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Van Persie missing piece in Fergie's title jigsaw
LONDON - Agence France-Presse
Manchester United's Robin van Persie. EPA PhotoAlex Ferguson has hailed Robin van Persie as the missing piece in Manchester United's title jigsaw as the Premier League leaders bid to extend their lead at the top against Newcastle on Wednesday.
Van Persie has made a superb start to his United career after leaving Arsenal in a 24 million move in pre-season and the Dutch forward's haul of 15 goals has fired Ferguson's team four points clear of champions Manchester City heading into the hectic Christmas programme.
The 29-year-old's dynamic displays have added an extra edge to United in the same way that French playmaker Eric Cantona and Portugal forward Cristiano Ronaldo galvanised previous teams in the Ferguson era.
After missing out on the title to City last season, United were in need of a new driving force this term and Ferguson believes van Persie is providing it.
"I am reluctant to subscribe to the cult of an individual. But sometimes you find the last piece of the jigsaw," Ferguson told United's official matchday programme.
"We did it when we brought Eric Cantona to Old Trafford and he proved to be the right player at the right club at the right time. He became the catalyst and springboard for our surge to success.
"It doesn't have to be signing someone for a record fee. Cristiano Ronaldo was not a record buy either but he certainly made a difference as he prospered with us to the extent that he came to be regarded by a lot of people as the world's best player." Without van Persie's goals, United would be eighth and that perhaps explained Ferguson's fury when Swansea defender Ashley Williams kicked the ball into the Dutchman's head as he lay prone on the turf during Sunday's 1-1 draw at the Liberty Stadium.
How Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini must rue van Persie's decision to snub the champions in favour of joining United.
Mancini had hoped to make van Persie the centre-piece of his team as he looked to build on last season's title triumph, but instead he has had to watch the striker revitalise his club's arch rivals, while his own strike-force has gone through a barren period.
Sergio Aguero, Carlos Tevez and Edin Dzeko all laboured once more against Reading, the division's bottom club, on Saturday and it was left to England midfielder Gareth Barry to show them how to do it with a stoppage-time winner.
The good news for Mancini's side was United's failure to defeat Swansea 24 hours later, a result which will give fresh impetus to City's challenge according to defender Kolo Toure.
"It's giving us encouragement because we haven't played to our best yet," Toure said ahead of Wednesday's game at Sunderland.
"Every team knows we are champions. They play 200 percent and that makes it really hard for us. We just keep fighting, keep pushing and we can still be better." United and City could be forgiven for regarding the title race as a strictly Manchester affair this season, especially as Chelsea have appeared on the verge of self-destructing at times.
But the Blues finally showed signs of emerging as a serious contender on Sunday thanks to an 8-0 demolition of Aston Villa.
That victory left Chelsea 11 points behind United but with a game in hand and interim manager Rafael Benitez refuses to write off the prospect of a title challenge.
"You could see the mentality of the players, even at 6-0 we were pushing and trying to score more," he said.
"The team are attacking as a whole and not just depending on one or two players.
"Now we have to sustain this run, keep winning some games and then it will be easier for me to send a message out that we can compete." With Arsenal's clash against West Ham postponed due to a strike on the London Underground, fifth-placed Everton, who host Wigan, Tottenham, who travel to Villa, and West Bromwich Albion, on their travels at QPR, all have a chance to move into the top four.

