercise -- from Crimea on the Ukraine border – involving Russia's Black Sea and Caspian fleets and 12,000 troops.

This step was taken against the background of the strong interface sustained in recent years between the Ukrainian and Syrian crises in times of high US-Russia friction.

Moscow’s military intervention in Syria, now exactly a year old, was bracketed from the word go with Russian domination of the Crimea and the Black Sea. For every military or political falling-out with Washington over Syria, a crisis developed over Ukraine.

Therefore, the commander of the Caucasus 2016 exercise is none other than Col.-Gen. Alexander Dvornikov, who up until July was commander of Russian forces in Syria.
The Obama administration has wielded its own second-strike capability against Moscow.

US intelligence agencies have let it be known that they are now officially investigating allegations that Russia has embarked on a broad operation, involving cyber tools and hacking, to sow public distrust in the US presidential election and its political institutions. The probe is led by Director of Intelligence James R. Clapper.

The administration has thus gone way beyond the accusations thrown out in late July by the Democratic Party campaign and some Republican leaders that Russian intelligence was meddling in the campaign by hacking Democratic Party emails for disclosures to embarrass their candidate Hillary Clinton. There were also subsequent discoveries of interference in the computers of two state polling centers.

Taking all these events together, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the “cold war” between Russia and the United States had stepped out from Ukraine to Syria and landed squarely in the middle of the US presidential election campaign.

Whether or not Russian intelligence was put to work to achieve this, Putin appears to be content with the outcome.

Via Debka


(virtualjerusalem.com)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
9/7/2016 6:09:00 PM

WND EXCLUSIVE

WHAT?! SCIENTISTS NOW CAN ENGINEER EXTINCTION


'Unprecedented power' offered by controversial procedure

BOB UNRUH


What if you could get rid of the mosquitoes that carry Zika virus? All of them. An entire species.

Would it be right to do?

What if the gene-editing process known as “gene drives” could modify a species of mice on an island so that only male offspring are produced, effectively setting in motion an irreversible extinction and protecting a species of bird?

What if a tool already existed, dubbed the CRISPR-CAS9, that would simply give “technicians the ability to intervene in evolution, to engineer the fate of an entire species, to dramatically modify ecosystems, and to unleash large-scale environmental changes?”

These are the questions being debated now at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature conference in Hawaii.

The procedure goes way beyond genetically modifying organisms, which, while still controversial, is becoming more common. It includes modifying corn seed to make it resistant to various diseases.

Claire Hope Cummings, an environmental lawyer, is just one of many signatories to a letter that openly calls for “conservation with a conscience” and warns against such manipulation.

The letter, which includes the signatures of luminaries such as environmental icon David Suzuki, physicist Fritjof Capra, organic pioneer Nell Newman and Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, is blunt, “Given the obvious dangers of irretrievably releasing genocidal genes into the natural world, and the moral implications of taking such action, we call for a halt to all proposals for the use of gene drive technologies, but especially in conservation.”

Cummings explained in a blog post, “This is not just your everyday genetic modification, known as ‘GMO’; it is a radical new technology, which creates ‘mutagenic chain reactions’ that can reshape living systems in unimaginable ways.”

Reduced to layman’s terms, gene drives provide a way for scientists to control what otherwise would have been a random process at the gene level. For example, scientists could designate that every offspring is male.

“Gene drives represent the next frontier of genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and gene editing. The technology overrides the standard rules of genetic inheritance, ensuring that a particular trait, delivered by humans into an organism’s DNA using advanced gene-editing technology, spreads to all subsequent generations, thereby altering the future of the entire species,” Cummings wrote.

“It is a biological tool with unprecedented power.”

