Moments of Awareness

BOISE -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture wants school lunches to be healthier. On Thursday, the USDA proposed new federal guidelines aimed at just that. But thanks to Idaho guidelines already in place, your child may already be eating a healthier lunch. "We're very concerned about the fact that one-third ouf our youngsters are at-risk for being obese, or in fact, obese," said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. "And there are serious consequences to not getting our arms around this problem right now." Vilsack proposed these guidelines for school lunches and breakfasts; to limit calories, ban trans fats, serve more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, cut sodium, and use low-fat or non-fat milk. But in Idaho schools, most districts have already adopted state recommendations (rolled out in 2009) that meet these federal standards. [...] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Previous article Meridian looking to expand smoking ban to public parks

BEIJING — Like most drivers around the world, Shi Jianfeng did not like to roll down his window at toll booths. In fact, Mr. Shi, a farmer from Henan Province in central China , was so averse to toll collectors, he evaded more than $550,000 in road fees during eight months of highway driving, according to the provincial court that convicted him. But his punishment, life in prison and a $300,000 fine, has provoked a firestorm in the media and among Chinese who have accused the government of imposing a draconian sentence on a man trying to make ends meet in these inflationary days. “Rape and murder will earn you 15 years in prison but evading road charges will get you life,” said one typically cynical posting on Tianya, a popular message board. “Ours is a miraculous country with peculiar laws.” Chinese legal scholars said it was the first time toll evasion had earned a scofflaw a life sentence. There seems to be little dispute that Mr. Shi, who had turned to hauling sand and

As a blogger and a former software developer, I must frequently deal with copyright issues.  For most of my adult life, intellectual property has been my primary source of livelihood and remains so to this day.  While some people take issue with the concept of intellectual property and believe that all content should be free, I don’t count myself among them.  In fact, for the most part I consider the anti-copyright fanatics rather juvenile and intellectually immature.  Too often their utopian language is merely a hollow shell around the desire to get something for nothing. Overall I happen to think that modern copyright law is extremely fair, balanced, and wise.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable for the creator of an original work to retain control over his/her creation while at the same time providing the means for others to benefit from that work, to reference it, and to discuss and debate it without undue restrictions.  Creating an original work can take considerable effort

The Better Business Bureau is hearing from an alarming number of people reporting a credit card scam. The scheme starts with a phone call from someone claiming to be with Visa or MasterCard. Let’s say you receive the call. The caller informs you — the intended victim — that your credit card has been used throughout the United States to rack up about $6,000 in charges. The caller, claiming to be with the fraud department, says he or she needs to verify your information and make sure you have the card in your possession. Obviously, the only way to prove you have the card is to give the caller your credit card number. Fortunately, no one who has called the Better Business Bureau has provided the requested information. However, the BBB doesn’t hear from everyone contacted by these thieves. If you’ve unsuspectingly given your credit card number to the wrong person, the BBB recommends immediate action: [...] ~~~~~~~~~~~ Dale Dixon is president and CEO of the Better Busines

TUCSON, Ariz. — The woman was a native Arizonan, her family going back six generations. Hours after her congresswoman was gunned down at a neighborhood supermarket, she stood at a candlelight vigil on a street corner and clutched a sign that read "Peace." Margaret Robles lamented the shooting in the town where she'd lived all her 64 years. She praised Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, agonized for all the victims. But her sadness was mixed with shame. "I'm embarrassed to say I'm from Arizona," said the retired teacher's aide. "Too many things are happening." Yes, acts of violence can, and do, happen anywhere. And the dismay over the nasty political rhetoric of past years — much discussed in the days since Saturday's rampage — reaches far beyond this state's borders. [...] ~~~~~~~ Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Amanda Lee Myers, Gillian Flaccus and Raquel Maria Dillon in Tucson, Ariz. Copyright 2

A new Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Messier 82, or M82, shows the result of star formation on overdrive. At a distance of only 12 million light years, M82 provides a unique cosmic laboratory for studying conditions similar to those that existed billions of years ago when stars were forming at a furious rate in most galaxies. M82 is a so-called starburst galaxy, where stars are forming at rates that are tens or even hundreds of times higher than in a normal galaxy. The burst of star birth may be caused by a close encounter or collision with another galaxy, which sends shock waves rushing through the galaxy. In the case of M82, astronomers think that a brush with its neighboring galaxy M81 millions of years ago set off this torrent of star formation. M82 is seen nearly edge-on with its disk crossing from about 10 o’clock to about 4 o’clock in this image from Chandra (where low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are colored red, green, and blue respectively.) Among the 104

