Stephanie Romero | More from this Blogger

One of the discoveries I have made in being a parent for nearly 17 years now is that its not just about my children learning and growing, it is about me doing the same. I am amazed at how little I really know but how much more I do learn as I parent each of my three children.

I think what I have also found is that when I finally get an age or a stage down pat, I’m suddenly thrust into a new one. It’s not until it has passed and I look back that I can say what should and should not have been done. It is when you are in the midst of it that you are the most clueless.http://parenting.families.com*

I guess that’s why I try to refrain from giving parenting advice. And quite honestly, I get a little unnerved when someone else is trying to give it, especially if they are still in the midst of it or if they have yet to reach the same stage I am at.

I will never claim to be an expert or to do it all right. I do have my victorious moments but I have also made many mistakes. I would prefer to lean more toward the victorious moments but I think time will really tell.

I can share with another mom some of the things that seem to be working for our family but it doesn’t mean it will work the same for another. May I never come across as knowing it all and here is my public apology if I have ever done that.

I guess what I am trying to really get at is that we need to look within and examine our own hearts and motives for the things we do as parents. We need to focus on our role as a parent and not be so quick to judge another or to steer them in what we may believe is the “right” direction.

Let’s face it, we sometimes get it wrong. We are learning just as much as our kids are learning. We weren’t born with an innate ability to know how to do everything perfectly. So we should cut ourselves some slack and other parents as well. Let’s remember this is not an easy job. But we have an incredible responsibility to give it all we’ve got. ]]> http://www.proparents.com/?feed=rss2&p=4936 http://www.proparents.com/?p=4935 http://www.proparents.com/?p=4935#comments Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000 proparents.com?p=4935 WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled that federal law shields vaccine makers from product-liability lawsuits in state court seeking damages for a child's injuries or death from a vaccine's side effects.

The high court on Tuesday ruled for Wyeth, which is now owned by Pfizer Inc, in a lawsuit brought by the parents of Hannah Bruesewitz, who suffered seizures as an infant after her third dose of a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine in 1992.

Pfizer and other vaccine makers had argued that a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs could open the door to a flood of lawsuits — many by families who believe vaccines cause autism — and threaten the supply of childhood vaccines.

Pfizer Executive Vice President and General Counsel Amy Schulman said the company was pleased with the ruling.

"The Vaccine Act that Congress enacted nearly 25 years ago appropriately places the responsibility for determining the optimal design of life-saving childhood vaccines in the hands of expert federal agencies, not a patchwork of state tort systems," she said.

At issue in the ruling was the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, a law that created a special program to handle disputes in an effort to ensure a stable vaccine supply by shielding companies from most lawsuits.

The federal program, involving what is known as the vaccine court, has awarded more than $1.8 billion for vaccine injury claims in nearly 2,500 cases since 1989. It is funded by a tax on vaccines.

In the Hannah Bruesewitz case from Pennsylvania, her parents claimed in their lawsuit that her seizure disorder and serious developmental delay stemmed from toxins in the vaccine's design.

They said a safer alternative had been available but was not used. The DTP vaccine was taken off the market in 1998.

Russell and Robalee Bruesewitz said their daughter was a healthy infant until she received the shot, but has experienced seizure disorders and developmental problems ever since, requiring a lifetime of supervision and care.

WYETH HAS DENIED VACCINE CAUSED INJURIES

Wyeth has denied its vaccine caused her injuries.

After the couple's claims were rejected under the federal compensation process, they filed a lawsuit in state court. But a federal judge and then a federal appeals court based in Philadelphia ruled the 1986 federal law barred such lawsuits.

The Supreme Court, in a majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, upheld that decision and ruled the federal law pre-empted all such design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers.

"Vaccine manufacturers fund from their sales an informal, efficient compensation program for vaccine injuries; in exchange they avoid costly tort litigation and the occasional disproportionate jury verdict. Congress enacted this deal to coax manufacturers back into the vaccine market," Scalia said.

The ruling accepted the Obama administration's position.

O. Marion Burton, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents 60,000 pediatricians, applauded the ruling.

"Today, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed what pediatricians have been advocating for decades," Dr. Burton said. "Vaccines save lives."

