Friday, November 22, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day


Man Goes Missing While Walking Dog; Dog Returns Home With Bloody Leash – NBC

By Christina Cocca and Robert Kovacik

A Southern California family is asking for the public's help in finding a missing man whose dog returned home from walk alone with a bloody leash, police said.
Darwin Vela, 22, was last seen Tuesday about 9 p.m. in the 2900 block of South Redondo Boulevard in Los Angeles, east of Culver City, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Vela took his dog "Coco" for a walk, and the 3-year-old, 90-pound chocolate Labrador Retriever dog came home without Vela, dragging a bloody leash, police said. Family members said he has never gone missing before. "His tail was between his legs and he was hunched over crying," said Vela's fiancée, Kelly McLaren. "I grabbed the leash and looked down and there was a thumbprint-size spot of blood."

A lab test on Thursday confirmed the blood on the leash was human blood, police said.
Police, bloodhounds and choppers were in full force Thursday night in search of the man.

McLaren said she and Vela are witnesses in a criminal case, which had a preliminary hearing earlier Thursday. "The circumstances caused us concern and caused his family concern, so we are looking into that," LAPD Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese said.
The family plans to canvass the neighborhood to search for Darwin and tell residents of their missing loved one.

Vela's mother is set to take a DNA test Friday to help police determine if the blood is that of her son. Vela is described as a Hispanic man with black hair and brown eyes, 5 feet 6 inches tall, about 160 pounds. He was dark green knit cap, a black shirt and blue jeans.


This story is sad. I hope the police find Vela and, if he is dead, his killer. The assault on Vela could be due to a criminal case, it said. It is startling that his dog came home with his tail between his legs and hunched over, “crying.” Retrievers are known to be intelligent, especially golden retrievers. It's also a clear case of an animal showing a strong emotion. This dog's demeanor makes it likely that his master is dead. There are numerous stories about dogs grieving over their over their owner's death. This story took my attention.





Aged to perfection? 3,700-year-old cellar housed 'luxurious' wine

John Roach NBC News


These 3,700-year-old jars were discovered in an ancient palatial wine cellar unearthed by researchers at Tel Kabri in July. The team worked in day and night shifts to excavate 40 intact vessels during its six-week dig.

A 3,700-year-old palatial cellar packed with jars once filled with a wine-like brew has been discovered at an archaeological site in northern Israel, a team of researchers announced Friday. 

The cellar is perhaps the oldest of its type ever discovered and the wine was anything but ordinary. Spiked with juniper berries, cedar oil, honey and tree resins, it was likely the good stuff pulled from the cellar for grand, royal banquets where resident rulers and perhaps their trading partners washed down a feast of wild cattle with an intoxicating swill, according to Assaf Yasur-Landau, chair of the maritime relations department at the University of Haifa in Israel.

"This wine included, it is important to note, not only local materials but also possibly materials that were imported from elsewhere such as cedar oil, thus making it a very luxurious drink that was reserved for these special occasions," he said during a telephone briefing with reporters on Thursday. 

Yasur-Landau and colleagues unearthed the wine cellar in July and August as part of ongoing archaeological excavations at a sprawling Canaanite city called Tel Kabri. Its 30,000 or so residents were primarily tapped into the agricultural economy, though pottery from the island of Cyprus and art from ancient Greece indicate a robust maritime trade.
The researchers were to present their findings Friday at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Baltimore. According to Yasur-Landau, the discovery marks "the first time that such wine is found in quantity in a palatial storeroom."

Oldest 'palatial' wine cellar
Neither the newly discovered wine nor the wine cellar are the oldest known, according to Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia and an renowned expert on the ancient history of alcoholic beverages. 

"The oldest chemically conformed 'wine cellars' are those in the tomb of Scorpion I," he said in an email to NBC News. This Egyptian tomb dates to around 3150 BC and contained about 1,200 gallons of wine that was imported from the Jordan Valley. A wine cellar that dates to 3000 B.C. is in the cave of Areni in present-day Armenia, McGovern added.

