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The Institute of Medicine – a group that offers advice to the government on health issues – released a 478 page report this week on obesity. The report refutes the belief that obesity is due to a lack of willpower and instead blames environmental causes. Committee member, Shiriki Kumanyika told Reuters, “The average person cannot maintain a healthy weight in this obesity-promoting environment.”
Some of their suggestions make a lot of sense to me. For instance, certain crops (such as wheat and cotton) are currently subsidized by the government making it harder and less profitable for farmers to plant fruits and vegetables. The committee recommends ending these price-supported programs. It also, however, reviewed 800 additional programs and interventions, sparking concern over more intrusive measures such as taxes on soda and limiting the amount of sugar allowed in foods.
Some believe the mentality that people are not capable of making personal choices regarding their food consumption may lead to more and more restrictions regarding personal choice.
Take for example, Massachusetts.
As reported by the Boston Herald, The Department of Public Health and Education has issued a new ban on bake sales and sugary treats in schools beginning August 1st. Any foods served or sold outside of the regular school lunch program must be healthy. State officials are also hoping to extend the ban further into the evening prohibiting concession stands at sporting events.
Classroom treats at parties and items at bake sales will soon no longer consist of sweets and pizza and will have to be replaced with fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fat-free milk.
Middleboro, Massachusetts school committeeman Brian Giovanoni said, “My concern is we’re regulating what people can eat, and I have a problem with that. I respect the state for what they’re trying to do, but I think they’ve gone off the deep end. I don’t want someone telling me how to do my job as a parent.”
The number of children struggling with their weight in this country is, indeed, a cause of great concern. Massachusetts, however, is doing a fine job of highlighting what happens when government takes a noble cause, whips up a bunch of regulations and laws, and runs wild. Having carrot sticks at a holiday party or selling apples at a
bake sale fresh fruit sale is not going to solve the problem. Instead it will limit the fundraising efforts of public schools and simultaneously knock the wind out of previously joyous school parties and birthday celebrations.
I reject the generalization that we, as parents and members of society, are completely helpless. If we solely blame our environment for our choices, what kind of message will that send our children? What do you think? Would you support a bake sale/treat ban at your child’s school?

domain: sociology


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Australian packaging company Amcor has launched a new platform of paper-based packaging products called AmFiber.
Ron Delia, Amcor CEO said AmFiber innovations aim to redefine the capabilities of traditional paper packaging, providing a wider range of features and functional benefits to meet the changing needs of consumers.
“Amcor’s long-term experience in paper and carton packaging was the basis for launching the AmFiber platform,” Mr Delia said.
“Amcor has a proven history of delivering ground-breaking innovation to support our customers’ growth aspirations.
“This family of differentiated paper-based products builds on Amcor’s extensive track record across multiple materials and applications.”
Amcor said the first AmFiber product will be launched later this year. The product in question will debut in Europe and will give European snack and confectionery clients a recyclable package that provides a strong barrier against oxygen and moisture.
Amcor plans to progressively expand its new paper-based goods across a range of applications, including coffee, drink powders, seasonings, and soups, into the Americas and Asia-Pacific regions.
The launch of the AmFiber platform comes on the four-year anniversary of Amcor’s goal to make 100% of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025, as well as to boost the usage of recycled materials.
Other paper-based goods recently released by Amcor include butter and margarine solutions in Latin America, cheese solutions in Europe, and confectionery solutions in Australia.

