Saturday, November 30, 2013

News Clips For The Day



60 years in an iron lung: US polio survivor worries about new global threat – NBC
JoNel Aleccia NBC News


Martha Ann Lillard was just 5 in 1953 when she became paralyzed by polio and had to use an iron lung respirator. She's spent six decades in the 800-pound device and worries that people in the U.S. don't remember the panic that polio caused.

It’s a long way from central Oklahoma to Syria, but one of America’s last iron lung survivors says she’s a living reminder that an outbreak of polio anywhere in the world is a danger everywhere.

Martha Ann Lillard, now 65, has spent most of the past six decades inside an 800-pound machine that helps her breathe. News this month that at least 13 children have been paralyzed by a resurgence of polio in Syria — where the disease had been eradicated since 1999 — filled her with sadness and dread, she told NBC News. At least four additional cases have been confirmed in the country, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

“If my mother would have had the opportunity to give me the vaccine, she would have done that,” says Lillard, who was a kindergartner in 1953 when she woke up with a sore throat that quickly progressed to something much worse — a life-threatening infection with poliovirus.

“To let somebody go through what I went through and what other children went through. What if people had to do that again? It would be just unbelievable.”
U.S. health experts agree. America’s last outbreak of polio was in 1979, and though risk of reintroduction of the disease is low, they say that growing pockets of unvaccinated children are raising concerns that people may have forgotten the panic over the disease that crippled Lillard — and how easily it could return.

“Scenarios for polio being reintroduced into the U.S. are easy to image and the disease could get a foothold if we don’t maintain high vaccination rates,” says Dr. Greg Wallace, a team leader for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he heads the measles, mumps, rubella and polio epidemiology branch.

“Syria is a good example,” he adds. “They didn’t have any cases. Then they stopped vaccinating for two or three or four years and what do you have?” What you have, according to the World Health Organization, is more than a dozen children permanently paralyzed in Syria, where conflict and a humanitarian crisis have interrupted inoculation efforts that provide a lifetime of protection with just a few doses of vaccine.

It’s a heartbreaking setback in a battle against a disease that’s on the verge of eradication worldwide, with polio still endemic in only three countries, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan, WHO says.

Infectious disease experts in Germany this month warned that Syria’s outbreak could endanger Europe as tens of hundreds of refugees flee the war-torn country and settle in places that have been polio-free for decades.

That idea alarms Lillard, who is one of an estimated six to eight polio survivors in the U.S. still using iron lungs, according to Joan Headley, executive director of Post-Polio Health International, an advocacy group.

Their numbers have dwindled steadily since 1959, when more than 1,200 people in the U.S. relied on the machines that use negative air pressure to passively move air in and out of lungs weakened or paralyzed by the virus.

Lillard says she remembers well the sheer fear her illness caused in her rural Oklahoma town.
“The night before I was paralyzed, the neighbor children ate out of the same bowl of pancake batter that I did,” Lillard recalls. “They just had to pray that nobody got it.”

The first known outbreak of polio in the U.S. was in 1894 in Vermont, but it’s the epidemics in the 1950s that scarred the nation. In 1952, a record 57,628 cases of polio were reported in the U.S., and between 13,000 and 20,000 people a year were left paralyzed, records show.

Poliomyelitis is a viral infection of the spinal cord that mainly affects young children. The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water. Most people who are infected develop no symptoms and don’t even know they’ve got it. But in about 1 in 200 cases, the virus destroys the nerve cells that activate muscles, causing irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. It can paralyze breathing muscles, too, sometimes causing death.

Only the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk and introduced to a waiting nation on April 12, 1955 stemmed the fear and tamed the virus — but that came too late for youngsters like Lillard.

She has spent most of her life inside one of several long metal cylinders in which she’s enclosed with an airtight seal, with only her neck and head sticking out of a foam collar. She has switches inside —along with a goose down comforter and nice sheets — to allow her to roll a tray-like cot in and out.

Lillard owns her iron lung, which was built in the 1940s and runs on a fan belt motor that friends help patch together with car parts when it breaks.
“It feels wonderful, actually, if you’re not breathing well,” says Lillard. “When I was first put into it, it was such a relief. It makes all the difference when you’re not breathing.”

Lillard taught herself with great effort to walk again and she’s able to leave the respirator — but she often doesn’t want to. She says she has tried the portable positive pressure ventilators that most polio survivors use. Those devices force air into the lungs, often through a tube in the throat.

But Lillard says the harsh air from those devices causes “tremendous amounts” of inflammation and worsens asthma caused by post-polio syndrome, a debilitating condition common among many polio survivors. The devices are also difficult to keep clean and could introduce life-threatening bacteria into her vulnerable system, says Lillard, who is 4-foot-9 and weighs just over 100 pounds.

“If I use the positive pressure vent, I’m not as well rested,” she says. “Some people have said I’d rather die than leave my iron lung, and it makes it sound like I’m not trying to be modern, and it’s not like that at all.”

In fact, Lillard is a chatty, outgoing woman who dotes on her three beagles and lives with a housemate so the two of them can take care of each other. She keeps in touch with the world by phone and computer and says she has had to learn to endure in spite of her crippling illness.

“I ask ‘Why’ all the time. I don’t get any answers,” she says. “After you ask so many times and you don’t get answers, you just go on.”
Lillard says she knows she’s an anomaly in a U.S. society that barely remembers the scourge of polio. In 2004, there were 39 people still using iron lungs, and by 2010, perhaps a dozen, experts say.

But with polio back in Syria — and in Cameroon, where it hadn’t been detected since 2009, the WHO reported this week — Lillard says she wants to make sure that people never forget.
“I think the word is to get your child vaccinated,” she said. “Why would we let somebody have to go back through that again


I have been seeing the news articles about polio in Syria for the last few months and wondering about our country.It didn't seem likely to come here, but now with refugees leaving Syria and outbreaks in several other countries, it looks like we need another push in this country to vaccinate our children. I well remember the panic in the US about it in the 1950s, and getting my polio shot. According to the web site WebMD it is currently recommended for all US children, and “in most places” mandated before a child starts school. We're probably protected, certainly from a major outbreak.




North Korea says American it detained is a criminal – NBC

By Jack Kim, Reuters

North Korea said on Saturday it had arrested U.S. citizen Merrill E. Newman for "hostile acts" against the state and accused him of being "a criminal" who was involved in the killing of civilians during the 1950-53 Korean War. 

Newman "masterminded espionage and subversive activities against the DPRK and in this course he was involved in killings of service personnel of the Korean People's Army and innocent civilians," the North's official KCNA news agency said. 

DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea is technically still at war with the South and the United States as a truce, not a peace treaty, was signed to end the Korean conflict. 
"He admitted all his crimes and made an apology for them," KCNA said. 

In a separate dispatch, KCNA carried what it said was a statement of apology by Newman, made after being detained. "During the Korean War, I have been guilty of a long list of indelible crimes against DPRK government and Korean people as advisor of the Kuwol Unit of the U.N. Korea 6th Partisan Regiment part of the Intelligence Bureau of the Far East Command," it said. 

The unit appears to refer to one of the special operations units of partisan, or irregular, fighters acting against the North. 
Newman, who had been visiting North Korea as a tourist, has been held in Pyongyang since officials took him off an Air Koryo plane that was scheduled to leave the country on Oct. 26. 

Newman is a retiree from Palo Alto in California, and the U.S. State Department has refused to provide any details of the detention. 

North Korea has been holding another U.S. citizen and a Christian missionary of Korean decent, arrested last year and sentenced in May to 15 years of hard labour on charges of committing hostile acts against the state. 


Now that Newman has apologized we are waiting to find out what the North Korean government will do next. I'll try to clip articles as they appear and add them to this blog.





Endangered Species Act turns 40 years old — and faces midlife crisis – NBC
Alan Boyle, Science Editor


The act has helped some animal populations rebound, but others remain perilously close to extinction.

Four decades after going into effect, the legislation that protects some of Mother Nature's most vulnerable creatures is facing an existential crisis.
Since the Endangered Species Act became law, it's generated its share of success stories (such as the bald eagle's resurgence) and less impressive case studies (such as the continuing decline of the Northern spotted owl).

This year's anniversary is generating a lot of talk about the Endangered Species Act's past — and its future.
"There are a lot of pundits out there who will tell you that it has either been a disaster or a huge success," Peter Alagona, a professor of environmental history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told Smithsonian magazine. "The truth is that it has really been a mixed bag to date, and 'to date' is a really short time. For species that took centuries to decline, 40 years is probably not enough time to recover."

Alagona takes an in-depth look at species protection in a book titled "After the Grizzly," and says the law has done "a really good job" of preventing extinctions. "But it's done a really poor job promoting the recovery of species that are on the list," he said.

What works, what doesn't
The problem is that bringing an endangered species back to a sustainable population often requires more than just restricting human activities in a defined geographical area. Sometimes the solution springs from other factors: The growth of bald eagle populations, for instance, arguably had more to do with the 1972 ban on DDT's agricultural use than with the Endangered Species Act. Even though the eagles were taken off the endangered list in 2007, they're still protected under different laws.

The law's protections aren't always enough to address the bigger problems facing a species and its habitat. Take the Northern spotted owl: Limits on logging in the threatened species' Pacific Northwest forest habitat generated a huge outcry in the 1990s, but even though the protections took effect, the spotted owl population is continuing to decline — mostly due to encroachment by a more aggressive species, the barred owl.

"The conservationists who got into this in the first place got into it because they wanted to save owls, and now they’re being faced with the idea of shooting one owl to protect another," Alagona said.

Politics and science
Even though the status of endangered species is supposed to be determined purely on scientific grounds, politics enters into the picture. Such is the case for the gray wolf, which has recovered enough that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed taking the species off the endangered list. Some environmentalists worry that the move is premature — and have accused the federal government of stacking the deck during its peer-review process. A decision on delisting gray wolves is expected next year.

Then there's climate change: In the decades ahead, species and their habitats could face rapid shifts due to rising sea levels, warmer temperatures and other effects associated with greenhouse-gas emissions.

One of the potential casualties is the endangered red wolf, which is limited to a low-lying coastal habitat on North Carolina's Albemarle Peninsula. Up to a third of that habitat could disappear over the next century, due to land subsidence and sea encroachment. Rising sea levels pose a similar threat to other species, such as the Florida panther, the Key deer and the Atlantic piping plover.

Could the Endangered Species Act be invoked to shut down CO2-emitting coal plants? "You could make that legal argument, but the political reaction would be very intense," Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of Maine, told Outside Online.