For example, she noted, one plan is to “protect native birds on Hawaii’s Kauai Island by using gene drives to reduce the population of a species of mosquito that carries avian malaria. Another plan, championed by a conservation consortium that includes U.S. and Australian government agencies, would eradicate invasive, bird-harming mice on particular islands by introducing altered mice that prevent them from producing female offspring. Creating the ‘daughterless mouse’ would be the first step toward so-called Genetic Biocontrol of Invasive Rodents (GBIRd), designed to cause deliberate extinctions of ‘pest’ species like rats, in order to save ‘favored’ species, such as endangered birds.”

She urged people to consider the possible impact.

“The assumption underlying these proposals seems to be that humans have the knowledge, capabilities and prudence to control nature. The idea that we can – and should – use human-driven extinction to address human-caused extinction is appalling.”

She said she’s not alone in her concern, as the letter signed by many reveals.

“We believe that a powerful and potentially dangerous technology such as gene drives, which has not been tested for unintended consequences nor fully evaluated for its ethical and social impacts, should not be promoted as a conservation tool,” the letter said.

Signers include experts from Ecuador, Mexico, Nigeria, the U.S., Germany, Indian, Britain, Canada and Malaysia.

“The assumption of such power is a moral and ethical threshold that must not be crossed without great restraint,” they warn.

They write they are alarmed “that some conservation organizations have accepted funding for and are promoting the release of engineered gene drive organisms into the wild.”

“They propose to use extinction as a deliberate tool, in direct contradiction to the moral purpose of conservation organizations, which is to protect life on earth. We are also concerned about the potential use of gene drives by the military and in agriculture. We note that current regulatory schemes are not capable of evaluating and governing this new technology.”

They warn the plan is “irretrievably releasing genocidal genes into the natural world.”

According to AFP, even those who first advocated for the efforts are now expressing caution.

“As a scientist who worked on it, I am particularly concerned because we scientists are ultimately morally responsible for all the consequences of our work,” said Kevin Esvelt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“It should be a requirement that no one gets to build a gene drive or any technology designed to alter the shared environment in a laboratory without making their proposals public first. If something goes wrong in the laboratory, it can affect people outside the laboratory.”

He continued, “That means if you do it behind closed doors – as is traditional in science – then you are not giving people a voice in a decision that might affect them.”

The report also included concerns expressed by Chris Farmer, a program director in Hawaii for the American Bird Conservancy. He’s concerned because 38 forest birds in the state already have gone extinct because of disease.

One particular problem is malaria carried by mice and harming other species.

“One of the scariest things of working on conservation in Hawaii is there is no way to save these birds from malaria,” he said. Without using gene drives, “we are choosing to let these species go extinct.”

But AFP reported Floyd Reed of the University of Hawaii said a single small release could expand.

“These should be treated extremely cautiously. And there are other types of population modification genetic technology that are safer, geographically self-limiting, and reversible,” he said.

At the Civil Beat blog, Nathan Eagle wrote, “With gene drives, scientists can edit genes at the level of their individual DNA bases so that it’s no longer random what trait gets passed on to the offspring, which could allow people to control entire populations of species.”

Steve Rissing, a biology professor at Ohio State, wrote just last month, “We might be able to exploit our knowledge of these mechanisms to eliminate mosquito populations that carry Zika, Dengue or Chikungunya viruses. We might rescue endangered species by eliminating invasive competitors. But we also might make these situations worse with no ability to reverse the effects once released into the environment.”

He continued: “What don’t we know? What if a gene drive starts to drive the wrong gene? What if it jumps to a closely related, but non-target species? What if an even worse disease vet or an invasive species replaces the one we eliminated?”

“Why should we blindly believe that everything is under control?” continued Cummings.

“In my view, the focus on using gene-drive technology for conservation is a ruse to gain public acceptance and regulatory cover. Why expose something to public scrutiny and possibly restraints when you can usher it in through the back door by pretending it will do some good?

“The risks are too obvious for gene-drive advocates to risk talking about them.”

Investigate the growing trend of blending human and machine, called “transhumanism,” at the WND Superstore.

WND recently reported on a move by the federal government to fund research to investigate the injecting animal embryos with human stem cells, creating half-human half-animal hybrids.