domain: news


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SAN FRANCISCO ART EXCHANGE LLC
Founded in 1983 by Theron Kabrich and Jim Hartley, SAN FRANCISCO ART EXCHANGE LLC (SFAE) has represented historic Pop Culture artworks created by over 200 of the world's most accomplished and important artists and photographers.
Recognized as market pioneers and premier purveyors of iconic imagery, SFAE has featured over 100 major curated exhibitions highlighting music, film, cultural events, and historic figures.
SFAE is known worldwide for record-breaking sales of album cover related and important artwork from Pop Culture and has successfully represented and sold such revered artworks as the originals for:
Pink Floyd: The Wall, Abbey Road, Meet The Beatles, Rubber Soul, Imagine, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Ummagumma, Animals, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Best of The Doors, Candy-O and many more.
In addition to these music-related artworks, SFAE has also handled the sale for a number of original movie poster artworks including those created for Cool Hand Luke and The Sting, among others.
SFAE's sale of a complete, 7-piece matched set of The Beatles Abbey Road Album Cover Session by Iain Macmillan at $900,000 stands as the highest price ever paid for Rock & Roll Photography.
And, our sale of the original painting for the Pink Floyd: The Wall movie poster (a.k.a. The Scream) by Gerald Scarfe at $1.85 million, stands as the highest price ever paid worldwide in both the Rock & Roll and Movie Poster Original Artwork categories.
While maintaining its leadership role within the world of Rock & Roll artwork, SFAE is broadly focused on important artwork from all spheres of Popular Culture including film and entertainment, sports, advertising, civil rights, and historical events.
All artworks sold by SFAE are signed by the artist or their estate representative and will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Items ship insured all over the world.
For the curious, we have outlined our journey with some key milestones below:
THE EARLY DAYS OF SFAE LLC
Jim Hartley and Theron Kabrich founded SFAE as a fine art business brokering the work of 20th Century masters such as Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Warhol, Haring, Dalí and others. They soon evolved into promoting more contemporary painters, where they began exploring the importance and value of art and imagery that have become part of the popular consciousness. Rockwell, Nagel, Neiman are good examples of familiar artists who became popular through their commercial work and later went on to become collectible in a fine-art gallery format.
In the 1990s momentum encouraged us to double the size of our gallery to 3000 sq feet. We then began to incorporate Music and Hollywood photography to our makeup as a natural progression to expand the scope of the definition of collectible popular iconography.
in the 21st Century we have continued to expand our focus to representing the work of more than 200 photographers, adding important historical figures and events, along with Athletic superstars and more. Today we are recognized as the global leader in the representation and sale of the fine art of Pop Culture.
We think our early art dealing roots put us in a unique position to appreciate and frame a discussion around the artistic merit, historical importance, cultural significance and, hence, the market value for much of the art and imagery of popular culture that has surrounded us for decades.
Read on to see how it happened!
ALBERTO VARGAS OPENS THE DOOR
In 1985, the Alberto Vargas Estate selected SFAE to represent their vast collection of original works by one of Americaʼs most popularly famous artists of all time. Vargas created incredibly beautiful paintings, widely-known as “Vargas Girls” throughout his long career. He painted for The Ziegfeld Follies, all the major Hollywood studios, Esquire Magazine and Playboy, among many others.
We were entrusted to bring this treasured collection of original artworks to market for the very first time, opening the premiere retrospective during the summer of 1985. Since then we have sold more than $25 million of Alberto Vargas artwork, including original paintings, studies, and limited edition prints. We are the acknowledged authorities on Vargas artworks and the #1 dealer worldwide.
RONNIE WOOD JOINS THE PARTY
Due in part to the immediate success of the Vargas collection, and our growing reputation in the genre of Popular Culture, in 1987 the gallery was approached by the management of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood to become the primary distributor and dealer in North America for his new collection of paintings and limited edition prints. He made the great connection that since we had sold millions in great artwork of beautiful Pin Up illustrations, probably most of those collectors would also be fans of Rock & Roll!
Ronnie had a passion for drawing and painting since childhood and attended art school at Ealing in London, and was a serious artist, growing increasingly prolific as he began exploring print-making and continually expanding his repertoire across different media. We hosted our first exhibition with him in 1987 and since then we have amassed a huge number of avid collectors worldwide, with sales in excess of $10 million of his artwork alone. While we no longer act has his distributor, SFAE remains the all-time #1 dealer of his artwork, and his longest standing dealer.
Looking back on how it all happened, we now recognize that the selection of SFAE to represent Ronnie Wood literally launched the modern market for the Art of Rock & Roll. Not only with Ronnie’s artwork but it also inspired many friends and associates of his, especially other artists and photographers in the music realm to reconsider their own archives - many of which had sat in dusty drawers and boxes for decades - and take the leap of faith to offer them as fine-artworks for collectors.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY ERA BEGINS
Our first major photography exhibit featured the work of Annie Leibovitz in April 1989. The exhibition featured nearly 50 portraits of celebrities taken for her award winning American Express campaign (1984-1987). Subjects included musicians, actors, models, politicians, and athletes, all personalities captured in Leibowitz's trademark style. The campaign won a 1988 Clio; The Andy Award for the Best Print Campaign of 1988; The Art Directors Club of New York's Gold Award in Magazine Advertising and Advertising Age's award for the best magazine advertisement of 1987.
The exhibition was co-sponsored and co-hosted by American Express and Esquire Magazine. Annie attended the opening and lectured. (Pictured at right is an example of the exhibition display from another location.)
A FOCUS ON ALBUM COVER IMAGERY
We begin to represent the work of legendary Album Cover artist Roger Dean, who is responsible for a huge number of iconic albums from the late 1960s that continues into the 2020s. He best-known for his fantasy inspired landscapes and creature designs that graced the album covers for Yes, Asia, Uriah Heep, Osibisa, and many others.
MORE TO COME!
1990 - today
...Stay tuned for more!