Speaking of legal arguments and political reaction, the Fish and Wildlife Service accelerated the pace of its process for protecting species two years ago after a pair of legal settlements — and that has sparked a new round of congressional scrutiny for the Endangered Species Act. House Republicans say the law "has become a tool for litigation that drains resources away from real recovery efforts and blocks job-creating economic activities."

After 40 years, is it high time for an overhaul? Does the act need to be reworked to cover emerging environmental threats, or to reflect economic realities? Either way, feel free to weigh in with your comments.


I wonder which recovery efforts the Republicans think would work better. As for job-creating economic activities, that probably means logging, mining and farming, which continue to encroach on habitat for animals and pollute the environment. The issue is always at base about money, combined with a deep hatred for environmental protection because it causes inconveniences for business people. Such "conservatives" tend to say that they like “people” over “animals.” As long as they are allowed to dominate we will lose our forests, meadow lands and waterways constantly until we can't find a wild squirrel anywhere except in city parks. Or maybe the trend which has started, for larger wild predatory animals to migrate into the cities and become scavengers will increase. That isn't good either. I hope the Republicans don't win when Congress looks at the law. I'll watch for articles about congressional activity.



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Emily Dickinson's Envelope Writings: 'Gorgeous' Poetry In 3-D – NPR
by Craig Morgan Teicher
­
The Gorgeous Nothings, by Emily Dickinson, Marta Werner and Jen Bervin is a new book of her last unpublished poems. ­ This daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, in her late teens, is the only authenticated portrait of the poet past childhood.
Readers always seem to want to get closer to Emily Dickinson, the godmother of American poetry. Paging through her poems feels like burrowing nose-deep in her 19th century backyard — where "the grass divides as with a comb," as she writes in "A narrow Fellow in the Grass."

And yet the deeper one probes the poems, the more their meaning seems to recede, so that their minutiae suddenly speak for an almost inarticulable, often dark truth or wisdom at the core of things: "Zero at the Bone" is how she characterizes the more-than-fear she feels upon meeting the snake who is this poem's subject. Her images are so strange, and yet so startlingly accurate, that it's hard to believe one person could contain such contradictions. Who was this poet, really?

Until now, to fathom Dickinson, fans could make the pilgrimage to her Amherst, Mass., home, scrutinize the authenticated and contested daguerreotypes for clues and, of course, pore over her poems and letters. But now we have another way to approach the Emily who inspires and confounds us: this significant collection of facsimiles and transcriptions of late poems drafted — one might even say grafted — on leftover envelopes.

These 52 pieces were found, unbound, among Dickinson's papers, written on envelopes that had been used or addressed and unsent. They are as much works of visual as textual art, offering the chance to read into Dickinson's slanting handwriting. Her bubbly loops and long strokes suggest, to me at least, the odd confidence of one who knows the peculiar joy of refining and performing her own identity on a private stage, a bit like the names of boys or bands on the backs of middle-school notebooks.
And, if we agree with editor Marta Werner, Dickinson was playing not only with the arrangement of words in poetic lines, but the arrangement of different groups of words on different parts of these envelopes. On a folded-over lip of one envelope, she describes a "Drunken man" (who may also be dead, or almost dead), "Oblivion bending / over him," and, written slanted over the curled edge, "enfolding him / with tender / infamy." It's the medium making the metaphor here, something usually reserved for sculpture. This is poetry in 3-D.

These are late writings, probably composed after she'd sewn up the last of her famous "fascicles," the bound packets in which her poems were found after her death. So these are experiments, perhaps, begun after she'd set the bulk of her legacy in store for "immortality," one of her favorite words. Due, perhaps, to the limits these unusually shaped pages exerted on her writing, the best of these poems are among her most compressed and aphoristic. "A Pang," she writes, "is more / Conspicuous in Spring / In contrast with the / things that sing," blending colloquial and biblical speech in the kinds of enigmatic leaps that make her poems rush with wind.

­ The editors offer endless avenues of interpretation; the typed transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting are superimposed atop the outlines of their corresponding envelopes, so the multidirectional layout of the text isn't lost. A series of esoteric indexes — by shape of the envelopes, by what direction they are turned, by whether or not they have "penciled divisions," for example — encourage the reader to speculate about the various relationships Dickinson may have conceived between paper and words.

It's a good season to chase after the ever-elusive Emily Dickinson. In addition to this book, there's a corresponding exhibit in Chicago, and all of the poet's online archives were recently organized into one accessible hub. This book is a rare gift for all poetry lovers. We are lucky to have more of Dickinson's ongoing "letter to the World / That never wrote to Me," an endlessly fascinating correspondence, addressed to any of us who find it — so long as we're willing to answer it with concentration and curiosity.


Emily Dickinson was the first poet I ever read on my own, which was in my early teen years. I loved mystery, from Stonehenge to haunted houses, and Emily Dickinson's writing is nothing if not mysterious. I also liked her plain presentation, without complex rhyming and meters to encumber the reading aloud, focusing much more on the meaning of the words. My favorite of her poems goes like this:

To make a prairie (1755)

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

The ideas and truths that she expressed are the heart of introverted thinking at its best. This poem contains the sheer magic that Dickinson's work often held. Like Haikus, the sparse wording adds to the impression of depth – blissful simplicity.




Calif. company finds special value in autistic employees – CBS
ByCarter Evans CBS News November 28, 2013

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- The most surprising thing about Max Parker’s morning routine is that he has a job to go to -- at all.

He didn’t know a whole lot about it when he got into it. “It was pretty much all new stuff,” he says. But now, he seems to be excelling at it.
Parker is a software analyst. He’s also autistic. Parker says that when he was growing up, he never envisioned having a job like this.

Roughly 75 percent of autistic adults are unemployed, in part because the brain disorder makes it difficult to interact with others. But many on the autism spectrum also have an uncanny ability to focus intensely on minute details -- perfect for the tedious work of hunting for glitches in computer software.

“This is not a charity,” says Chad Hahn, the CEO of MindSpark. “And our employees are good at what they do.”
Hahn, a software designer, used to outsource work to India, but his wife, a social worker, convinced him “high-functioning” autistic adults, like Parker, are well suited for the job.

“If you and I look at a set of instructions over and over again, I don’t know about you, but I would miss some things,” Hahn says. “Max doesn’t miss things. He’s really good at it.”

“Finding jobs for people with autism that focus on technical skills, on concentration, on detail, is exactly the right thing to do,” says Dr. Marcel Just, who studies autism at Carnegie Mellon University.

Just says his research has found autistic brains are wired differently. Most people rely on the front of the brain to process the “big picture” around us. But with autism, it’s the opposite: thinking is dominated by parts of the brain that handle details.

“People with autism can zoom in on detail, with technical knowledge, with expertise, and zoom in, not be bothered by the larger picture and maybe find details that are wrong,” Just says.

Max Parker is one of three autistic employees at MindSpark, and more are training in an on-site classroom.

“Think about how hard it’s been like for them all these years, where people have dismissed them and their abilities, and maybe overlooked what they could do or could be,” Hahn says. “They just needed a chance. They have abilities that are quite valuable. That should be unlocked somehow. And that’s all we’re trying to do here.”
Providing opportunity -- and a paycheck.


This is a happy story. Autism is trying for parents sometimes when the child screams without end or won't talk, but if they are successfully schooled and trained, apparently they can do well as adults and learn to live with their disability. Their IQ varies from case to case.

The following information about autism is from Wikipedia:

“Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and verbal and non-verbal communication, and by restricted, repetitive or stereotyped behavior. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent before a child is three years old.[2] Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood.[3] It is one of three recognized disorders in the autism spectrum (ASDs), the other two being Asperger syndrome, which lacks delays in cognitive development and language, and pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified (commonly abbreviated as PDD-NOS), which is diagnosed when the full set of criteria for autism or Asperger syndrome are not met.[4]

"Autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autism are complex and it is unclear whether ASD is explained more by rare mutations, or by rare combinations of common genetic variants.[5] In rare cases, autism is strongly associated with agents that cause birth defects.[6] Controversies surround other proposed environmental causes, such as heavy metals, pesticides or childhood vaccines;[7] the vaccine hypotheses are biologically implausible and lack convincing scientific evidence.[8] The prevalence of autism is about 1–2 per 1,000 people worldwide, and it occurs about four times more often in boys than girls.[9

[13] "Early behavioral, cognitive, or speech interventions can help autistic children gain self-care, social, and communication skills.[12] Although there is no known cure,[12] there have been reported cases of children who recovered.[14] Not many children with autism live independently after reaching adulthood, though some become successful.[15] An autistic culture has developed, with some individuals seeking a cure and others believing autism should be accepted as a difference and not treated as a disorder.[16]

"There are many anecdotal reports, but few systematic studies, of aggression and violence in individuals with ASD. The limited data suggest that, in children with intellectual disability, autism is associated with aggression, destruction of property, and tantrums. A 2007 study interviewed parents of 67 children with ASD and reported that about two-thirds of the children had periods of severe tantrums and about one-third had a history of aggression, with tantrums significantly more common than in non-autistic children with language impairments.[29] A 2008 Swedish study found that, of individuals aged 15 or older discharged from hospital with a diagnosis of ASD, those who committed violent crimes were significantly more likely to have other psychopathological conditions such as psychosis.[30]

"Intensive, sustained special education programs and behavior therapy early in life can help children acquire self-care, social, and job skills,[12] and often improve functioning and decrease symptom severity and maladaptive behaviors;[132] claims that intervention by around age three years is crucial are not substantiated.[133] Available approaches include applied behavior analysis (ABA), developmental models, structured teaching, speech and language therapy, social skills therapy, and occupational therapy.[12] There is some evidence that early intensive behavioral intervention, an early intervention model for 20 to 40 hours a week for multiple years, is an effective behavioral treatment for some children with ASD.[134"

Friday, November 29, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day



Thanksgiving shopping? Not in states that ban it
By Michelle R. Smith, The Associated Press
November 28, 2013

Shoppers ride escalators in a mall in Cambridge, Mass., Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2013. Shoppers in many states will line up for deals hours after their Thanksgiving dinners, but stores in a handful of states are barred by law from opening on the holiday.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Shoppers won't be lining up for Thanksgiving Day deals at stores in Rhode Island, Maine and Massachusetts. They can't.
It's the legacy of so-called "blue laws," which prohibit large supermarkets, big box stores and department stores from opening on Thanksgiving. Some business groups complain, but many shoppers, workers and even retailers say they're satisfied with a one-day reprieve from work and holiday shopping.

Some business groups complain it's an unnecessary barrier during an era of 24-hour online shopping, and there have been some recent failed legislative attempts to change things. But many shoppers, workers and even retailers say they're satisfied with the status quo: a one-day reprieve from work and holiday shopping.