The National Institutes of Health announced the agency is requesting public comment on expanding the kind of experimentation that could create “chimeras.”

Carrie D. Wolinetz, NIH’s associate director for science, announced in a blog post that the agency is requesting public comment on expanding fund said the development of “these types of human-animal organism … holds tremendous potential for disease modeling, drug testing, and perhaps eventual organ transplant.”

“I am confident that these proposed changes will enable the NIH research community to move this promising area of science forward in a responsible manner.”

Meanwhile, this kind of experimentation is not just going on in the U.S.

Experiments involving genetically engineered animals have nearly tripled in Germany in the past 10 years, driven by a burgeoning global industry that involves inventing and patenting genetically altered species for scientific research, says a new study commissioned by Germany’s Green Party and conducted by the research group Testbiotech.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/09/what-scientists-now-can-engineer-extinction/#o6kR0Y7ORaIr0CJB.99

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
9/8/2016 1:36:52 AM

There she is: Out of the closet, and ready for Miss America


FILE - In this Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016 file photo, Miss Missouri, Erin O'Flaherty waves as she is introduced during Miss America Pageant arrival ceremonies in Atlantic City. After competing in pageants for generations in the closet or working behind the scenes, gays and lesbians finally get to see one of their own take one of pageantry's biggest stages. O' Flaherty, will compete for the Miss America crown on Sept. 11, as the first openly lesbian contestant. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)


ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — After competing in pageants for generations in the closet or working behind the scenes, gays and lesbians finally get to see one of their own take one of pageantry's biggest stages.

Miss Missouri, Erin O' Flaherty, will compete for the Miss America crown this weekend as the first openly lesbian contestant.

"Behind the scenes, we've been well-represented, but I'm the first openly gay title holder, so I'm very excited," she told The Associated Press in a recent interview. "I knew going in that I had the opportunity to make history. Now I get to be more visible to the community and meet more people."

Rich Helfant, executive director of the Greater Atlantic City GLBT Alliance, helps run the Miss'd America pageant, a drag spoof of the Miss America pageant that has become popular in Atlantic City as an entertainment and fundraising event. He said he'll watch the Miss America pageant finals Sept. 11 with extra interest this year.

Miss'd America took its name from the fact that many gay pageant workers toiled behind the scenes during Miss America and never got to see what was happening onstage.

"They literally missed Miss America," Helfant said.

Robert Hitchen of Philadelphia appears regularly in the Miss'd America pageant under the stage name Sandy Beach and recalled decades of behind-the-scenes work on pageants, including designing floats, and later riding on them in Miss America parades.

The "Show Us Your Shoes" parade that has become a fixture of Miss America, in which contestants ride in vehicles on the Boardwalk and show off their state-themed footwear, sprang from the interest of gay spectators, he said.

"We would watch the parade from the deck of a hotel and we'd look down into the cars and see some of the women wearing slippers or being barefoot, and we started calling out, 'Show us your shoes!'" he recalled. "We sort of embarrassed them into wearing these big elaborate shoes, which are the highlight of the parade now."

Antwan Lee, who won the Miss Gay America 2016 pageant under the stage name Asia O'Hara, would excitedly watch Miss America every year as a child and a young man, imagining what it would be like onstage.

"I would always gravitate toward celebrities and singers and actresses that had a high level of glam: beautiful, poised people who would live their life with a high degree of dignity," he said. "To see that on TV with 50 women, as a young gay boy, that's the first place you see such a concentration of that. I was like, 'Wow, look at all those beautiful women, all the class, all the glamor!' It's very alluring."

Lesbians have been more visible in pageants lately. Djuan Trent competed in the Miss America pageant as Miss Kentucky in 2011, when she finished in the top 10. She came out as a lesbian in 2014.

Patricia Yurena, two-time winner of the Miss Spain contest and a runner up in the 2013 Miss Universe competition, announced in 2014 that she is a lesbian, posting a photo of her and her girlfriend cuddling, titling it "Romeo and Juliet."