subset: commoncrawl


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Team TEDxNJLibraries
May 10, 2010 at 9:47 am Peter Bromberg 2 comments
Team TEDxNJLibrarires
Originally uploaded by Khürt
By Peter Bromberg
It was an honor to be a part of TEDxNJLibraries.
Thank you Janie for inviting us to come along for this great ride. Thanks also to our amazing speakers, sponsors and attendees who came together to create a day of inspiration and conversation.
For more pictures from the event, see: http://www.flickr.com/groups/tedxnjlibraries/.
To follow the Twitter stream, see: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23tedxnjlibs.
Professional pix and video, (courtesy of Girl + Camera and Shining Star Interactive) coming soon.
Entry filed under: Library Garden, Programming, Speaking and Presenting.
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It was the first day of summer in a place where summers had become hazardous to a child's health, so the school bus rolled out of the parking lot on its newest emergency route. It passed by the church steeples of downtown and curved into the blue hills of Appalachia. The highway became two lanes. The two lanes turned to red dirt and gravel. On the dashboard of the bus, the driver had posted an aphorism. "Hunger is hidden," it read, and this bus had been dispatched to find it.
The bus was empty except for a box of plastic silverware and three oversize coolers that sat on green vinyl seats. Inside each cooler were 25 sack lunches, and inside each sack was what the federal government had selected on this day as the antidote to a growing epidemic of childhood hunger — 2 ounces of celery sticks, 4 ounces of canned oranges, chocolate milk and a bologna sandwich, each meal bought with $3.47 in taxpayer money.
On the outside of the bus, the familiar yellow-and-black design had been modified with the bold lettering of the U.S. economy in 2013: "Kids Eat FREE!"
Here, in the rural hills of Tennessee, is the latest fallout of a recession that officially ended in 2009 but remains without end for so many. More than 1 in 4 children now depend on government food assistance, a record level of need that has increased the federal budget and changed the nature of childhood for the nation's poor.
First, schools became the country's biggest soup kitchens, as free and reduced-price lunch programs expanded to include free breakfast, then free snacks and then free backpacks of canned goods sent home for weekends. Now those programs are extending into summer, even though classes stop, in order for children to have a dependable source of food. Some elementary school buildings stay open year-round so cafeterias can serve low-income students. High schools begin summer programs earlier to offer free breakfast.
And late last month came the newest iteration: a school bus retrofitted into a bread truck bouncing along a potholed road near the Blue Ridge Mountains. It parked in a valley of 30 single-wide trailers — some rotting in the sun, others swallowed by weeds and mosquitoes alongside the Nolichucky River. The driver opened his window and listened to the utter silence. "It feels like a ghost town," he said.
A 5-year-old girl saw the dust trail of the bus and pedaled toward it on a red tricycle. Three teenage boys came barefoot in swimsuits. A young mother walked over from her trailer with an infant daughter in one arm and a lit cigarette in the other. "Any chance there will be leftover food for adults?" she asked.
It was almost 1 p.m. For some, this would be the first meal of the day. For others, the last.
The driver opened the bus door and made the announcement he would repeat at six more trailer parks on this day.
"Lunch is served," he said.
The driver's name was Rick Bible, and his 66-mile route through the hills of Greene County marked the government's latest attempt to solve a rise in childhood hunger that had been worsening for seven consecutive years.
Congress had tried to address it mostly by spending a record $15 billion each year to feed 21 million low-income children in their schools, but that left out the summer, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to spend $400 million more on that. Governors came together to form a task force. Michelle Obama suggested items for a menu. Food banks opened thousands of summer cafes, and still only about 15 percent of eligible children received regular summer meals.
So, earlier this year, a food bank in Tennessee came up with a plan to reverse the model. Instead of relying on children to find their own transportation to summer meal sites, it would bring food to children. The food bank bought four used school buses for $4,000 each and designed routes that snake through some of the most destitute land in the country, where poverty rates have almost doubled since 2009 and two-thirds of children qualify for free meals.
"We got ketchup?" Bible said now, loading supplies onto the bus before heading out for the day.
"Yes," said Morgan Anderson, a food bank employee who worked on the bus with him.
"Ice? Hand sanitizer?"
"Yes. Yes."
Bible and Anderson were beginning their second week together on the route, which made seven regular stops in five hours, Mondays through Fridays, delivering 66 sack lunches with 750 calories each. Government rules required them to stop for 15 minutes at each trailer park to make sure children ate their lunches on the bus. Anderson, 22 and pursuing her master's degree in dietary studies, tested the temperature of the coolers every hour and kept inventory of food in a color-coded binder. Bible, 58 and laid-off from a furniture factory, sneaked extra fruit cups to the kids and told stories as long and winding as their route.
Their job on the bus included enforcing a long list of rules from the USDA: No giving out seconds, because the federal government reimburses only 2 percent of their value. No extra milks. No children taking food home. No free meals for adults over 18 unless they are disabled. On Anderson's first day, she had watched three men come on board, sweaty and unshaven after a morning working in the strawberry fields. "Are you under 18?" she had asked them. "Yes," one had said, even though she suspected it was a lie. The men had eaten quickly and left, never returning to the bus on subsequent days, and lately Anderson had begun to worry about them, blaming herself for their absence. Had she scared them away? Were they going hungry because of her? Why had she bothered to ask about their age?
"You learn that there are rules, and then there's the reality of the people you see on the bus," Anderson said.
On this day, what she saw at the first stop was five siblings arriving in clothes still stained from the pizza sauce they had been served on the bus the day before. "Did you get a chance to change today?" Anderson asked one of them, a 10-year-old girl. "Into what?" she said.
Next, at the second stop, a 7-year-old whose parents were both at work arrived carrying his 1-year-old sister in nothing but a diaper, spoon-feeding her juice from the bottom of his fruit cocktail cup. "She can't eat chunks yet," he said.
At the third stop, a high school football player pleaded for extra milk; at the fourth, teenagers fired rifles at cans up the road; at the fifth, always the most crowded, kids, parents and dogs waited in the shade under the trailer park's only tree.
"Finally!" one of them said as the bus pulled in. He was a 12-year-old boy, shirtless and muddy with half of a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and he barged onto the bus and grabbed his lunch. "Bologna again?" he asked, studying his sandwich.
"I'll take yours then," another boy said, grabbing for his bag.
"No fighting," Anderson said, as she handed out 15 meals and walked toward the back of the bus, where a young mother in a tank top and pink slippers was sitting with her 2-year-old son. The mother opened the toddler's fruit cup and, a minute later, the little boy stood up on his seat, laughed and tossed the fruit cup out the school bus window.
"How dare you?" the mother said, turning to the toddler, slapping his bottom hard enough for the bus to go quiet, then pulling her arm back to slap him again.
"It's okay," Anderson said, hurriedly reaching into another bag for a replacement cup of fruit, breaking the rule about seconds.
"It is not okay with me!" the mother said. She turned back to her son, who was wailing, and yanked him back into his seat. "Sit on your butt," she said. "What did I tell you about wasting?"
Anderson watched the mother for a few seconds and wondered if this would be one of the times when she needed to call child protective services to make a report. It had happened three times on buses already in the past two weeks, once for possible child abuse and twice for possible neglect. Stress, anger, desperation — these were behaviors she had been told to anticipate on the bus at a time when a record 10 percent of children live in homes unable to provide adequate, nutritious food. "Low-income families are being pushed to the very edge," one of her training manuals had warned. But now Bible walked back from his driver's seat and put his hand on the young mother's shoulder. "It's hot. We're hungry. Nobody is in a good mood," he said. "So I'd like to tell a joke. Have you heard that this bus has 2050 air conditioning? That means 20 windows down and 50 miles an hour."
The mother appeased him with a smile. The 2-year-old went back to eating his sandwich. The meal ended, and the bus emptied out.
"We got them through it," Bible said.
"Thank goodness," Anderson said.
"Fifteen minutes and 750 calories," Bible said.
"And again tomorrow," Anderson said.
The bus pulled away. The mother in pink slippers took her 2-year-old back to a trailer with no air conditioning. The 12-year-old boy walked away cursing about bologna. This is what the bus left behind at every stop along the route: children who were not quite satisfied, and whose appetites would build for 23 hours and 45 minutes until the bus returned.
At Cedar Grove, the first stop, all five Laughren siblings returned to their single-wide trailer, back into the vacuum of their summer. Their mother usually took the family's only car to work, leaving the children stranded in the trailer park. Admission to the nearby swimming pool cost $3 per person and they only had $4.50 among them. The cable company had cut off their service, and they had already spent the morning watching a DVD of "Fast & Furious" twice.
"I am so freaking bored," said Courtney Laughren, 13, walking over to their refrigerator 21 hours before the school bus was scheduled to return. Inside she found leftover doughnuts, ketchup, hot sauce, milk and bread. "Desperation time," she said, reaching for a half-eaten doughnut and closing the door.
Desperation had become their permanent state, defining each of their lives in different ways. For Courtney, it meant she had stayed rail thin, with hand-me-down jeans that fell low on her hips. For Taylor, 14, it meant stockpiling calories whenever food was available, ingesting enough processed sugar and salt to bring on a doctor's lecture about obesity and early-onset diabetes, the most common risks of a food-stamp diet. For Anthony, 9, it meant moving out of the trailer and usually living at his grandparents' farm. For Hannah, 7, it meant her report card had been sent home with a handwritten note of the teacher's concerns, one of which read: "Easily distracted by other people eating." For Sarah, the 9-month-old baby, it meant sometimes being fed Mountain Dew out of the can after she finished her formula, a dose of caffeine that kept her up at night.
And for Jennifer, their mother, 32, desperation time meant the most stressful part of her day began when she arrived home at 6 p.m., after another 12-hour shift as a cook at a nursing home.
"I'm back," she said now, dropping her keys onto the floor of the trailer, collapsing onto the couch.
She had spent her day preparing meals for $8 an hour in an industrial kitchen at the nursing home: 50 servings of breaded pork chops, rolls and macaroni salad — unless, of course, residents requested something else, in which case she cooked to order. She prepared chef salads, chicken soup and sweet-potato pies until the leftovers filled the refrigerator and stacked on the counter. A few weeks earlier, a boss had spotted her taking some of those leftovers home and threatened to put her on probation. So now Jennifer had returned to the trailer empty-handed, with five more dinners left to make for her children.
She always worried about the basics of caring for her family — "Home. Job. Food. I never hit that jackpot all at once," she said — but only in summer did their situation become so dire that she regularly asked her children to rate their hunger on a scale of 1 to 10. When her kids were in school, they ate a total of 40 free meals and 20 snacks there each week — more than 25,000 government-sponsored calories that cost her nothing. Her $593 in monthly food stamps usually lasted the entire month. They ate chicken casserole and ground beef for dinner. But now, with school out, she was down to $73 in food stamps with 17 days left in the month. "Thank God for the bus," she said, but even that solved their problems for only one meal a day.
She walked into the kitchen, collected what items remained in the pantry and set them on the table for dinner. "Buffet's ready," she announced. The children ate corn chips, Doritos, bread, leftover doughnuts, Airheads candy and Dr Pepper.
"I'm still hungry," Courtney said a few minutes later, 14 hours before the bus returned.
"Me, too," Jennifer admitted.
Her food stamps could be used for cold food but not hot food, and the nearby grocery store sold pre-made sandwiches for half-price after 8 p.m. She loaded all five kids into the car and drove a mile to the supermarket. They chose three subs from a case that glowed under fluorescent lights. They shared two, mushing pieces of bread for the baby, and then Jennifer wrapped the third sandwich to take home.
"For breakfast," she said, and they drove back to the trailer and went to bed.
The kids awoke at 9, two on the bed they had found at Goodwill and two more on the box spring. They watched "Fast & Furious." They ate the leftover sandwich.
At 11 a.m., Courtney stood by the window, rocking the baby and watching for the bus. Three other children from the trailer park were already waiting outside, picking rocks off the road and throwing them at a nearby tree. They heard the bus before they saw it, big tires crunching gravel. "Food's here!" Courtney yelled, alerting her sisters. Before they were ready to leave the trailer, Bible, the driver, walked over to find them. By now he knew the regulars on his route, and he always made sure they were fed.
Bible had lived in Greene County his entire life, but the trailer parks on his route reminded him of Belize, where he had traveled on a mission trip a decade earlier. He had spent a week there building a basic shelter for a homeless man while 70 other homeless people watched, wondering if Bible might build them houses, too. What he had experienced then was the same combination of fatigue and helplessness he felt now, looking inside the Laughrens' dilapidated trailer. In this part of the country, in this time, no amount of sack lunches would ever be enough.
He knocked on the door. Courtney and her siblings opened it.
"We have turkey, crackers and pears today," he said. "You hungry?"
"Always," she said, and they followed him back to the bus.


