Moments of Awareness

Dogs, Flowers, Birds, Nest, Ornament & Sun See the full gallery on posterous Posted via email from Peace Jaway

Note to critics: Read (or reread) his books. Obama is doing just what he said he would do. (Page 1 of 2) Photos: Is Obama Keeping His Promises? Obama's Promises Every old-fashioned American amusement park had a fun house with mirrors that exaggerated your features. One mirror lengthened your legs, another widened your middle, a third made your face a wavy mask. If you stood in the right place, you vanished into endless distorting reflections. Nowadays, the political stage has become America’s communal fun house, and nobody looks stranger than Barack Obama. The president’s critics on the right deride him as a radical socialist seething with anti-American rage. To them, he’s a frightening success who has transformed the federal government, ruined the economy, and undermined national security. To the left, Obama is a tragic failure who squandered his chance for dramatic change: no single-payer health-care plan, no heated battle against Wa...

By Drew Westen , Special to CNN November 19, 2010 3:36 p.m. EST STORY HIGHLIGHTS Drew Westen: Tax cut issues pose a challenge for Democrats, GOP Westen says Republicans will be tested on whether they're serious about cutting deficit He says presidential adviser David Axelrod was wrong to suggest extending all the cuts Westen: Democrats should yield a bit on tax-cut ceiling while opposing blanket extension RELATED TOPICS Taxes Recessions and Depressions U.S. Democratic Party U.S. Republican Party Editor's note: Drew Westen is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University and founder of Westen Strategies, a strategic messaging firm. His is the author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Nation." He has been a consultant or adviser to several candidates, and he informally advised the Barack Obama campaign in 2008. (CNN) -- Democrats and Republicans agree on extending tax cuts t...

13 August 2010 Last updated at 03:05 ET Share this page Facebook Share Email Print Peru battles rabid vampire bats after 500 people bitten Vampire bats feed on the blood of mammals while they sleep Peru's health ministry has sent emergency teams to a remote Amazon region to battle an outbreak of rabies spread by vampire bats. Four children in the Awajun indigenous tribe died after being bitten by the bloodsucking mammals. Health workers have given rabies vaccine to more than 500 people who have also been attacked. Some experts have linked mass vampire bat attacks on people in the Amazon to deforestation. The rabies outbreak is focused on the community of Urakusa in the north-eastern Peruvian Amazon, close to the border with Ecuador. The indigenous community appealed for help after being unable to explain the illness that had killed the children. The health mini...

19 November 2010 Last updated at 07:38 ET Share this page Facebook Share Email Print Afghan town's despair as Nato eyes endgame By Quentin Sommerville BBC News, Charikar Just outside Kabul, parts of Parwan province are ravaged by unemployment, drug addiction and crime Continue reading the main story Taliban Conflict Can Afghan forces step up? Who are the Taliban? Q&A: Fighting the Taliban Challenges for Afghan forces Just outside K...

19 November 2010 Last updated at 16:34 ET Share this page Facebook Share Email Print Rabid bat warning issued by Los Angeles health office More than 20 rabid bats have been found in LA county so far this year, officials say Continue reading the main story Related stories Peru battles killer vampire bats Los Angeles county health officials have issued a warning to residents, telling them to be on the lookout for rabid bats. The Department of Public Health said 21 rabid bats had been found in the county this year so far, twice the number typically found in the region. Health director Jonathan Fielding said it was unclear why the number of rabid bats had increased. Rabies is a viral disease that can cause death. It was important for all residents to "understand the potential dangers posed to themselves and their pets, as most of...

19 November 2010 Last updated at 05:20 ET Share this page Facebook Share Email Print Social gets personal as new network limits friends By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley There are plans to offer paid for premium features at a future date Continue reading the main story Related stories Smaller social network for better friends? The ups and downs of social networks Facebook hits 500m user milestone A former Facebook executive aims to turn the world of social networking on its head by making it more personal. Dave Morin's new company Path has launched a photo-centric social hub that limits the number of friends you can have to 50. The aim is to enable more effective communications with people who are...

18 November 2010 Last updated at 23:01 ET Share this page Facebook Share Email Print Cough syrup gives clue to breast cancer drug dose An active ingredient of cough syrup is broken down in the same way as Tamoxifen Continue reading the main story Related stories Call to extend breast screening Way to 'boost' breast cancer drug Hot flushes good for cancer drugs Giving breast cancer patients cough syrup might tell doctors how well they will respond to a vital drug. Women often respond differently to Tamoxifen, which can mean they need a higher dose to get the same effect. Researchers from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam noticed the body deals with the active ingredient of cough syrup the same way - offering an easier way to make this calculation. Charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer said it mi...