domain: artistic


When the ashes from Australia’s last bushfire season cooled, we were left with a few mind-boggling numbers: 34 human lives lost, more than a billion animals dead, and 18.6 million hectares of land burned.
But those figures don’t necessarily help us understand what was lost. The human mind struggles to grasp very large scales. And in Australia, our colonial past skews the way we view landscapes today.
This disconnect is important. Many scientific concepts, including climate change, happen at scales outside human perception.
Understanding the scale of destruction wrought by bushfires is vital if governments and societies are to adapt in the future. So how can Australians truly come to terms with the damage wrought by last summer’s bushfires?
Beyond human perception
This is not only true of bushfires. It also applies to human understanding of climate change, nanoseconds, the size of the Universe and the geological time scale (the millions of years over which continents, oceans and mountains formed).
But science has shown humans have trouble understanding, or imagining, large orders of magnitude. In one US study for example, university students struggled to understand the relative relationships between the age of the Earth, the time required for the origin of the first life forms, and the evolution of dinosaurs and humans.
Even university students studying STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) have been shown to struggle with identifying and comparing magnitudes at large scales.
So what’s actually going on in our brains here? Research suggests humans use both numerical and “categorical” information – concepts drawn from their prior experience – to estimate the size of an object. For example, a person estimating the width of a truck might set it as a proportion of the presumed width of highway lanes.
The use of this prior experience can improve the accuracy of estimations. But it can also introduce bias and lead to inexact estimations.
Understanding vast landscapes
During the fires, satellite images and interactive maps sought to help us understand the scale of the crisis. But they can’t give a full picture of the life destroyed. So how might we otherwise understand the richness lost in a burnt landscape?
Unfortunately, our colonial views of the land are not much help here. British colonisation of Australia, and subsequent land laws, were established on the basis of “terra nullius” – meaning the land belonged to no one. This denied Indigenous people’s prior occupation of the land in order to legitimise its “lawful” settlement by Europeans.
Seeking to understand Indigenous perspectives of Country might help non-Indigenous Australians to truly comprehend the loss brought by bushfires. As Indigenous academic Bhiamie Williamson wrote on The Conversation in January:
the experience of Aboriginal peoples in the fire crisis engulfing much of Australia is vastly different to non-Indigenous peoples. How do you support people forever attached to a landscape after an inferno tears through their homelands: decimating native food sources, burning through ancient scarred trees and destroying ancestral and totemic plants and animals?
A human-centric view
Beyond the colonial influence, our generally human-centred view of the world also tends to render invisible the plants and wildlife within it. As Australian researcher Brendan Wintle and others noted in a recent paper, firefighting strategies routinely overlook the need to protect natural assets. They wrote:
It may be unrealistic to expect critical habitats of our most precarious species to compete for firefighting resources with houses and farms. We are far too self-interested. However, could we imagine the last remaining habitat for a brush-tailed rock-wallaby (Petrogale penicillata) might feature as an asset for protection in a fire that is burning through a wilderness area? Surely that needs doing.
In other words, gaining a better understanding the scale of a fire’s destruction means taking a more holistic view of what dwells in the landscape, and might need saving.
Under climate change, bushfires in Australia will become more severe and frequent. So bearing in mind our limited abilities to perceive the potential scale of loss next time, what can we do to prepare?
As Wintle argues, more work is needed to organise conservation efforts before, during, and immediately after a bushfire. That includes establishing “insurance populations” of species and keeping them out of harm’s way, and better monitoring and surveying before a fire, so we know which places need protecting.
Williamson wrote of how most Indigenous Australians “have been consigned to the margins in managing our homelands”, watching on as they were “mismanaged and neglected”, which increased the bushfire risk.
The current bushfire royal commission has pledged to consider ways Indigenous land and fire management practices could improve our resilience to natural disasters. There is much room for ancient traditions to be incorporated into mainstream fire management.
It will take some time to grasp the repercussions of the last bushfire season. But it’s clear that we must transcend colonial, non-Indigenous, human-centred perceptions of the land if we’re to truly understand what was lost.