In 2012, two openly lesbian contestants, Jenelle Hutcherson and Mollie Thomas, competed in the Miss California USA pageant but did not advance to the national Miss USA pageant competition.

O'Flaherty is the first Miss America contestant to win a state title after coming out; Trent came out after competing.

Hitchen said the social activism of many Miss America contestants resonates with the gay community; the Miss'd America drag queen parody pageant raises $300,000 a year for local and national charities and has become the top social event of the year in Atlantic City's gay community.

Josh Randle, chief operating officer of the Miss America Organization, said the pageant reflects an evolving America.

"Through every major milestone of our nation's evolution, Miss America has provided a voice for women from all walks of life, and, this year, we welcome our first openly gay contestant," he said. "Miss America contestants continue to be the best and brightest in the country, and we proudly support each and every young woman who competes in our national program."

___

Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC


(Yahoo News)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
9/8/2016 10:54:05 AM

9/11’S NEW VICTIMS: CANCER AND OTHER DISEASES LINKED TO TERRORIST ATTACK CLAIM MORE LIVES

“This shouldn’t be happening to me"


Leah McGrath Goodman | IBTimes -
SEPTEMBER 7, 2016


When Placido Perez closes his eyes, he can still see the World Trade Center towers beneath him. On weekends, he would sometimes fly his red-and-white Cessna along the Hudson River, taking selfies with the towers in the background, stark against a cerulean sky. “I still look at the pictures all the time,” he says. “I remember the good times. It’s what gets you through.”

Perez also has pictures he took of the September 11, 2001, attacks. He was standing at the base of the towers that morning with a digital camera, not far from where he worked as a manager at a telecommunications company. “I was on my way to work, and, boom, I heard a turbine smash into one of the buildings,” he says. “I remember the sounds and the people jumping [from the towers]. That marble plaza outside of the towers where the globe sculpture was—remember it had speakers? Muzak was playing. They couldn’t stop the music. It was automatic. People were jumping, and debris was flying. It was awful.”

Perez, a licensed emergency medical technician, stayed downtown to help people trying to escape the burning buildings. The next day, he returned to the site and volunteered alongside thousands of police officers, firefighters, construction workers and others to search for survivors. He didn’t leave Ground Zero for a week, working 12- to 14-hour shifts. When he needed rest, he slept at the site.

Now, on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, he’s struggling to accept a harrowing truth: His time saving lives at Ground Zero has made him sick—and could kill him. “Between 2005 and 2009, I ended up in the emergency room six or seven times, thinking I was having a heart attack and about to die,” says Perez, 59. They were panic attacks—his heart rate as high as 157 beats per minute, well above the average for a healthy man his age. Then came the respiratory problems that would choke him in his sleep and wake him in the night. He discovered he had restrictive lung disease, post-traumatic stress, rhinitis, asthma and swelling of the liver so severe it began to interfere with his blood platelets, esophagus, diaphragm, stomach and other digestive organs.Now, on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, he’s struggling to accept a harrowing truth: His time saving lives at Ground Zero has made him sick—and could kill him. “Between 2005 and 2009, I ended up in the emergency room six or seven times, thinking I was having a heart attack and about to die,” says Perez, 59. They were panic attacks—his heart rate as high as 157 beats per minute, well above the average for a healthy man his age. Then came the respiratory problems that would choke him in his sleep and wake him in the night. He discovered he had restrictive lung disease, post-traumatic stress, rhinitis, asthma and swelling of the liver so severe it began to interfere with his blood platelets, esophagus, diaphragm, stomach and other digestive organs.