(Editing by John Wallace and Maureen Bavdek)

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The world's top consumer and producer of lead, China has struggled to rein in polluting industry under lax environmental regulations as the country's economy grows rapidly. Lead-poisoning, especially in children, has roused public anger.

"The prevention of heavy metal pollution concerns the health of the people, especially children's health, and concerns social harmony and stability," Minister of Environmental Protection Zhou Shengxian said in a speech on Friday. The summary of the speech was published on the ministry's website on Tuesday.

In a fresh plan outlined by Zhou, Beijing will aim to cut pollution in key regions and industries, including lead-acid battery manufacturing and lead smelting, by 15 percent of 2007 levels by 2015.

Other "non-focus areas" that do not exceed 2007 levels for heavy metal pollution will have been considered effectively controlled, Zhou said.

The plan will include provisions to make local officials accountable for reduction targets, Zhou said, adding that serious investigations will take place if regions do not meet requirements of the plan.

China has repeatedly promised to clean up its distressed environment. But it often fails to match rhetoric with the resources and political will to enforce Beijing's mandates, as officials put economic development ahead of environmental protection.

In January, more than 200 children living near battery plants in eastern China showed elevated levels of lead in their blood, prompting parents to demand compensation from the government. Lead is not the only heavy metal wreaking havoc on China's environment and the health of citizens.

Chinese gold miner Zijin Mining has been ordered to pay millions of yuan in fines for its role in a series of environmental lapses, including 2010 waste water leaks at its Zijinshan copper and gold mine in Fujian province that dumped toxins into the Ting river. The China Daily last week cited a study by a professor at Nanjing Agricultural University showing 10 percent of China's rice market, and more than 60 percent of rice grown in some southern provinces, may contain high levels of cadmium.

Cadmium can damage the lungs, blood, heart and kidneys with long-term exposure.

Greenpeace's China campaign manager Yang Ailun said pollution accidents in China have been on the rise in the past five years, and the next five could be worse.

"The old facilities that were put in place 20 years ago, many of them are starting to expire or breakdown," Yang told Reuters.

"The next five years are really important if they (the government) want to put in place more safeguard measures."

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If your family will need significant financial aid, you will increase your chances of receiving a lot of outside help if you get accepted to the nation's most generous colleges and universities. The schools with Cadillac financial aid packages will meet 100 percent of a student's demonstrated financial need.

[Avoid 4 common financial aid myths.]

Here's an example: Let's say that the financial aid methodology says your family can afford to pay $20,000 for one year of college. Let's also assume that the college you want to go to costs $50,000. If you get accepted to a school that meets 100 percent of your financial need, your family would pay $20,000, and the financial aid package would include $30,000. The schools with the best aid practices do not include loans in their financial aid package.

All this might sound great, but here's the hitch: The schools that are most generous are also among the most elite. Schools like Yale University, Smith College, Pomona College, and Middlebury College are extremely hard to get into, but if you are accepted into one of these schools–and need financial aid–you've struck gold. U.S. News compiled a list of schools that claim they meet the full need of their students, and you can see by looking at the names that many of them are elite institutions.

The vast majority of private and public colleges and universities can't provide the sort of sweet deal that the schools on the U.S. News list offer. In a higher-ed industry survey, only 32 percent of public institutions and 18 percent of private colleges said they meet the full financial need of accepted students.

[Read 3 ways the government overestimates your ability to pay for college.]

Since most teenagers aren't going to qualify for elite schools with their awesome financial aid, what can they do? They should evaluate any college by asking two questions:

1. What is the average percentage of financial need that the college meets? While most schools can't come close to offering 100 percent of need, it's best to find schools that meet the highest percentage of need possible. The numbers for individual schools are all over the board. Some schools might meet 60 percent of need, others 85 percent or 74 percent of need, or any other number.

2. What is the college's average breakdown of loans versus grants? As a practical matter, nearly all schools will use loans in their packages, which is why you will want to pay attention to the percentage of loans versus grants in the average aid package. You can find all these figures for individual schools on sites like U.S. News and the College Board.

I'm going to use Wofford College, a private liberal arts college in South Carolina, as an example, using Wofford's financial aid statistics from the College Board's site. The average percentage of need that the school meets is 86 percent, which is very good. The average aid package is $29,916 for a school where tuition and room and board totals $40,580. The average need-based grant is $28,448. Of the total undergraduate aid awarded, the breakdown of Wofford's scholarships/grants versus loans/work study is 86 percent to 14 percent, which is great.

