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News 
Sat Mar 13, 2010 at 13:06:52 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Tuna, tuskers, tigers headline wildlife trade meet
by Anne Chaon, AFP
28 mins ago
| DOHA (AFP) - Atlantic bluefin tuna is in crisis and meets the criteria for a total ban on international trade, the head of the UN wildlife trade organisation said on Saturday in opening a 13-day meeting.
The 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), convening for the first time in the Middle East, is the only UN body with the power to outlaw commerce in endangered wild animals and plants.
Besides the sharply disputed proposal on bluefin, the Convention will debate the status of African elephants, polar bears and tigers. |
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Sat Mar 13, 2010 at 13:00:00 PST
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Welcome to this week's Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.
Scientists find why "sunshine" vitamin D is crucial
(Reuters) - Vitamin D is vital in activating human defences and low levels suffered by around half the world's population may mean their immune systems' killer T cells are poor at fighting infection, scientists said on Sunday.
The findings by Danish researchers could help the fight against infectious diseases and global epidemics, they said, and could be particularly useful in the search for new vaccines.
Vitamin D Pills May Prevent Fractures in Older Adults
Vitamin D supplements may help prevent fractures in people over 65, provided they take enough of the right kind. A new review of clinical trials appears to show a strong dose-dependent effect for vitamin D in lowering the risk for nonvertebral fractures in the elderly.
Aging: Vitamin D Levels Tied to Dementia Risk
Low blood levels of vitamin D may be associated with an increased risk for dementia, a British study has found.
The Claim: Sunscreen Prevents Vitamin D Production
Dermatologists routinely talk of the need to wear sunscreen. But the body needs sunlight to produce vitamin D, a crucial nutrient.
So is it possible that wearing sunscreen might interfere with the synthesis of vitamin D?
Yes. Studies have found that by blocking ultraviolet rays, sunscreen limits the vitamin D we produce. But the question is to what extent.
Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin that is stored in the body's fatty tissue. It aids in the absorption of calcium and regulate the amount of calcium and phosphorus in the blood. The few food sources for Vitamin D are cheese, butter, cream, fortified milk (all milk in the U.S. is fortified with vitamin D), fish, oysters, fortified cereals and margarine. Anyone remember cod liver oil?
Vitamin D is also known as the "sunshine vitamin" because the body manufactures the vitamin after being exposed to sunshine. Ten to 15 minutes of sunshine 3 times weekly is enough to produce the body's requirement of vitamin D. However, many people living in sunny climates still do not make enough vitamin D and need more from their diet or supplementation.
Too much Vitamin D can cause an increase of calcium in the blood that can result in an increase of calcium deposits in soft tissue such as the heart and lungs that reduces their ability to function. It can also cause kidney stones, muscle weakness and vomiting.
Too little Vitamin D can cause osteoporosis in adults and Rickets in children.
The tables for taking Vitamin D supplement can be found here
Dietary Supplement Fact Sheet: Vitamin D. However, before taking a Vitamin D supplement you should consult your doctor and or a nutritionist.
As is now custom, I'll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I'll answer as best I can.
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Sat Mar 13, 2010 at 02:03:23 PST
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(noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck)
With the advent of Gay couples gaining the right to legally marry in the Nation's Capitol, the Catholic Charities found it self with a dilemma. They would have to give health care coverage to the spouses of gay employees. Solution, just don't cover any employee's spouse, gay or straight.
Same-sex marriage leads Catholic Charities to adjust benefits
Employees at Catholic Charities were told Monday that the social services organization is changing its health coverage to avoid offering benefits to same-sex partners of its workers....
Starting Tuesday, Catholic Charities will not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees who are not already enrolled in the plan. A letter describing the change in health benefits was e-mailed to employees Monday, two days before same-sex marriage will become legal in the District.
So, just let them get sick and maybe die. What would Jesus say?
h/t Eli @ FDL
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Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 13:00:03 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Twin suicide attacks kill 45 in Pakistan's Lahore
by Sajjad Qureshi, AFP
1 hr 15 mins ago
| LAHORE, Pakistan (AFP) - Twin suicide attacks seconds apart targeted the Pakistani military Friday, killing up to 45 people in the second attack to hit security forces in the country's cultural capital this week.
The bombers walked up to army vehicles in the crowded R A Bazaar area of Lahore, blowing themselves up as people sat down to eat before the main Muslim weekly prayers were to begin, a senior official said.