091691103PerezRetired telecoms manager and pilot Placido D. Perez, 59, was an EMS worker at the World Trade Center site. He was at the base of the towers when both planes hit, and remained there until they fell. Now, he suffers from numerous health issues including stage four liver swelling and PTSD. Photo: DEVIN YALKIN /Newsweek

He says his liver disease is now so far advanced and the scarring so great that it cannot heal or regenerate—only a transplant can help him. All he can do is wait. Perez says if the disease progresses further, the doctors fear it will mean cancer or liver failure. “I have never done any drugs, and I don’t drink. I weigh 163 pounds and am thin, except for my liver, which is like an inner tube around my waist.

“This shouldn’t be happening to me.”

Ground Zero Exposure

Perez is one of the thousands fighting deadly diseases as a result of exposure to Ground Zero. Doctors with the World Trade Center Health Program, which the federal government created in the aftermath of the attacks, have linked nearly 70 types of cancer to Ground Zero. Many people have fallen victim to cancers their doctors say are rare, aggressive and particularly hard to treat. “The diseases stemming from the World Trade Center attacks include almost all lung diseases, almost all cancers—such as issues of the upper airways, gastroesophageal acid reflux disease, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, panic and adjustment disorders,” says Dr. David Prezant, co-director for the Fire Department of the City of New York’s World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program.

With the exception of the Civil War battle of Antietam, more American lives were lost on September 11, 2001, than on any other day in U.S. history: 2,996 people were killed—265 on the four hijacked planes, 125 at the Pentagon and 2,606 at the World Trade Center and surrounding area. More than 411 emergency workers died on 9/11, and the total number of rescue and recovery workers who have died has more than doubled since the attacks, to 1,064 as of July, according to data obtained exclusively by Newsweek from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

The wider population is also suffering: As many as 400,000 people are estimated to be affected by diseases, such as cancers, and mental illnesses linked to September 11. This figure includes those who lived and worked within a mile and a half of Ground Zero in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the vast majority of whom still don’t know they’re at risk. Mark Farfel, director of the World Trade Center Health Registry, which tracks the health of more than 71,000 rescue workers and survivors, says, “Many people don’t connect the symptoms they have today to September 11.”

Richard Dixon, a Bronx-based cop with the New York Police Department, agrees. “You don’t think that the cough you get today will be the cancer you get tomorrow.” He spent two months working in rescue and recovery at Ground Zero. Since then, he’s had sleep apnea, sinusitis and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), which can be a precursor to cancer.

091691104DixonRichard Dixon, 50, has been a New York police officer for 30 years and has no plans to retire. He worked at the World Trade Center site for two months digging for survivors. He now suffers from numerous health issues including GERD, but can still work. Many of his colleagues from September 11 are now dead from cancer.Photo: DEVIN YALKIN/Newsweek

And he’s one of the lucky ones. Unlike others on the force, he’s still able to work—and is cancer-free. “We lost 23 NYPD officers in the attacks,” he says. “But many more have died since then of these September 11–related illnesses. We need to find out why, or that list of names on the 9/11 memorial is going to just keep growing.”

The World Trade Center Cough

Days after the attacks, rescue workers started showing up at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for treatment and medical assistance. Many of them had injuries and respiratory problems from the debris that had fallen on them, including what became known as “the World Trade Center cough.”

“The symptoms these patients have are terrifying,” says Dr. Michael Crane, director of the World Trade Center Health Program’s lead clinical center at Mount Sinai, which treats around 22,000 rescue and recovery workers. “They will suddenly wake up and find they cannot breathe.”

One Mount Sinai patient who had the cough was John Soltes, a retired cop for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which had oversight of the World Trade Center towers. He worked at Ground Zero for almost nine months clearing debris and recovering the remains of his colleagues. “I only had the cough for a year,” he says. “I know some guys who still have it.” His cough led to GERD and a serious complication of that condition, called Barrett’s esophagus, which can develop into cancer. “I’ve already dealt with skin cancer on my face, my cheek and my back,” which are also 9/11-related, he says. “So I am trying to be careful.”

