One bird down

Back in October I speculated that Musharraf might be playing off militants and Bhutto against each other. Now that Bhutto is down, that leaves only the militants as a viable threat to his rule.

Musharraf has now set the stage for nuclear blackmail. The USA has little choice but to back and fund his regime in order to prevent Pakistan's nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of militants should Musharraf's regime collapse and individual military commanders be left to pursue individual ambitions. Yet it's worth noting that Musharraf has been diverting billions toward conventional weapons better suited to fighting India than militants.

In interviews with The New York Times, U.S. officials, commenting on the more than $5 billion of funding to Pakistan, ... admitted most the money is being diverted to help finance weapons systems to match those of India, Pakistan's traditional foe.

A potential mechanism for taser-related death

Recently I ran across the account of a coroner puzzling over how tasers could be linked to heart attacks:

Dr. David Evans, the Toronto regional supervising coroner for investigations, says that while there's no proof to say the shock could make things worse, "I agree potentially it could." But, he adds, "why aren't they dropping dead immediately?"

That would seem to rule out the scenario that the electrical shock of the taser is directly destabilizing heart rhythms.

This two-year old report out of John Hopkins University may hold the key to the underlying mechanism:

Dr. Wittstein and his research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals into the blood stream. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to those of a typical heart attack: chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure. However, there are no further similarities between "broken heart" syndrome and cardiac arrest. Closer inspection using blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging scans failed to show the typical heart attack signs, such as irreversible muscle damage and elevated levels of certain enzymes...
Wittstein cautioned that even a stress-induced heart attack must not go untreated.

Stress from being tasered along with the trauma of being taken into custody could lead to temporary a hormonal response that is toxic to heart function.