–Ada County Highway District paid $115,000 for a consultation by the Urban Land Institute to tell them what they wanted to hear. Namely that 6 cities within the county have to stick to their comprehensive master plans and ACHD should work with them. In short, everyone should play nice. The GUARDIAN would have told them the same thing for half the money.
–Not to be outdone, the Idaho Department of transportation ponied up $600,000 to survey past and present vendors. A Texas consultant did the phone survey work and contacted Tony Jones–the guy who wants to keep the houses off Hammer Flat at the Cliffs Development who is also an economic consultant.
Here is part of Tony’s rap on the subject: “BUY IDAHO. And, get some real bids. $600,000 for this gig is high by about $500,000. For an agency that is perpetually broke, and has to borrow from the Feds to fund projects long overdue, the least ITD could do is spend the money in state where it will stimulate secondary economic activity and generate tax receipts. If nothing else, Idaho needs the money a lot more than Texas.”
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The Charlotte Observer reports that under North Carolina’s School Violence Prevention Act of 2012 (SVPA), it will be a misdemeanor for students to post something online “with the intent to intimidate or torment a school employee.” This expansion of the state’s existing cyberbullying law, that goes into effect December 1, 2012, may be the first of its kind in the country. The SVPA builds on a similar law passed in 2009 that criminalized online bullying of a student or a student’s parent or guardian.
Legislators say the law is necessary to keep up with the rise of students on social media. According to state Senator Tommy Tucker, the law is necessary to deter online posting of statements that “could damage the reputation and character of a teacher ….”
However, critics insist that what constitutes cyberbullying is not clear in the law and that fear of punishment could stifle free speech. State law has never defined the word “intimidate,” said Sarah Preston, Policy Director for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina. “Without definitions of ‘torment’ or ‘intimidate,’ it’s not clear what online activity will violate the law,” Preston said. “It does invite arbitrary enforcement because there’s no clear legal standard.”
Preston also notes that the law extends beyond libel, by criminalizing statements, “whether true or false,” that could provoke someone to harass a school employee. “Even if you post a factual statement about your teacher, then it could be criminal depending on the interpretation of those words,” Preston said.
Tucker counters that intimidation has a clear definition – “to use a tactic that would cause someone to change one’s behavior” – that does not need to be spelled out in the law. Activities made illegal by the statute could include building a fake profile or website; posting personal or sexual information about school employees; and signing school employees up for pornographic websites or junk mail.
The law might be the first in the country to make student-on-teacher cyberbullying a crime, both Tucker and Preston said. The offense is a Class 2 misdemeanor, punishable by up to 60 days in jail.
Local district attorneys have charged 37 people under the 2009 cyberbullying law, though only three have been convicted, according to the state Administrative Office of the Courts.
Cyberbullying cases are difficult to prosecute, said Jameson Marks, a Johnston County assistant district attorney. “Just because something was posted from their account doesn’t mean that they’re the ones who posted it,” Marks said. “People get pranked like that a lot. Being able to prove that it was that person who sat at that computer and typed that is difficult.”
The 2009 law prompted Johnston County school leaders to create a policy this summer that regulates Internet use off-campus, said Oliver Johnston, Assistant Superintendent of Student Services. The rules ban all messages that violate school regulations or “harass, bully or intimidate employees or other students.” Promoting gang activity, school vandalism and threats of physical harm are also regulated. The policy is designed to combat problems within school, Johnston said, while the state law helps parents and children with bullying outside of school.
“Bullying has always been an issue of concern for schools,” Johnston said. “It’s just that it’s evolved from the playground, where we could view physical bullying, to online.” Nearly all high school students use Facebook, and a growing number are getting smartphones, said Mark Jewell, Vice President of the N.C. Association of Educators, which supports the law. Cyberbullying against students and teachers is becoming more prevalent, he said. “It’s been done not only to teachers, but administrators and principals,” Jewell said. “Educators were definitely saying that kids, students and staff need to be protected with legislation.”
The Classroom Teachers Association of North Carolina, based in Charlotte, fought for the 2012 law. President Judy Kidd said a criminal penalty is necessary because students will not stop harassing teachers online if school regulations are their only threat of punishment.
“What the law does is protect the teachers against false accusations, which is a real problem – some students will stoop to any level to get what they want,” Kidd said. “If you’re ever going to get a society under control, there have to be penalties for doing things that are wrong.”
Source: The Charlotte Observer, 10/23/12, By Kelly Poe
[Editor's Note: The pertinent part of the North Carolina legislation, Session Law 2012-149, that becomes effective on December 1, 2012, states:
[I]t shall be unlawful for any student to use a computer or computer network to do any of the following:
(1) With the intent to intimidate or torment a school employee, do any of the following:
a. Build a fake profile or Web site.
b. Post or encourage others to post on the Internet private, personal, or sexual information pertaining to a school employee.
c. Post a real or doctored image of the school employee on the Internet.
d. Access, alter, or erase any computer network, computer data, computer program, or computer software, including breaking into a password-protected account or stealing or otherwise accessing passwords.
e. Use a computer system for repeated, continuing, or sustained electronic communications, including electronic mail or other transmissions, to a school employee.
(2) Make any statement, whether true or false, intending to immediately provoke, and that is likely to provoke, any third party to stalk or harass a school employee.
(3) Copy and disseminate, or cause to be made, an unauthorized copy of any data pertaining to a school employee for the purpose of intimidating or tormenting that school employee (in any form, including, but not limited to, any printed or electronic form of computer data, computer programs, or computer software residing in, communicated by, or produced by a computer or computer network).
(4) Sign up a school employee for a pornographic Internet site with the intent to intimidate or torment the employee.
(5) Without authorization of the school employee, sign up a school employee for electronic mailing lists or to receive junk electronic messages and instant messages, with the intent to intimidate or torment the school employee.
In March 2012, Legal Clips summarized the decision by a Mississippi federal district court in Bell v. Itawamba Cnty. Sch. Bd., which held that school officials did not violate a student’s free speech rights when they disciplined him for posting a “rap” song he composed and performed off-campus, and posted on his Facebook page. The court concluded that Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969), specifically held that school officials can regulate off-campus speech/expression that causes material or substantial disruption at school. The song accused two coaches of flirting and inappropriate contact with female students.]