"If we are making this claim only for ancient Canaan and put the emphasis of 'palatial,' then Kabri might well be the earliest," he said. Regardless, the importance of the discovery, McGovern explained, is that it helps round out the picture of Canaanite winemaking, which was developed "to high degree, beginning possibly as early as 5000 B.C."

"The Canaanites went on to transplant the domesticated grapevine and winemaking to the Nile Delta, where the pharaohs established a royal industry around 3000 B.C., and then transmitted the wine culture across the Mediterranean to Crete, Italy, Spain and elsewhere by seaborne trade and colonization in later millennia," McGovern noted. "The Canaanites and Phoenicians thus laid the foundation for winemaking from the Eurasian grape (Vitis vinifera) around the world."

Put in this context, the new finds at Karbi represent a later stage in the development of winemaking in Canaan. "It also lines up nicely with the huge contemporaneous or later 'wine cellars' and storerooms" at ancient sites in central Turkey, Syria and elsewhere in northern Mesopotamia.

Jar analysis
Forty jars, each about 3 feet tall and lacking decorative markings, were found in a 15-by-25-foot storeroom adjacent to a banquet hall that the team excavated in 2011, Eric Cline, an anthropologist and project co-director, explained on the call with reporters. 

"We've got about 2,000 liters (528 gallons) of wine. That's not actually enough to distribute to the general populace, which is why we are thinking at the moment it was a palatial wine cellar," he said. The caveat, he added, is it appears that additional storerooms may exist adjacent to the cellar excavated this summer. If so, there could be enough wine for wider distribution.

As the jars were excavated from the site, Andrew Koh, an archaeological scientist from Brandeis University, collected samples from near the bottom of each vessel and put the the residue through organic analysis. 

"What struck us is that there is great regularity in all of these jars; these aren't a sporadic enterprise. They consciously crafted and brewed these wines for a specific purpose," Koh said in the briefing. According to his analysis, the jars contain traces of tartaric and syringic acid, which are consistent with wine, as well as tree resins, juniper berries, cinnamon bark, mint and honey.

"This in fact is not your average wine, but this this is some sort of special wine, which would fit a palatial context," he said. According to McGovern, the wine may be special, but he urged caution about such interpretations until the chemical analysis is published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. And as for hopes the research will yield a recipe for a next blockbuster wine, he said that "is highly unlikely since compounds deferentially degrade."



This reminds me of a report of olives and fish sauce that were found at Pompei under the ash. It's very special when archaeologists find such detail of the life of people. It's as good as finding the Iceman's arrows, fire starting kit and grass cloak. It keeps me reading about ancient life.






Senate goes 'nuclear,' Democrats approve changes to filibuster rules – NBC
By Kasie Hunt and Carrie Dann

The Senate has voted to change one of the chamber's most fundamental rules, invoking the so-called 'nuclear option' for executive branch and non-Supreme Court judicial nominations.

Fifty-two Democrats voted for the measure, an unprecedented change previously threatened but not invoked until Thursday. Three Democrats -- Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Pryor of Arkansas -- voted with Republicans against the change. 

The vote overturned an existing rule that required a 60-vote majority for the approval of presidential nominees. Now, just a simple majority will be required for executive branch and judicial nominees except for Supreme Court picks. 

Speaking after the vote, President Barack Obama said he supports the Senate's action. 
"The vote today, I think, is an indication that a majority of senators believe as I believe that enough is enough," Obama said. "The American people’s business is far too important to keep falling prey day after day to Washington politics."

Democratic leaders said the 'nuclear' option was the only way to break a logjam on Obama's nominees. Republicans had infuriated Democrats by blocking a series of Obama's judicial nominees, saying the president was unfairly attempting to stack the nation's courts with judges who will uphold his agenda.

