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President Donald Trump’s administration relieved Vivek Murthy of his surgeon general post Friday, cutting his four-year term in half. However, it’s not Murthy’s firing but his silence on gun violence that may tarnish his legacy. 

In an April 21 Facebook post about his departure, Murthy highlighted his report on alcohol, drugs and health, as well as the millions of letters he mailed to doctors imploring them to join him in fighting the opioid crisis, as among his accomplishments. 

“While I had hoped to do more to help our nation tackle its biggest health challenges, I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to have served,” Murthy wrote. “Thank you, America, for the privilege of a lifetime.”

While Murthy will be remembered for shining a light on addiction in America, the way his predecessors highlighted AIDS and smoking as public health problems, he’ll also be remembered for his views on guns, which nearly kept him from being confirmed as surgeon general.

As co-founder of Doctors for America, initially named Doctors for Obama, Murthy had been outspoken about addressing gun violence as a public health problem. (His wife, Dr. Alice Chen, whom he married in 2015, is executive director of Doctors for America and a vocal advocate for gun violence research.) 

After his 2013 nomination by President Barack Obama, Murthy quickly found himself in the crosshairs of the National Rifle Association, and his confirmation took a year. Tweets like the one below from 2012 likely contributed to the impression that he would advocate for gun control. 

The NRA, in its effort to block Murthy, lobbied Senate leaders, alerting them to his views on ammunition limits, gun buyback programs and federally funded gun violence research.  

“Murthy’s record of political activism in support of radical gun control measures raises significant concerns about the likelihood he would use the office of Surgeon General to further his preexisting campaign against gun ownership,” the NRA wrote on its website in 2014.

Murthy’s silence creates mixed legacy on gun violence   

In December 2014, Murthy gained confirmation after promising senators he wouldn’t advocate for gun control as surgeon general. 

“I do not intend to use my office as surgeon general as a bully pulpit on gun control,” he said. 

True to his word, Murthy rarely mentioned firearms or gun violence during his time as surgeon general.

“He has been rather mum on the issue, as has everybody in his administration,” Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and a dean at the Boston University School of Public Health, told HuffPost. 

Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, sees that as a missed opportunity. 

“He was a person who was brilliant,” Rosenberg told HuffPost. “He knew about the public health approach. He knew about the cost, the consequences and prevention of gun violence. And yet he made a deal to be silent about this.

“Someone that we needed more than ever made a deal to be silent. I think that was a huge mistake.”

Why calling gun violence a public health problem is controversial 

Referring to gun violence as a public health concern, rather than solely a criminal justice issue, is controversial in Congress. In public health circles, it’s common sense.

“The statements I’ve made in the past about gun violence being a public health issue, I stand by those comments because they’re a fact,” Murthy told The Washington Post in 2015.

“They’re a fact that nearly every medical professional who’s ever cared for a patient can attest to.” 

More than 30,000 Americans die by firearms every year, according to the CDC. That puts doctors who treat gun-related injuries on the front lines of an issue that lacks comprehensive research and data.

And although suicides make up the bulk of these deaths, gun homicides are a significant problem in the United States and far outstrip the gun violence levels in other developed nations.

The NRA spent more than $36 million toward electing Trump and Republican Congress members during the 2016 election, more money than on any election in history, according to The Trace. Trump is scheduled to speak at the NRA’s leadership forum on April 28, making him the first president in 34 years to do so.

Trump has yet to nominate a replacement for Murthy, whose deputy, Rear Adm. Sylvia Trent-Adams, is now acting surgeon general.

It’s not unprecedented for an incoming administration to appoint a surgeon general whose views line up with its own. In 1961, Dr. Leroy E. Burney stepped down to allow the Kennedy administration to nominate a surgeon general. (Burney had served a full four-year term.)    

It remains to be seen whether Murthy will address gun violence now that he’s no longer surgeon general.

“I got into some trouble for saying gun violence is a public health issue,” Murthy told Stat last year. “I was stating what I think is the obvious, and I think most people in the country understand, which is that far too many people die from gun violence. And in my book, every single death from gun violence is a tragedy because it was preventable.”