NEW YORK — The bleakest year in the foreclosure crisis has only just begun. Lenders are poised to take back more homes this year than any other since the U.S. housing meltdown began in 2006. About 5 million borrowers are at least two months behind on their mortgages and industry experts say more people will miss payments because of job losses and also loans that exceed the value of the homes they are living in. "2011 is going to be the peak," said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac Inc. The firm predicts 1.2 million homes will be repossessed this year. The blistering pace of foreclosures this year will top 2010, when a record 1 million homes were lost, RealtyTrac said Thursday. One in every 45 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing last year, a record 2.9 million of them. That's up 1.67 percent from 2009. [...] Full article at  idahostatesman.com   Posted via email from Peace Jaway

GALVESTON, TX — Drugs that pharmaceutical companies market most aggressively to physicians and patients tend to offer less benefit and more harm to most patients — a phenomenon described as the “inverse benefit law” in a paper from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Published online Thursday, Jan. 13 in the American Journal of Public Health , the article explores recent withdrawals of blockbuster drugs due to safety concerns and finds a clear pattern of physician-focused marketing tactics that ultimately exposed patients to a worsening benefit-to-harm ratio. Potential patient safety and public health implications include unnecessary exposure to adverse side effects, high medical costs and competition for scarce resources. “This is not a random occurrence, but rather a repeating, planned scenario in which drugs, discovered with good science for a specific set of patients, are marketed to a larger population as necessary, beneficial and safer than other alt

Drinking four cups of coffee every day can decrease a woman's risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by more than half, according to a new study. And the researchers say they've uncovered the reason why the new findings and other research have suggested a link between java and diabetes . They found that coffee raises the amount of sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) in the blood, and higher levels of SHBG are known to lower the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes . It's likely something in the coffee besides the caffeine — or something about coffee drinkers that confers these protective effects, said James D. Lane, an associate research professor at Duke University Medical Center, who was not involved with the study. Although, "it's impressive to find these new things," Lane told MyHealthNewsDaily, more research is needed to confirm the link. [...] ~~~~~~~~~~~~ 10 New Ways to Eat Well 10 Medical Myths That Just Won’t Go Away Coffee

This zoomed-in image shows how the Sun's magnetic field shapes hot coronal plasma. Photos like this highlight the ever-changing connections between gas captured by the Sun's magnetic field and gas escaping into interplanetary space. NASA/LMSAL/SAO View full size image A NASA spacecraft is giving scientists great looks at parts of the sun's superhot atmosphere that had previously evaded detailed study. The outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, called the corona, is hotter than the solar surface, but its tenuous light gets swamped by the much brighter solar disk. Historically, researchers have studied the corona during eclipses , when the moon blocks out the disk and reveals the corona, or by using an instrument called a coronagraph, which similarly blocks out the sun's disk. However, eclipses are relatively rare and don't last long, and coronagraphs occlude the inner parts of the corona. Now, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observat

Avian influenza A H5N1 viruses, seen in brown Collection Mix: Subjects RM / Getty Images Got a fever, headache, sore throats and all the other lovely symptoms of influenza? You can blame it on the birds. The main reservoir for influenza viruses is wild birds, which can pass those microbes to domestic poultry, which can come into contact, and potentially infect, human beings. That is what's happened with the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus, which has killed at least 306 people over the past 7 years, not to mention hundreds of millions of chickens and other birds. International heath authorities have increasingly focused on that viral intersection between birds and humans, reasoning that if H5N1 can be controlled in poultry, it won't be able to threaten people. That's a tall order though, by one count there are as many as 70 billion chickens around the world, many of them in backyard shacks in the developing world, and the shifty flu virus often evades vaccina

The president directly confronted the political debate that erupted after the rampage, urging people of all beliefs not to use the tragedy to turn on one another. He did not cast blame on Republicans or Democrats, but asked people to “sharpen our instincts for empathy.” It was one of the more powerful addresses that Mr. Obama has delivered as president, harnessing the emotion generated by the shock and loss from Saturday’s shootings to urge Americans “to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully” and to “remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.” “At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” he said, “it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” The president led an

THE woman who came to see Ken Altshuler, a divorce lawyer, had reason to be enraged: her husband was not only having an affair, he was also having an extravagant, money’s-no-concern, fabled-and-faraway-beaches affair. He had taken his girlfriend to Tahiti, he was sending flowers to her. But what infuriated his wife the most was where he had often made love to his girlfriend: their marriage bed. “She was totally fixated on that,” said Mr. Altshuler, who practices in Portland, Me., and is president-elect of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “ ‘You had sex with that woman in our bed’ — that was overriding everything else. For a year in the divorce, every time an issue came up, that was part of it. We’d need to talk about placing the house up for sale, she’d say, ‘You mean that house where he brought that so-and-so to our bed?’ Or, when we talked about personal division of property, ‘He can take the bed and shove it’ or ‘He can use it with his next whore.’ ” How did Mr

