Donnette

The following mesothelioma research findings were reported in a recent issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Mesothelioma researchers have reported that combining Tomudex (raltitrexed) and Platinol (cisplatin) has shown amazing results in the improved survival of patients suffering from the rare Malignant pleural mesothelioma which is caused by habitual exposure to asbestos.

According to the mesothelioma research findings reported in the journal, the combination of the two treatments dramatically improves the survival of patients compared to the use of Platinol alone.

These mesothelioma research findings emerged from a randomized phase III trial.

Patients suffering from this rare mesothelioma usually experience shortness of breath, cough, pain, fatigue and loss of appetite. This new mesothelioma research findings are all the more encouraging because this type of cancer has proved to be resistant to most therapies such as surgery, chemotherapy on its' own and even when combined with radiation.

What usually complicates matters further is the fact that usually patients are not aware of the fact that they are suffering from malignant pleural mesothelioma until the disease has already progressed to a very advanced stage where treatment with surgery or radiation is no longer a viable option.

That is why the identification of treatment that can improve survival as well as quality of life in patients, as this mesothelioma research promises, is so significant.

Visit the author's mesothelioma research blog for the latest mesothelioma research findings.

The hassle of asking the traffic police or any passerby about the location you want to reach is over. The danger of losing your track is also no more there. All this is possible due to the availability Tom Tom Go. It works on an in-car navigation system and provides a flying interface with a bird's-eye view of the road, as well as a direct-overhead map view. With approachable TV styling, it remains the simplest satnav system currently available in the market.

TomTom Go uses a GPS receiver to show the precise location and provide visual and spoken directions on how to drive to the desired destination. Certain Tom Tom systems also integrate with mobile phones using Bluetooth. They show traffic congestion maps or actually take calls and read aloud SMS messages. Along with car navigators, Tom Tom has also navigational solution for bikes and scooters.

In spite of its invisibly integrated antenna, the Tom Tom was the first unit to acquire GPS lock-on. It starts working instantly, splashing bold, bright and clear 3D information on its large screen in a range of primary colours. The unit is capable of tracking every twist and turn of the road. Refresh rate and vehicle orientation is also highest quality. With straightforward and easy to use Menus, clear diction and fast navigation TomTom Go offers a superb service.

The maker of this handy and powerful device also offers a line of fee-based services under the name of TomTom PLUS. TomTom Go includes paid services like warning drivers about speed cameras, providing weather updates, changing voices and providing traffic alerts. Generally it comes with enough data installed in it. Yet, the option of inputting more data is also there. Perfectly clear views, easy to use system and high-quality navigation make the Tom Tom a safe choice for almost any motorist, from novice to rally driver.

Jack Triston is a renowned business writer who has years of experience in writing technical reviews, product descriptions and product feature analysis of technical gadgets and gizmos. He has won appreciation especially for enlightening people about the latest communication gizmos...the TomTom Go

Did you know that your teacher gets all of her homework ideas from the terrorists themselves? NOT! That was a rumor. (Or for some of you it was just a slight exaggeration.) But what would happen if you believed that rumor. Some people might even go far enough to call the police or the CIA because they might imagine their teacher is interacting with terrorists. If the police or CIA believed the rumor then she might be thrown in jail for life!

Rumors are often lies or complete exaggerations. Some, if not all, are hurtful to others and can drive people away from you if youre the one who starts rumors. Think about it who wants to hang around someone who is always spreading rumors? Pretty soon, theyll be spreading rumors about you.

And, listening to a rumor and repeating it is as bad as starting it, because it makes you part of the rumor, and you will be partly responsible for whatever harm it causes others. Also, if you listen to a rumor about someone you dont know, and believe it, you might stay away from that person. Or, you might not sign up for art class, for example, since everyone says the art teacher is mean. And then it turns out the art teacher is really nice, and you missed out on art your favorite subject because you believed a rumor instead of making your own judgment about a person based on whats REAL what you see with your own eyes, not what someone is telling you to see.

Rumors are as bad as poison and just a waste of breath. So why do people start them? Some do it because they think making someone else look bad will make themselves look better. And maybe it will at first, but in the end, everyone will know the truth about who started the rumor and why the ugly rumor monster!

To show people how rumors can affect them, I wrote a comical book called The Student from Zombie Island about a kid at school who is hearing tons of rumors about a new student thats coming to school after winter break. There are some really outrageous ones like he will make you play football with real feet, and he once ate an entire class for lunch. In the end, it turns out hes not bad, and it was all the rumors that made the new kid sound like a horrible person.