“It’s time to change,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor as almost all members sat at their desks in the chamber. “It’s time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete.”

"The age-old rules of the Senate are being used to paralyze us," Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said. "The public is asking – is begging – us to act." 
Republicans vocally criticized the move as 'dangerous' and 'desperate.'
While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., calls recent filibusters by Republicans a "troubling trend," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken., fires back, saying we learned by watching you, citing Democrat-staged filibusters during George W. Bush's time in office.

"It's a sad day in the history of the Senate," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, calling the move a Democratic "power grab." 
The GOP also derided the vote as an attempt to distract the American public from the early failures of the Obama-backed health care law's rollout. 

The higher threshold had increasingly become the norm for even the most mundane nomination fights in recent years, as the minority had been allowed to insist that nominees clear the higher hurdle. The tactic made filibusters of presidential nominees - once rare - merely business as usual. 

“The Senate is a living thing, and to survive it must change, as it has over the history of this great country,” Reid said.
Republicans warned before the vote that the GOP will retaliate when it wins back a majority in the Senate. 

"Some of us have been around here long enough to know that sometimes the shoe is on the other foot," McConnell said before the vote, telling Democrats "you may regret this a lot sooner than you think."

The “nuclear option” threat may sound familiar to most Americans; similar crises have shaken the Senate four times in the last three years. But each time, the procedural bomb had been defused by eleventh-hour bipartisan negotiations.

Vice President Joe Biden, who served in the Senate for over 30 years, told reporters Thursday before the vote that he supported the change. But Biden was notably not on Capitol Hill; he made the comments during a visit to a D.C. eatery. 


It has always been a frustration to me when senators indulge in the filibuster. Too many times in their work they are simply employing obstructionist tactics and wasting time. I hope they'll do something about the business of adding an unpopular bill onto the budget or other important bill, hoping that the opposition party will ignore it and pass it anyway. If that were ruled out we would have no more government shutdowns. A bill would have to pass on its own worth or not at all.



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Wal-Mart Food Drive Unwittingly Fuels Talk Of Minimum Wage Hike – NPR
by Liz Halloran
­ Wal-Mart's pay practices have long been targeted by advocates of America's working poor. So it was no surprise that it became national news when the discount retailer, the nation's biggest employer, asked workers at an Ohio store to contribute to a holiday food drive — for fellow workers.

Wal-Mart officials said the store-level effort spoke to employees' concern for each other, and that similar drives have been held in prior years. But activists lobbying Congress for the first increase since 2007 in America's $7.25-per-hour minimum wage have seized on the food drive as fresh evidence for their cause.

"Wal-Mart is the largest employer of low-wage workers in the country, and they set the terms of this debate," says Judy Conti of the National Employment Law Project. "Don't add insult to injury and ask low-paid workers to help those even worse off."

The Wal-Mart food drive, and recent reports detailing a McDonald's website for employees that suggested selling possessions online at eBay for extra cash, come as the Senate — with President Obama's support — is poised to consider a bill that over three years would bump up the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour.

The legislation, expected to go to the Senate floor in early December, would also increase tipped workers' federal minimum hourly wage of $2.13, unchanged since 1991, to $7.10 over a similar period.

Meanwhile, low-wage worker advocates in at least nine states, from New Jersey to Alaska, are campaigning for state-level increases in minimum hourly wages. A handful of counties and municipalities, including Washington, D.C., are contemplating the same.

The latest? The Massachusetts Senate this week voted overwhelmingly to raise the state's minimum wage from $8 an hour to $11 an hour over three years, and ultimately to tie increases to inflation. The measure now moves to the state House.

Push For Federal Action
There is no denying that the nation's minimum wage has not kept up with rising prices since Congress overwhelmingly passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. Calculations based on the Consumer Price Index suggest that if the federal minimum wage approved six years ago was adjusted for inflation, it would be $10.75 today — $3.50 more per hour than the actual minimum wage.