Daisy Bonilla, an NYPD school safety agent, also worked in rescue and recovery at Ground Zero, taking care of orphaned children whose parents died in the attacks. Today, her upper airways are too inflamed to swallow solid food. “Food would get stuck in my esophagus, and I would feel like I was choking,” she says. “So now I have protein shakes or have to have all my food pureed. I haven’t been able to go to a restaurant with friends. I haven’t had solid foods or eaten a steak in over a year. It sucks, but I am getting used to it. I try to look at it in a positive way—at least I am alive.”

Crane is also regularly seeing cancers that have been developing since as far back as 2005. As of June, 5,441 of the 75,000 people enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program have been diagnosed with at least one case of 9/11-related cancer, according to data Newsweekobtained from the program. And many of them have multiple cancers, with the total number of cancers certified at 6,378 as of June. “Any internal cancer below the skin is awful,” Crane says. “But cancers of the digestive organs, cancers in the gut, can sit there sometimes, and you don’t even know they are growing.”

Paul Gerasimczyk, a retired NYPD cop who worked in the Ground Zero cleanup, says he first went to Mount Sinai in 2005 for treatment for “the cough” and discovered he had asthma. “Beads of sweat were breaking out on my face, I was coughing so hard,” he says. “The doctor said, ‘Did you call the ambulance and go to the hospital?’ I said, ‘No, I thought it was just coughing.’ And she said, ‘You had an asthma attack.’” By 2007, Gerasimczyk learned he had developed kidney cancer, as well as GERD. “When you’re told you have cancer, you’re in disbelief,” he says. “You feel you’re healthy, and you’re in denial. You feel you can beat it, the operation will be successful.”

091691105CraneDr. Michael Crane, 64, is the director of the World Trade Center Health Program’s clinical center at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York and treats more than 22,000 September 11 rescue and recovery workers. Photo: DAVIN YALKIN/Newsweek

He says two close friends who worked at Ground Zero didn’t make it—one died of pancreatic cancer and the other of brain cancer. “They don’t just die; they die in the worst ways imaginable,” he says. “My friend Angelo Peluso, who died in 2006, they had to remove an egg-shaped tumor from his brain. The first time they operated on him, he was mentally impaired and could only say my name. The second time they operated, he never left the hospital, and in months he was gone. It just rips the heart out of your chest.”

A Cesspool of Cancer

Today, 15 years after the attacks, doctors are starting to understand why people are still dying. When the towers came down, they say, they released a massive plume of carcinogens, turning lower Manhattan into a cesspool of cancer and deadly disease. “We will never know the composition of that cloud, because the wind carried it away, but people were breathing and eating it,” says Mount Sinai’s Crane. “What we do know is that it had all kinds of god-awful things in it. Burning jet fuel. Plastics, metal, fiberglass, asbestos. It was thick, terrible stuff. A witch’s brew.”

In a report issued just months after the attacks, the National Resources Defense Council, a New York–based environmental advocacy group, noted that the World Trade Center’s north tower contained as much as 400 tons of asbestos. That, along with burning office furniture, mainframe computers and the thousands of fluorescent lights in the buildings, led to the release of lead, mercury, volatile organic compounds and other deadly poisons. “An environmental emergency such as this, with hundreds, if not thousands, of toxic components simultaneously discharged into the air on the scale of September 11th is unprecedented,” the organization wrote, and the effects “unknown.”

Because the fires burned at Ground Zero for more than 90 days, a later study explained that the contaminants found in the dust immediately after the attacks continued to show up in samples for weeks. The results supported “the need to have the interior of residences, buildings, and their respective HVAC [heating, ventilation and air-conditioning] systems professionally cleaned to reduce long-term residential risks before rehabilitation,” the study said, noting the probability of “acute or long-term health effects” from dust, which could be stirred up endlessly.