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Don't Ditch Those Bonds
Time to rethink conventional investment wisdom?
En español | Classic advice bout diversifying investments tells us that we should choose stocks for growth, high-quality bonds for income and banks for cash. So those of us in — ahem — the prime of life usually own some bonds or bond mutual funds.
Quality bonds lie on the safe side of the investment spectrum, which is another reason we own them. But right now, they may not be feeling especially safe.
Sign up for the AARP Money Newsletter
An ironclad law of the universe says that when interest rates rise, the market value of bonds goes down. Rates popped this spring and bond funds took quick hits — losses of 0.5 to 1 percent or so for short-term bonds, 2 to 4 percent for intermediate terms, and 7 percent or more for longer terms. (Another ironclad law says that longer-term funds swing more sharply with interest rate changes than short-term bonds do.) With interest rates predicted to climb, bond fund holders are wondering if they should cut and run.
Surprising benefits
I say no, and for a reason that you might not expect: It's actually possible for your bond funds to benefit from rising interest rates, if you're reinvesting dividends, making only modest withdrawals and planning to hold on to the funds for 20 years or more. That's because your fund is buying the higher-rate securities that are available on the market now, which raises your income yield. Over the years, your gains can more than make up for the principal you lost.
For an example of how this works, I turned to actuary and financial planner Joe Tomlinson of Greenville, Maine. He looked at funds invested in Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS), whose drop in value especially alarmed conservative investors. The internal value of TIPS is increased twice a year by the inflation rate, so many investors felt safe.
Say that you invested $290,000 last April 1 in Vanguard's TIPS fund to help pay for your retirement over 25 years. You planned on withdrawing $10,000 in the first year, with an increase to cover inflation each year after that. By the end of June, rising rates had pushed up your fund's yield by 0.83 percentage points. Its market value fell 7.4 percent and you took a $21,500 loss.
Plans ruined? Not at all, Tomlinson says. Thanks to the higher yield, you could increase your withdrawal to $10,350 and the money would still be expected to last for 25 years.
Two things have made TIPS more volatile than other funds. First, they contain more longer-term securities. Second, consumer price increases have been running at historic lows. When interest rates rise and inflation doesn't, TIPS tend to underperform.
No need to jump ship
You could blow your retirement income plans, however, if you bail out of your bond funds and, temporarily, hide the money in bank CDs. You're thinking, "I'll go back into bonds when interest rates stabilize." But no one rings a bell when a rate rise is complete. You're giving up a lot of income while you wait. What's more, when you return to bonds, you'll need to capture a higher-than-average rate to make up for the income you let go. That would mean taking higher risks.
CDs and very short-term bond funds are fine for cash you need soon, but for down the road you should stay with intermediate-term funds.
To prevent apparent loss, some investors might switch to individual bonds. That gives you "emotional control," says Christopher Philips, senior investment analyst for Vanguard. You collect your full principal when the bond comes due. But you don't get the increase in income that bond funds pay. To capture part of a rising rate, you might buy a series (or "ladder") of bonds that come due in different years. But bond funds are easier to own.
Finally, remember one more ironclad law: Interest rates are unpredictable. They might rise gradually just with economic growth; or rapidly if inflation takes hold; or decline if the economy gets squashed again. For the fixed-income part of your retirement investments, a prudent allocation would include a TIPS fund plus an intermediate-term fund — say, a bond index fund or a tax-free municipal fund. Stick with high-quality bonds, Philips says. Take your risks and part of your inflation protection in stocks.
Jane Bryant Quinn is a personal finance expert and author of Making the Most of Your Money NOW. She writes regularly for AARP Bulletin.
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One of the nation's more troubling tax inequities may fall as both the political and judicial stars appear to finally be aligning to address creation of a nationwide system of collecting existing sales taxes already owed on retail purchases made online as those taxes are already collected on counter sales.
In the existing system in Mississippi, the buyer owes 7 percent sales tax on the counter sale purchase of a hammer at his local mom-and-pop hardware store. The state has legally required the merchant to serve as the tax collector and before he walks out with the hammer, the state through the seller collects the sales taxes due from the buyer.
But if that same buyer in that same Mississippi town decides to buy the same hammer online at the same price, the online seller is not compelled to serve as the tax collector for the state of Mississippi. Mind you, the buyer still owes the tax. But he doesn't pay it because he isn't compelled to do so.
Hence, the counter sale buyer is treated differently in this system than is the online buyer. So, too, is the bricks-and-mortar merchant treated differently in this system than is the online merchant. The state loses significant tax revenue owed not under "new" taxes but under existing taxes already levied.
The Congressional Research Service cited federal estimates of $4.1 trillion in online sales in 2010, which amounts to 16.1 percent of all U.S. sales - an annual $303.4 million in uncollected Mississippi sales tax revenues. A University of Tennessee study estimates that states nationally could gain as much as $11 billion in tax revenue from existing levies that simply go uncollected because online sellers have won the lobbying wars in Congress against streamlined sales tax collections.
But a recent 75-24 U.S. Senate advisory vote approving a plan to let states collect existing taxes on online purchases shows that the political winds are shifting. The plan presently before Congress, the so-called "Marketplace Fairness Act," would establish that long-awaited national system of collecting online taxes and would allow states the option of joining the system or sitting it out.
Court cases on challenges to states that are trying to fully collect sales taxes have begun to swing toward the states and away from the online retailers. The online retailers, even Amazon, are now voluntarily collecting state sales taxes in eight states, soon to be followed by seven more.
Mississippi has been a bastion of the "no-new-taxes" political agenda, but the argument that collecting existing sales taxes from online customers in the same way that the state routinely collects the same tax from counter sales customers is weak as cold dishwater.
Sales taxes have been on the books in Mississippi since 1932. We all pay those taxes daily. Those of us who can afford a computer and an Internet Service Provider have a ready way to avoid paying some sales taxes by making our purchases online. Mississippians who can afford the option of shopping on the Web or who are simply not computer-savvy don't.
In writing about this issue for the last 15 years, I've heard every rant and argument imaginable that there somehow exists an inalienable right to shop from home and not pay sales taxes. I've heard the old "well, I pay shipping charges!" argument along with the one that is closer to the bone of why people get so angry about being asked to pony up what they owe on existing sales taxes: "I pay a lot of taxes that benefit poor people who aren't paying taxes, so if I get a little break on sales taxes on online sales, I deserve it."
Interesting theory, that. The path to addressing that argument is pretty simple. If the Mississippi Legislature wants to exempt online sales from sales taxes, they can certainly do so. So far, since 1932, the Legislature in its wisdom has not chosen to do that. About 41 cents of every Mississippi General Fund dollar comes from sales tax.
Since Mississippi's current sales tax law doesn't exempt online sales from sales tax, then the question becomes one of why we as a state are leaving millions in uncollected taxes from existing tax levies on the table? If Mississippians truly believe in the philosophy of "no-new-taxes" it would stand to reason that one of the best ways to avoid new taxes is to fully collect the taxes that are already on the books.
Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at 601-507-8004 or email@example.com.


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Universität Ulm
Universität Ulm
Helmhlotzstrsse 16
89081 Ulm/Donau
Participant's Lead
Project Staff
Dr. Michael Schmeisser
Phone: +49 731 500 23202
Partner Presentation
The Boeckers lab is for more than 15 years working on the molecular structure and plasticity of postsynaptic densities. In this context we cloned and characterized several PSD molecules including ProSAP/Shank, ProSAPiP1, LAPSER1 and the Spar family. We were able to analyze the function of the molecules (as well as the mutated forms that are related to autism spectrum disorders/Coop. Th Bougeron, Paris) in different model system including neuronal culture, drosophila, xenopus and transgenic/KO mouse lines. Recently, we additionally started to produce and analyze human neuronal cells via iPS cells that were generated from autism patient?s hair keratinocytes. The lab will therefore provide a wide range of methods, animal autism disease models, iPS technology and a long standing experience in the analysis of synaptic contacts. Dr. Schmeisser in the lab is responsible for the characterization of the mouse models that we would like to provide within the consortium. He is getting help from the technicians Maria Manz and Susanne Gerlach-Arbeiter. Dr. Stefan Liebau has established a successful group that deals with the establishment of iPS cell derived human neurons from unaffected persons and patients suffering from autism spectrum disorders.TOP