The 2007 legislation passed with a 315-116 House vote and a 94-3 vote in the Senate. It bumped up the federal minimum hourly wage — then $5.15 — incrementally over three years to its current $7.25 level.

According to data compiled for the Senate labor committee, 19 states and Washington, D.C., have since approved minimum wages that exceed the federal mandate, with a high of $9.19 in Washington state. Ten of those states have minimum wage increases tied to inflation, and 30 states have voted to approve higher minimum wages for tipped workers.

And a recent Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, would support a hypothetical hike in the minimum wage to $9.
But even the most ardent advocates of the legislation, introduced by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., initial sponsor of the 2007 bill, and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, acknowledge that its prospects are dim, given the atmosphere on Capitol Hill and sustained opposition by powerful business interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The chamber and other business groups assert that increases should be linked to tax incentives for small businesses, similar to provisions in previous minimum wage bills, like deductions for small business investment in equipment and expansion.
Says Randy Johnson, senior vice president of labor, immigration, and employee benefits for the Chamber of Commerce, in a statement provided to NPR:
"Any discussion about raising the minimum wage needs to recognize that small employers often have to operate under very slim profit margins and will have the hardest time absorbing these higher labor costs. They will have to find more revenues or trim costs to make up the difference. This reality is never part of the discussion. Furthermore, indexing the minimum wage to inflation means that employers will likely be faced with automatically increasing labor costs without an automatic increase in revenues or profits.

"Additionally, many small employers are currently trying to figure out how to keep their current benefits for their employees or whether they can continue to have their employees continue to work a traditional 40 hour week. Increasing the minimum wage will only add to their uncertainty and burdens and make creating new jobs and expanding considerably more difficult."

It's worth noting that research on the effect of hikes in the minimum wage suggests that Johnson's assertions may be true, but they may not.
A recent survey of 38 economists by the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found sharp disagreement about the effects of a minimum wage hike.

When asked if hiking the minimum wage to $9 per hour would "make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment," 34 percent of the economists agreed, 32 percent disagreed, and nearly a quarter said they were uncertain.

Starting A Conversation, Again
Conti, of the National Employment Law Project, says that despite the likelihood that there aren't votes in the Senate to move the wage bill, "you have to start somewhere."
"Minimum wage increases always involve long and hard-fought campaigns," she said. "We need to have this discussion publicly, in the media, in social media, and during the election cycle."

In the wake of the food drive contretemps out of its Canton, Ohio, store, Wal-Mart said that its full-time workers earn on average $12.87 per hour.
OUR Walmart, a nonprofit organization that serves as an independent voice for Wal-Mart hourly workers, says its calculations show that the average salary is between $8 and $10 per hour.



It is interesting that Wal-Mart gives $12.87 as the average wage, while OUR Walmart, which speaks for the workers, says $8.00 to $10.00. I would like for a minimum wage to be $9.00 per hour. I think most people who live alone could live on that at full time, though not luxuriously. If they have children and the wife doesn't work, they couldn't live on it.

Luckily some states have already stepped up to the plate and raised the minimum wage. The US Chamber Of Commerce is concerned about small businesses. Many small businesses make good profits. The new start-ups are probably struggling until they build up a customer base, but maybe they could do with a small number of employees, while paying them a better minimum wage.

$7.25 won't pay for housing, food and transportation to work. If medical bills come up the worker will simply have to go without food or owe the hospital until they can afford to pay. I will write Sens. Harkin and George Miller an email suggesting that they put some tax breaks for businesses into the minimum wage law, if the Chamber of Commerce says it is needed. Maybe that will make the bill go through.






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Insomnia Could Raise Risk Of Heart Disease And Death In Men – NPR
by Maanvi Singh
There are lots of reasons to aim for a good night's sleep. Sleep helps us retain our memories. It helps our brains get rid of harmful toxins. But sleep might also play a role in heart disease.