091691107BonillaDaisy Bonilla, 49, was one of the only women at the World Trade Center site and one of the youngest. She was 34 at the time of the attacks and a school safety agent for the NYPD. She patrolled Ground Zero for two months and looked after the morgues and orphaned children, as debris fell on her repeatedly. She retired last year due to health issues linked to contaminant exposure—today, she cannot walk without a walker, eats a liquefied diet, and suffers from precancerous GERD, Lupus and major circulatory issues in her legs. She believes no one should live or work near the WTC site and believes air and environment aren't safe. Photo: DEVIN YALKIN/Newsweek

New research confirms that this toxic cocktail caused heightened rates of cancer. “If you compare our cancer rates to the general U.S. population, our rates are about 10 percent higher than expected,” says the Fire Department’s Prezant, who tracks the health profiles of 15,700 firefighters and emergency medical services workers. “If you compare it to our pre–September 11 data, the cancer rates range from 19 to 30 percent higher for our firefighters.” He says the data are carefully adjusted for age, exposure and other factors to “yield the most conservative numbers.”

Prezant also found that firefighters at Ground Zero had a substantial reduction in lung capacity. “Normally with lung exposure, you recover,” he says. “I found that their lung function did not recover, despite treatment and despite time. I attribute it to the extremely inflammatory nature of the dust found at the World Trade Center site. When you look at [the dust particles] under a microscope, they are very jagged, and they are coated with carcinogens.”

Yet following the attacks, the government repeatedly announced the air within Ground Zero’s 16-acre zone was safe to breathe. One week after the towers fell, Christine Todd Whitman, then the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, stated that the air did “not pose a health hazard.” She was wrong. At the time, the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement,” according to a 2003 U.S. inspector general report. “The White House Council on Environmental Quality [under George W. Bush] influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that the EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced the EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals later ruled that Whitman wasn’t liable for the EPA’s claims, because she did not intend any harm. Perez, the rescue worker, is still bitter about the EPA’s assurances. He lost several friends to breathing the dust. “No one was saying anything about the chemicals and what it meant to be breathing the ash of so many toxins mixed with human remains,” he says. “I had friends that developed carcinoma in their lungs, and many of them were deep in the pile.”

Too Young to Die

Since 9/11, many of those who were at Ground Zero have dispersed to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and more than 15 countries, including Canada and the U.K., as well as parts of continental Europe and the Middle East, says Farfel, the World Trade Center Health Registry director. “You see all these survivors with elevated asthma, behavioral issues, post-traumatic stress, substance-abuse issues and increased cancer rates,” he tells Newsweek. “This has now been linked to the attacks and corroborated by multiple studies.”

The registry is part of a broad network of post–September 11 clinics and organizations belonging to the World Trade Center Health Program. The program is publicly funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the CDC, and it consists of a responder program for rescue and recovery workers like Perez, as well as a thinly attended survivor program for those who lived and worked near Ground Zero. “A lot of people who should enroll in the program don’t, because they think other people need it more than they do,” Crane says.

091691108GerasimczykPaul Gerasimczyk, 57, is a retired NYPD police officer. He was standing at St. Paul's Chapel when first tower came down. "[It was] a nightmare. I thought we were already dead," he says. Now he suffers from, kidney cancer, for which he has had surgery, and precancerous conditions such as GERD. Photo: DEVIN YALKIN/Newsweek

No one knows exactly when downtown New York became safe again—and some, like Bonilla, say it isn’t safe now. But those directly exposed to the World Trade Center disaster who can prove they lived or worked in the area between September 11, 2001, and July 31, 2002, when the cleanup ended, can receive free treatment for a growing list of illnesses linked to the 9/11 attacks. In December, Congress reauthorized a bill to provide free medical services and treatment to responders and survivors of September 11 for the rest of their lives. In fiscal 2016, Congress will spend $330 million on the program. That number will gradually rise to $570 million by 2025.