Lahore, a city of eight million near Pakistan's border with India, has been increasingly subject to Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked attacks in a nationwide bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,000 people in three years. |
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Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 13:01:45 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
Now with 41 Top Stories.
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Violence flares at Greek anti-austerity protest
by John Hadoulis, AFP
15 mins ago
| ATHENS (AFP) - Greek police clashed with hooded youths on Thursday as thousands demonstrated against austerity measures aiming to end a crippling debt crisis and the country was gripped by a new general strike.
Violence broke out around a union demonstration in the capital with riot police firing tear gas at hooded youths who hurled firebombs and vandalised stores near parliament and other areas of the city centre.
Police said they had detained 16 people, of whom nine were later arrested, and that 13 officers were hurt after being hit by objects thrown by protesters. |
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Wed Mar 10, 2010 at 13:10:19 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed
by Aminu Abubakar, AFP
2 hrs 22 mins ago
| JOS, Nigeria (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday denounced the "atrocious" bloodshed in Nigeria after a massacre of Christian villagers, as police said 49 people would be charged over the killings.
As new gunfire added to the tensions around the flashpoint city of Jos, the Catholic Pontiff added his voice to a chorus of international revulsion over the weekend slaughter which police now say left 109 people dead.
About 8,000 Nigerians have also fled their homes around Jos in the wake of the violence, the International Committee of the Red Cross said. |
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Wed Mar 10, 2010 at 04:54:44 PST
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Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread
1 Curious whales give boost to Mexican fishermen
by Sophie Nicholson, AFP
Wed Mar 10, 1:20 am ET
| SAN IGNACIO, Mexico (AFP) - When the massive, barnacle-spotted head of a Pacific gray whale slid alongside Pachico Mayoral's wooden boat, he nervously reached out to touch it.
Like other fishermen, he usually beat his boat with a stick to try to frighten the giant mammals away, but for once he hesitated.
"The whale insisted, going from one side of the boat to the other, and at one point I was curious and, very gently, I stroked the whale's face. And nothing happened. It stayed calm," Mayoral said, driving a boat of tourists across the San Ignacio lagoon some 40 years later. |
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Tue Mar 09, 2010 at 13:03:06 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 In former Afghan 'ghost town,' Gates gauges US war effort
by Dan De Luce, AFP
45 mins ago
| NOW ZAD, Afghanistan (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday said a new strategy in the Afghan war showed promise after he visited a former ghost town where American forces recently cleared out Taliban militants.
As US Marines stood guard on roof tops and a small number of bemused Afghan men and boys looked on, Gates took a brief stroll along the dusty main street of Now Zad in southern Afghanistan, where a handful of humble shops have reopened since the Taliban retreated in December.
The mud-brick town remains mostly deserted and a long way from the bustling centre that once was home to about 30,000, but US officials hope life will gradually return as part of a NATO-led bid to push back the Taliban from its southern strongholds. |
A guerilla does not stand and fight, they swim like a fish in the ocean.
Good luck with that.
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Mon Mar 08, 2010 at 13:01:52 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Appeals for calm after Nigerian sectarian slaughter
by Aminu Abubakar, AFP
18 mins ago
| JOS, Nigeria (AFP) - UN chief Ban Ki-moon appealed Monday for "maximum restraint" amid revulsion at the slaughter of more than 500 Christians in Nigeria, as survivors told how the killers chopped down their victims.
Funerals took place for victims of the three-hour orgy of violence on Sunday in three Christian villages close to the northern city of Jos, blamed on members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group.
While troops were deployed to the villages to prevent new attacks, security forces detained 95 suspects but faced bitter criticism over how the killers were able to go on the rampage at a time when a curfew was meant to be in force. |
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 17:06:59 PST
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(10 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck)
A narrative is a story that has a beginning, middle and end. It engages the reader's mind and heart. It shows actors moving across its stage, revealing their characters through their actions and their speech. At its heart, a narrative contains a mystery or a question-something that compels the reader to keep reading and find out what happens.
[...]
A traditional news feature starts with an anecdote or scene, moves to a nut graph that tells the reader where the story is going and then spends the rest of the piece explaining and supporting the nut graph.
A narrative, on the other hand, lets the story unfold through character, scene and action-usually without summing up the story and telling readers what it's about. A narrative also attaches a little story to a big story -- it is built around theme. In journalism, a Nut graph is a paragraph, particularly in a feature story, that explains the news value of the story. [...] ie, "in a nutshell" paragraph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/...