Now that you know how to evaluate a school's financial generosity, let's see you try it with colleges on your list.

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Graphic YouTube videos showing teens cutting, burning, or otherwise harming themselves are an "alarming new trend," researchers say, and could serve as a how-to for millions of vulnerable online viewers. The 100 most-watched self-injury videos have been viewed more than 2 million times, and most are rated highly by viewers, with an average score of 4.6 out of 5, according to a study published Monday in Pediatrics. The videos often glamorize self-injury, as teens demonstrate how to use razor blades and other sharp objects to draw blood from their skin or burn themselves. About half of the videos are delivered in an educational tone, while the other half are more melancholic, according to the study. Few videos discourage self-mutilation. "If [individuals] are vulnerable and regularly and repeatedly viewing these types of videos, it could be a virtual community in which self-injury could be reinforced," study author Stephen Lewis, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Ontario told HealthDay. Past research suggests that up to 21 percent of teens have deliberately injured themselves at least once in belief that self-harm will blunt their emotional pain. Many "cutters" struggle with anger, sadness, and depression.

–Teen Suicide Risk Factors: Parents Are Too Often Clueless

–Is Your Teenager Struggling With School and Friends? Could Be Depression

To Cut Diabetes Heart Risks, Diet and Exercise May Beat Drugs

More than 1 in 10 American adults have diabetes, and many of them successfully keep their blood sugar levels under control with various medications. Unfortunately, these multibillion-dollar blockbuster drugs haven't proved to be so successful against the biggest cause of death related to diabetes: heart disease. Four studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year brought nothing but disappointing news for diabetics who rely on drugs to lower their risk of heart attacks and strokes. One found that using antihypertensives to lower systolic (the top number) blood pressure below a healthful measurement of 120 mm Hg did nothing to lower a diabetic's risk of heart complications; another found no benefit to adding a drug to raise HDL "good" cholesterol levels in diabetics who were already taking a statin to lower the bad kind. And no heart benefits were associated with two drugs given to lower high blood sugar levels, according to the two other studies.

What all this evidence suggests is that more may not always be better when it comes to finding ways to prevent heart disease in diabetics, U.S. News reports. "It's not enough to show that a drug lowers high blood sugar levels or other risky biomarkers," says Steven Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, whose research linked the diabetes drug Avandia with an increased rate of heart attacks. "Does it actually improve clinical outcomes? Does it cause more benefits than risks?" [Read more: To Cut Diabetes Heart Risks, Diet and Exercise May Beat Drugs.]

–Know Your Diabetes Risk: Take a Self Assessment

–It's OK to Incorporate Flexibility Into Your Diabetes Diet

The Best Low-Carbohydrate Diet? One That's Plant-Based

Since its debut in the '80s, the Atkins diet and similar low-carb menus have swung back and forth, lauded and vilified, several times over. Some supporters say they're a fast track to weight loss with less hunger, while detractors say they're too restrictive and don't provide enough fuel–carbohydrates break down to glucose, which powers the body and brain. New research could tip the scales once again in favor of low carbs, U.S. News reports. According to a study published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a low-carb diet may reduce the risk of death from all medical causes, especially heart disease–if it's heavy on proteins and fats from plants, not animals. A low-carb regimen heavy on meat raised the risk of dying from cancer and other medical causes, the researchers found after following more than 85,000 women for 26 years and 44,000 men for 20 years.

"It's no big surprise, because the animal-protein diet will have lots of saturated fat and cholesterol, and the plant-based diet will have unsaturated fats, which lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes," says study coauthor Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Low-carb diets are neither good nor bad–it's what we're replacing those carbs with that's important. It's making choices among your protein and fat sources, and choosing to emphasize the plant sources."

The study highlights the Eco-Atkins diet popularized in 2009 by David Jenkins, a nutritional scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada, who is credited with developing the eating plan. High in plant proteins and rich in fruits and vegetables, it is touted by the study authors as an ideal example of a healthy low-carb diet. While the study does not suggest such a diet will make you live longer, Eco-Atkins has been shown to improve cholesterol levels and promote weight loss, says Jenkins. [Read more: The Best Low-Carbohydrate Diet? One That's Plant-Based.]