"I shop all year. People need to be with their families on Thanksgiving," said Debra Wall, of Pawtucket, R.I., who will remain quite happily at home Thursday, cooking a meal for 10.

The holiday shopping frenzy has crept deeper than ever into Thanksgiving this year. Macy's, J.C. Penney and Staples will open on Thanksgiving for the first time. Toys R Us will open at 5 p.m., and Wal-Mart, already open

24 hours in many locations, will start holiday deals at 6 p.m., two hours earlier than last year. In recent years, some retail employees and their supporters have started online petitions to protest stores that open on Thanksgiving — but shoppers keep coming.

Bill Rennie, vice president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said many shoppers are crossing into border states that allow Thanksgiving shopping, including Connecticut, Vermont, New York or New Hampshire, which is even more alluring because it doesn't have a sales tax.

"Why not give stores in Massachusetts the option?" he said.
The group has backed legislation, which has so far gone nowhere, to roll back the laws and allow stores to open on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

From New York to Paris, department stores get into the holiday spirit with lavish window displays.
That would include grocery stores, which also must stay closed on the holidays. Woe to the Massachusetts cook who forgets a crucial ingredient or messes up the turkey and is forced to find a replacement at a convenience store. Convenience stores are allowed to open, as are movie theaters, pharmacies, restaurants and some other businesses.

The laws do not prohibit stores from opening at non-traditional hours Friday, and some will open at midnight or 1 a.m., when holiday deals will start.
Blue laws were once widespread throughout the country and are thought to date back to Colonial times, although some of the current regulations in Maine were instituted in the 1960s. The name may be derived from an 18th-century usage of blue meaning "rigidly moral," according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
The rules vary among the states. Retailers smaller than 5,000 square feet can operate in Maine, for example.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are the main holidays affected in all three states, but in Massachusetts, blue laws also prohibit stores from opening on the mornings of Columbus and Veterans Day without state permission. Easter and New Year's Day are also sometimes included.

Rhode Island lawmakers have in recent years rolled back blue law prohibitions on Sunday sales of alcohol and cars, but the Thanksgiving ban remains. Maine lawmakers shot down legislation this year that would have allowed stores to open on the holiday.
Law enforcement officials in all three states said there had been no recent incidents they could recall of retailers breaking the law. In 2005, Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly sent a warning letter to upscale grocery chain Whole Foods after a competitor discovered it was planning to open on Thanksgiving. In Maine, a violation is punishable by up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine. 

Maine allows certain sporting goods stores to remain open, an exemption that allows Freeport-based outdoor retailer L.L. Bean to operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Spokeswoman Carolyn Beem said workers sign up for shifts on a volunteer basis and get paid extra for working the holiday. She said they generally have more volunteers than shifts on what she calls a generally slower business day.
But along the New Hampshire border, the Kittery Trading Post in Kittery, Maine, will remain closed, even though it could operate under the same exemption, said vice president Fox Keim. He said giving employees the day off is part of the store's "core values."

"What's more important to us is keeping our staff happy and keeping morale at the company at a high level," he said.
Diane Mareira, who has worked for BJ's Wholesale Club for 29 years and now manages its store in Northborough, Mass., said she remembers the days when people spent Sundays home with their families, but said that has all changed. BJ's, which operates stores in 15 states, won't open until Friday, even in states that allow it.

"You have both parents working in the household. There's very few days that you can set aside and dedicate to your families," Mareira said. "Those are days that we should be home."
Mareira said she's planning to do just that on Thursday. She'll have her extended family over to cook, eat and enjoy the day with each other.



I have been caught once at a Publix grocery store on Thanksgiving Day only to find it closed, but luckily, Winn Dixie was open and I got my groceries. Other than that, I don't shop on Thanksgiving Day. For the last week there have been local news shots of shoppers camped outside Wal-Mart and other stores in the 38 degree night temperatures in order to be first in line to get into the store on “Black Friday.”

When the stores open there are sometimes mad rushes to get into the door, with even some people being trampled or pushed down. To me, that is shameful and a sign of mass insanity. I personally don't care how many stores they close, it won't impact me. I no longer do Christmas shopping, by group decision in my family, and if I did I wouldn't buy the high-ticket items that the wild and crazy shoppers are trying to get on discount.





Navajo Code Talker says Redskins name not derogatory – NBC
By Felicia Fonseca and Matthew Brown
November 28, 2013

A leader of the Navajo Code Talkers who appeared at a Washington Redskins home football game said Wednesday the team name is a symbol of loyalty and courage — not a slur as asserted by critics who want it changed.
Roy Hawthorne, 87, of Lupton, Ariz., was one of four Code Talkers honored for their service in World War II during the Monday night game against the San Francisco 49ers.
Hawthorne, vice president of the Navajo Code Talkers Association, said the group's trip was paid for by the Redskins. The four men met briefly with team owner Dan Snyder but did not discuss the name, Hawthorne said.

Still, he said he would endorse the name if asked, and the televised appearance in which three of the Native Americans wore Redskins jackets spoke for itself.
"We didn't have that in mind but that is undoubtedly what we did do," Hawthorne said when asked if he was intending to send a statement with the appearance. "My opinion is that's a name that not only the team should keep, but that's a name that's American." 

Monday night's brief, on-field ceremony came as some Native Americans and civil rights leaders wage a "Change the Mascot" campaign that targets the term redskins as a racial epithet.
The Navajos' appearance drew heated comments from both sides on social media, including assertions that the Code Talkers were being used as props in a public relations stunt meant to deflect criticism over the name.

Jacqueline Pata, head of the National Congress of American Indians, called the appearance "a political play rather than a heartfelt recognition of the Code Talkers."
Pata, a member of the Tlingit Tribe of Alaska, said she reveres the Code Talkers for the work they have done but added that people often fail to recognize that the origins of the term "redskin" date to a period when Native Americans faced efforts to annihilate their culture.

"We were outlawed during that same period the mascot was created from practicing our own religion and our own cultures," she said. "That term is associated with getting rid of the Indians."
Snyder has called the team name and mascot a "badge of honor." The name dates to the team's first years in Boston in the 1930s, and has survived numerous outside efforts to change it. The team has been in the Washington, D.C., area since 1937.

Tony Wyllie, Redskins senior vice president said there was no truth to suggestions that the Code Talkers were used to bolster the team's resistance to a new name.
"They're American heroes, and they deserved recognition," he said.
Also attending Monday's game were Code Talker president Peter MacDonald Sr., George Willie Sr. and George James Sr.

The Navajo Code Talkers used codes derived from their native language to shield military communications from interception by Japanese troops. Hawthorne said there are now about 30 surviving Code Talkers.

The trip to Washington was the second this month for Hawthorne, who last week joined other Code Talkers to receive Congressional Gold Medals for the role they played in World War I and World War II.

The Navajo are perhaps the best known of the Code Talkers, but the Defense Department says the program began in 1918 and at its peak included more than 400 Native Americans who used 33 dialects to make their codes indecipherable. 


The American Indians have always been considered by the white settlers to be a foe to be feared, thus their being named as a mascot for a sports team to show their prowess. The term “Redskin” is the biggest problem, since in the West it was a derogatory term which arose in the time of the “trail of tears” when many Indians were killed and the reservations were set up.

I am happy to say that, as the story goes, there is a Cherokee Indian on my father's side of the family. I have never been DNA tested, so I don't have proof of the statement. I honor the American Indians as they live among the whites today, “fitting in,” while maintaining some memories of their tribal cultures and languages. The whites didn't win, if their goal was to exterminate them.

As for changing the name of the sports team, I don't have strong feelings about it. I understand the desire to prevent further abuse of the Indians by changing the name. I would think the Redskins would willingly make the change. They will still be a good football team no matter what they are called.





Australian police find 328 guns, 4.2 tons of ammo at farm --NBC

By Alexander Smith,
November 29, 2013

A father and his two sons have been arrested in Australia after police found a $3 million arsenal of more than 300 guns and 4.2 tons of ammunition at their farm, police said Thursday.

The men, aged 69, 46 and 42, were charged with possessing restricted firearms after police found the weapons stockpile stashed in sheds at their property in Monto, Queensland.
A selection of the firearms from a huge stockpile of 328 guns and 4.2 tons of ammo recovered by police in Queensland, Australia.

Among the 328 weapons were military-style automatic rifles, some of which were worth up to $50,000 each, and Glock handguns worth $10,000, police said.
“This is certainly one of the largest hauls of firearms, ammunition and weapons we have uncovered,” said Detective Superintendent Jon Wacker of the Queensland Police. “These firearms are very disturbing.”

The men, who have not been named, were licensed to have 71 weapons. But most of the stockpile was illegal, modified or converted in some way, Wacker said.
As well as the Glock handguns, the haul contained military-style guns such as AK-47s, MP5 sub-machine guns and rifles featuring telescopic lenses.

An audit of the men's weapons was carried out sometime in the past two months, in accordance with Australian firearms law, but police would not say if that led to the raid.

Wacker told a news conference Thursday that it appeared the men were "holding" many of the weapons for other people. "[The firearms] will be matched with a national database to see if any of the firearms have been used in other offenses," he added.
"Our fear is that these firearms are high-caliber firearms that if they got into the wrong hands they could certainly be used in a nasty way."
The three men charged are due to appear in front of magistrates next month.


$50,000 for a rifle and $10,000 for a Glock, 328 weapons – these men were clearly set to make a fortune. So many people are in love with guns in the US that they want weapons that they have no practical use for. You don't hunt with a military rifle. Maybe these guns were being held for paramilitary groups in foreign countries, or drug king-pins. The whole turn of mind makes me angry. The only purpose for guns like that is to kill people. Yet the gun lobby members talk in such high flown terms about the right to bear arms. All of our rights in this country have some limitations, as they should.




Presidential turkey pardons, not as long a history as you might think – NBC

By Domenico Montanaro, Deputy Political Editor
November 29, 2013

The annual ceremony of the presidential turkey pardon is so ingrained in the American Thanksgiving tradition that it might seem as old as the holiday itself. But the ritual of White House clemency for a pair of lucky fowl is actually relatively recent.
President Barack Obama will officially pardon "Popcorn" and "Caramel" this week at the White House.

President Harry Truman is often cited, incorrectly, as the first president to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey.
(Just Google first president to pardon a turkey and see how many amateur-website Truman answers you get.)

Adding to the confusion, President Bill Clinton attributed the first Thanksgiving-related poultry acquittal to Truman during his own pardoning session in 1997.
But the Truman Library wrote in 2003: "The Library's staff has found no documents, speeches, newspaper clippings, photographs, or other contemporary records in our holdings which refer to Truman pardoning a turkey that he received as a gift in 1947, or at any other time during his Presidency."