Boise State can’t match the money, history and conference connections of the top college football programs. Fortunately for the Broncos, those places can’t match what matters most to football coach Chris Petersen — the livability of Boise. Petersen announced Monday that he will return to Boise State for a sixth season as head coach and 11th season overall. He had a telephone conversation with Stanford about its head coach opening — a call that satisfied Petersen’s curiosity — but nothing more, he said. Petersen is 61-5 with two Fiesta Bowl titles. He’s the first coach since World War II to win 90 percent of his games in his first five seasons. “It’s more about Boise State being a great place that we really love,” Petersen said. “We’ve said this many times that this is a tough job. I know it seems like all fun and games at all times, but we go through this 24/7, year-round. We’re just trying to figure out how to like our lives a little bit while doing the job that we do. “… I c

Intro Page With regard to the flu virus, it strikes me that for something to be dead it has to have once been alive. Viruses are never alive. They're bits of DNA, not even whole DNA, so I'm interested in the measure by which the ones in vaccines are determined to be dead. Also, I'm really glad they put the 8 glasses of water thing in here. That one's so pervasive and so spectacularly wrong, with a potential to be dangerous to some people. Posted via email from Peace Jaway

BOISE, Idaho — A nurse practitioner at a Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest office in Idaho has filed a complaint with the state pharmacy board, contending a pharmacist abused a new health care conscience law to deny a patient medication. Lawmakers during the 2010 Legislature passed a measure to allow health-care workers to opt out of providing assistance for abortions, emergency contraception or end-of-life care in some instances, if it violated their conscience. In the complaint made public Wednesday, the nurse practitioner contends a Walgreens pharmacist in Nampa, Idaho, in November balked at filling a prescription for a drug that helps control bleeding after childbirth or abortions, then hung up the phone when asked for a reference for a pharmacist who would fill the prescription. Last year's law defines "health care services" that could trigger conscience provisions as "an abortion, dispensation of an abortifacient drug, human embryonic stem cell

A bare hand exposed to below-freezing temperatures, a hood over his head, bulky clothing and the effort of balancing on ice didn’t stop Sam Johnson from making a successful shot at the disc golf course at Ann Morrison Park. Yes, disc golf in 20-degree January weather. Treasure Valley’s serious, and not-so-serious, disc golfers don’t give up the sport because of frozen ponds, patches of snow and shorter days. You’ll see them making the rounds on sunny days, in snowstorms and even into late afternoon when you can hardly see the disc-golf basket as darkness looms. That’s because winter disc golf is a fun way to get some exercise despite the cold, and it’s something to do close to home. “It’s a year-round sport and it’s free,” said Johnson, of Boise. You don’t have to worry about the water hazards, just the ice hazards, as he learned while taking a shot from the ice on the pond. “We’re here in the wind, water, snow and rain,” said Luke Gibbons of Boise, who was with Johnson on a s

Brett Favre's Many Goodbyes I like Brett, but this is amusing. :) Posted via email from Peace Jaway

For all the warnings about terrorism, law enforcement authorities say the greater and more likely threat in this country comes from people like the suspect in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords -- what are known as lone wolves. And while some observers want to blame Saturday's bloodshed on lax gun laws or heated political rhetoric, experts say there is nothing more American than a loner who wants to be famous. "If we feel that civility in public discourse is going to take away mass shootings we are mistaken," said Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist at New York University and an ABC News consultant. "Because the one common threat in mass shooting is, what does the shooter get out of it? And the shooter recognizes that if you assassinate a political figure you will be notorious." "I think John Lennon had more to do with this than Sarah Palin," said Welner. America has been plagued for decades by acts of violence at

Posted via email from Peace Jaway

Posted via email from Peace Jaway

20 Ways to Stick to Your Workout Posted via email from Peace Jaway

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." Those words are often attributed to Mark Twain, who penned the classics "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." If Twain were alive today, he'd witness his beefy novels being censored by an Alabama-based publishing company. The language in Twain's novels, deemed by some to be racist, has put them on banned book lists in the past. Now the words he used more than a century ago are again creating controversy. Publishing company NewSouth Inc. is scheduled to release the two Twain classics next month in a bound volume with edits that have some educators crying foul. The word "n-----" will be replaced with "slave" and the word "injut" with "Indian." Randall Williams, co-founder and editor-in-chief of NewSouth, told The Lantern that people have "misunderstood our intent&