–Diagnosed With Diabetes? 4 Tips for a Low-Carb Diabetes Diet

–Weighing the Evidence on 6 Popular Diet Programs

Popular Health Articles from USNews.com

–2011 Fitness Trends: What's In, What's Out

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–Video: What Is Rheumatoid Arthritis?

Need Care? Scan the Rankings: Best Nursing Homes, Best Health Plans, and Best Hospitals

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"Mr. Tumpy's Caravan" is a story of around 200 typed pages which was initially believed to be a version of "Mr. Tumpy and His Caravan," a picture book made up of newspaper comic strips, said Kathryn Row of the Seven Stories children's book gallery.

But the charity's archivist looked in more detail and called in an authority on Blyton.

"They (the experts) are fairly confident it's an undiscovered piece of work," Row said.

"We bought these manuscripts at auction last September, and the archivist went through it all. Just before Christmas she had a hunch that this was something quite different," Row added.

Imogen Smallwood, Blyton's youngest daughter, told the BBC: "There's always excitement when an unknown typescript is found of anybody's who is well known. Because this wasn't even known about, it has to rank quite high."

The story is not dated, but according to the BBC, it bears the address Old Thatch, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, which was Blyton's home until 1938.

Mr. Tumpy's Caravan follows the adventures of a caravan with a mind of its own.

Blyton died in 1968, and was one of the most successful children's writers of the 20th century.

According to her publisher Chorion, she wrote nearly 800 books which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. She created a group of internationally renowned series which included mystery and adventure stories like "The Famous Five" and "The Secret Seven," school stories such as "Malory Towers" and the "Noddy" stories for younger children.

Seven Stories' Row said the charity could not publish the newly-discovered work, because Chorion held the rights.

"It is up to them, and at the moment there are no plans to publish," she said.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Patricia Reaney)

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The research team, which conducted its study on mice, thinks the results also would apply to humans and eventually could result in a new infertility treatment.

Lead researcher Liisa Kauppi, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, discovered that the X and Y chromosomes have multiple mechanisms to make sure this unlikely pair are able to combine and effectively separate into individual and viable sperm.

"This is really the Achilles’ heel, the most difficult region of the genome to pair, so that's why these mechanisms have evolved," co-author Maria Jasin, also of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, told LiveScience.

Kauppi noted, "the X and Y chromosomes really behave quite differently than the rest of the chromosomes."

Crossed chromosomes

The miracle of conception is not actually a miracle; the bodies of all mammals go through a special type of cell division to make sperm and egg cells. Each cell carries two sets of genes (sequences of DNA), which are twisted into thread-like chromosomes, except for egg and sperm cells, which have only one set.

During fertilization, the half of mom's chromosome set (in the egg) gets paired with the half of dad's set contained in the sperm.  The two sets are very similar, but contain certain differences, so they are called "sister chromosomes." This new set of chromosomes grows into a full-sized human, which then makes it's own sperm or eggs. When the cell gets ready to divide to make sperm, the two sets of chromosomes copy themselves and line up with their sisters in pairs.

To ensure high genetic diversity when the chromosomes pair, they play a game of switcharoo and swap some of their genetic information. They do this by cutting both sister chromosomes in the same place, called a "double-strand break," and then stitching the swapped portion into place, called a "crossover," or recombination.  

"We understand a great deal about the actual mechanism of recombination,” said Scott Hawley, of Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Mo., who wasn't involved in the research. However, “one of the areas that still remains pretty opaque is how cells control where recombination occurs."

Recombination happens pretty easily in most chromosomes, which are very similar to each other and don't need too much help to pair up anywhere along their length. The confusion comes with the male's sex chromosomes – the X and Y (females have two X's which can crossover like any other pair). These two chromosomes are vastly different in size, shape and the sequence of their nucleotides (the chemicals that make up the DNA ladder molecule) yet they are required to pair up and cross over like any other chromosome pair. 

Sexy swapping

The X and Y chromosomes have a tiny region, covering less than 1 percent of their length, where they can match up and perform this strand-swapping. The cells have to make sure to cross over the DNA in this tiny matching area to make viable sperm. If they can't, the X and Y chromosomes won't divide and the sperm cell will die, or genetic diseases such as Klinefelter's (where the child ends up with two Xs and one Y) or Turner's (a single X) could occur.