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Science Writing Smackdown: Henig vs. Shenk, Part I
DS: Really interesting piece, Robin. It is amazing to learn how inklings of a person's temperament can be detected at such a young age -- as early as 4 months of age, or even 1 month. And as you document, we know that these inklings are real, because longitudinal studies show that they are stable over time. My concern here is in your use of the words "innate" and "inborn," and your phrase "wired to worry." These words strongly suggest that these early temperaments derive straight from a person's genetic instructions. From our initial (off-line) exchange, I gather you didn't mean to imply that. But could you speak to your use of those words and what you mean by them?
RMH: Well, you caught me, sort of. When it comes to some of the phrases I used, like "wired to worry" or "born to fret," I am guilty of trying to come up with something vaguely cute and vaguely memorable. (Much like your use of the word "smackdown" in your title, above, which isn't literally true, either.) This is an occupational hazard for journalists, and even more of one for journalists who write about science for a general audience. I do want to emphasize that these were my terms, not the scientists' -- who often have odd language peccadilloes of their own. Jerome Kagan, for instance, the psychologist whose work I focused on in my piece, REALLY didn't want me to use the phrase "anxious brain," which he said is an absurdity. "The brain can't be anxious," he said. "It's like calling something a happy kidney." I had to do some last-minute scrambling to change it in the title my editor had already sent to page proof!
I know that your own particular beef, David, is the language we use to describe the gene-environment interaction, which makes words like "innate" and "inborn" especially loaded. But I'd argue that what these words mean is just "present at birth"--an observation, not a presumption about provenance. Maybe it's time for you and me to go back to the article itself, and see the full sentences in which I used the words that bother you -- and if a casual reader would have made the same assumptions you did. I'd also like to hear how you would have me rewrite those sentences in a way that makes it clearer that neither I nor the scientists are biological determinists.
DS: I completely agree that this is a very difficult task, to distill very complex science and ideas into easily-understood and hopefully memorable phrases. And it's that much harder to do on deadline, which you had to worry about and which I effectively didn't when I was writing my book. I also think you and I are swimming upstream here: we're working to dispel long-held notions, using tools (specific words) that come loaded with fixed meanings in the public mind.
I'll be glad to take this sentence by sentence and look at the alternatives. First, though, I want to focus on something you said above. You said you used the words "innate" and "inborn" to mean "present at birth." But do we actually have any indication that these temperaments are truly present at birth? Even one month of infancy is a lot of time for a nascent trait to develop. And from what we understand about gene-environment interaction, it is overwhelmingly likely that there is some significant dynamic-developmental process going on that leads to these traits -- influenced by genes, to be sure, but almost certainly not immune to outside stimulus. Can we agree on this much, before we go further?
RMH: Yes we can. Specifically, we can agree on two things: that it's a stretch to assume that traits that are measurable at four months were present at birth (though as the mother of two very different babies, I can attest that SOMETHING is present at birth, and it tends to remain pretty consistent in the first months of life); and that environmental influences on gene expression exist not only from the moment of birth, but before. I've long tried to make the case for this second concept when writing about human cloning. Clones seem to be the best argument that two organisms can be distinctly different even when they have identical DNA -- especially if the intrauterine environment is different. Remember the first cloned cat, that made headlines back in 2002? It was a calico, which means its coat coloration depends not just on genes but on which genes turn on and off in utero. (I'm not sure of the genetics involved exactly, but it has something to do with X-inactivation. Coat color genes are carried on the X chromosome, which is why calico cats are almost always female.) It seemed to me that most of the news reports of the cloned cat's birth missed the learning opportunity it provided, the vivid, graphic demonstration of the fact that the environment can change the way the genes are expressed. I mean, that cloned calico didn't look at all like its DNA donor!
So with that out of the way, David, I'm braced for whatever you have next. Fire away with an example of a sentence in my anxiety article where I was wrong in my word choice, and offer me a better alternative.
DS: The first sentence that caught my eye was this one:
"Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first embodied for him what it meant to be wired to worry."
That phrase, "wired to worry," strongly suggests to me a preset design, the same as a car might be built for speed or a shoe designed for comfort. Perhaps you meant it to suggest that the wiring was an ongoing process and therefore very distinct from the cliche of "hard-wiring." But I'm pretty sure that most readers are going to read it the same way I did. My suggested rephrasing would be something like this:
"Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first demonstrated how astonishingly early the first essential pieces of temperament could develop in a human being. Her core temperament was taking shape before she could walk, talk, or even fully focus her eyes on the world around her."
It's not as catchy, I know, but part of the trick of educating people about the developmental process is, I think, not falling into a familiar shorthand that allows them to quickly roll past a phrase. We don't want the language to be clunky, of course. But we do want them to slow down and think about what we're saying.
I don't know Kagan's work anything like you do, but it also seems to me that this approach puts the focus more properly where it belongs. It sounds to me like the revelation to Kagan was that this core aspect of temperament comes in quite early and can be amazingly stable over time.
RMH: There you have it, I think -- to make all the subtle distinctions that you wanted me to make, you replaced my three words, "wired to worry," with 41. You have to remember that this paragraph is in the early set-up section of the piece, which is already going on for a pretty long time for a set-up, with descriptions of Baby 19 and a little bit of a description of Kagan's research. I agree with you that it's important sometimes for the reader to slow down and think, but I disagree that this is the place in the article to do it. At this section, sort of the "nut graf" of the article, I felt like I needed three words, not 41.
This reminds me of an argument I occasionally have with my husband, who is a professor of political science. In his own writing, he often wants to underscore the tentativeness of some of his findings by using three or four synonyms instead of one good word. It ends up sounding like legalese, throwing out a bunch of caveats and qualifiers just in case. The problem with your suggested phrasing isn't that it's "not as catchy" as mine -- well, maybe it sort of is, given where in the article it would appear. The real problem is that all those extra words don't really edify. I want readers to be so captivated by my intro that they will keep reading and THEN will get all the information they need to put Kagan's findings in perspective. In the case you've cited, I feel like "wired to worry" is a phrase I needed up front to captivate my reader and to sell the rest of the story.
DS: Yes, yes, yes: keeping people reading is 99 percent of the game. I agree. That's why my books take me a ridiculously long 3 years instead of 8 months. And even with all that time, I'm sure, come March, you'll have some excellent suggestions for how some of my sentences could have been sharper (and I'll be happy to post your critique). But we're skirting the real problem here, because I think you've already essentially agreed that "wired to worry," even by your own definition, is simply not correct. You've implied that that phrase is supposed to mean "these traits are present from birth." But haven't we both agreed that Kagan isn't really saying that?
Back to the sentence. I completely respect your need to come up with a short, captivating sentence. Here's an edit that comes in at six words shorter than your original:
"Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first revealed that worry comes early."
RMH: "Worry comes early" is a better phrase, but guess what -- that's not really accurate, either. Kagan is not saying that these high-reactive infants are worrying. What he's saying is that a temperament that predisposes a person to worrying (and also to behavioral inhibition, shyness, a tendency to be inner-directed, and a higher risk of clinical anxiety disorder) relates to a hyper-reactive amygdala, which in an infant creates the specific motor activity he measured -- kicking, arching the back, fussing, crying when exposed to novel stimuli. Later in life, this hyper-reactive amygdala leads to different outward signs: social withdrawal and a kind of freezing behavior in early childhood, interior fretfulness and sometimes clinical anxiety disorders in adolescence and adulthood. These babies aren't worrying early. They are predisposed early to worrying.
I'm not at home at the moment, and the New York Times fact-checker still hasn't returned most of my Kagan books anyway, but I'm pretty sure he would not object to the statement that these traits ARE present from birth. They just look different at different ages. Even at one or two days of age you can see a high-reactive temperament, which in the neonatal period is exhibited by the rate at which the infant sucks on a nipple. There was an experiment that involved feeding newborns sugar water with different concentrations of sweetness. Since I don't have the book at hand, I'm afraid I can't cite the specifics, but I do remember that some babies, when the concentration changed, reacted with a much greater increase in their speed of sucking. I'm pretty sure (I need to get home next week to check this out) that the two-day-old infants who sucked fastest in response to novelty -- the neonatal correlate of high reactivity -- were more likely to grow up to look like the behaviorally inhibited and anxiety-prone children in Kagan's study. I see this as evidence that temperament probably IS present at birth, at least to some degree.
(Part II is also available.)


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By Matt Murphy
State House News Service
BOSTON — The Senate today will consider legislation to increase the financial penalties for corporate manslaughter, taking up a bill first filed by Attorney General Martha Coakley in the aftermath of the Big Dig tunnel ceiling collapse, according to a Senate aide.
The bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Jennifer Flanagan, D-Leominster, would increase the penalty for a corporation found guilty of manslaughter to $250,000 from its present $1,000 limit, and has taken on added significance in the wake of a deadly meningitis outbreak stemming from unsanitary conditions at a Massachusetts compounding drug pharmacy.
Coakley, who lists the bill as a priority this session, argued in December that corporate responsibility for "criminally negligent behavior" is largely unaddressed in state law.
"It is a common-sense update to the current manslaughter statute that allows the commonwealth to more fully hold corporations charged with manslaughter accountable," Coakley wrote in a letter to the chairs of the Committee on Public Health. "The $1,000 penalty has not been increased in nearly 200 years."
The committee reported the bill favorably in August, and it was referred to the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
The Senate, which was to meet today in a formal session for the first time since late July, will also take up legislation related to critical incident intervention by emergency-service providers.
Sponsored by Sen. James Timilty, the legislation seeks to encourage first-responders to provide or receive crisis intervention treatment after a critical incident by guaranteeing the confidentiality of any information disclosed in the course of such intervention.
The bill would protect those providing or receiving crisis intervention services from being required to testify or divulge information unless the communications indicate a threat to the individual or another person, or indicate the existence of past child abuse or neglect, abuse of an adult or family violence.
Gov. Deval Patrick in January filed legislation to strengthen the oversight and regulatory controls of compounding pharmacies in Massachusetts, and said at the time supported increasing the corporate manslaughter penalties.
The Legislature has yet to address questions of oversight of compounding pharmacies, but leaders have discussed the issues as a priority this legislative session.
Coakley first filed legislation to increase the financial penalties for corporate manslaughter in 2009 after Powers Fasteners. That came after the New York-based marketer and distributor of the epoxy bolts used in portions of the Big Dig tunnel system was indicted for manslaughter in connection with the 2006 ceiling-panel collapse that killed Jamaica Plain resident Milena Del Valle. That case was settled with the Attorney General's Office in 2008.
While individuals can be imprisoned for up to 20 years for manslaughter, corporations only face monetary punishment. The law establishing the current fine was signed by Gov. John Brooks in 1819 and has not been updated since.