This reporting is brought to you by HuffPost’s health and science platform, The Scope. Like us on Facebook and Twitter and tell us your story: scopestories@huffingtonpost.com. 

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Yesterday Verizon announced the launch of Fios Gigabit Connection, as “the nation’s largest deployment of gigabit Internet connection service.” It even promised a $70 per month price standalone, however, as people tried to sign up a few shortcomings…

<span class="articleLocation”>(Reuters Health) – Children in America’s poorest communities have three times the risk of dying from child abuse before age 5 as children in the wealthiest neighborhoods, a new study finds.

“We think our study should inform public health leaders and local clinicians to be aware that children living in high-poverty communities are really a vulnerable group at increased risk of death due to child abuse,” lead author Dr. Caitlin Farrell, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, said in a phone interview.

Farrell and her team analyzed death certificates for young children and U.S. Census poverty data from 1999 through 2014. For children ages 4 and under, counties with the highest concentrations of poverty had more than triple the rate of child-abuse fatalities compared to counties with the lowest concentrations of poverty, the study reported in Pediatrics found.

Nearly 10 out of every 100,000 children died as a result of child abuse in the most impoverished counties, the study found.

African-American children were the most vulnerable regardless of where they lived.

Among every 100,000 young children, eight African-Americans died from assault, shaken-baby syndrome, abusive head trauma, suffocation, strangulation or another form of child abuse, compared to three white children, the study found.

The fatality rate for African-American children in the richest counties was higher than the fatality rate for white children in the poorest.

Farrell can’t explain why African-American infants and toddlers were most at risk of dying from abuse. She called for more research and for the development of policies and plans aimed specifically at protecting poor children and African-American children.

During the 15 years covered by the study, 11,149 children died of child abuse before turning 5 years old. Children under the age of 3 comprised the vast majority, or 71 percent, of the deaths, the authors wrote.

African-American children represented a disproportionate 37 percent of the nationwide child-abuse deaths.

“We hope our study can serve as a catalyst for researchers to further explore the complex relationship between community poverty and child abuse,” Farrell said. “Ultimately, this information is needed for policymakers, public health officials and clinicians to enact effective prevention strategies.”

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Robert Block said the study’s findings should come as no surprise.

“What may be surprising is that although this fact is both intuitive and now statistically proven, given the significant percentage of children living in poverty, the United States has yet to develop a comprehensive plan to address the issue,” he wrote. Block, who was not involved with the study, is a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and emeritus professor at the University of Oklahoma – Tulsa University School of Community Medicine in Tulsa.

Poverty-related factors – such as food insecurity, unemployment and living in unsafe neighborhoods with a high prevalence of gun violence – can lead to frustrations and consequent stressors that can lead to child abuse, Block wrote.

Parenting education could help, as could educating community leaders to address the challenges of poverty in an effort to reduce frustration, drug addiction, family violence and other stresses, he wrote.

“To change the influence of poverty and race on the incidence of child-abuse deaths will not be easy,” Block said in an email. “Early identification of troubled parents as part of comprehensive pediatric evaluations might be a beginning.”

Farrell also called for more preventive measures during children’s wellness checks in pediatric clinics.

One limitation of the study is that it could not tease out pockets of poverty within affluent counties or pockets of wealth within poor counties. The study also could not detect possible bias on the part of the medical examiner in determining the cause of death.

SOURCE: bit.ly/2pYx9Bf and bit.ly/2pYLQnL Pediatrics, online April 24, 2017.

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So you bought yourself a fancy flatscreen TV so you can enjoy movies, sports and games on the big screen. But you plug it in and are quickly disappointed that the tiny little speakers they crammed in there do nothing to complement the awesome picture. What you want is a home theater sound system. While you could buy a big multispeaker setup, that means wires everywhere, multiple boxes, and generally something that’s not particularly living room-friendly. You need a soundbar.

One of the newer entries into the soundbar market here in the US is Q Acoustics. This popular UK hi-fi brand has recently started to sell their gear here in the states. They sent me over one of their M3 Soundbars for testing, and overall, I think it’s a very solid entry into the space, with an exceptionally good price for its quality.