Kauppi studied sperm formation in normal mice and noticed that the sex chromosome crossover happens after the rest of the chromosomes are paired. The reason simply could be that they take longer to make the double-strand breaks.

But then the team tested mice with different forms of the protein that controls this crossover process, called SPO11beta or SPO11alpha. For the male mice that expressed only SPO11beta, they were infertile about 70 percent of the time; that wasn't the case for males with the alpha form of the protein, which is important for viable sperm formation, Kauppi said.

It is likely that this sex chromosome crossover happens the same way in humans, which is what Kauppi is studying next. Based on rates of X-Y pairing-related diseases, co-author Scott Keeney, also of Sloan-Kettering, noted "there are some individuals who are more prone to having the X and Y misbehave."

"There are many patients who show up in clinics where the actual cause of infertility isn't known," Keeney told LiveScience.

Diagnostic tests could be created to determine if male infertility is a result of these processes, and possible treatment options could be developed. Tests also could help diagnose the likelihood of a sex chromosome anomaly, like Klinefelter's or Turner's syndrome.  

"This opens up the field in a really exciting way," Hawley told LiveScience. "I really thought this was a terrific paper."

You can follow LiveScience staff writer Jennifer Welsh on Twitter @The History and Future of Birth Control

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Researchers hooked up 79 babies aged 6 to 24 months to an EEG, or electroencephalogram, which records electrical activity in the brain. Forty-six of the infants had an older sibling with an autism spectrum disorder, while the other 33 had no family history of autism.

Children who have a sibling with autism are much more likely to develop autism themselves, explained lead study author William Bosl, a neuroinformatics researcher at Children's Hospital Boston. Prior research has shown that about 20 percent of siblings of children with autism will also develop autism and another 40 to 50 percent will have some characteristics of the disorder, such as repetitive behaviors or problems with social interaction, language or communication, but not the full-blown disorder.

While the children watched people blowing bubbles, researchers measured the babies' brain waves and analyzed the results using computer algorithms. The algorithms can detect subtle patterns in the lines created by EEGs that the human eye might miss, Bosl explained.

When the babies were nine months old, researchers could predict who was in the high-risk autism group — that is, they had a sibling with autism — with nearly 80 percent accuracy.

"In this study, we have taken the first step in showing that there is definitive information in the electrical signals measured by EEG to distinguish normal controls from infants at high risk for developing autism," Bosl said.

When broken out by gender, researchers found other differences. For example, at nine months they were able to predict which boys were in the high-risk group with near 100 percent accuracy. But accuracy for girls at that age was only 60 percent, not statistically significant.

At six months of age, however, they could predict the high risk girls with about 80 percent accuracy, though they couldn't do the same for boys that young.

"It seems perhaps they are on a slightly different developmental trajectory," Bosl said.

The study is published online Feb. 22 in BMC Medicine.

EEGs measure brain electrical activity through electrodes attached to the scalp. The technology has been around for awhile — developed in the late 1920s, it has been used for more than 60 years to detect seizures in epileptics.

But it's the newer, artificial intelligence technology and sophisticated computer algorithms that enabled the researchers to look more deeply into what the EEGs show, Bosl said.

"Artificial intelligence gives us the ability to find patterns we might not find with our own eyes," Bosl said. "One of the difficulties with a disorder like autism is that it's very heterogenous. A very high-functioning person with autism might not be so different from a so-called 'normal' person who is quirky. Defining the differences may be somewhat subtle."

EEGs are also relatively inexpensive, painless and safe, Bosl said. And unlike MRIs, they require no sedation, so testing could be put to widespread use, he said.

"My hope is we would have a simple way of measuring brain activity in every child and see the patterns emerging that might track autism characteristics," Bosl said. "That would be tremendously useful. We know early intervention is extremely important. Right now, for a lot of children, that means 3 years old. What we don't know yet is if you can intervene at 9 or 12 months and how effective that could be."

Dr. Joshua Ewen, a neurologist and director of the clinical neurophysiology laboratory at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, said the study is well done and looks promising, but needs to be replicated.

Also, the study predicted who was at high risk of autism, but it's unknown if those babies actually went on to develop autism, he noted.