The story was as a gift for my second-grade teacher, Ms. Lujan, She inspired me to read and write more than anyone I know. She read to the class, lent me books, and even let me work on assignments past the due date because I had a lot more I wanted to write about to make the assignment really great. Then I thought maybe there was something in return I could give to her, so I wrote a story and illustrated it for her. She loved it so much that now she reads it to every class she has.

Several years later I read over my past work and I thought it may be worth publishing. So I asked my parents, and they said that if I was going to publish it I would need to spend some time editing it. That summer I edited my book and finally sent it in to some publishers. The first publisher that accepted it, hung onto it for a year then changed his mind and didnt print it. But I knew it was a good book, so we sent it out again. Little Five Star Publications loved it and printed it. Which goes to show that with the right amount of effort anything is possible even for an 11-year-old.

Michael Moorehead, author of The Student from Zombie Island, is a sixth-grade student who lives in Tempe, AZ.

When Michael J. Moorehead isn't writing, he's hiking, baking oatmeal cookies, playing video games and participating in Boy Scouts. His favorite animal is the polar bear, and he hopes to one day become an environmentalist. He's concerned about the plight of the polar bears and says he wants to stop global warming to save the majestic white creatures from extinction - but he will have to graduate from junior high school first. Michael lives in Tempe, Arizona, with his mother, a freelance writer and editor for the SanTan Sun News and Arizona Parenting magazine, and his father, an insurance property adjustor, who moonlights as a movie critic for the Wrangler News.

How President Marcos, Christina Kim, Lee Kuan Yew, Dr. Christian Bernard and a resident golf pro with a colourful past got together

Poro Point June 2007: You may be an avid golfer who has travelled around in Southeast Asia and played in most of the known courses on the golf map. However, the chances are you would not have discovered this little course nestled on the coast facing the Luzon Sea, just about an hour or so drive west of Baguio City. To call it a non-descript would unfairly douse the enthusiasm of the many mostly local golfers who gather every late afternoon for the game; nonetheless it could have been passed off as just one of the many courses in the Philippines, built during the time of the American administration and now awaiting either an upgrade, if fortune has it, or a slow death from neglect and then become completely overwhelmed when a new and modern course gets built in the vicinity, except that Wallace Golf Club, the only club in the city of San Fernando, Province of La Union, is unique!

Built in 1975 primarily for the US Airborne Division stationed here, it is the only course with sand-green in the entire Philippines! Not to raise undue expectations, the Wallace course is actually a simple Par 36 2,600-yard course with Hole#1 starting from the thatched-roof club house some 300 yards away from the sea and curving along the coast before turning at the lighthouse back towards the club house. The Signature Hole - one takes the liberty to call it that - is Hole#4 Par 4 307-yard dog-leg right with a 265-yard straight hair-clipped by tall trees at the turn before the straight again to landing. Not exactly a piece of genius in the course design but even if you have the driving prowess you might still be well tested to make the green in two. Period.

Sipping cool lemon tea on a lazy sunny afternoon and looking over the driving range and the tee-off for Hole#1, it is hard to imagine anyone who could be excited over these course technicalities. You either play here or you don't. There are no other courses in the vicinity. But not so for Sixto Domenden, the 65 year-old grandpa resident pro, one of the two main architects involved in the building of Wallace. The other architect was his American Air Force colonel for whom, he recalled fondly, he often covered during the latter's secret rendezvous with his girl-friend.

Way back in Baguio City Sixto began his career in the golf course as a caddy. But he was no ordinary one unless you consider caddying for the infamously great President Marcos as an ordinary job on the course. When they first met, Marcos was only a Congressman. By the time he became President of the Philippines, Sixto was already firmly his personal caddy. As he noted, Marcos did not change a bit after becoming the President and that impressed him a lot. It was the great President who made sure that his golden words of 'always look back to where you came from before embarking further in your life' were firmly imprinted in the mind of the then young Sixto. For that Sixto remained grateful. Perhaps the saga of the Marcos' legacy could have become a little clearer and more easily resolved if everyone trusted the integrity of the great President as much as Sixto did: Marcos was a regular mean handicap 8, but his good card scores were never taken seriously by the media.

When the golden moment for the personal caddy to the President finally arrived, perhaps as a sign of him taking the President's words of wisdom in earnest, he chose to remain in golf instead of accepting a possibly more lucrative job of position or working abroad. Thus he became the Assistant Director of the Wallace Golf Club project with his American colonel as the chief.