Slideshow: A look back at presidential turkey pardons
In fact, Truman was fairly blunt about the fact that the tasty birds that came to the White House weren’t exactly headed toward blissful retirement after a high-profile political absolution.

"Truman sometimes indicated to reporters that the turkeys he received were destined for the family dinner table," the library wrote.

It appears that Abraham Lincoln, in a way, was the first to spare a turkey. But it wasn't a Thanksgiving turkey. It was a turkey his son adopted as a pet during the Christmas season, which is apparently the kind of thing kids did in the mid-1800s.
"[T]he tradition actually began 83 years earlier when President Lincoln received a turkey for Christmas holiday,” Clinton said during that same 1997 speech. “His son, Tad, grew so attached to the turkey that he named him 'Jack,' and President Lincoln had no choice but to give Jack the full run of the White House."

President George W. Bush made reference to the same story in his “pardoning” ceremony in 2001.
So which president was the first to actually pardon a Thanksgiving turkey?
President John F. Kennedy reaches out to touch a 40-pound turkey presented to him Nov. 19, 1963, at the White House.

It appears it was John F. Kennedy in 1963. An NBC News archive search found a Los Angeles Times article dated Nov. 20, 1963 with the headline, "Turkey gets presidential pardon."
And that turkey was a monster. The paper described it as a "55-pound broad white tom."
Despite a sign hanging around the bird's neck that read, "Good eating, Mr. President," Kennedy took a look down at the "frightened, panting bird" and said, "We'll just let this one grow."

One more – albeit morbid – note about these pardoned birds. They're bred to be eaten, and they only live an average of two years after the leave the White House.
On that appetizing note, enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner!


This is one of the best of our American traditions. It gives the president a lighthearted moment no matter what his problems at the time, and it does remind us that even animals bred to be eaten have a life. The presidents always look like they are enjoying meeting the turkey and they usually stroke his feathers. It's good to have some fun.



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Tax Break For Mass-Transit Commutes May Soon Be Slashed – NPR
by David Welna
November 29, 2013
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Unless Congress acts quickly, taking mass transit to work is about to get more expensive for some people.
For the past four years, public transportation users and people who drive their cars to work and pay for parking have been able set aside up to $245 a month in wages tax free if they're used for commuting costs or workplace parking.

The transit tax break expires at the end of the year. So starting Jan. 1, the benefit for riders will be cut nearly in half — to $130 a month. Drivers, on the other hand, will get a slightly bigger break as their parking benefit rises to $250.

"It doesn't make sense at all, the fact that you get a bigger tax break for driving your car than riding a train," says Dan Smith, who lobbies Congress on tax issues for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. He says many commuters don't realize that the parity for transit and parking tax breaks vanishes in the new year. But they soon will.

Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who rides his bike to work, is sounding the alarm.
"We've heard lots of talk about fiscal cliffs, a dairy cliff, but at the end of the year, we are facing a transit commuter cliff," he says.

Blumenauer has rounded up five House Republicans and 44 fellow Democrats to co-sponsor legislation that would keep the parking subsidy, which by law is automatically renewed, equal to the transit subsidy, which requires congressional approval every year:
"You might tilt it the other way and provide greater benefit for people who are having less impact on the planet," he says. "But the fact is, this is embedded, ingrained and accepted, so we want to at least just have transit parity for the full range of commuter options."

Indeed, eliminating or even reducing the parking subsidy is a bipartisan non-starter in Congress.
"My own view is there are some people — many people — who don't have the luxury of being able to take transit," says Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The California Democrat defends the tax break for people who drive to work:
"I don't agree that you should put one group against the other," she says. "I think we should encourage fuel-efficient cars, and if someone really needs their car for work, I don't have a problem with saying, you know what, there's enough expense here, we can make sure that this isn't exorbitant for you."

That's unfortunate, says Elyse Lowe. She's one of Boxer's constituents as well as the executive director of Move San Diego, a group advocating smart growth in that city. For Lowe, it makes sense to subsidize public transit users, not drivers:
"This is at the heart of getting people to change their travel behaviors through economic incentives," she says, "and typically people don't actually look at their own personal behavior until there's some sort of economic reason to do so."

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse agrees. He's skeptical, though, that Congress can act in time to keep the transit break on par with the parking subsidy.
"What certainly doesn't make sense is to favor that over using public transportation. But given the general level of blockade of anything and everything by our Republican friends around here, I can't promise that we'll get to that."
Making parity between transit and parking subsidies — one more casualty of congressional gridlock.


They need to amend that law so that it doesn't have to be renewed every year. It is a good incentive to those who can commute by train or bus to do so, and therefore save CO2 emissions. When I lived in Washington DC I didn't keep a car – as a result I not only was more physically fit, I was contributing to the national good. It took longer to get home, but I didn't have to look around everywhere I went for parking spots.



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Book News: 1640 Psalm Book Nets $14.2 Million At Auction – NPR
by Annalisa Quinn
November 29, 2013
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A 1640 book of psalms translated from Hebrew sold for a record breaking $14.16 million at auction on Tuesday. Known as the Bay Psalm Book, it is the first book published in English in what is now the U.S. There are only 10 other known copies. The buyer was David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group, who says he plans to loan the book out to museums.

The Rev. Nancy Taylor of the Boston church that sold the book, explained the decision to sell it in a press release last year: "We want to take this old hymn book from which we literally sang our praises to God and convert it into doing God's ministry in the world today." The preface to the book — which can be viewed online — describes it as "a plaine and familiar translation of the psalms and words of David into english metre." The translators wrote that they did not "smooth our verses with the sweetnes of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather then Elegance, fidelity rather then poetry in translating the hebrew words into english language, and Davids poetry into english meetre that soe wee may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his owne will."

Cheryl Strayed, Wally Lamb, Dave Berry, Sherman Alexie, James Patterson and hundreds of other authors will volunteer as booksellers this Saturday, known as "Small Business Saturday." In an open letter published in September, Alexie asked other "book nerds" to volunteer, writing that "now is the time to be a superhero for independent bookstores."

Publisher's Weekly has named Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, together with the ABA's board, its "Person of the Year." Publisher's Weekly praised the ABA "for their role in leading the resurgence of independent bookselling."


Bay Psalm Book
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The early residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them several books of psalms: the Ainsworth Psalter (1612), compiled by Henry Ainsworth for use by Puritan "separatists" in Holland; the Ravenscroft Psalter (1621); and the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter (1562, of which there were several editions). Evidently they were dissatisfied with the translations from Hebrew in these several psalters and wished for some that were closer to the original. They hired "thirty pious and learned Ministers", including Richard Mather and John Eliot, to undertake a new translation, which they presented here.[4] The tunes to be sung to the new translations were the familiar ones from their existing psalters.

The first printing was the third product of the Stephen Day (sometimes spelled Daye) press, and consisted of a 148 small quarto leaves, including a 12-page preface, "The Psalmes in Metre", "An Admonition to the Reader", and an extensive list of errata headed "Faults escaped in printing". As with subsequent editions of the book, Day printed the book for sale by the first bookseller in British America, Hezekiah Usher, whose shop at that time was also located in Cambridge.[5] An estimated 1,700 copies of the first edition were printed.[6]

The third edition (1651) was extensively revised by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon. The revision was entitled The Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs of the Old and New Testament, faithfully translated into English meetre. This revision was the basis for all subsequent editions, and was popularly known as the New England Psalter or New England Version. The ninth edition (1698), the first to contain music, included 13 tunes from John Playford's A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London, 1654).[7]


$14.16 million is an amazing price for any book. It will be lent to museums for display, according to this article. That was a very generous act by the buyer Rubenstein, making it available to the public and I assume to scholars as well. In downtown Jacksonville there is a museum which houses only important manuscripts. I have never been there. I should get together with a friend and go see the exhibits.




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Yes, Your Toddler Really Is Smarter Than A 5-Year-Old – NPR
by Nancy Shute
November 29, 2013
­ Parents, does your 18-month-old seem wise beyond her years? Science says you're not fooling yourself.
Very small children can reason abstractly, researchers say, and are able to infer the relationships between objects that elude older children who get caught up on the concreteness of things.

In experiments at the University of California, Berkeley, children as young as 18 months were able to figure out the relationship between colored blocks.
The child would watch a researcher put two blocks on top of a box. If the blocks were identical, the box would play music. The majority of children were able to figure out the pattern after they were shown it just three times. They would then help the researcher pick the correct block.

The toddlers did much better at this task than do chimpanzees and other primates. The non-human primates have to practice doing the task themselves thousands of times to figure it out. And even then, it's only with lots of treats thrown in.
That's not such a big surprise. What really got the researchers' attention is that the diaper set did better at this sort of abstract thinking than children who were just a few years older.

What Do Babies Think?
"Older kids tend to be really bad at analogies," says Caren Walker, a graduate student at in cognitive development who led the study. It was published online in the journal Psychological Science. She says that older children tend to focus on the objects rather than the relationships between them. "Learning may actually harm these kids' abilities to do abstract reasoning."

Walker is working in the lab of Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist who has made a career out of devising experiments that reveal the inner thoughts of children still too young to talk. Her take is that babies are smart, and in many ways smarter than adults.

In this experiment, the box actually hides a wireless doorbell, and the researcher moving the blocks controls the music by tapping a hidden button with her foot. But the illusion of control is compelling, not just for the toddlers but for the parents who watch the experiment with their children, Walker says.

The researchers tested their hypothesis by running the same experiment but letting the children see only one of the pair of blocks. They couldn't get the right answer more often than they would by chance. By contrast, 61 percent of the children got it right when they could see the blocks.

And in a third variation, almost 80 percent were able to correctly deduce that they needed to choose sets of blocks that included pairs if they were going to do the experiment.

"Even as incredibly young children, 18-month-olds are extremely powerful little learning machines," Walker told Shots.
Walker and Gopnik are repeating the same experiment with older children, to see if they do indeed lose this very early ability to think abstractly, only to regain it later in the context of language and culture.


It's clear that parents should be more careful what they do and say in front of their 18 month old children. Hearing frequent fights between the parents or receiving harsh punishments could have a lasting effect. Why the love bonds fail to form between some parents and their children, or what causes some babies to become very timid, could be explained by this.

I wish the article covered some of the results of this period of high intelligence.
At this age babies are learning to talk in sentences and becoming more independent from their parents, also. They need to receive some discipline to avoid becoming little tyrants, but it needs to be gentle. They are the cutest at this age because they are still very young, but very responsive to interaction with others.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day



Cubans to be allowed to charge visitors for using home telephones – NBC

HAVANA - Cubans have a new private enterprise opportunity — acting as "telecommunications agents" by essentially turning their homes into phone booths and charging neighbors by the minute to use their telephones.
The Labor Ministry rule announced Tuesday also says the "agents" will be able to offer Internet access at some point in the future.