"If it can eventually be shown that this technique can reliably identify which children will indeed develop autism, then we will have a valuable tool for early detection," Ewen said. "Early detection continues to be of critical importance, as it opens the door to early intervention, which has been shown to improve outcomes for children with autism."

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has more on autism.

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It’s the original guide to “everything illegal,” from pot loaf and hash cookies to tear gas, dynamite, and TNT. There are frank tips on demolition, surveillance, sabotage, and the gorier parts of hand-to-hand combat, including how to behead a man with piano wire and make a knife “slip off the rib cage and penetrate the heart.” In the introduction, the then-teenage author makes clear his wish that the book be of more than just theoretical use. “I hold a sincere hope that it may stir some stagnant brain cells into action,” he wrote.

William Powell, author of The Anarchist Cookbook, succeeded all too well. His slim, 160-page volume democratized the nuts and bolts of terror. Published in 1971, it would sell more than 2 million copies worldwide and influence dozens of malcontents, mischief-makers, and killers. Police have linked it to the Croatian radicals who bombed Grand Central Terminal and hijacked a TWA flight in 1976; the Puerto Rican separatists who bombed FBI headquarters in 1981; Thomas Spinks, who led a group that bombed at least 10 American abortion clinics in the mid-1980s; and the 2005 London public-transport bombers.

Just last spring, after a father-son team of British white supremacists drew on the book to make a jar of ricin, a London judge joined police in calling for a ban on the title and the many copycat volumes it has inspired. But retailers refused, and the book’s Arizona-based publisher, which acquired the rights in 2001, declined to comment. So the work lives on, and so does its author. Just not in the way you might expect.

Powell, now 61 years old, long ago renounced the bestselling terrorist bible he penned. He left the country in 1979, bouncing around the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, working as a teacher and administrator in a series of State Department-backed private schools. He wrote more books, about pedagogy and professional development. And he gained a reputation for—wait for it—conflict resolution.

Powell has not spoken publicly about his role in fostering a generation of anarchic rebellion. Until now. In an exclusive interview with Newsweek, he talked about the origins of the Cookbook, his reinvention as a teacher of diplomats’ children, and how he processes the unseemly acts that are tied to his name. Taken together with a batch of recently released FBI records on Powell’s case—including more than a hundred pages of civilian letters, internal memos, and intelligence reports discussing the book’s dangers—his comments tell the story of a lost chapter in the history of American radicalism, one that still resonates wherever established order is under attack today.

“I didn’t anticipate the ramifications. I don’t think I was as emotionally intelligent as I might be now.”

“It’s part of who I am,” says Powell of the Cookbook. “In the context of 1969 and the Vietnam War and a wide-eyed 19-year-old, some of the sentiments contained in it make sense.” But in a subsequent conversation, he takes a step back. “I’m sorry that it has been used by people for violent purposes.”

In 1969 Powell was living in a tenement in Lower Manhattan. Vietnam vets bought and sold drugs in nearby Tompkins Square Park. Outside his door, as war dragged on, the glow of the Summer of Love was wearing off. The peaceniks were beginning to get violent. In the course of 1968 and 1969 alone, there were well over a hundred politically inspired bombings, not including arson and vandalism, according to The Sixties, a history of the era by former activist Todd Gitlin.

Powell had come to New York from Westchester County, dropping out of high school and fleeing to the city the first chance he got. The son of a United Nations press officer, he spent his early boyhood in the leafy London suburb of Harrow, and enrolled in a private school where 8-year-olds studied Latin and Greek and were made to recite Scripture from memory. If they faltered, they were beaten. “I was caned fairly regularly,” he recalls. He moved back to America as a middle-schooler, sticking out because of his British accent, and impatient with school.

Settling in Alphabet City in an apartment “with the proverbial bathtub in the kitchen,” Powell became part owner of an off-off-Broadway theater, more interested in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud than radical movements. But he wanted to become a writer, and he got a letter—one that threatened to tax his personal liberty and force him into war. The arrival of a draft card in the mail “made me very angry,” he recalls. Suddenly, his research for a book took a decidedly political turn.