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The mastodons, ground sloths, and sabercats are all gone. They all slipped into extinction around 10,000 or so years ago, along with an even wider variety of fantastic beasts and birds that fall under the category "megafauna." But not all the Ice Age megamammals died out. We spend so much time mourning the losses that we often forget the survivors that carry whispers of the Pleistocene world. Among these resilient beasts is the jaguar.
Jaguars are old cats. They first evolved in Eurasia sometime around three million years ago before spreading both west and east, eventually inhabiting a range from southern England to Nebraska and down into South America. Today's range of southern Arizona to Argentina—over 3.4 million square miles—is only a sliver of their Ice Age expansion. And it wasn't just the jaguar's range that shrunk. Today the spotted cats are about fifteen percent smaller than their Pleistocene predecessors.
Nevertheless, jaguars survived while the American lion, the sabercats, and other predators vanished. How? In order to investigate this question, biologist Matt Hayward and colleagues looked at the jaguar diet and how the cat's prey preferences changed over time.
Drawing from 25 published studies documenting 3,214 jaguar kills, Hayward and coauthors found that jaguars are pretty finicky for apex predators. The big cat's menu spans 111 species—ranging from cattle to rodents to monkeys to turtles—but, contrary to what has often been written about the cat, the jaguar is not really a generalist that hunts anything and everything.
The most common parts of the jaguar diet, Hayward and colleagues found, are capybara, wild pig, caiman, collared peccary, nine-banded armadillo, giant anteater, and white-nosed coati. These species account for 16-21% of the jaguar diet. The stats also showed that prey including peccaries, brocket deer, giant anteaters, and coatis which were hunted 85% of the time when they were present in the jaguar's range. Crunching the numbers a bit further, the zoologists found that jaguars seemed to especially target capybara and giant anteater. On the other hand, jaguars never preyed upon tapirs and almost never touched primates.
Jaguars come out of all this as a paradox. They are burlier than leopards, yet they prefer to hunt a narrow range of prey that falls in the shallow end of what jaguars should be able to tackle. This might have something to do with why the cats have shrunk. Jaguars aren't large enough to take on tapirs alone, yet human hunting on mid-range prey—such as deer—has made such herbivores too rare to rely upon. So despite their size, jaguars responded by picking out smaller prey which Hayward and coauthors dub "suboptimal" for what the cats initially evolved to do.
The jaguar's not alone in this. Coyotes have gone through similar changes. The scrappy canids are Ice Age survivors, too, and they were significantly larger during the Ice Age. When all their competition disappeared, coyotes became smaller and ended up living on the fringes in a world heavily influenced by humans.
Flexibility made all the difference for these carnivores. Even though jaguars no longer prowl as much of the world as they once did, and are currently listed as "near threatened" on the IUCN Red List, they were able to persist where so many other carnivores perished by shifting their diets. "It may be that jaguars survived this mass extinction event by preferentially preying on relatively small species," Hayward and coauthors write. The fossil record of cougars tells a similar story: By eating parts of carcasses other cats didn't want, mountain lions were able to survive the tough times. And even though the cause of the loss of many Ice Age celebrities remains debated, the survivors are truly the animals we should be looking at in greater detail. How they succeeded may hold the secrets to why so many other species failed.
Hayward, M., Kamler, J., Montgomery, R., Newlove, A., Rostro-García, S., Sales, L., Van Valkenburgh, B. 2016. Prey preferences of the jaguar Panthera onca reflect the Post-Pleistocene demise of large prey. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2015.00148


text: Adventure Sports Lovers look for chances to exercise their hobby at new and fascinating locations. From ocean kayaking to canoeing and from bungee jumping to stream river rafting, the extent of adventure sports has extended widely in past times handful of generations. People's desire for journey sports are increasing. When you are dysphoric using the… Continue reading Adventure Sport Lovers


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More than 2 million Americans stand to lose their jobless benefits unless Congress reauthorizes federal emergency unemployment help before the end of the year.
The people in danger of having their unemployment checks cut off are among those who have benefited least from the slowly improving job market: Americans who have been out of work longer than six months.
These workers have exhausted their state unemployment insurance, leaving them reliant on the federal program.
In addition to those at risk of abruptly losing their benefits in December, 1 million people would have their checks curtailed by April if the program is not renewed, according to lawmakers and advocates pushing for an extension.
"We cannot forget the human cliff looming for more than two million Americans scheduled to lose their economic lifeline during the upcoming holidays," Rep. Sander M. Levin (Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement.
The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program is just one component of the looming "fiscal cliff," a number of programs and tax breaks set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress comes up with an alternative.
Conservative lawmakers have raised concerns that continually extending jobless benefits is both an unmanageable burden on the federal budget and a disincentive for people to find work.
Many jobless Americans have come to depend on the benefits.
"I don't know what I would do without them," said Richard Crowe, 54, a Wintersville, Ohio, millwright who has depended on a $764 biweekly unemployment check since May, when the steel company he worked for closed and filed for bankruptcy. "I will probably have to try to sell my house just to stay above water."
Crowe, who made $84,000 a year before being laid off, said he has applied for about 100 jobs, but to no avail. "All I get back, if anything, are 'Dear John' letters," he said.
His plight is not unusual.
More than 5 million Americans have been out of work longer than six months — the limit for most state-funded unemployment insurance — though not all of them receive jobless benefits. This group makes up 40 percent of the nation's unemployed, a share that has dropped little even as the jobless rate has inched down.
Federal jobless-benefit extensions are intended to provide support, until the job market improves, to workers who have gone beyond state-funded unemployment insurance limits. The program has been in place since President George W. Bush signed it into law in June 2008, as the economy was deteriorating as a result of the financial crisis.
At the time, fewer than one in five jobless workers had been out of work longer than six months.
As the unemployment crisis has persisted, the program has been extended on 10 occasions, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), which advocates for low-wage workers and the jobless.
In February, Congress renewed the program but cut the number of weeks of extended aid available. The change reduced benefits that once stretched to 99 weeks in the states with the highest unemployment rates.
Supporters of the program point to academic research showing that unemployed workers who receive benefits spend more time looking for jobs than those who do not.
Combined with the drop in the jobless rate, changes in the federal unemployment program have reduced the average time that jobless Americans can collect benefits by nearly one-third, according to the Congressional Research Service. Meanwhile, the proportion of jobless people receiving unemployment benefits has dropped from 64 percent two years ago to 43 percent in September, according to the NELP.
A coalition of more than 35 groups led by the NELP is launching a campaign to press Congress to extend the program. In the coming days and weeks, the coalition is planning to visit lawmakers, buy ads and hold news events aimed at building pressure for its cause.
The groups want Congress to make reauthorizing unemployment insurance a priority during the lame-duck session, which starts this week and is scheduled to go until the end of next month.
Beyond the pain that a cutoff would cause recipients, advocates say that ending the federal jobless benefits would harm the economy because those who get such checks tend to quickly spend the money on basic needs.


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With things gently crumbling between Chelsea and I, I decided to give Middle Eastern another chance. I enjoyed spending time with him, and he certainly was a nice kid. I wasn't sure if I could see myself dating a guy still in college, but I figured it certainly couldn't hurt to give it a shot.
Wednesday morning while I was on my run, I did a lot of thinking. I was trying to clear my head. I realized I wasn't all that into Chelsea after all. There were a few things about him I liked, but there was nothing there that got me truly excited to see him again. I didn't want to waste either of our time, so I decided it was best to tell him how I felt.
While at work Wednesday afternoon I thought about him a M.E. He was such a sweet guy, he was quite interested in me, he was smart… There were a lot of great qualities there. The big question — Is he mature enough for me. I'd never dated someone that much younger than me before. I wasn't basing this on a number. I was basing it more on his personality.
The other side of the coin was how great he was in bed. I really enjoyed being with him the first time. I fantasized about he and I having sex in the locker room shower of my gym.
When I got home that evening, I told him to come over. He didn't hesitate. He finished what he needed to do, and he made his way to Hoboken.
Warning: The following may be too graphic for some. When he arrived, we immediately went to my bedroom. He was hungry for sex. We quickly stripped each other until we were naked and enjoyed kissing, groping, sucking, etc. It was nice to be with a man who was so passionate once again. He loved to kiss and was good at it. I didn't have a single complaint about him. After ample foreplay, we had sex. It appeared I created a bottom. He was all about it now, even begging for it this time. It was hot. I really like how masculine he was, but also how much he was willing to bottom for me. This was an unusual combination from my experience. [I actually had to walk away from the computer for a minute because I was thinking about the fun we had and getting a bit too excited while writing this].
Afterwards, I went into the bathroom to relieve myself. I came back to my bedroom to find M.E. on his phone. He was doing a lot of typing. I encouraged him to come to the living room with me to watch TV and be somewhat social with my roommates, but he told me he'd be out in a minute. He had a few messages he needed to reply to.
Since I last saw him, he sprained his ankle. I'd been giving him some advice, having sprained both mine multiple times and being related to a physical therapist and someone who teaches athletic training. As a result of this sprain, he wasn't able to go on his planned spring break. He told me he was working out the logistics of rescheduling the trip for another time.
I left the room and went to the living room. I'm not 100% sure why this idea popped in my head, but I wondered if he might be on Grindr. I had my phone and tablet with me, so I pulled up the app and checked it out. He didn't show up on either. Maybe he wasn't on there, but my suspicions weren't fully satisfied. When about ten minutes passed, I went back to the room to see if he was coming. He put some of my clothes on and joined me. We watched another episode of Modern Family together.
While he watched, he sat behind me in the chair, and I laid between his legs watching the show. We both laughed a lot. By the time the show was over, it was late. I suggested we go to bed, and he agreed. I asked him what he'd told his roommates about where he was going. He told them he was heading home for the night.
While he was brushing his teeth, he left his phone on my night stand. My mind shot back to the chance I had to look at N's phone the night I witnessed him kissing another man in front of me. Boston convinced me it was a bad idea. I wasn't going to make that mistake again. I had no problem if he was using Grindr. We were not exclusive. I was seeing other people. I just found it incredibly offensive if he was cruising Grindr from the comfort of my apartment. That was not okay in my book. I needed to know. I turned his iPhone on, and sure enough, at the top of the screen was an icon for Grindr showing he had 23 messages. I placed the phone back down on the night stand and processed what I just learned. Not only did he have messages, but he blocked me on both my accounts so I couldn't see that he was cruising Grindr.
It was that exact moment I decided M.E. and I wouldn't date after all. It was fine if we spent time together and enjoyed having sex, but I wasn't going to date him long-term. I couldn't trust him. I wasn't mad he may be seeing other guys or even having sex with them. I was mad he was attempting to line up other guys from my bedroom. I decided not to say anything right then and there. It would simply form my future behavior.
He came back to the bedroom, and we both climbed into bed. I wrapped my arms around him and he climbed into the natural crevice I created as big spoon until we dozed off.
When we woke in the morning, we fooled around a bit. I had to go to work, but I made sure to set an extra early alarm to allow for a little fun in the bed followed by a shower with each other. It was sexy and a nice way to start my day.
We left together, and he gave me a ride to the PATH. Since he told me last time he wished I kissed him when he dropped me off, I decided to oblige that request. I gave him a nice smooch before heading into the city to start my workday. I liked M.E., but not enough to make him my boyfriend — Not after what I learned. But, it would be nice to have someone around regularly to share affection and pleasure with on occasion. Maybe this was the start of a beautiful friendship…Follow @onegayatatime