Men who reported difficulty falling or staying asleep had a moderately higher risk of death, especially from cardiovascular disease, than did men who said they fell asleep easily, a study finds.

Researchers from Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital looked at the health of 23,447 men over six years. Over the course of the study, 2,000 men died. The researchers looked at how insomnia might be related.

The men who had trouble falling asleep had a 55 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those who said they didn't, and a 25 percent higher risk of death. The number isn't as grim as it sounds. It reflects what's called relative risk, which compares the differences between two groups of people. An individual's risk of death, what scientists call absolute risk, rose just 8 percentage points, from 7 to 15 percent.

Harvard epidemiologist Xiang Gao, one of the researchers behind the study, says the findings made sense. "Poor sleep has influence on endocrine function, it can increase chronic inflammation and also it can change circadian patterns," Gao tells Shots.
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Circulation.
Of course, this study doesn't prove that sleeping problems were responsible for the death difference. It could be just chance.

Factors other than sleeplessness might be behind the discrepancy. But the researchers took quite a few into account, including age, depression and diabetes.
Gao tells Shots that while the association documented in this study is very strong, it's still just an association. "I still believe more studies are needed," he says.
For one thing, this was an observational study, and the men reported the sleep issues themselves, which could influence accuracy. The next step, Gao says, is to bring people into a sleep lab to get a more detailed look at how insomnia might affect mortality.

But you probably don't need to wait for the answer if you're concerned about your health. "To improve sleep is always a good thing," Gao says,
In recent years, scientists have become more interested in insomnia as a deeper medical issue, rather than a nuisance. One-third of Americans say they have trouble sleeping.

All of the participants were sampled from Harvard's Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, which has been following a group of men since 1986. Gao says the next step is to look at women and see if the association between insomnia and mortality holds true among them.


I have always had insomnia. I used to fight it by staying up until I was exhausted, and now I go to bed with the television on softly about an hour after supper and drop off to sleep about 9:00 PM. I use tapes of television documentaries on informative, but quiet subjects. Archaeology is a good subject to go to sleep by. I can't have any gunshots or screaming in my tapes, nor laughing either. Laughing, instead of relaxing me, makes me excited and alert. When I'm giggling, I'm not sleepy. The purpose of the tape is to provide my mind with something that is definitely not worrisome to think about, thus calming me until I can get to sleep.

So, all this makes me wonder if women as well as men have a greater risk of heart problems because of insomnia. I looked insomnia up on the Internet linked with illness and only came up with mental illness, except for one inherited (very rare, luckily) condition in which a prion brain disease is involved, which can lead to death. I'm not going to worry about it. I will probably live at least another 15 years, if my family background is a predictor of when I will die. My mother was 90 when she died and my father's mother was 94.




­ Five places already feeling the effects of climate change – CBS
LiveScience
The effects of a warming planet are likely to be vast and varied — ranging from increased droughts and coastal flooding to reductions in snow and ice. But while most climate predictions look ahead to the potential risks 50 or 100 years from now, there are places around the globe that are already being impacted by global warming. 

Here are five places where climate change is already hitting close to home:

Great Barrier Reef
Satellite measurements have demonstrated that the waters of Australia's Great Barrier Reef have warmed by 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) on average over the past 25 years. This warming has led to a decline in the amount of seafloor covered in thriving coral.

A 2012 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that half of the Great Barrier Reef was lost in the past 27 years. 
Warming oceans, linked to rising emissions of carbon dioxide, increase the risk of coral bleaching — a phenomenon that disrupts the symbiotic relationship between corals and the organisms that live within their tissues and provide food the corals need to survive.

Higher-than-normal ocean temperatures cause corals to expel the tiny animals and algae that live inside them. This turns the corals white and places the reef-building animals — and the entire ecosystem — under stress.