Cuba has some 1.2 million fixed phone lines and 1.8 million cellphones for a population of around 11 million. Many domestic land lines are not equipped for making long-distance and international calls, though they can receive them.
The "agents" will have to charge the same as what state telecom monopoly Etecsa charges customers, with the company paying them a commission. International rates in Cuba can run as high as several dollars a minute.

The measure also authorizes the contractors to sell prepaid cellphone cards, collect phone bill payments and even offer Internet.
A woman sells paper and spools of thread at her private stall at the entrance of her home in Havana last month. About 200 areas of independent economic activity now allowed under President Raul Castro's reforms.

As with a number of the 200 or so areas of independent economic activity now allowed under President Raul Castro's reforms, the resolution seems geared toward regulating and taxing activities that are already common in the informal economy.
Cubans with long-distance lines already let neighbors use their phones for a fee, and there's also a black market for the sale of dial-up Internet minutes.

According to government figures, only 2.9 percent of Cubans say they have access to the full Web, though the real figure is believed to be higher accounting for the black market. More Cubans do have access to a domestic Intranet where they can browse homegrown websites and send and receive email.

Home Internet accounts are still closely restricted, though authorities have said they intend to begin offering them to the wider public next year.
Recently, authorities opened more than 200 public cyber-cafes across the island that charge about $4.50 an hour.


I wonder who the people are, or rather what their status is, who have home Internet already. What are the current restrictions? At any rate, they can now sell their services to the public in Cuba. I can see how that could be a popular business, as important as having Internet is in the US today. Long distance telephone service, also, is something we take for granted here, and prize highly. I wonder how lucrative these businesses are. It's a step forward for Cuba, apparently – I didn't realize how controlled the lives of the people in Cuba have been. This article is an eye-opener.





Full speed ahead for connected cars, but are they going the wrong way? – NBC

By M. Alex Johnson

Mitsubishi's EMIRAI concept car includes a touchscreen where a driver is supposed to write commands.
Why is it, Tarun Bhatnagar was wondering, that the "beautiful screen in the instrument cluster of my rental car can't provide me with a connected and safer driving experience?"

Bhatnagar, Google's director of Maps for Business, was describing how he used his phone's navigation app to get to the Los Angeles Auto Show last week. For the whole drive, he said, he had to balance the phone on his lap.

"That needs to change," Bhatnagar said in a keynote address at the show, which prominently featured a pavilion devoted to car tech.
Finding ways for drivers to safely use their cherished electronics is big business: What's called the connected car industry is projected to grow at a rate of 35 percent through 2019, to $132 billion, Transparency Market Research, an international market analytics firm, calculated last month.

The idea is to keep drivers' hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. But safety experts insist that's beside the point — your brain simply isn't built to concentrate on two (or more) activities at once, so it's impossible to make electronics safe to use behind the wheel, no matter how much money and technology you throw at it.

"All this creates a dilemma for automakers," acknowledged Derek Kuhn, vice president of QNX Software, which makes an operating system used in many of the leading car systems. "How do they place a bet on the future?"

The challenge, according to Kuhn, is to develop "a balanced environment where smartphones bring apps into the car, consumers enjoy the integration they desire, and automakers deliver a consistent, branded experience."

Scores of companies are spending a lot of money to meet that challenge:
• Ford Motor Co.'s Sync technology — which lets drivers make calls, play music, get directions and even send and receive texts, all by voice — will be available in more than 90 percent of Ford's 2014 vehicles, the company said at the L.A. Auto Show, where Jim Farley, the company's global vice president for marketing, called your car "the ultimate mobile device."

• General Motors Co.'s OnStar embedded system, which does many of the same things, will connect with your smartphone so you can run apps by voice at the wheel.
• Apple Inc. is already putting "eyes-free" versions of Siri and iTunes in some cars, designed to let drivers control them with buttons on the steering wheel. But Apple has far grander plans — it hopes to turn your car into a full four-wheeled Apple computer by embedding iOS 7 beginning next year.

Other in-the-works or planned technologies could turn your car into something out of "The Matrix" or "Minority Report":

• A startup called The NeXt Co. is raising money to produce Heads UP — which wirelessly projects your smartphone's screen onto your windshield, where you can use it by voice and gestures:
• Mitsubishi Electric is already on the second generation of its EMIRAI concept car, which senses your surroundings and biometrics and can pop up any of 18 function buttons on the steering wheel as it determines you need them. It even includes an armrest touch screen where you're supposed to write out commands with your finger.
• Government-funded researchers at Germany's Free University of Berlin are working on the "BrainDriver" — a soft head covering that reads your brain waves and translates them into driving commands. It's still in the demonstration phase; unfortunately, in road tests there's still "a slight delay between the intended command and the actual reaction of the car," the researchers say.

German researchers are working on a sensor array you wear on your head so the car can read your brain waves.
It's exciting stuff, but skeptics point to more than a decade of research that establishes that dividing your concentration on anything but the task of driving creates too much competition for mental processing.

This is true not just when you take eyes off the road to deal with a beeping, brightly lighted screen, they argue, but even when you listen to information without diverting your gaze. That means wearable tech like BrainDriver and Google Glass likely won't solve things.

Researchers call it "inattention blindness": You may be looking where you're going, but you don't really see it because your brain is crunching different data. That's true for simply listening to the radio, which can delay your reaction time by a half-second, researchers at the University of Utah concluded in June in a report for AAA's Foundation for Traffic Safety (.pdf).

(Half a second might seem trivial, but "a fraction-of-a-second delay would make the car travel several additional car lengths," the congressionally chartered National Safety Council found in a 2010 survey of data on distracted driving (.pdf). "When a driver needs to react immediately, there is no margin for error.")

Talking on the phone hands-free and using devices through speech recognition further lengthen that delay, the Utah report found. What makes the new data especially alarming is that the study controlled for manual distraction; that is, all of the tests specifically recorded tasks that drivers could perform without taking their hands off the wheel.

"This clearly suggests that the adoption of voice-based systems in the vehicle may have unintended consequences that adversely affect traffic safety," the report concluded.
Research like that is why the National Transportation Safety Board is pushing Congress and state legislatures to ban all drivers from using electronics, including phones — even if they use hands-free technology.

If anything, said Robert Rosenberger, an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, whizbang tech like iOS in the car and BrainDriver makes things worse because "it encourages people not to be cautious."
Video: In the first in-depth study of drivers’ brain activity as they attempt to multi-task, researchers found the more our minds are preoccupied, the more distracted our driving. NBC’s Tom Costello reports.

"They send the wrong message to drivers," Rosenberger told NBC News. "It implies to drivers that these things are safe."
David L. Strayer of the University of Utah, a lead researcher on the AAA study, put it more simply

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it," he said.


I vote for precluding the installation of these devices in cars, especially anything with a screen, or the device that you activate by “writing with your finger” while driving. I am guilty of only one distraction when I drive, but I don't find that it keeps me from driving safely – I keep my car radio tuned to NPR, which on my station in Jacksonville is almost all talk shows and news. It's low key and gives me something to think about besides the mammoth truck that is bearing down on me from behind. I find it keeps me from giving in to nerousness about driving, which is even more distracting than any radio program.

This story is about our increasing addiction to our electronic gadgets, which in this case are truly damaging. I hope Congress doesn't allow them to be installed in cars.






Warming oceans, not air, may be critical to melting ice sheets – NBC
Tia Ghose LiveScience

In the last 10,000 years, the Greenland Ice Sheet shrank to its smallest size around 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, when ocean temperatures were also quite high, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Nov. 22 in the journal Geology, suggests that ocean temperatures, not atmospheric temperatures, could be a critical factor in melting ice sheets in current global warming scenarios. Understanding the reaction ice sheets like the ones covering Greenland and Antarctica will have to climate change is important because the melting ice could contribute significantly to rising sea levels.
"We're particularly concerned about what the ice sheets are going to do, because when they melt, sea levels rise," said study co-author Jason Briner, a geologist at the University at Buffalo. [Image Gallery: Greenland's Melting Glaciers]

Current and past warming
One way to make predictions about the current warming period is to see how warming trends in the past affected the ice sheet, and the rivers of ice called glaciers that make them up.

As glaciers grow, they shove piles of debris and rubble aside, like giant bulldozers, forming rocky regions called moraines. Because moraines form only when glaciers get bigger, figuring out when moraines formed can provide clues to the ice sheet's size in the past.

In Greenland at some point in the last 10,000 years, the advancing ice sheet ploughed through several ocean basins, leaving piles of marine sediments and fossils such as clamshells in their wake. Briner and his team collected those fossils near the edges of the Greenland Ice Sheet. When organisms are alive, all the amino acids, or protein building blocks, in their body are left-handed, but after they die, the amino acids gradually flip to the mirror right-handed orientation. So in theory, the rate at which these proteins flip orientation can be used to figure out when the animals died.
To figure out that rate, the team dated some of the marine fossils using a technique involving carbon isotopes, or elements of carbon with different numbers of neutrons. Separately, they measured how many of the amino acids in the marine fossils had switched orientation.

By correlating the two, the team was able to date the marine fossils and determine that most of the moraines were formed — and the glaciers advancing — about 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.

Ocean temperatures
That suggests the ice sheet had reached its smallest point just before this time period, because there was more debris to push around as the glaciers grew.
Other climactic data has found that air at that time wasn't that warm, but ocean temperatures were quite high.

"We think about global warming and how the atmosphere is warming up — that it's like putting an ice cube in an oven," Briner told LiveScience. "But what happens if you drop an ice cube not in an oven, but in a warm bath?"
The new findings suggest that the warm bath may be most critical for melting ice sheets, by melting the glaciers at the edges of the ice sheet that are submerged in warm ocean waters.

"It's warm ocean water that can actually melt the snouts of these marine glaciers," Briner said.  


This article doesn't say why the oceans are warming. I was unable to find an article on the Internet which told why it is happening except for one which mentioned an increase in El Nino events. One did state that the colder depths tend to moderate rises in surface temperature, which is a cause for hope about the warming of the surface. I presume the surface of the ocean simply warms up as the atmosphere does. That is basically what this National Geographic article says. See below:

http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-sea-temperature-rise/

As climate change has warmed the Earth, oceans have responded more slowly than land environments. But scientific research is finding that marine ecosystems can be far more sensitive to even the most modest temperature change.