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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Open Storage
D-Block Project's inaugural exhibition.
"Open Storage"
"Open Storage" is an invitation for artists to use D-Block Projects as storage facility and exhibition space for artworks that were being stored in their studios and out of view of the public's eye. This exhibition draws upon the "open storage" trend found in several museums where storage facilities are opened to the public to see the otherwise private existence of stored art. The open storage experience removes the historical context of works and instead displays work based on the size, logistics of storage and the availability of space.
The exhibition "Open Storage" aims to create a heterogeneous display of artworks that have an intended random association to each other and require the viewer to create a narrative or framework outside of the traditional method of viewing art.
"Open Storage" will be D-Block's inaugural exhibition and a transitional organization of art works as D-Block begins it's 2011 programming at 218 The Promenade in Downtown Long Beach, CA.
Artists: Celine Bayla, Ed Bopp, Jeff Chabot, Ethan Crenson, Emmanuel Crespo, Carla Danes, Chris Danes, Rashell George, Ed Gomez, Fidel Hernandez, Luis G. Hernandez, Ryan Lamb, Ivan Limas, Albert Lopez, Matt MacFarland, Caroline Maxwell, Chris Morales, Mike Rogers, Steve Schmidt, Francesco X. Siqueiros, JJ Stevens, Jason Wallace Triefenbach, and Yalda Yazdanpanah.
Opens: Dec. 11, 2010 (soft opening), Jan. 8, 2011 (Official Opening)
Hours: Saturday, 7pm – 10pm
Visiting Information
Download Press Release


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FULL BRAZILIAN AND OTHER RITUALS, Amsterdam
As warm, syncretic and eclectic as Brazil itself, the Museumnacht evening at the Oude Kerk offered art from Brazil and the Netherlands that deals with the idea of ritual in its most open sense. New, traditional and invented rituals for happy healing and more, made this an evening to listen, feel, see and enjoy. FULL BRAZILIAN AND OTHER RITUALS was part of the Brazil Festival Amsterdam.


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Reading FC Community Trust have once again shown magnificent support and joined forces with Football Aid, allowing football fans the opportunity to grace the hallowed turf and play on their Field of Dreams at the Madejski in 2013, while at the same time raising funds for charity.
Our magical event allows Reading supporters to 'Live the Dream' in an authentic match day experience. Players will gain exclusive access to the pitch and tunnel areas, pull on their own personalised shirt in the official changing rooms, walk down the tunnel to the sound of a cheering crowd and ultimately to step out on the hallowed turf and represent their club in a never to be forgotten 90 minutes of football.
The matches have also been supported by a host of Royal legends, with the likes of Michael Gilkes, Mick Gooding, Lawrie Sanchez and many more all lending their valuable support in recent years, by playing alongside or managing the supporters in the hugely enjoyable matches at the Madejski.
Securing your position couldn't be easier, just visit www.footballaid.com and choose your club, then you'll have two ways to secure your Fixed Price position: Option 1: 'Buy Now' - Our quickest and most popular option, or Option 2: 'Sponsored to Play' - Pay a non-refundable £100 deposit to secure your position and then simply pay off the remaining balance anytime before 25th January 2013.
So if you're keen to secure your place on your Field of Dreams this season, why not visit www.footballaid.com today to make sure you're part of the team! Alternatively if you'd like any additional information, you can call Football Aid on 0131 220 5999 or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
Football Aid celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2010 and have allowed over 13,090 football fans the chance to "Live the Dream" in more than 501 matches. They are a groundbreaking organisation which generates funds annually by hosting charity football matches at iconic stadiums all over the UK. The unique concept was the brainchild of businessman and Football Aid Chairman Craig Paterson and funds raised from the event will benefit the work of a charitable project nominated by the club, as well as projects nominated by Football Aid's parent charity Field of Dreams.


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NACO, Ariz. — Investigators searching a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border for clues into the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent face a treacherous territory that is heavily used by drug smugglers, offers many hiding places and is close enough to Mexico for traffickers to make a quick getaway.
Whoever killed Agent Nicholas Ivie and wounded another agent in the sparsely populated desert in southeastern Arizona early Tuesday may have done just that.
Those who carried out the shooting near Bisbee, Ariz., probably had time to cross the border in the early-morning darkness before authorities could seal off an escape route, said George McCubbin, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union representing about 17,000 border patrol agents.
"I seriously doubt anybody would be laid up and hiding," he said.
Ivie and two other agents were fired upon in a rugged hilly area about five miles north of the border as they responded to an alarm that was triggered on one of the sensors that the government has installed along the border. The wounded agent was shot in the ankle and buttocks and released from the hospital after undergoing surgery. The third agent wasn't injured.
Ivie was a 30-year-old father of two who grew up in Provo and was active in the LDS Church. He was an agent for four years.
Authorities have declined to provide other details, including what they believe prompted the shooting and whether the agents were ambushed. Still, they suspect that more than one person fired on the agents. No arrests have been made.
The last Border Patrol agent fatally shot on duty was Brian Terry, who died in a shootout with bandits near the border in December 2010. Terry's shooting was later linked to the government's "Fast and Furious" gun-smuggling operation, which allowed people suspected of illegally buying guns for others to walk away from gun shops with weapons, rather than be arrested.
Authorities intended to track the guns into Mexico. Two rifles found at the scene of Terry's shooting were bought by a member of the gun-smuggling ring being investigated. Critics of the operation say any shooting along the border now raises the specter that those illegal weapons are still being used in border violence.
A federal law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told The Associated Press that no weapons have been found. The official requested anonymity because information on the search hasn't been publicly released.
The shooting occurred in an area heavily frequented by drug smugglers, though less so in recent years by illegal immigrants crossing the border, said Dave Stoddard, a retired Border Patrol agent who worked in the agency's station in the area for eight years. "You're talking about cocaine alley," Stoddard said.
The area historically has been popular with smugglers because U.S. 80 comes within several miles of the border, allowing backpack-toting smugglers to take loads of drugs to the highway for pickup by vehicles. "It takes maybe less than a minute and everybody leaves the scene," Stoddard said, explaining that the "mules" either get in the vehicle or go back into the desert to return to Mexico on foot.
The desert where the shooting occurred is dotted with creosote and other brushes that hamper visibility at ground level. Gullies and ridges also provide cover for smugglers.
The area is part of the nation's busiest Border Patrol sector, which received additional agents and fencing as the federal government sought to improve border security in recent years.
To sneak drugs into the country, teams of smugglers who lug up to 40 pounds of marijuana each in backpacks made of burlap and flour bags typically have to either walk over the border or scale the fence that covers about 30 percent of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.
Agents patrol the fence by driving along roads beside the barriers and monitor the area through surveillance cameras mounted on nearby towers and sensors placed along smuggling routes after the fence.
Agents who may find it hard to spot smugglers in the brush use remote sensors to detect illegal border-crossers so agents can be deployed in response. Seismic sensors buried in the ground on paths and trails in the desert and mountains north of the border are used to detect the passage of people, animals and vehicles.
Each Board Patrol station monitors hundreds of such sensors and can dispatch agents to the scene when the devices are triggered. "As people walk over that, that will trigger the signal," McCubbin said. "You go out and check it out."
Multiple sensors can be deployed along a path so agents can tell the direction of travel and get an idea of how large a group is involved, he said. Then agents can either get ahead of the group or come in from behind and use night-vision goggle sand infrared cameras to spot them.
Border Patrol agents often are posted several hundred feet and even miles away from the border to look for people who sneaked into the country. Once smugglers get past several layers of enforcement, they typically hook up with a driver on a highway or ranch road and use back roads to make their way around Border Patrol checkpoints.
In the county where the shooting occurred, checkpoints could be seen on two highways that carry traffic to and from Interstate 10.
Drug-sniffing dogs and agents screen traffic passing through the checkpoints, resulting in searches of vehicles if there are indications of smuggling activity. But the checkpoints' real enforcement purpose is indirect, Stoddard said.
"The real purpose of the checkpoint is to get the dope or people on foot in a remote area where they can be picked up. It's gravy when a load goes into the (checkpoint)."