Advertisement 30 September 2010 Last updated at 15:02 ET Help Astronomers have detected an Earth-like exoplanet that may have just the right kind of conditions to support life. Gliese 581g lies some 20 light-years away in its star's "Goldilocks zone" - a region surface temperatures would allow the presence of liquid water. Scientists say that the newly found world could also potentially have an atmosphere. Pallab Ghosh reports. via bbc.co.uk Posted via email from Peace Jaway

Greetings from Cambodian Kiva partner, CREDIT Thank you for supporting an entrepreneur in Cambodia. Dear Kiva CREDIT Lender, Thank you for supporting a Cambodian entrepreneur with CREDIT. As a Kiva Fellow, for the past three months I have had the privilege to interact with CREDIT and its borrowers. As Kiva's oldest partner in Cambodia, CREDIT has reached countless borrowers throughout the partnership, and continues to provide new opportunities to target low-income communities in the country, including through CREDIT's Vulnerable Services Unit (VSU) for more marginalized and vulnerable populations, as well as the organization's new Trust Bank program. From the VSU program, responsible clients are offered the Trust Bank program. Both programs offer non-collateral loans for guarantee groups and trainings, but the Trust Bank also provides slightly larger loan...

Greetings from Cambodian Kiva partner, CREDIT Thank you for supporting an entrepreneur in Cambodia. Dear Kiva CREDIT Lender, Thank you for supporting a Cambodian entrepreneur with CREDIT. As a Kiva Fellow, for the past three months I have had the privilege to interact with CREDIT and its borrowers. As Kiva's oldest partner in Cambodia, CREDIT has reached countless borrowers throughout the partnership, and continues to provide new opportunities to target low-income communities in the country, including through CREDIT's Vulnerable Services Unit (VSU) for more marginalized and vulnerable populations, as well as the organization's new Trust Bank program. From the VSU program, responsible clients are offered the Trust Bank program. Both programs offer non-collateral loans for guarantee groups and trainings, but the Trust Bank also provides slightly larger loan...

WASHINGTON — The maker of the painkiller Darvon is pulling the drug off the market at the request of public health officials who say the more than 50-year-old pill causes potentially deadly heart rhythms. The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals had agreed to halt all U.S. marketing of Darvon and the related brand Darvocet, which have been subject to safety concerns for decades. The Kentucky company confirmed the move in its own statement. The FDA also ordered generic drugmakers to stop making and selling low-cost drugs containing the active ingredient in Darvon, called propoxyphene. Britain and the European Union decided to ban Darvon in 2005 and 2009, respectively, due to a long trend of suicides and accidental overdoses. FDA officials said they decided to take action based on a recent study showing Darvon interferes with the electrical activity of the heart, causing irregular heart rhythms that can be fatal. Xanodyne conducted the study las...

Earlier this month, I offended a number of readers with a column suggesting that if you want to see rapacious income inequality, you no longer need to visit a banana republic. You can just look around. My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point. That’s right: I may have wronged the banana republics. You see, some Latin Americans were indignant at what they saw as an invidious and hurtful comparison. The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal. The best data series I could find is for Argentina . In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20...

via nytimes.com Posted via email from Peace Jaway

A quick experiment. Before proceeding to the next paragraph, let your mind wander wherever it wants to go. Close your eyes for a few seconds, starting ... now. And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever your mind went — the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid bills — that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as focusing intensely on the rest of this column will. I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science . Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness , psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking. The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they wer...

On Nov. 4, Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day. This was an important “story.” It underscored just how far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before the Internet, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But it also showed that there is an antidote to malicious journalism — and that’s good journalism. In case you missed it, a story circulated around the Web on the eve of President Obama’s trip that it would cost U.S. taxpayers $200 million a day — about $2 billion for the entire trip. Cooper said he felt impelled to check it out because the evening before he had had Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Republican and Tea Party favorite, on his show and had asked her where exactly Republicans will cut the budget. Instead of giving specifics, Bachmann used her ai...

Once every three or four months my son, Sam, grabs a cookie or a piece of candy and, wide-eyed, holds it inches from his mouth, ready to devour it. He knows he’s not allowed to eat these things, but like any 9-year-old, he hopes that somehow, this once, my wife, Evelyn, or I will make an exception. We never make exceptions when it comes to Sam and food, though, which means that when temptation takes hold of Sam and he is denied, things can get pretty hairy. Confronted with a gingerbread house at a friend’s party last December, he went scorched earth, grabbing parts of the structure and smashing it to bits. Reason rarely works. Usually one of us has to pry the food out of his hands. Sometimes he ends up in tears. It’s not just cookies and candy that we forbid Sam to eat. Cake, ice cream, pizza, tortilla chips and soda aren’t allowed, either. Macaroni and cheese used to be his favorite food, but he told Evelyn the other day that he couldn’t remember what it tastes li...