Apart from the President, he also caddied for dignitaries. Among them was Singapore's former Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew who, as he vividly recalled, would always characteristically look up at the sun, open-mouthed, as if to draw inspiration from it before proceeding to set-up for the shot. When asked for the reason, the Prime Minister apparently told him that he drew energy from the act. One day according to Sixto, President Marcos confided to him that the Prime Minister was his mentor. However it wasn't exactly clear that whether such a ritual of Mr. Lee had in any way decidedly influenced the President to regard the latter his mentor, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Lee is now, perhaps coincidentally or as the result of a strange sequence of events or for the diplomatic golfer in the Prime Minister or the other way round, a Minister Mentor in the cabinet of the Singapore Government!

Sixto also caddied for the late Dr. Christian Bernard, the renowned surgeon who performed the first heart implant operation in 1967. He remembered Dr. Bernard as, understandably, being more concerned with his delicate fingers for surgery than for a more robust grip of fellow countryman Ernie Els'. But, if there's a feather in the cap that old Sixto would gladly anecdote, it would be that he clinic-coached Christina Kim for two months at the Mimosa Club in Clark Field. Then, young Kim was preparing to qualify for the LPGA card. Before going back to South Korea to do her regional qualifying, she gave Sixto his first ever cell phone for them to stay in touch. As it turned out according to Sixto, on at least two occasions, young Kim called him during play to ask for advice. The rest, as they say, is history. Ms Christina Kim duly qualified and is now a big name in LPGA. For Sixto, the same cell phone remains in his possession despite failing batteries and a long expired shelf-life of the phone itself. For him, it just might ring again and when it does, it can only be for the big time!

Meanwhile, the Junior Golfers' Programme started by Sixto to produce new young talents continues in this most unassuming course of Wallace Golf Club, although as he has often wondered, for how much longer? In retro, it is not as if he hasn't done enough for golf in the Philippines by first becoming a caddy, then winning the National Caddies' Tournament of the Philippines and then representing the nation in the Putra Cup (a regional Southeast Asia Inter-national Team Tournament) which his team won with no small contribution of his top 10 finish in the individuals. The pinnacle of his career was being the personal caddy to the great President following which was his illustrious involvement in the building of Wallace. Sixto has in fact come full circle and should be able now to look back with pride and satisfaction at Wallace today.

But, nearby, where the Casino is, the landscape has lately been irreversibly unearthed. In about six months' time, a modern 18-hole course will be ready to complement the Casino with mod-cons that Wallace can only dream of. What of Wallace after that? The committee has, albeit reluctantly, decided that progress shall be the way to go and the sand-green shall be turfed, just like everywhere else! Deep down, in the fading light of the evening sun there's sadness evident through the smudged metal-rimmed glasses on the well-weathered face of the creator of the Wallace Golf Club. Looking over the sand-green of the last hole in the direction of the lighthouse, there is no doubt in his mind, when the virgin turf finally surfaces in six months' time, a piece of the colourful history of golf in the Philippines will not only be silently but surely concealed and lost forever! Will Sixto remain? Why not, even if it is only for the reason that putting will now become less strenuous! There's so much that he can now look back on and be proud of, and not least to pass on the story of the origin of golf in San Fernando lest it be so easily forgotten beneath the skin-deep turf of the new green. Yes, I shall remain, just like Christina Kim, watch your telly, never fails to aim her put a little beyond the hole, he assured me!

Post script note:
www.GOLFnTours.com chanced upon Mr. Sixto Domenden at Wallace Golf Club while net-working in the Philippines to bring the country into its golf tours destination map and also to promote in general the business of GOLFnTours.com. If you find the article interesting you might like to find out more about golf in the Philippines. GOLFnTours.com would be happy to tailor a package for you there or to any other hot golf destinations in Southeast Asia.

Author Bio: Francis Huang is not a professional writer but nonetheless keeps regular diary for anything interesting he encounters on his frequent travels, particularly in Southeast Asia. Hopefully an article like this will help improve his website: http://www.GOLFnTours.com as well as increase exposure of his golf tour business to many more interested.

Peritoneal mesothelioma is one of the deadliest and most painful forms of cancer. Fortunately it is also one of the rarer forms of a relatively uncommon cancer, though that is small comfort to the thousands of people that must endure it every day. This terminal condition begins when a person ingests the microscopic jagged asbestos fibers. Asbestos is a naturally-occurring, fibrous mineral that has been used in fireproofing and insulation for millennia, and even since these ancient times those that worked with asbestos tended to die even earlier than other people did.