Global warming caused by human activities that emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide has raised the average global temperature by about 1°F (0.6°C) over the past century. In the oceans, this change has only been about 0.18°F (0.1°C). This warming has occurred from the surface to a depth of about 2,300 feet (700 meters), where most marine life thrives.

When water heats up, it expands. Thus, the most readily apparent consequence of higher sea temperatures is a rapid rise in sea level. Sea level rise causes inundation of coastal habitats for humans as well as plants and animals, shoreline erosion, and more powerful storm surges that can devastate low-lying areas.

Stronger Storms

Many weather experts say we are already seeing the effects of higher ocean temperatures in the form of stronger and more frequent tropical storms and hurricanes/cyclones. Warmer surface water dissipates more readily into vapor, making it easier for small ocean storms to escalate into larger, more powerful systems.
Warmer seas also lead to melting from below of polar ice shelves, compromising their structural integrity and leading to spectacular shelf collapses. Scientists also worry that warmer water could interrupt the so-called ocean conveyor belt, the system of global currents that is largely responsible for regulating Earth's temperature. Its collapse could trigger catastrophically rapid climate changes.

Will It Continue?

The only way to reduce ocean temperatures is to dramatically reign in our emission of greenhouse gases. However, even if we immediately dropped carbon dioxide emissions to zero, the gases we've already released would take decades or longer to dissipate.



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Israel Dreams Of A Future As An Oil Producer – NPR
by Emily Harris
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There's an old joke that if Moses had turned right when he led Jewish tribes out of Egypt, Israel might be where Saudi Arabia is today — and be rich from oil. Consultant Amit Mor of Eco Energy says that joke is out of date.

"Israel has more oil than Saudi Arabia," he claims. "And it's not a joke."
But that oil will be difficult to reach, if it can be recovered at all. The oil he's talking about is not yet liquid but is trapped in rocks underground.
"Maybe, if technology will be proved viable, Israel can meet all of its needs from domestic production of oil," Mor says.

That is precisely the dream of Israel Energy Initiatives, an Israeli company backed by major U.S. investors.
"The motivation of our investors starts with the energy independence for Israel," says Relik Shafir, its CEO.

He explains that extracting the oil would be a long, slow process. The technology involves placing electric heaters in an 8-inch pipe about 1,000 feet below the ground.
"Through a slow heating process that may take two to three years, it turns the organic part of the rock into gases and liquids," Shafir says.
Commercial production is at least a decade away, and the hurdles aren't just technical. They are environmental and political as well.

Surrounded By History
A windy perch in a nature park south of Jerusalem gives a good view of the spot where a pilot project would go. It's next to farmland and a two-lane road. The road crosses the dry riverbed where David, in the biblical story, is said to have found the stone he used to kill the giant Goliath.

­ Sigal Sprukt, an environmental activist and local resident, looks over a valley that is believed to have oil. Israel Energy Initiatives, an energy company, is planning a pilot project to extract oil from shale in a slow heating method. But Sprukt says this "area is one of the last areas that are not ruined by cities."

Religious pilgrims are regular visitors here. On this day, a busload of Christians from Africa and another from the U.S. stop by. Local resident Sigal Sprukt worries that even a slow-paced oil industry would change the nature of this place.
"The area is one of the last areas that are not ruined by cities," Sprukt says. "The history of the Jewish people is all around here."

She says the gas discoveries off Israel's coast have already made Israelis feel more secure about meeting the country's energy needs.
"Right now, we don't need this oil," she says. "When we finish the gas, and you have the technology, a good technology, come back and do it here."

There are an estimated 400 billion barrels of oil trapped in rocks here. That's enough to cover Israel's current oil consumption for centuries. Meanwhile, a much smaller field of conventional oil is ramping up production.

Workers recently moved gigantic steel pipes in place for Givot Olam's sixth well. The publicly traded company has "proven and probable" reserves of 12.5 million barrels of oil. CEO Tovia Luskin expects to drill 40 wells eventually, plus build a pipeline to a refinery on the coast. Luskin is a Hasidic Jew, originally from Russia. He chose where to drill based on a passage from the Bible.

"After the first well, we had signs we could not walk away from," Luskin says. "We had a liter of oil, then we had a few barrels of oil, then we had a bit more barrels of oil. Now we're in production."

But Luskin is facing local opposition, too: Palestinian opposition. The land he's drilling is right up against the Israeli-built security barrier in and around the West Bank. Israeli officials don't want to discuss whether the field continues to the Palestinian side. Luskin says flatly that it is Jewish land.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority says it is preparing tenders for oil exploration in the West Bank.


I hope this land isn't on the Palestinian side – Israel claims parts of their land already. This may be one more problem between the two peoples. Other than that, this is a good thing. Our important international ally Israel will be richer now, and I expect so will we.



­
'The Knockout Game': An Old Phenomenon With Fresh Branding – NPR
by Gene Demby

This still from a video of an alleged "knockout game" assault has been played over and over on news reports on the supposed trend.
There are a few variations, but this is generally how "the knockout game" works: A teenager, or a bunch of teenagers, bored and looking for something to get into, spies some unsuspecting mark on the street. They size up the person, then walk up close to their target and — BLAM — punch him or her as hard as possible in an effort to knock the person out. The most brazen perpetrators even post the videos on sites like YouTube and Vine.

There are reports about "the knockout game" popping up all over the news. In St. Louis. In Hoboken, N.J. Brooklyn. Lansing, Mich.
In several instances, these attacks have been fatal. And they can be deeply and understandably traumatizing to victims.

Part of what unnerves people about this phenomenon is that it's described as a "game," a pastime of bored, delinquent young people. As Jamelle Bouie writes at The Daily Beast, "It's as if we're living in A Clockwork Orange, with our cities under siege by violent young men."

In a story in the Riverfront Times, a few young people said they'd participated in "knockout king" — one of the its various names — and said it was a pretty well-known activity in their neighborhood. (It's worth noting that this story is from two years ago. More on that in a second.)

Framing it as a game gives it a hook for the news media, but we already have a name for this type of thing: It's a random street assault, a terrible phenomenon, but not a new one. And the language that kids and the news media have latched onto makes it sound both sinister and casual. It dramatizes the behavior, perversely elevating it above the senseless street violence that happens every day and has happened for decades. (There were more than 750,000 assaults in 2011, according to the FBI.)
As Chris Ferguson, a psychologist who specializes in youth and violence, told the Riverfront Times, "For some reason everything involving teens gets called a game, no matter how little play behavior has to do with the motives."

There are plenty of good reasons to refer to this phenomenon simply as assault. For starters, the knockout game is pretty hard to distinguish, in cause and effect, from random attacks, according to the New York Times: "Police officials in several cities where such attacks have been reported said that the 'game' amounted to little more than an urban myth, and that the attacks in question might be nothing more than the sort of random assaults that have always occurred."

And officials in both the New York Times and the Riverfront Times stories pushed back hard on framing this activity as a game. "A kid arrested for assault may tell authorities it was a game because he doesn't want to tell anyone what the fight was really about," one St. Louis city official told the Riverfront Times.

And again, in the NYT:
[Officials] cautioned that they had yet to see evidence of an organized game spreading among teenagers online, though they have been reluctant to rule out the possibility.

There is particular concern within the department that widespread coverage could create the atmosphere where such a "game" could take hold in New York.
The name of the "game" itself isn't very precise. In recent years, "knockout" has also been used to refer to a game in which a bunch of kids try to make themselves pass out.

Every few years, the "trend" of bored delinquents assaulting random strangers gets some new designation. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was "wilding." In the mid-aughts in the the U.K., it was "happy-slapping." In recent years, the news media in my hometown, Philadelphia, was filled with stories of "flash mobs." (Every report on knockout gives it a different name, too: "point 'em out, knock 'em out," "one-hitter quitter," "knockout king.")

In a few of these incarnations, as in this most recent one, there are racial dimensions to the phenomenon. The current "knockout game," "wilding" and "flash mobs" all ostensibly involve young black kids inflicting violence on arbitrary white folks because of their race. In fact, one of the knockout game's other alleged names is more gruesomely racialized: "polar bear hunting." And with this, too, we already have some terminology: An attack on someone because of his or her race is a "hate crime." (Indeed, one of the people indicted in an alleged incident of the knockout game was charged with a hate crime.)

The first reference we could find to "the knockout game" goes back to 1992, when the Boston Globe reported on a case in East Cambridge, Mass., in which several young men fatally stabbed an MIT student after playing "knockout." None of the principals in that story was black.

But treating the knockout game as a separate phenomenon from street assaults also posits it as an altogether new thing that's on the rise. It isn't.
Ferguson told us that violent crime, and violent crime by young folks in particular, is down. Way down. The rate of violent crime among young people has fallen by nearly two-thirds over the past two decades. "We are seeing a massive decline in our country — of course, being the U.S., we had the furthest to fall compared to other countries," Ferguson said. "There's been a remarkable decline of violence, rape — [even] bullying, as much as it gets attention."

Ferguson went on: "Youth today are about as well-behaved as we have on record," he says. (He said that violent crime committed by people over the age of 50 has fallen less dramatically.)

Ferguson said that giving crimes names — here "the knockout game" — also helps gives them narratives. And once we have those categories, we begin to apply that label to any instance that fits the pattern. Ferguson said that now random assaults are being retroactively tagged as examples of the knockout game.
"If the narrative didn't exist, then people wouldn't be thinking along those lines," Ferguson said.

Indeed, as several observers have pointed out, many of the videos and cases being discussed in the current furor over the knockout game are over a year old. That Riverfront Times story we linked to above is from 2011. So if this is a new trend, it's been a "new trend" for quite a while now.

The way we frame this type of incident deeply influences how we process this type of incident. So if these assaults aren't new, and we already have language for them, and the incidents happen with relative infrequency over large swaths of time and space, is there any value in calling it "the knockout game"?


The good news in this article is that violent crime is less common now. This “game” is just another sign that the youths involved are more hardened than their age would tend to indicate. It goes beyond fighting over some disagreement about a girl. I wonder if severe penalties are being meted out by the courts – they should be. Random extreme violence for the fun of it or because of racial hatred should be cause for a prison term, without lenience due to their ages. Of course, that's just my opinion, but I do generally think that teenaged violence should be punished at the adult level.



­ The Horse Who Picked Up A Paintbrush – NPR
by Frank Deford
­ This is a Thanksgiving story about a horse. Actually, a horse artist. I don't mean an artist who paints horses, like Degas or Remington, but a horse who paints — and thereby also raises money for less fortunate horses.
Really.