Despite these substantial resources, Farfel says, it remains difficult to get people to link an illness they may be suffering from today to attacks 15 years ago. Farfel has a staff of a few dozen people based in Long Island City, New York, trying to alert people to the dangers of their exposure to the World Trade Center site and how to get free treatment. They even have Chinese and Spanish speakers reaching out to more underserved groups. “It’s a real challenge for us,” he says. “How do you make contact with and encourage people to apply, especially those who may already be suffering and are isolated?”

Farfel’s goal is to limit the number of people who continue to die from 9/11-related illnesses. As of July 2016, 1,140 people have died since the attacks, the majority of whom worked or lived at or near the site, according to data from the World Trade Center Health Program. But that’s only based on unsolicited reports, since the program does not seek out mortality data, nor analyze it for things like cause of death. The program says it is focused solely on health monitoring and treatment.

The number of fatalities is likely to be far greater than that tally. Fewer than 10,000 people deemed eligible for the survivor program have enrolled. That means nearly half a million people exposed to what doctors are now calling “the World Trade Center disaster area” remain untreated and unaccounted for. The amount of care this population will need over the next decade is expected to be monumental, as doctors note the incubation periods for cancer can be up to 15 to 20 years—a time window patients are hitting now. “While this population is getting older,” says Crane, “it’s still relatively young to be looking at death.”

The average age of rescue and recovery workers is approaching 54, says Andy Todd, co-deputy director of Mount Sinai’s World Trade Center Health Program. More than 86 percent of them are men, and more than half are suffering from multiple World Trade Center–related illnesses. Fewer than 10 percent have cancer right now, Todd says, but as these people get older, both he and Crane expect that number to steadily rise. “If you were down there, and especially if you were a responder,” Crane says, “you need to be seen.”

‘They Found Some Bones’

This time of year is always hardest for the 9/11 survivors, Perez says, because they are plagued by disturbing thoughts and memories. Aside from cancer and other diseases, doctors say, many suffer from the same mental health problems as soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gerasimczyk, the retired cop, vividly recalls standing feet away from the south tower when it fell. “We were right by St. Paul’s Chapel when the first building came down,” he says. “A nightmare. I thought, We’re already dead.” He had been dispatched downtown as soon as the planes hit. One of his supervisors, Timmy Roy, an NYPD sergeant, was radioing for help from the base of the towers. In the days that followed, Gerasimczyk and his colleagues searched the rubble for Roy and put him on the list of the missing. “We never saw Timmy again,” he says. “They found some bones. And they found his gun. It had melted.”

Paul Gerasimczyk, 57, is a retired NYPD police officer. He was standing at St. Paul's Chapel when first tower came down. "[It was] a nightmare. I thought we were already dead," he says. Now he suffers from, kidney cancer, for which he has had surgery, and precancerous conditions such as GERD.DEVIN YALKIN FOR NEWSWEEK

The grief he still feels over lost colleagues like Roy makes it painful to think about the anniversary of the attacks. “I can’t watch stuff on television about it,” he says.

Since 9/11, Soltes, the retired Port Authority officer, says he has struggled with claustrophobia, panic and fear of heights, in part because he saw people jump from the burning towers. Still, he does not regret the time he spent in the rescue efforts at Ground Zero. “If I’d had to watch that on TV without doing anything, it would have driven me out of my mind,” he says. “It was better for me to be down there.”

One night, as he dug through the rubble, he found a briefcase, completely intact. Inside was a pair of eyeglasses and a New York Times dated September 11, 2001. The man who had owned it was on a list of the missing, so Soltes and his colleagues were able to return it to the man’s family. “When I think about being down there, searching the rubble from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m.,” he says, “I know each and every one of us would do it again tomorrow.”

Despite his illness and the agonizing memories, Perez feels the same way. He never published the photos he took on 9/11. He keeps them as a way to try to heal and accept what happened. “I have gone to the site, and I take my photo albums with me. I think, I am standing right here, where I was standing then.”

Whether he will heal from the physical damage is less certain. “I only ask, Keep me in your prayers. Keep us all in your prayers,” he says. “We all need them.”

This story was originally published on newsweek.com.


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