Between 1968 and 1970, Powell devoured the “U.S. Combat Bookshelf” in the New York Public Library, reading decommissioned government manuals. He supplemented those with Boy Scout guidebooks, electronics catalogs, and a stack of obscure insurrectionist pamphlets, including Abbie Hoffman’s F–k the System. The result—produced longhand at home on legal pads—was a brisk volume infused with the first-person authority of someone who had deep experience doing drugs and toppling governments. “There are basically two methods of booby-trapping pipes … Explosions can be a really thrilling and satisfying experience … Banana skins really do contain a small quantity of Musa Sapientum Bananadine.”

The problem—beside the fact that banana skin is not, alas, a psychedelic—is that Powell had little personal experience with the activities that he was expounding upon. His guerrilla tactics and bomb-making recipes were “for the most part accurate,” as the FBI’s own laboratory later concluded. But his voice was the invention of an aspiring novelist, and so were most of his anecdotes. He never drove a hot-wired car to Miami, made LSD in his kitchen, or fed cops a fake name when busted at an antiwar demonstration, as the book suggests. In fact, Powell’s only appearance before a judge involved his theater, when Paramount Pictures sued for an illegal run of The Little Prince. (Powell closed the show, and the suit disappeared.)

The book, however, did not. As he was finishing the writing, he took the SATs and applied to Windham College, a now-defunct liberal-arts school in Vermont, where enrollment tripled with kids hoping to sit out the war with an “education” deferral. Powell then sent his manuscript—titled The Anarchist Cookbook for the simple reason that it contained recipes for would-be hell-raisers—to perhaps the most daring publisher of the time. Lyle Stuart had just blown the mind of square America with The Sensuous Woman, which purported to be the first sexual how-to book written by a lady, for ladies, and he liked Powell’s offering right away. “No one else did,” Stuart told an interviewer in 1978, “and of course no other publisher would touch it.” In other words, a perfect match. It was “published verbatim,” Powell adds.

The Cookbook debuted in mid-January 1971. Almost immediately, as the FBI’s recently released records show, letters poured into the bureau from citizen snoops around the country. “This is not a cookbook!” wrote George Kellog of Glendale, California. “Why is this allowed to happen!!!” added Earl C. Levering, who didn’t bother with a return address. Joseph Singleton of Titusville, Florida, simply scrawled his message on a news clipping: “Danger!” he wrote to the office of Director J. Edgar Hoover. “What are you doing about this???”

Officially, the answer was nothing. Hoover (or his PR team) responded with reassurances that “I share your concern about this matter,” but “the FBI has no control over material published through the mass media.” Internally, however, the teletype machine came alive. “Urgent” correspondence flew among senior members of the White House, the Department of Justice, and the FBI, including President Nixon’s lawyer, John Dean (who later did time for the Watergate coverup), and Hoover’s associate director, Mark Felt (later revealed as the informant known as Deep Throat). The conclusion: This is “a manual for revolutionary extremists,” and “the effects on a civilized society could be devastating.”

The effect on Powell was devastating, too. In the 12 months after the book was published, bombings increased to an average of five a day, according to FBI data. Citizens who blamed Powell stuffed his Vermont mailbox with death threats. Anarchists weren’t happy, either, accusing him of war profiteering, and setting off stink bombs at his only press conference in New York. The FBI never bothered Powell personally (deciding that he would leverage it for publicity). But they questioned his father and his father’s colleagues at the U.N., and they tracked which stores were selling the book. He drew increasing publicity—Newsweek and others profiled him and attacked his work—but he shrank from the limelight. “I can’t say I enjoyed the notoriety,” he says, “and I didn’t expect it.” Amid it all, Powell himself soured on the book, purging his home of copies and declining to discuss it with friends. “I didn’t anticipate the ramifications,” Powell says. “I don’t think I was as emotionally intelligent as I might be now.”

Powell dropped out—way out. He signed on as chief timekeeper on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He volunteered as an English instructor in a home for disturbed boys. In 1975, he moved back into his parents’ house in Westchester, volunteering as a special-ed teacher, earning a master’s degree in English, and eventually landing a paid teaching job upstate. He met the woman who would become his wife. And he tried to forget about the destructive cultural force that bore his name. “Actually, the book had stopped selling and the royalties at this point were negligible,” he says, unsure why sales ever picked up again. “I just assumed that the book would go out of print.”