Metro Meteor was a well-bred thoroughbred, foaled in 2003, who specialized in sprints on the turf. He competed at the top tracks, like Belmont and Saratoga, earning just short of $300,000 in purses. He was born with a knee condition, however, and he needed surgery twice to remove bone chips. Each time he came back a winner.

But his knees did him in, and he ended up losing cheap races at a minor-league track named Penn National. At last, the track vet wouldn't let Metro Meteor back into the starting gate. Gelded, he couldn't stand at stud, and, like a lot of broken-down thoroughbreds, Metro Meteor could have simply ended up as horse meat.

Metro wields a paintbrush as owner Ron Krajewski looks on at Motters Station Stables in Rocky Ridge, Md.
Jeffrey B. Roth/Reuters/Landov

But Ron Krajewski, an artist who lives in Gettysburg, Pa., and his wife, Wendy, adopted him. Soon, though, the Krajewskis found that the horse's knees were so bad they couldn't even mount him to ride trails.
Worse, a vet told them that Metro Meteor's condition was terminal. He had two years, maybe.

But the Krajewskis so loved their horse. And when Ron noticed that Metro Meteor liked to bob his head up and down, Ron somehow decided that if he put a brush in the horse's mouth where a bit used to be, and put a canvas in front of him where a finish line used to be, Metro Meteor could, yes, paint.

And, incredibly, he did. Big, colorful brushstrokes. Soon, in fact, the horse was the best-selling artist in Gallery 30 in Gettysburg. With half the money from his paintings, the Krajewskis sought to find a way to save Metro Meteor's life.

­And a young vet, Dr. Kim Brokaw, worked up an experimental treatment that reversed the bone growth. The knees are still a problem, but, thankfully, Metro Meteor can at least walk the trails now and, after all, an artiste has to devote more time to his craft.

And the rest of the money that Metro Meteor makes painting? It goes to the New Vocations Racehorse Adoption Program, which helps retired thoroughbreds find homes and get new careers.

How many old horses can give thanks that an equine pal has donated almost $45,000 from the sale of his works to keep them alive and loved?
Now Metro Meteor has also signed a licensing agreement with Dream Green USA. The decorative pillows are my favorite. And, as Ron Krajewski says, his artist partner is "the unofficial spokeshorse for racehorse adoption."

So on Thursday, along with the turkey and stuffing, please pass Metro Meteor his favorite treats: oatmeal cookies and Twizzlers — yes, Twizzlers.


This is another happy story. Koko the gorilla and her “consort” Michael both paint and their paintings are up for sale. I even saw a video of an elephant painting a couple of years ago. I think animal brains are more similar to ours than we usually think, and for a good reason. One species has followed the others down the evolutionary line making changes in the original genetic makeup, not particularly with wildly differing mutations but with gradual smaller increments. Otherwise mice wouldn't make good substitutes for humans in laboratory testing. Much of the difference between us and the more intelligent animals is the fact that humans have flexible hands with an “opposable thumb,” and the proper vocal cords for talking and singing. I'm sure you've heard that before from anthropologists. I think it is true.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day


Independent Scotland would keep queen, pound and TV shows but create own military – NBC

By Alastair Jamieson, Staff writer, NBC News

Scotland will keep the United Kingdom's queen and currency but will create its own defense force and passports if the country votes for independence next year, the nationalist government pledged Tuesday.

A 600-page blueprint setting out detailed terms for Scotland’s possible separation from Britain was published by First Minister Alex Salmond.

It promises no overall tax increases and says the scrapping of nuclear defenses would help pay for policy pledges on welfare payments and public education.
The “Scotland’s Future” document [PDF link] aims to convince Scots they should vote to end a 306-year union with England in a referendum taking place on September 18, 2014.

“We, the people who live here, have the greatest stake in making Scotland a success,” it says in a preface. “With independence we can make Scotland the fairer and more successful country we all know it should be.”

The publication of the "white paper" will intensify a political campaign that has already begun over Scotland’s future.
With 10 months until the referendum vote, many of Scotland’s five million citizens remain undecided. The most recent opinion poll, published Sunday, suggests 38 percent are in favor of separation and 47 percent opposed, with 15 percent undecided.
Voters – including, for the first time, 16 and 17-year-olds - will be asked: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"

Scotland's Future - a blueprint for a better country is published today at http://t.co/exeim2ktXE #indyplan
— Scottish Government (@scotgov) November 26, 2013
If they vote "Yes," negotiations will begin immediately with the U.K. government, the Bank of England and a host of other cross-border institutions so that Scotland would become fully independent by March 24, 2016, the document says.
Scotland would be able remain a member of the European Union but would create its own publicly owned postal service and a Scottish Broadcasting Service to replace the BBC, the document adds.

However, it even promises voters that the new broadcaster would still air popular BBC television shows such as "EastEnders" and "Doctor Who." 
Britain's three main U.K.-wide political parties are opposed to independence, saying Scotland would suffer economically and on the political stage if it separated from London.

Pro-independence supporters wearing kilts pose for photographs during a rally in Edinburgh on September 21.
Among the most contentious issues are access to oil reserves in the North Sea, how Britain’s national debt would be split and what would happens to Britain’s Trident nuclear defense system, which is currently based on Scotland’s River Clyde.
In providing detailed answers to the big “what if” questions, Salmond hopes to frame the referendum campaign as a policy debate for Scottish voters rather than a question of the future of United Kingdom.

Scottish citizens would get their own passport, but there would be no border controls with England because Scotland would remain inside the existing U.K. common travel zone which also includes Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. However, new Scottish border controls would be needed to replace the international checkpoints operated by the U.K. Border Agency, the document says.

However, Alistair Darling, the Scottish lawmaker and former U.K. government minister who is leading the “Better Together” campaign for a “No” vote in September’s referendum, dismissed the document as “absolute nonsense.” He said many of the post-referendum actions could only take place with negotiation from cross-border institutions.

He added: "It ducks most of the important questions, including what would happen if Scotland had to renegotiate its position within the European Union."
At SNPs launch of White Paper for Independence. I have been given a badge which says "international media". That's jumping the gun isn't it?

— Chris Ship (@chrisshipitv) November 26, 2013
There was also laughter after Tuesday’s news conference in Glasgow when it emerged that London-based news outlets had been issued with “International” credentials.
"We are nothing if not far-seeing,” Salmond joked to reporters. 


This is the first I have heard of a divided UK. The issues Scotland is interested in – welfare payments and public education – make it sound like they are like our liberals here in the US. It is surprising that they are polling 16 and 17 year olds and calling them “voters.” Our teenagers can't vote. They also want to get rid of the nuclear defense program, which is based in Scotland. Finally, they want access to the oil reserves in the North Sea.

It sounds like they wouldn't disrupt the life of the Scottish people too much – giving them more control over daily life, but keeping their favorite BBC shows, alongside their own Scottish broadcasting company. I wonder if Scotland has enough economic resources to maintain itself independently. The history of this goes back to 1853, according to Wikipedia, with the current campaign by the Scottish National Party being launched on May 25, 2012. Sean Connery along with some other Scottish celebrities has come out in favor of independence.

I saw a charming movie about a little Scottish seashore village whose people were simple and poor, associated with an option for the oil drilling in the town. The movie was called “Local Hero.” The local hero was an old man who was refusing to sell his property to the oil company. Finally the oil company agrees to drill offshore and set up an oceanographic research facility at the town. That movie is the only picture I have of the Scottish people in modern times. I should get a book from the library about them.




US to Afghanistan's Karzai: Sign security deal or we'll pull out all troops next year – NBC

By Aarne Heikkila and Alastair Jamieson

KABUL, Afghanistan –The White House threatened to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan next year, after President Hamid Karzai refused to sign a new bilateral security agreement.

The two countries remain deadlocked over future military involvement after an unsuccessful working dinner between Ambassador Susan Rice and Karzai at his palace in Kabul on Monday night.

In a statement, the White House said Karzai had outlined new conditions for a deal “and indicated he is not prepared to sign the BSA promptly.”

“Ambassador Rice reiterated that, without a prompt signature, the U.S. would have no choice but to initiate planning for a post-2014 future in which there would be no U.S. or NATO troop presence in Afghanistan,” the statement said.

The dinner meeting came at the end of Rice’s three-day trip to Afghanistan to visit American troops and civilians and to assess conditions in the country.
On Sunday, a grand council of Afghan tribal leaders - the Loya Jirga – voted to accept the BSA, but Karzai has since indicated he may not sign it until Afghanistan has elected a new president in March. 

The White House statement added: “Ambassador Rice conveyed the overwhelming and moving support she found among all the Afghans with whom she met for an enduring U.S.-Afghan partnership and for the prompt signing of the BSA.

“In closing, Rice highlighted the American people's friendship and support for the people of Afghanistan as embodied in the extraordinary sacrifices of our service-men and women and the unprecedented investment Americans have made in Afghanistan.”
In Afghanistan, there are still 47,000 American forces. The U.S. has been in discussions with Afghan officials about keeping a small residual force of about 8,000 troops there after it winds down operations next year.

U.S. officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, have said the BSA must be signed by year-end to begin preparations for a post-2014 presence.

Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi said the Afghan leader laid out several conditions for his signature to the deal in the meeting, including a U.S. pledge to immediately halt all military raids on, or searches of, Afghan homes.

The agreement includes a provision allowing raids in exceptional circumstances - when an American life is directly under threat - but it would not take effect until 2015.

"It is vitally important that there is no more killing of Afghan civilians by U.S. forces and Afghans want to see this practically," Faizi said, according to Reuters.
Karzai also called on Washington to send remaining Afghan detainees at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back to Afghanistan, saying that the Loya Jirga had endorsed the pact with this condition.


I very much want to see the US close Guantanamo Bay, as Obama promised to do in his first term, and I think it is against a respectful treatment of the Afghans when we go into their homes, especially if there is no “exceptional circumstances.” That is one of the ways that innocent people have been killed by our soldiers. I hope we comply with those conditions – it is only fair.





Pope Francis attacks 'tyranny' of unfettered capitalism, 'idolatory of money' – NBC

By Naomi O'Leary, Reuters

Pope Francis called for renewal of the Roman Catholic Church and attacked unfettered capitalism as "a new tyranny," urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.
The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to an official platform for his papacy, building on views he has aired in sermons and remarks since he became the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years in March.

In it, Francis went further than previous comments criticizing the global economic system, attacking the "idolatry of money" and beseeching politicians to guarantee all citizens "dignified work, education and healthcare."

He also called on rich people to share their wealth. "Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills," Francis wrote in the document issued on Tuesday.

"How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses 2 points?"
The pope said renewal of the Church could not be put off and said the Vatican and its entrenched hierarchy "also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion."
"I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote.