During the manufacturing process asbestos fibers are often released into the air, where their light weight and small size allows them to settle in the mouths and throats of anyone nearby, and they can even be carried home where they can contaminate the friends and family of the original worker.

Peritoneal mesothelioma begins when asbestos fibers enter the digestive track and slice through the tissues of the stomach and intestines. These fibers shred through these organs and protrude through them and puncture the peritoneal mesothelium, the delicate membrane that secretes the lubrication that allows them to move during digestion. Without this vital lubrication the organs could not process food properly. Some of the symptoms of peritoneal mesothelioma include:

Abdominal pain

Abdominal mass

Weight loss

Abnormal bowel function

Fluid buildup in the abdomen

Expanding waistline but losing weight

Blood clots

Unfortunately, peritoneal mesothelioma does not usually present symptoms until it is extremely advanced, and by that time it is usually impossible to treat. Further complicating diagnosis of peritoneal mesothelioma is the nature of the disease itself; the symptoms are often confused with less dangerous conditions such as indigestion or heartburn.

Peritoneal mesothelioma is always fatal. By the time it is diagnosed it is usually so advanced that the only treatment available is to make the victim as comfortable as possible and relieve as much pain as they can. Most victims usually succumb within six to eight months after diagnosis; a few cases manage to survive longer than a year, but few if any survive longer than five years.

There is hope for victims of peritoneal mesothelioma. New treatments include photodynamic, gene, angiogenesis, and immunotherapy that could hold the key to turning the tide on this deadly, debilitating, and tragic disease.

To learn more about peritoneal mesothelioma or how to hire a mesothelioma lawyer, please visit our website at http://www.resource4mesothelioma.com This article may be freely reprinted as long as this resource box is included and all links stay intact as hyperlinks.

Here are the key steps to preparing a room for a new coat of paint or paper. Whatever type of surface you're going to tackle it must be clean, dry and smooth for the best results - preparation is the secret of a good-looking finish.

Time to complete job: Preparing a room for a new coat of paint or paper will take at least half a day, including filling and smoothing old plaster.

Approximate budget: The basic tools and materials should cost less than 20 for most rooms.

You will need:
Sugar soap
Bucket and sponge
Rubber gloves
Interior plaster filler
Decorator's sealant
Filling knife
Sanding block or electric sander
Dust sheets
Step ladder
Dust mask

Tip: Before to begin, always protect yourself by using a dust mask and your floor by laying down dust sheets.

Step 1: Smoothing the surface Scrape off any flaking paint with a flexible filling knife and smooth the surface with a sanding block. For more tips on stripping back paint, see Paint Stripping. If there is wallpaper on the walls this will need removing. For tips on doing this, see Stripping Wallpaper.

Step 2: Repairing damaged plaster Sometimes patches of old plaster become loose or cracked. Pick out the loose areas with your filling knife and repair the areas with plaster filler. Work methodically over the whole room to make sure you have treated all the damaged areas. When the filler is dry, use an electric sander or sanding block to smooth any rough areas of plaster and blend in the new repairs. Very powdery plasterwork or new bare plaster should be coated with a coat of plaster sealer. Depending on the size that requires repairing, you may need to patch it up. Patching up plaster is beyond the scope of this article but detail of how to do this can be found on the UKTV website. Tip: Cracks around the skirting boards and door frames will spoil your new finish. Rake out any chipped paint and fill the gaps with a flexible decorator's sealant.

Step 3: Cleaning Wash off any black mould with a solution of household bleach and leave to dry. Stains left by mould or tobacco use can quite easily be masked with anti damp paint or watered down unibond which are available at all hardware stores. Tip: It's essential to treat the cause of mould and damp patches before redecorating.

Step 4: Make a judgement call as to whether the esposed walls need to be covered with lining paper. If the walls have large repair patches or lots of tiny hairline cracks, covering with plain lining paper will provide a smooth base for paint or wallpaper. Hang the paper just like ordinary wallpaper and leave overnight to dry. For more tips, see Wallpapering. And last but by no means leas, ensure that the surface is dirt and grease free by wiping down with sugar soap or hot water and washing up liquid. Don't forget to wash the ceiling as well if it's going to be decorated.

UKTV's DIY guides at can help you with all of your home improvement needs.