News Feature v. Narrative: What's the Difference?
Rebecca Allen -- January 9, 2006
In a Nutshell, People like Stories.
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 13:02:15 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Icelanders refuse to foot bill for bank collapse
by Marc Preel, AFP
Sat Mar 6, 10:10 pm ET
| REYKJAVIK (AFP) - Iceland's socialist government was surveying the damage Sunday after a referendum rejected a deal to pay Britain and the Netherlands billions for losses in the collapse of the Icesave bank.
As expected, Icelanders overwhelmingly voted down the deal in Saturday's referendum, with some 93.6 percent of voters lined up on the "no" side after more than 50 percent of the votes had been counted.
Only 1.5 percent of voters had so far voted "yes" to the Icesave deal, said RUV public broadcaster which compiles all electoral statistics. |
"You're basically sending the bill to tax payers for the failure of a private bank"
Fuck you banksters.
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Sat Mar 06, 2010 at 13:00:07 PST
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Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Bank payback plan faces failure as Iceland votes
by Marc Preel, AFP
45 mins ago
| REYKJAVIK (AFP) - Icelanders headed to the polls in drizzling rain Saturday in a referendum set to reject a bank repayment deal worth billions that many here consider a foreign diktat, but a "nei" vote is expected to plunge the country deeper into crisis.
"I will vote 'no' simply because I disagree very strongly with us... having to shoulder this burden" from the 2008 collapse of the online Icesave bank, Ingimar Gudmundsson, a 57-year-old truck driver, told AFP.
The issue is whether Iceland should honour an agreement to repay Britain and the Netherlands 3.9 billion euros (5.3 billion dollars). |
Go Vikings!
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Sat Mar 06, 2010 at 13:00:00 PST
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Welcome to this week's Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.
A family takes shelter in one of several extremely crowded displaced persons camps in and around Port-au-Prince.
Haitians Facing 'Intolerable Breach of Human Dignity'
Colette Gadenne, who has been managing Doctors Without Borders/Médecins San Frontières (MSF) activities in Haiti over the last few weeks, and Christopher Stokes, General Director of MSF in Brussels, recently returned from Haiti. Almost two months after the devastating earthquake, they gave their views on the situation and stressed "broadly insufficient" aid on the ground.
As is now custom, I'll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I'll answer as best I can.
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Fri Mar 05, 2010 at 18:50:42 PST
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(6 pm. - promoted by ek hornbeck)
 Framing, as a theoretical concept, emerged from agenda setting--the notion that media coverage does not tell the public what to think, but it does have an effect in telling them what subjects to think about. (3)
Framing took agenda setting beyond audience salience and added that media coverage also indicated how that subject was to be approached by the audience, the acceptable range of terms, connections, and interpretations [...]
Framing also has roots in cognitive theories about how the human brain works. (6) It ties into schema theory, the idea that the synapses of our brains do not purely save and store facts. Instead, our brains link related ideas in associative patterns; ideas fitting patterns more easily find room than those with no existing "hook" to hold them.
Ideas need the right frame to have a lasting impact.
A frame must find a common "hook" in order to take up its new residence.
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Fri Mar 05, 2010 at 13:02:04 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 British PM insists Iraq war was 'right decision'
by Alice Ritchie, AFP
19 mins ago
| LONDON (AFP) - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown defended his role in the 2003 Iraq war Friday, telling a public inquiry it was "the right decision" and rejecting claims he denied funds for the military fight.
Brown distanced himself from military moves or diplomatic negotiations in the run-up to the conflict, but said he had always been fully informed and did everything required of him as finance minister under former premier Tony Blair.
"Nobody wants to go to war, nobody wants to see innocent people die, nobody wants to see their forces put at risk of their lives," he said, but added: "I think it was the right decision and made for the right reasons." |
Liar. I hope the coming Conservative government, that he and Tony Blair guaranteed with their neo-Liberal policies and War Crimes, locks him in the Tower for the rest of his miserable life.
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Thu Mar 04, 2010 at 13:05:10 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Baghdad attacks kill 14 as Iraq voting begins
by Salam Faraj, AFP
34 mins ago
| BAGHDAD (AFP) - Early voting in Iraq's general election was overshadowed Thursday by two suicide bombings at polling stations that killed seven soldiers and a mortar attack that claimed the lives of seven civilians.