In July, Francis finished an encyclical begun by Pope Benedict but he made clear that it was largely the work of his predecessor, who resigned in February.
Called "Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), the exhortation is presented in Francis' simple and warm preaching style, distinct from the more academic writings of former popes, and stresses the Church's central mission of preaching "the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ."

In it, he reiterated earlier statements that the Church cannot ordain women or accept abortion. The male-only priesthood, he said, "is not a question open to discussion" but women must have more influence in Church leadership.

A meditation on how to revitalize a Church suffering from encroaching secularization in Western countries, the exhortation echoed the missionary zeal more often heard from the evangelical Protestants who have won over many disaffected Catholics in the pope's native Latin America.

In it, economic inequality features as one of the issues Francis is most concerned about, and the 76-year-old pontiff calls for an overhaul of the financial system and warns that unequal distribution of wealth inevitably leads to violence.
"As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems," he wrote.

Denying this was simple populism, he called for action "beyond a simple welfare mentality" and added: "I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor."
Since his election, Francis has set an example for austerity in the Church, living in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the ornate Apostolic Palace, travelling in a Ford Focus, and last month suspending a bishop who spent millions of euros on his luxurious residence.

He chose to be called "Francis" after the medieval Italian saint of the same name famed for choosing a life of poverty.
Stressing cooperation among religions, Francis quoted the late Pope John Paul II's idea that the papacy might be reshaped to promote closer ties with other Christian churches and noted lessons Rome could learn from the Orthodox such as "synodality" or decentralized leadership.

He praised cooperation with Jews and Muslims and urged Islamic countries to guarantee their Christian minorities the same religious freedom as Muslims enjoy in the West.


"Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), is an attempt to return the Catholic Church to the teachings of Jesus. He speaks of the power structure of the church and a “decentralized leadership.” The document is an “exhortation,” not a mandate of change, but hopefully will affect Catholic public opinion. His recommendations are “liberal” rather than radical, not including the ordination of women or the acceptance of abortion. Still, if world societies were to follow the recommendations, the lives of the less powerful and wealthy people would be changed greatly for the better.






10,000-year-old house among amazing finds unearthed in Israel
Megan Gannon LiveScience


Video: A thousands-year-old settlement was accidentally discovered by workers widening a roadway in Estaol, Israel.
Archaeologists say they've uncovered some stunning finds while digging at a construction site in Israel, including stone axes, a "cultic" temple and traces of a 10,000-year-old house.

The discoveries provide a "broad picture" of human development over thousands of years, from the time when people first started settling in homes to the early days of urban planning, officials with the Israel Antiquities Authority said.
The excavation took place at Eshtaol, located about 15 miles (25 kilometers) west of Jerusalem, in preparation of the widening of an Israeli road. The oldest discovery at the site was a building from the eighth millennium B.C., during the Neolithic period. [See Photos of the Excavations at Eshtaol]

"This is the first time that such an ancient structure has been discovered in the Judean Shephelah," archaeologists with the IAA said, referring to the plains west of Jerusalem.
This image shows the 10,000-year-old house, the oldest dwelling to be unearthed to date in the Judean Shephelah.

The building seems to have undergone a number of renovations and represents a time when humans were first starting to live in permanent settlements rather than constantly migrating in search of food, the researchers said. Near this house, the team found a cluster of abandoned flint and limestone axes.

"Here we have evidence of man's transition to permanent dwellings and that in fact is the beginning of the domestication of animals and plants; instead of searching out wild sheep, ancient man started raising them near the house," the archaeologists said in a statement.

The excavators also say they found the remains of a possible "cultic" temple that's more than 6,000 years old. The researchers think this structure, built in the second half of the fifth millennium B.C., was used for ritual purposes, because it contains a heavy, 4-foot-tall (1.3 meters) standing stone that is smoothed on all six of its sides and was erected facing east.

"The large excavation affords us a broad picture of the progression and development of the society in the settlement throughout the ages," said Amir Golani, one of the excavation directors for the IAA. Golani added there is evidence at Eshtaol of the rural society making the transition to an urban one during the early Bronze Age, 5,000 years ago.

Archaeologists think this standing stone, which is worked on all of its sides, is evidence of cultic activity in the Chalcolithic period.

"We can see distinctly a settlement that gradually became planned, which included alleys and buildings that were extremely impressive from the standpoint of their size and the manner of their construction," Golani explained in a statement. "We can clearly trace the urban planning and see the guiding hand of the settlement's leadership that chose to regulate the construction in the crowded regions in the center of the settlement and allowed less planning along its periphery."
The buildings and artifacts were discovered ahead of the widening of Highway 38, which runs north-south through the city of Beit Shemesh.

Throughout Israel, construction projects often lead to new archaeological discoveries. For example, during recent expansions of Highway 1, the main road connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, excavators discovered 9,500-year-old animal figurines, a carving of a phallus from the Stone Age and a ritual building from the First Temple era.


Standing stones like the one mentioned here dating from the Neolithic are all over Europe and the UK. It doesn't seem likely that the same cult would have been in all those places, but the quarrying and transportation of large boulders to create monuments may have become popular, as the new ideas of neolithic life spread across Europe. It seems to have been a period of great wealth and cultural unity to have included such growth and city development. We have lost many civilizations and, I feel sure, much knowledge over the last 10,000 years. Maybe this site will yield many new relics and treasures, fleshing out the picture of human development.



Supreme Court will take up religious objection to Obamacare – CBS

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to referee another dispute over President Barack Obama's health care law, whether businesses can use religious objections to escape a requirement to cover birth control for employees.

The justices said they will take up an issue that has divided the lower courts in the face of roughly 40 lawsuits from for-profit companies asking to be spared from having to cover some or all forms of contraception.

The court will consider two cases. One involves Hobby Lobby Inc., an Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain with 13,000 full-time employees. Hobby Lobby won in the lower courts.

The other case is an appeal from Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a Pennsylvania company that employs 950 people in making wood cabinets. Lower courts rejected the company's claims.

The court said the cases will be combined for arguments, probably in late March. A decision should come by late June.
The cases center on a provision of the health care law that requires most employers that offer health insurance to their workers to provide a range of preventive health benefits, including contraception.

In both instances, the Christian families that own the companies say that insuring some forms of contraception violates their religious beliefs.
In a statement, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the White House does not comment on specifics of a case pending before the Court. However, he said the administration's policies are generally designed to ensure that health care decisions are made between a woman and her doctor.  

"The President believes that no one, including the government or for-profit corporations, should be able to dictate those decisions to women," he said. "The Administration has already acted to ensure no church or similar religious institution will be forced to provide contraception coverage and has made a commonsense accommodation for non-profit religious organizations that object to contraception on religious grounds.  These steps protect both women’s health and religious beliefs, and seek to ensure that women and families--not their bosses or corporate CEOs--can make personal health decisions based on their needs and their budgets."

The Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide full health care coverage for contraception, though the rule exempts houses of worship like churches or synagogues. The administration proposed a rule earlier this year, which said that non-profit religious organizations would have to ensure that enrollees of their health care plans get full contraception coverage, but they would not have to pay for it.

The key issue before the Supreme Court is whether profit-making corporations can assert religious beliefs under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act or the First Amendment provision guaranteeing Americans the right to believe and worship as they choose. Nearly four years ago, the justices expanded the concept of corporate "personhood," saying in the Citizens United case that corporations have the right to participate in the political process the same way that individuals do.

Hobby Lobby calls itself a "biblically founded business" and is closed on Sundays. Founded in 1972, the company now operates more than 500 stores in 41 states. The Green family, Hobby Lobby's owners, also owns the Mardel Christian bookstore chain.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said corporations can be protected by the 1993 law in the same manner as individuals, and "that the contraceptive-coverage requirement substantially burdens Hobby Lobby and Mardel's rights under" the law.
In its Supreme Court brief, the administration said the appeals court ruling was wrong and, if allowed to stand would make the law "a sword used to deny employees of for-profit commercial enterprises the benefits and protections of generally applicable laws."

Conestoga Wood is owned by a Mennonite family who "object as a matter of conscience to facilitating contraception that may prevent the implantation of a humsan embryo in the womb."

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the company on its claims under the 1993 law and the Constitution, saying "for profit, secular corporations cannot engage in religious exercise."

The Supreme Court will have to confront several questions - can these businesses hold religious beliefs, does the health care provision significantly infringe on those beliefs and, even if the answer to the first two questions is "yes," does the government still have a sufficient interest in guaranteeing women who work for the companies access to contraception.

The companies that have sued over the mandate have objections to different forms of birth control. Conestoga Wood objects to the coverage of Plan B and Ella, two emergency contraceptives that work mostly by preventing ovulation. The FDA says on its website that Plan B "may also work by preventing fertilization of an egg ... or by preventing attachment (implantation) to the womb (uterus)," while Ella also may work by changing of the lining of the uterus so as to prevent implantation.

Hobby Lobby objects to those two forms of contraception as well as two types of intrauterine devices (IUDs). Its owners say they believe life begins at conception, and they oppose only birth control methods that can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, but not other forms of contraception.

In a third case in which the court took no action Tuesday, Michigan-based Autocam Corp. doesn't want to pay for any contraception for its employees because of its owners' Roman Catholic beliefs.

Physicians for Reproductive Health, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other medical groups tell the court that the scientific and legal definition of a pregnancy begins with implantation, not fertilization. Contraceptives that prevent fertilization from occurring, or even prevent implantation, do not cause abortion "regardless of an individual's personal or religious beliefs or mores," the groups said.

But another brief from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Catholic Medical Association and others say in a separate filing that "it is scientifically undisputed that a new human organism begins at fertilization." Emergency contraception that works after fertilization "can end the life of an already developing human organism," regardless of the definition of pregnancy, they said.


I don't like any law that depends on viewing corporations as persons. Their very size gives them enough power in our country, without the courts protecting them. I can see lots of corporations that are not in any way linked to a church claiming this religious objection to a covered medical issue, just because they can get away with it. If they prevent their workers from getting their contraception costs covered, they should have to prove a link with a church.

In the end, birth control is not the most expensive of medical costs, though the birth control pills may cost more than I realize. The birth control pills are the most effective birth control, however, and therefore are probably preferable among people who absolutely can't afford to pay for a new child.

Not only does a baby disrupt a family's budget, there are quite a few couples who don't really want a baby at all, and as a result won't give the child loving and attentive care. That is the root cause of a lot of cases of parental abuse of children – the parents are resentful of their children for the extra care that they require. It can be said that such parents are immature, but that won't stop them from having babies and then neglecting or damaging them physically and mentally. Good birth control is a simple way out of the problem. Our government should support it, if only for the benefits to our society.