Category Archives: Transhuman News

By David McGrath Schwartz (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012 | 1:30 p.m.

CARSON CITY Gov. Brian Sandoval said he will still attempt to reverse salary cuts and furloughs borne by state employees since 2009, but the state has to weigh costs in health and human services and see where the state's tax collections are.

Sandoval, talking to reporters Tuesday after a Board of Examiner's meeting, said he never promised to restore those cuts, though instructions to agencies included that direction.

"I'm hopeful ... we can restore some of those salary reductions that have occurred historically," he said.

Since 2009, the state's budget has been balanced in large part with reductions to the pay for 17,000 state employees. In 2011, the Legislature and Sandoval instituted a 2.5 percent pay cut and six furlough days a year to save the state about $123 million a year. It also eliminated automatic pay increases for some employees and longevity pay, saving $69 million, according to the state budget office.

Sandoval's chief of staff, Gerald Gardner, told the Nevada Appeal last week that he had directed agencies to build those pay cuts and furloughs back into their budgets. Earlier budget instructions from the governor attempted to restore pay levels.

"I appreciate the hard work and dedication of state employees," Sandoval said Tuesday, pointing to state employees' response to Northern Nevada fires and efforts to reduce the costs of leases.

"It's a consideration to restore those" reductions, he said.

He instructed agencies to prepare "flat" budgets, but include the costs of increased caseloads and federal mandates. He said one area of increase has been health and human services, part of which he blamed on the Affordable Care Act.

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Sandoval says he never promised to restore state workers' pay

London, Oct 8 (IANS) A Georgian woman who claimed to be 132-years-old - making her the world's oldest human being ever - has died, The Independent reported Monday.

Antisa Khvichava claimed to have been born July 8, 1880, and had a Soviet-era passport and documentation to that effect, but her age was contested and never officially proven.

She lived in Sachino village in northwest Georgia with her 42-year-old grandson and claimed to have retired from her job as a tea and corn picker in 1965, when she was 85.

Khvichava claimed to be just 10-years younger than Russia's first communist leader Vladimir Lenin and to have been born a year before the death of celebrated Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

She said she had 12 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren and reportedly attributed her longevity and good health to drinking a small amount of local brandy every day, according to the newspaper.

Her original birth certificate is said to have been lost during the years of revolutions and civil wars that ravaged Georgia following the fall of the USSR.

But local officials, friends, neighbours and descendants have all back up the claim she was 132 when she died, the daily said.

The oldest living person at the moment is 116-year-old Besse Cooper from the state of Georgia in the US. Her birth can be officially proven to have been in August 1896.

The oldest ever verified person was French woman Jeanne Calment, born in February 1875, who lived to 122 years and 164 days before dying in August 1997.

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World's 'oldest person' dies at 132

Possibly the last person on the planet who knew the taste of the air in 1880 has died.

Antisa Khvichava, who claimed to be 132 years old, was enjoying her 47th year of retirement in Sachino, a remote village in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, when she passed away, according to a British newspaper, the Independent. If she was as old as she said, Khvichava would've been the oldest person to ever live.

Though a birth certificate and passport indicate Khvichava was born July 8, 1880, they are replacements of documents she had lost over the years, raising skepticism over her claim.

But science can't rule out her feat absolutely. If there's a maximum possible human age, it hasn't been found yet.

In 1798, the then-oldest verified person died at 103, according to the Gerontology Research Group. In 1997, France's Jeanne Calment, the current verified oldest, died at 122. [Infographic: Global Life Expectancy]

If Kvichava did, indeed, walk the Earth for well over a century, what did she do right?

Based on current science, the answer might be that, other than avoiding obvious physical threats, she didn't do much to earn her longevity.

Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University showed last year that, among a studied population of people older than 95, bad health habits such as smoking, drinking, poor diet and lack of exercise were about as common as in the general population, meaning their longevity seemed to be largely based on genes.

But this does not mean the general population should abandon healthy living and adopt a doctrine of genetic fatalism. Rather, that study and others suggest longevity outliers like Kvichava, a reported daily brandy drinker, have rare genetic protections that transcend unhealthy habits, propelling them into very old age in spite of lifestyle.

For people who aren't prepared to take a gamble that they're genetically predisposed to break 100 (the 2010 Census counted 53,364 centenarians in the United States), the famously abstemious and healthy-living Seventh-Day Adventists seem to hint at a practical regimen for increasing lifespan.

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How Did Woman Live to 132?