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19-Aug-2006 -- I planned an East Coast summer vacation to show my wife and sons some great US cities and the area where I grew up and went to college (Cleveland, Ohio). The transportation plan was to fly to New York City, rent a car and drive it to Chicago. The only thing lacking: a confluence visit! So I searched along our route for one that hadn’t been visited for a while and 42° North, 86° West looked like a good candidate.
This confluence is located about 230 yards (210 m) north of McKenzie Road in Cass County, Michigan. I was able to determine the address of the property owner and sent a letter along with an aerial photo of the site, a copy of Kourtney Nieboer’s write up of his 2001 visit, and the DCP Letter to Landowners. About a week later Ed Toy called me and said he welcomed a visit and would accompany us on our search.
As we drove west on our vacation, we left the Indiana Turnpike at Exit 107, crossed the border into Michigan and started to zigzag north and west to the confluence. This area is heavily wooded and we saw lots of small lakes. In the cleared areas, the primary crops are corn and soybeans. When we arrived, we met Ed and his father Don. They have owned this land since the 1960s and have made many improvements over the years, including a house they built 5 years ago.
We hopped in Ed’s jeep and drove back to the confluence. Ed’s memory for the location was very good and he did as good as my GPS in pointing the way. The tree cover (oak and cherry) prevented all zeros but we settled on a spot and Ed marked it with a 4x4 for future reference. The mosquitoes found us right away, so I took the essential photos and we retreated to the house. There, Ed and Don gave us a tour of their most recent project: a beautiful guest house and fish pond they built themselves. Then, with some great directions from Ed, we headed for Chicago.
Thanks once again to the DCP for getting us out to see interesting places and meet great people like Ed and Don Toy.