BEIJING — When garment buyers from New York show up next month at China’s annual trade shows to bargain over next autumn’s fashions, many will face sticker shock. “They’re going to go home with 35 percent less product than for the same dollars as last year,” particularly for fur coats and cotton sportswear, said Bennett Model, chief executive of Cassin, a Manhattan-based line of designer clothing. “The consumer will definitely see the price rise.” Inflation has arrived in China. And after Tuesday’s release of crucial financial statistics by China’s central bank, few economists expect Beijing officials to be able to tame rising prices any time soon. While American importers of Chinese goods will feel the squeeze, the effect on American consumers may be more subtle and the overall impact on United States inflation may be minimal. There are simply too many other markups along the way — from transportation to salesclerks’ wages — that affect the American retail prices of Ch

Taking short breaks from sitting, even for only one minute, might whittle your waistline and improve your heart health, according to a new study. People in the study who took the most breaks from sitting — up to 1,258 short breaks in one week — were about two pant sizes smaller than those who took the fewest, as few as 99 breaks in one week, said study researcher Genevieve Healy, who studies population health at the University of Queensland in Australia. And a smaller waistline means less abdominal fat and better heart health, Healy said. "A high waist circumference is associated with an increased risk for type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease," she told MyHealthNewsDaily. When we stand, the large muscles in our legs and the back are continually contracting to maintain our posture, but when we sit or recline , these muscle groups are basically inactive, Healy said. "So even short breaks from sitting get these large muscle

An agreement between Russia and the United States to cooperate more closely on civilian nuclear power took effect Tuesday and was hailed by both sides as a sign that a recent thaw in relations was bearing fruit. The deal, called the 123 Agreement, is intended to ease cross-border investment in nuclear power by resolving issues like liability for accidents. via nytimes.com Posted via email from Peace Jaway

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — The shouts came from the end of the dusty road: “They’re coming, they’re coming!” Young men broke into a run, waving their arms in warning. Bursts of automatic gunfire crackled in the humid air behind them. In a flash, the wide, pitted road — crowded a moment before with angry residents — emptied. The inhabitants, all too accustomed to raids, had quickly scattered. For the next 45 minutes, the neighborhood was raked by the pop-popping of gunfire and the sounds of explosions, delivered by the security forces of Laurent Gbagbo , the strongman who refuses to give up power despite losing a presidential election late last year. By the end of the assault, several people had been killed. Spent shells and trails of blood streaked the streets. All the while, the United Nations , which has nearly ten thousand troops here, was nowhere to be seen. Though top United Nations officials have recently pledged to enforce their mandate in Ivory Coast robustly, promisin

The Food and Drug Administration, which has long maintained that it has nothing to do with drugs used in executions, has quietly helped Arizona and California obtain a scarce type of anesthetic so the states could continue putting inmates to death. The shortage of sodium thiopental has disrupted executions around the country. But newly released documents show the FDA helped import it from Britain. Most state prison systems use sodium thiopental to put inmates to sleep before administering pancuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.   More U.S. news New threat note found in Tucson shooting The suspect in Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' shooting wrote the words "Die, bitch" on a note found in his home, a sheriff's official says. Full story Suspect's parents: 'We don't know why this happened' Woman who tried to save child relives horror NYT: Obama at memorial to f

Virgin Mobile’s unlimited 3G data service may not be as appealing to customers next month, as the service will be soft-capped at 5 GB per billing cycle starting February 15.  PC Magazine  received confirmation of the upcoming changes to Virgin Mobile’s Broadband2Go prepaid service  which is currently available for use with either a MiFi mobile hotspot device or a USB data stick. Once users hit the 5 GB cap, Virgin Mobile will reduce speeds of the 3G data connection until the next billing cycle begins. When Virgin Mobile rolled out its unlimited Broadband2Go service in August , we pointed out the value of the no-contract, $40 per month offering for unlimited service, which is provided on Sprint’s 3G network. At the time, the deal was half the price of comparable prepaid service from Verizon. And now, just six months later, the “unlimited” nature of the plan will be capped by speed throttling, the same method T-Mobile implemented last April for its data plans . The Virgin Mobil

Religiously observant people have more children than other people do, according to demographic studies. Assuming there's a genetic predisposition for religion, this means the religion gene could spread relatively quickly throughout a population. Research using new mathematical models demonstrates just how quickly this could happen. A religious group that makes up only 0.5 percent of a population could make up 50 percent within 10 generations, according to one of the models. "All people who work in this area know there is a genetic basis to being religious, in the sense there is a genetic basis to all human behavior ," said Robert Rowthorn, a professor emeritus of economics at Kings College in Cambridge, who developed the models. There are two possibilities, Rowthorn told LiveScience: Either we all have the same genetic foundation that predisposes us to religion , or, alternatively, some people have a genetic makeup that makes them more re