Priced at $349(USD), the M3 is designed to be the only piece of audio equipment you need in your living room. It sits underneath your TV, inside a cabinet, or on your wall, and features a clean, modern, and minimal design. One thing that’s really nice about it is that if you do chose to mount it on the wall, its base transforms into a wall mount, and they include a template in the box for drilling your wall anchors. A wall mount is often an extra cost with other soundbars.

The speaker measures 39.37″ wide x 5″ deep x 3.54″ high, making it the perfect height to sit in front of almost any display 45″ diagonal or larger. It will stick out just an inch or so on each side with a 40″ display.

Setup is easy. First flip the EQ switch on back to say whether you’re mounting the speaker on the wall, on a cabinet, or in a cabinet. That optimizes the sound quality to match your setup. Then plug in the included HDMI cable to your TV’s HDMI ARC out port, and you’re all set. If you don’t have an ARC port, you can connect it to your TV’s optical output, but you’ll need to buy a cable for that. After that, you go into your TV’s audio menu and make sure to turn of the internal speakers. That’s it. You’re all set.

In addition to being able to connect to your TV, the M3 also has Bluetooth support built in, as well as NFC-pairing if your phone supports it. Connecting to other Bluetooth devices is as simple as switching to that input, and pairing while the blue light is blinking. There are also a pair of analog line in jacks if you need them.

Once connected to my TV, the audio quality was dramatically better with the M3 than with the built-in speakers. It’s capable of pushing out room-filling volume levels, and is especially adept in the mids and highs. Since it doesn’t have an external subwoofer, don’t expect room-shaking bass, but there’s enough low end for a satisfying movie watching experience. If there’s any complaint at all, it’s that the low end does distort just a little bit at higher volume levels. For instance, when a big star destroyer passed overhead during The Force Awakens, there was a little unwanted woofer reverberation in the deepest tones. Dialogue is especially crisp and clear on the M3, but rather than focused in the center, it’s smoothly distributed across the soundstage, which is very pleasing to the ear.

When watching movies, I highly recommend enabling the MovieEQ feature on the remote. I’m not sure of its exact processing algorithm, but it seems to dramatically increase dynamic range as well as the perceived size of the soundstage. I can see no reason to leave this off when watching movies or TV shows, but you’ll want to leave it off when listening to music for the purest imaging. Music in movies and played from a smartphone via Bluetooth sound great too, so this can definitely double as a stereo system.

Overall, the Q Acoustics M3 would be a welcome addition to any living room in need of a bigger, louder sound but without clutter, and without breaking the bank. The M3 is available in the US and Canada from QAcoustics.com for $349.99 or in the UK for £299 from QAcoustics.co.uk.

Update – 9to5Mac has confirmed with Geekbench company’s founder that the screenshot has been doctored and is fake.

When it comes to marketing the iPhone, Apple tends to stay away from the technicals and usually prefers marketing the phone’s features and the lifestyle associated with it. This is why sometimes the iPhone is ridiculed due to its perceived low specs compared to Android. However as we have seen in the past, that’s hardly true.

Apple’s iPhone 7 with its A10 chipset has been shown to blow away the competition even in more recent times, and it looks like the A11 will be no different. According to a sighting, it seems that Apple’s iPhone 8 was recently spotted on Geekbench where it managed to clock a single-core score of 4,537 and a multi-core score of 8,975.

To give you guys some perspective, the single-core score is already 30% better than that of the iPhone 7, and 58% better in multi-core score than its predecessor. As for the competition, Samsung’s Galaxy S8 only managed to score 1,945 for single and 6,338 for multi. That being said, benchmark scores are just one way to measure a phone’s performance and it might not necessarily reflect real-life usage.

There could be other features that might appeal to you more than just power, like display size, resolution, camera quality, operating system features, and so on, but so far on paper and assuming this Geekbench sighting is legit, the iPhone 8 could very well be blowing the competition out of the water already.

Alleged iPhone 8 Geekbench Benchmark Scores Surface [Updated] , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.