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To stop the creation of spam accounts, a staff member will look at all new membership requests to verify authenticity before granting access to the site. Once your membership has been approved, you will receive another e-mail containing information about how to log in, set your password, and other details.
During working hours this approval could take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours. After hours and on weekends approval may take longer.
Thank you for your patience. This practice keeps Monasteries of the Heart and its data secure.


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WASHINGTON -- To help reduce healthcare costs, health plans should institute policies that encourage consumers to choose high-performing health systems based on comparative quality and cost information, researchers here said.
For example, a deductible could be waved for Medicare beneficiaries who register with a practice that is a medical home, or for care teams with the capacity to care for high-cost, high-risk patients, Stuart Guterman, executive director of the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System, said at a briefing here Monday on bending the healthcare cost curve.
Other out-of-pocket costs could be reduced for patients who receive care from networks that participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program or accountable care organizations.
The Commonwealth Fund released the proposal as one of several in its list to cut $2 trillion in healthcare spending in the next decade. Others included revising the physician fee structure to reward value and strengthening primary care and support teams for high-cost, complex patients.
Providing consumers with information to make more cost-effective choices is estimated to save $189 million in the next decade, the think tank said.
"Even though that accounts for a relatively small portion of the total savings estimate, it's necessary to make the system work better," Guterman said at the briefing, which was sponsored by the Alliance for Health Reform. "You need to engage consumers, but engage them with positive incentives."
Providers have been bludgeoned with efforts to improve costs and efficiency in their practices, whether it's through shared savings programs or a number of other quality incentives. But private and public plans have been slower to push such plans to consumers, panelists here said.
However, the issue of how to define "high-performing health system" remains difficult.
"If you look at a lot of health plans that have tiered benefits, you've got to question the degree to which they emphasize cost as opposed to quality," Guterman said. "It's easier to measure cost, and it's harder to measure quality. There's a lot of different measures of quality."
To address that problem, panelist Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, called for greater harmonization of quality standards between public and private health plans so providers, consumers, and payers could all look for the same factors and hopefully make better choices.
"This concept of value-based benefits could begin to be looked at very productively from a very pro-patient point of view, which is to support the kinds of high-quality choices that all of us want," she said.
Greater use of electronic health records should spur the dissemination of information to encourage more informed consumer choices, according to the Commonwealth proposal. "Having all-payer information on prices, quality, patient experiences, and outcomes of care, at both the state and community levels, would inform consumer choice," the proposal stated.
Another Commonwealth Fund proposal aimed at reducing cost and improving quality involves combining the different elements of Medicare coverage under a consolidated "Medicare Essential" plan. By consolidating Medicare Parts A, B, and D, spending would be lowered from reduced administrative costs, according to the authors.
"You have a more cohesive system and ... one that's easier to manage because it's all under the same umbrella," Guterman said.


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TOKYO (Reuters) - One of Japan's top kabuki actors, who worked hard to modernize the centuries-old theater form and performed around the world, died on Wednesday after a five-month battle with cancer, Japanese media reported.
Kanzaburo Nakamura, 57, was born to a family of longstanding performers in the ancient kabuki theatre - known for elaborate make-up, extravagant costumes and all-male casts - and began performing at the age of three.
He sought to modernize kabuki, which dates back 400 years, and to introduce Western audiences to the colorful art form through packed performances in New York, Paris and Berlin.
"I love Kabuki and it's a good thing I love it. If I hadn't loved it, I would have just gone mad, given the family I was born to," he told Reuters in 2008 before a performance in Berlin.
Diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June, he underwent surgery a month later but contracted pneumonia and was in and out of hospital after that, with women's magazines following his illness closely.
Born Noriaki Namino, he took the stage name of Kankuro Nakamura at his first performance, and then officially inherited the revered stage name Kanzaburo Nakamura in 2005, becoming the 18th person to bear it.
(Reporting by Olivier Fabre at Reuters Television; Editing by Elaine Lies and Ron Popeski)


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Dec. 22, 2012
Despite his indictment, Mr. Anenih has now been appointed by President Goodluck Jonathan to head the NPA board.
Tony Anenih, recently re-appointed by President Goodluck Jonathan to head the board of the Nigeria Ports Authority, NPA, does not have a clean past in managing public funds, a 2009 senate report said.
In December 2009, a damning report detailing how Mr. Anenih, a former works minister and then leader of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), allegedly mismanaged billions of naira meant for the rehabilitation and construction of Nigerian roads, was listed for debate – for the third time in a row – by the Senate.
The transport probe report is filled with revelations of alleged serial malpractices, and shows how, in 10 years (1999 to 2009), through multiple contract inflation frauds, connivance between contractors and government officials, some N645 billion was spent on 4,752 kilometres of road; shortchanging the government to the tune of N49 million on each kilometre of road worked on, amounting to approximately N233 billion.
The report, produced by a senate ad-hoc committee on transportation, led by Heineken Lokpobiri, blamed Anenih and his successors in the ministry, for the poor state of Nigerian highways during the period and called for their prosecution.
The report
The report shows that Nigeria's public transportation sector, under the watch of Mr. Anenih and three others, was a cesspit of monumental corruption and fraud as contractors connived with government officials to defraud the country.
The report contains details of what its authors said was one of the nation's largest portfolio of official scams at the time.
During its 20-day sitting in 2008, the ad-hoc committee said it scrutinised 532 written memoranda and listened to 248 presentations.
The committee said ministers and other senior officials of the ministries of transportation and Finance between 1999 and 2009 awarded multiple contracts for the same roads and paid for unapproved contracts.
According to the report, between 1999 and 2009, the ministry of transportation gave contracts for the construction and rehabilitation of 11, 591 km roads at a cost of N1.008 trillion – about N87 million per km.
During the same period, only 41 per cent of the roads were worked on, after close to 64 per cent of the contract value was paid.
In the 10-year period, work was done on only 4,752 kilometres of roads for N645.8 billion, at very high cost of N135.8 million per kilometre, defrauding the government N49 million on each kilometre.
"There was no commensurate value for funds expended on the roads from 1999 to 2009," the committee said.
The committee said contractors, who were usually selected on questionable grounds, liaised with the leadership of the ministries and reduced the scope of awarded contracts without an equivalent scaling down on costs. In all cases, no one received any query from the internal audit.
The report said that under the reign of Tony Anenih, Adeseye Ogunlewe, Obafemi Anibaba and Cornelius Adebayo, road contracts were awarded depending only on estimates that were submitted by the bidding contractors, without prior design by the ministry.
The ministry also "fixed prices even before the roads were actually designed by the companies," the report said.
The report detailed how about half – 46 per cent – of the companies that got jobs under Mr. Anenih and the three were not registered at the Corporate Affairs Commission at the time they were awarded contracts, against contract management rules.
It described the engineering representatives of the transport ministry as some of the most corrupt and lacking in technical expertise. "They granted clearances to the contractors when the jobs were far from finished," the report said.
The current Petroleum minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, who – as minister of Transportation and Works – literally wept while inspecting the condition of the Benin-Ore road, was also indicted in the report.
The panel said Mrs. Alison-Madueke paid more than N1.2 billion into the private account of a company called Digital Toll Gates Limited, against the written advice of the Due Process Office.
Recommended for prosecution
The senators recommended that Tony Anenih, Adeseye Ogunlewe, Obafemi Anibaba and Cornelius Adebayo, who headed the transport ministry within that period, along with their Ministers of State and the Permanent Secretaries be prosecuted by the government for defrauding the nation.
The report also recommended the prosecution of Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, who was the permanent secretary during the administration of all the ministers except Mr. Anenih's. He was alleged to have crafted a means of splitting contracts into sizeable amounts to bring the values within the approving authority of his office. With this, projects with single appropriation were allegedly awarded by him separately sometimes to non-existing companies.
Swept under the carpet
That report was never considered on the floor of the senate.
The report, which took the ad hoc committee 18 months to produce, kept appearing on the senate's order paper as a matter to be considered at the next plenary till February 2010 when it was again listed to be debated and adopted in March. That was its last listing before that senate session ended in June 2011.
Ayogu Eze, a member of the committee and spokesman for the senate at the time, said the report could have "skipped the minds of those in the Senate leadership" or, perhaps, the Rules and Business committee of the Senate failed to slate it for discussion.
The Rules and Business Committee schedules matters handed down to it by the Senate leadership for discussion.
Alloysius Etok, then chairman of the Rules and Business Committee explained at the time he could no longer schedule the probe report for debate because he got no green light from the then senate leadership, led by David Mark.
"I'm trying to prioritise them (issues to be discussed by the Senate) and again, they (the authors of the report) did not finish that job," Mr. Etok said. "I was trying to weigh the options which I am still trying to talk to the leadership to see if we can now take the report in part. If the leadership agrees that we treat it in parts, then I will bring it up for the interest of the public and Nigerian people. If the leadership says we should wait till they bring the second part of the report, then I will wait."
The report indicting Mr. Anenih was the first part of a larger investigation of alleged corruption in the transport sector since 1999 by the Lokpobiri led Senate ad-hoc committee.
The second part of the report, which lawmakers said detailed the misuse of the funds meant for the marine and air transport sector during that time, was never submitted.
Mr. Jonathan ignores indictment to reappoint Anenih
President Jonathan has now brushed aside that indictment hanging on Mr. Anenih's neck, appointing him to head the board of the NPA. Critics say the appointment has once again underlined the president's non-commitment to the war against corruption.
The presidency could not be reached to comment for this story. His spokespersons, Reuben Abati and Doyin Okupe, did not answer or return calls made to their telephones. Link c/o premiumTimes: http://saharareporters.com/news-page/how-anenih-alison-madueke-others-robbed-nigeria-n234bn-meant-road-construction-premium-tim