The blasts wounded 48 people, including 25 Iraqi soldiers, and came despite massive security, with troops, prisoners and the sick casting their ballots ahead of Sunday's parliamentary election.
Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Omar al-Baghdadi has threatened to disrupt the election by "military means" and 200,000 police and soldiers have been deployed in the capital alone to try to prevent attacks. |
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Wed Mar 03, 2010 at 13:00:01 PST
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Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Suicide blasts kill 33 ahead of Iraq polls
by Ali al-Tuwaijri, AFP
Wed Mar 3, 11:02 am ET
| BAQUBA, Iraq (AFP) - Three suicide attacks, including one by a bomber who rode in an ambulance to hospital before blowing himself up, killed 33 people in central Iraq on Wednesday, just days before nationwide elections.
The blasts in Baquba, the deadliest to hit the country in nearly a month, also wounded 55 people and spurred security forces to clamp an immediate curfew on the city, 60 kilometres (40 miles) north of Baghdad.
At least 10 policemen were among the 33 dead, a security official said. |
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Wed Mar 03, 2010 at 03:22:18 PST
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Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread
1 Whale opponents huddle in Florida
by Shaun Tandon, AFP
Tue Mar 2, 9:06 pm ET
| WASHINGTON (AFP) - Key players on whaling huddled behind closed doors in Florida in an uncertain bid to find common ground on an issue that has bitterly divided Australia and Japan.
Negotiators opened talks at a resort hotel in Saint Pete Beach, near Saint Petersburg on Florida's Gulf coast, participants said. Media were not allowed into the talks in the hopes of encouraging a more open dialogue.
The delegates will review through Thursday a proposal by Cristian Maquieira, chairman of the 88-nation International Whaling Commission (IWC), that aims to work toward a grand compromise bringing aboard all sides on the debate. |
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Tue Mar 02, 2010 at 13:05:13 PST
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| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Quake-hit Chile deploys more troops to battle unrest
by Moises Avila Roldan, AFP
1 hr 1 min ago
| CONCEPCION, Chile (AFP) - Thousands more troops were deployed across quake-hit Chile Tuesday as residents took up arms to stop a wave of mass looting in the nation's second city, slapped with an 18-hour curfew.
President Michelle Bachelet doubled the number of troops patrolling the worst hit areas to 14,000, as people in ravaged Concepcion were barred from leaving their homes from 6:00 pm to midday.
"Military personnel will be present in the streets of Concepcion until midday to maintain public order, and they will not waver in carrying out their duties," warned General Guillermo Ramirez. |
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Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 13:00:00 PST
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C'est moi, encore. ek is still resting from two weeks of boycotting NBC, so I am attempting to take his place. My version of the Afternoon Edition may not be as colorful but, hopefully, at least as informative.
The search for news about Haiti in the media is getting scarcer except for the rare analysis and comparison to the earthquake that occurred in Chile. Some of the analysis is thoughtful and well done, some of it is, well, tripe. The rains have arrived early and it has been raining everyday filling the streets with contaminated water and flooding the make shift camps that are home to over a million displaced people. The rain also adds to the difficulty of distributing food, clean water, shelter material and medical aid. If we thought it was bad in January, the early rains have compounded the misery.
Children's Messages of Hope for Haiti
Haiti's Futile Race Against the Rain
There were floods on Saturday in Les Cayes, in southwestern Haiti. It rained in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, and again on Saturday and Sunday night, long enough to slick the streets and make a slurry of the dirt and concrete dust. Long enough, too, to give a sense of what will happen across the country in a few weeks, when the real storms start.
Mud will wash down the mountains, and rain will overflow gutters choked with rubble and waste, turning streets into filthy rivers. Life will get even more difficult for more than a million people.
New misery and sickness will drench the displaced survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake - like the 16,000 or so whose tents and flimsy shacks fill every available inch of the Champ de Mars, the plaza in Port-au-Prince by the cracked and crumbled National Palace, or the 70,000 who have made a city of the Petionville Club, a nine-hole golf course on a mountainside above the capital.
The rainy season is the hard deadline against which Haiti's government and relief agencies in Port-au-Prince are racing as they try to solve a paralyzing riddle: how to shelter more than a million displaced people in a densely crowded country that has no good place to put them.
This is an Open Thread.
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March on Washington
Saturday, March 20
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