Powell reinvented himself as an educator on the international stage. He lectured at the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia (he wrote a history of the royal family that got him banned from the kingdom), and rose through the ranks to attain top positions in schools packed with children of the international elite in Dar es Salaam, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur. He was commissioned to write three books by the Office of Overseas Schools. But even as his star ascended, he never completely escaped his past.

In 1991, when Powell was interviewing to become headmaster at a Tanzanian school, a member of the parent board asked him how to make a Molotov cocktail. Powell swallowed hard. But the chairman, who knew about the Cookbook, had his back. He dismissed the work “as a youthful folly or symbol of protest,” according to the school’s official history. Powell got the job. A similar incident occurred two years later; on the strength of his record, Powell again prevailed.

The spread of the Internet only triggered more questions from students and colleagues. A senior asked Powell to sign a copy of the Cookbook on his graduation day. Then al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania, and another in Nairobi. The Anarchist Cookbook played no known role in the attacks, but anonymous mudslinging ensued, with parents warning the board of “a secret organization within the school.” Powell resigned the following year (not, he says, because of pressure). But he struggled to land another job.

He decided to go on the offensive—in a modest way. In the hopes of preempting critics and relieving “the discomfort of pretending it’s not there,” Powell added a reference to the book to his résumé. He also posted an eight-paragraph note on the book’s Amazon.com sales page, calling it “a misguided and potentially dangerous publication” and expressing his wish that the book be taken out of print. Yet his views don’t hold any sway: The rights belong to the publisher, and always have, so Powell has been a helpless observer, forced to watch his work inspire new generations of evildoers.

“I don’t like to think that I contributed to people being killed,” he says—taking no responsibility for the deeds associated with the book (because “I did not do them”). He says serious terrorists would have found a way to wreak havoc without him. Friends, family, and colleagues agree. (A State Department spokesperson says they’ve “known for several years” about Powell’s past.)

This month, almost 40 years to the day after he became a bestselling author, Powell flew from Beijing, where he and his Chinese wife often work as education consultants, to San Francisco. There, in the Grand Ballroom of the downtown Hyatt, some 500 members of the Association for the Advancement of International Education gathered to give Powell a lifetime-achievement award. Powell and his wife are “both highly, highly respected,” says Elsa Lamb, executive director of the group. “He’s awesome!” adds Toni Mullen, an American-born alumni director at one of the schools where Powell served as headmaster. The day after he received his award, the FBI released documents containing an honor far sweeter: a memo clearing Powell’s name. “We have studied the contents of the book itself, as well as the information contained in the bureau reports,” the 1971 memo states, and “we have concluded that the book does not urge ‘forcible resistance to any law of the United States.’?” There is also “insufficient evidence that the author or anyone else used the book as a guide,” and “we cannot establish necessary intent.” For these reasons, “no further action is in order.”

Tony Dokoupil is a staff writer and editor at Newsweek.

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Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but papers filed in U.S. federal court in New York noted the immediate dismissal of pending cases involving allegations of harm to children who were given the drug during the clinical testing in Nigeria.

Pfizer has argued that meningitis and not its antibiotic led to deaths of 11 children and harm to dozens of others in the 200-patient trial in the Nigerian state of Kano.

"The cases have been amicably resolved after many years of litigation. The settlement will bring an end to all litigation pertaining to Trovan in the United States and Nigeria and allow for just compensation for participants in the study and their families," Pfizer said in a statement.

The settlement follows a decision last June by the U.S. Supreme Court not to review a lower court ruling that reinstated U.S. lawsuits brought by Nigerian families. Pfizer had appealed that ruling to the U.S. top court.

Under terms of the settlement agreement, the plaintiffs will join the ongoing Healthcare/Meningitis Trust Fund process, which is being managed by an independent Board of Trustees in Kano, Nigeria, the parties said in a joint statement.

Pfizer in 2009 reached a separate $75 million settlement with Kano state government to compensate victims. The Healthcare/Meningitis Trust Fund was set up as part of that 2009 settlement to help administer payments.

"The settlement of the cases pertaining to Trovan clears the way for the Board (of Trustees) to finalize its work in Nigeria to determine claimants' eligibility," Pfizer Associate General Counsel Bradley Lerman said in a statement.

"We are pleased that this agreement moves us one step closer to providing compensation to those for whom the fund was intended," Lerman added.

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