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For nearly a week, the world followed the saga of Amina Arraf, the blogger who was celebrated for her passionate, often intimate writings about the Syrian government's crackdown on Arab Spring protesters. Those writings stopped abruptly last Monday, and in a posting on her blog, "A Gay Girl in Damascus," a cousin said Amina had been hauled away by government security agents.
News of her disappearance became an Internet and media sensation. The U.S. State Department started an investigation. But almost immediately skeptics began asking: Had anyone ever actually met Amina? On Wednesday, pictures of her on the blog were revealed to have been taken from a London woman's Facebook page.
And Sunday, the truth spilled out: The gay girl in Damascus confessed to being a 40-year-old American man from Georgia.
The persona Tom MacMaster built and cultivated for years — a lesbian who was half Syrian and half American — was a tantalizing Internet-era fiction, one that he used to bring attention to the human rights record of a country where media restrictions make traditional reporting almost impossible.
On Sunday, MacMaster apologized on the blog. "While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground," he wrote. "I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about."
MacMaster, a Middle East peace activist who is working on his master's degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote that he fictionalized the account of a gay woman in Syria to illuminate the situation for a Western audience.
The hoax raises difficult questions about the reliance on blogs, tweets, Facebook postings and other Internet communications as they increasingly become a standard way to report on global events. Information from online sources has become particularly important in coverage of the Middle East uprisings, especially in countries that severely restrict foreign media — or that use social media against protesters.
MacMaster had used Amina as an identity online for at least five years. He started the blog in February, shortly after Amina told people she moved back to Syria from the United States. Amina's story might have remained believable, but when he wrote of her arrest, her fans — in a desire to help the woman they had grown to care about — found a trail of evidence that led back to MacMaster.
In telephone interviews and e-mail exchanges with The Post over the past three days, MacMaster initially denied any connection to Amina. He insisted he had never heard of her or the blog before the news of the arrest broke.
"Look, if I was the genius who had pulled this off, I would say, 'Yeah,' and write a book," he said Friday, reached in Istanbul, where he is vacationing with his wife, a graduate student working on a PhD in international relations.
News organizations around the world, including The Washington Post, reported on the blogger's disappearance Tuesday. As the story spread, three Syrian sources contacted Andy Carvin of NPR with their doubts; he, in turn, asked the more than 48,000 people who follow him on Twitter whether anyone had met Amina or spoken to her on the phone. None said they had.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amina had been using another woman's photographs. The Post on Thursday contacted Scott Palter, a board game creator from Minnesota who corresponded regularly with Amina on a Yahoo message group called "The Crescentland.''
In a telephone interview, Palter said that he asked her several years ago for a mailing address to send her Christmas cards and that she gave him an address in Stone Mountain, Ga. Local real estate records show that MacMaster has owned the house since 2000 and that he and his wife lived there until they left for Scotland in September 2010.
Other links between Amina and MacMaster quickly surfaced. In 2006, both were active participants in a Yahoo message group for people interested in the esoteric subject of "alternate history," debating what might have been if major historical events had different outcomes.
Over the course of many months, Amina engaged MacMaster in detailed online discussions about the Middle East and other subjects. It also became clear that biographical information Amina provided about herself online was similar to MacMaster's actual biography.
Amina wrote of her childhood in Virginia, at the bend of a river in the Shenandoah Valley. She wrote that she lived in a home overlooking the buggies in the yards of the Old Order Mennonites. "The first time I saw these plainly dressed people, I mistook them for our own," she wrote in 2007. "I proudly announced to my parents that I had seen Muslims going into the bank."
MacMaster grew up in Harrisonburg, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley, as a Mennonite. His mother, Eve MacMaster, a Mennonite pastor, had taught English in Turkey before she married. "He was raised in a family that has a warm feeling for the Middle East," his mother said in a telephone interview.
On Friday, the editor of Lez Get Real, a lesbian news Web site based in Washington, told readers she and Amina had corresponded after Amina posted a thoughtful comment on her site. The editor said she had determined that Amina's e-mails had been sent from a computer in Edinburgh.
In several interviews, the editor — who spoke on condition that she be identified only by her pseudonym, Paula Brooks — said she encouraged Amina to write more, first on Lez Get Real and later on a new blog, titled "A Gay Girl in Damascus."
In February, just as the Arab Spring protests were gathering steam across the Middle East, Brooks said Amina told her she had moved back to Syria. She seemed to have extensive knowledge about Damascus, describing intricate details of museums that Brooks, who had been to Syria, knew to be true. Brooks, cautious about allowing someone she had never met to write for her site, said she questioned Amina about one thing that bothered her: Amina's IP address. An IP address is a geographical locator — a sort of digital Zip code — for Web connections.
Amina told her that for security reasons, she used a proxy Web server that made it appear she was writing from Scotland. It is a common tactic used by Syrian bloggers, many of whom write online anonymously. Brooks said that at the time she accepted the explanation.
MacMaster became interested in Palestinian issues during college, his brother, Sam MacMaster, said in a telephone interview.
Sam MacMaster said his brother was offered a full scholarship from Emory University, which he chose for the school's expertise on the Austro-Goths. Once there, however, MacMaster quickly switched his specialization to Arabic studies. Later, he traveled to Syria and Jordan to perfect his language skills.
Tom MacMaster became the co-director of a peace activist group called Atlanta Palestine Solidarity and traveled to the region. MacMaster said a close friend of his was killed in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He also said he went to Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War as part of a "student peace mission" trying to deter military action against Iraq.
Sam MacMaster, a professor at the University of Tennessee, recalled a childhood of social activism, including coming to Washington with his brother to hand out origami doves on the steps of the Pentagon to commemorate the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan.
"He enjoys pushing issues at some level," Sam MacMaster said. " . . . There's a Quaker saying, 'speaking truth to power.' He takes that very literally."
Tom MacMaster's interest in Syria also seems to have been deepened by his 2007 marriage to Britta Froelicher, a woman he met in Georgia through an online dating site. MacMaster said in the interview from Turkey that he and Froelicher traveled to Syria in 2008. In the same interview, Froelicher said she is working on a PhD at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, focusing on Syrian economic development.
While in Syria in 2008, Froelicher and MacMaster posted a photo on Picasa, a photo Web site, showing a billboard of a smiling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with the slogan "Syria believes in you." The newly married couple captioned the photograph, "My favorite little piece of propaganda of all time."
This year, on May 11, that image — showing the same motorcyclist and pedestrians passing by the billboard — appeared on Amina's blog. The post was titled, "Irony."
The controversy over "A Gay Girl in Damascus" has created anguish among her fans. As suspicions of a hoax grew, many expressed outrage that attention had turned away from the increasingly violent government crackdown in Syria.
The controversy has also angered many in the lesbian and gay community, which rallied around Amina. And it has raised concerns among bloggers who complain that MacMaster exploited their trust and may have jeopardized their ability to use pseudonyms.
The names of MacMaster and Froelicher first appeared in connection with the Damascus blog early Sunday morning on a site called Electronic Intifada. That post went up at 4:24 a.m. Washington time. At 3:08 p.m. MacMaster posted his admission, signing off as Tom MacMaster, "the sole author of all posts on this blog."
Staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.


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Manifestation contre le "Mariage pour Tous"
PROTESTS TOOK PLACE in Paris and across the rest of France last Saturday in response to the "Marriage and Adoption for All" bill which proposes to legalise gay marriage and adoption for French citizens.
In Paris, somewhere around 100,000 people including Catholic groups and other supporters of traditional family rights, gathered at Place Denfert-Rochereau in the 14th arrondissement to make their voices heard.
Protests at Place Denfert-Rochereau:
France already allows civil unions between same-sex couples but, despite opposition from more than 1,000 French mayors and the Catholic Church, President Francois Hollande has promised to change French law so that gay and lesbian couples can marry. The government approved a bill on the issue earlier this month and it will be debated by parliament in January.
The proposed legislation will replace the entries in a child's registry book from "father"' and "mother" to "parent 1" and "parent 2".
An Ifop (l'Institut Français d'Opinion Publique) poll in August 2012 found that 65% of respondents were in favour of same-sex marriage, while 53% supported adoption rights for same-sex couples.