Newtok, Alaska
Newtok, and many other villages in Alaska, are built atop permanently frozen soil, called permafrost. As ocean temperatures increase, Alaska's permafrost melts, causing the ground to erode and many of these remote, coastal towns to sink.
Newtok is located on the western coast of Alaska, on the edge of the rising Ninglick River. The flood-prone town already sits below sea level, and researchers have said the entire village could be underwater within a decade.

Now, members of the community are hoping to relocate Newtok's 350 residents to higher ground, at a site roughly 9 miles (14 kilometers) away. But there are financial and political barriers. For instance, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that moving the town of Newtok could cost up to $130 million.

Mumbai, India
The Indian metropolis of Mumbai is one of the places at risk of dangerous and costly floods due to climate change, according to a report released earlier this year by the World Bank. Economists at the World Bank examined 136 large coastal cities, and evaluated their coastal defenses and level of protection.

The report identified Mumbai as one of the coastal cities that face a high risk of devastating floods due to global warming. Researchers found the city's existing defenses against flooding and storm surges are only designed to withstand current conditions, not for the anticipated rise in sea levels that will make future floods more devastating.

While coastal defenses are a start, "if they are not upgraded regularly and proactively as risk increases with climate change and subsidence, defenses can magnify — not reduce — the vulnerability of some cities," study leader Stephane Hallegatte, an economist at the World Bank, said in a statement. 

The Alps
The Alps, one of the most famous mountain ranges in Europe, have long been a tourism hotspot, famous for their top-notch ski resorts and as a popular year-round destination for outdoors enthusiasts. But climatologists warn that global warmingcould spell trouble for the sprawling alpine region.

Since the late 19th century, temperatures in the Alps have been steadily rising, from an average yearly temperature of 49.3 degrees F (9.6 degrees C) in the late 1800s to today's average of 51.4 degrees F (10.8 degrees C), according to Gilles Brunot, a meteorologist based at the ski resort Chamonix-Mont-Blanc in southeastern France.
But concerns about global warming's effect on the Alps extend beyond the region's ski industry. About 40 percent of Europe's freshwater originates from the Alps, which stretch from Austria in the East to France in the West, dipping into parts of Italy and Monaco in the South. Climate change is threatening the area's water cycle, which includes patterns of precipitation, snow and glacier cover.

Gansu Province, China
Farmers across China's Gansu Province, one of the country's driest regions, are already struggling to cope with the effects of climate change, as droughts and arid land contribute to the region's vast poverty. The United Nations says warming temperatures are shrinking glaciers in central Asia and the Himalayas, which typically replenish China's rivers.

China recently completed its first National Census of Water, and found that as many as 28,000 of the country's rivers have disappeared since the 1990s. The study did not identify reasons for the loss of the rivers, but the research showed an alarming trend of dwindling water resources throughout the country.

China currently has 2,100 cubic meters (74,000 cubic feet) of water resources per person — roughly 28 percent of the global average, according to Reuters. But as the country's population grows, these supplies could dry up sooner than expected.


This article is a stark description of oncoming emergencies as Europe and China both run short of fresh water. 28,000 of China's rivers have disappeared since the 1990s. I didn't know China had 28,000 rivers. And in Europe the pattern of precipitation is changing the snow and ice cover in the Alps. India, meanwhile worries about coastal flooding. The town in Alaska that is sinking has awakened to the problem and is considering moving 9 miles away to higher ground, but the government is balking at funding it.

This is the first article I've seen that gives so many instances of the damage from global warming. I wonder if people will try to get their governments to cut down on CO2 emissions when they read this. I hope so, but I doubt if it will have a major effect. The things that need to be done to limit the CO2 escaping are too many and too difficult for great change in the near future. People are dependent on electricity and motorized vehicles and the markets are geared to proven fuels that are already in existence. Manufacturing still ejects chemicals and CO2 from their smoke stacks. I am losing hope about it. Our world as we know it may be all but doomed.