domain: geography


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silver sun energy balance ring
made from silver and brass, this silver sun ring will bring you reflective and balancing energy, along with energies of healing, wealth, and protection. the sun represents source and life force energy!
tune in and stay balanced and centered with this beautiful ring combining the feminine and masculine energies of the moon and sun!
- .625" width
- sterling silver + brass ring
the metal of the moon, silver is said to be the metal of emotion, love, and healing, and helps keep one in tune with the energetic flow of the universe.
brass is a metal of healing, wealth, and protection, associated with the sun.
the sun is a source of life force energy and symbol of life, energy, power, strength, clarity, the higher self, and source.crystals and metals are not to be used in lieu of medical treatment or professional counseling. click here for full disclaimer.


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Help keep One Green Planet free and independent! Together we can ensure our platform remains a hub for empowering ideas committed to fighting for a sustainable, healthy, and compassionate world. Please support us in keeping our mission strong.
We’ve all heard the story before—as a planet, we continue to waste a large portion of our precious food resources daily. But with a new study out by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this news takes on a more sinister picture. We’re not only squandering one third of food—1.3 billion tons—globally. As a result, we’re also stamping a huge carbon footprint on our planet.
FAO’s report, “Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resource” is the very first of its kind to study the impacts of global food waste from an environmental angle by analyzing its effects on the climate, water and land use and biodiversity. What researchers uncovered is quite staggering and should serve as wake-up call to us all.
According to the study, the total food produced but not eaten each year gulps up 250 cubic kilometers of water, the equivalent of the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River, reports Environmental News Service.
What’s more, much of our agriculturally fertile land is entirely wasted. Almost 30% of the world’s farmlands, around 1.4 billion hectares of land per year, used to till and harvest crops and care for livestock go directly into the dumpster.
The study’s astounding conclusions don’t even stop there. The total carbon footprint of wasted food amounts to 3.3. billion tons of carbon dioxide every year—more than any country, except for China and the U.S, reports Earth Day Network via EcoWatch. Additionally, by throwing away 1.3 billion tons of food annually, we are also flinging $750 billion a year into the trash.
“We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day,” said José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, the UN agency that produced the report.
In developed countries, most of the wasted food comes from consumers purchasing too much then throwing away what isn’t eaten. In developing nations, inefficient farming methods and inadequate storage facilities are the main causes of food waste.
The report points out major food products wasted per region. According to Raw Story, cereal waste (mainly rice) amounts to 80 kilograms per person in Asia and has emerged as a “significant environmental hotspot.”
In Latin America, Europe and Asia, high volumes of vegetable waste is contributing to both significant water waste and carbon emissions. And high-income regions, excluding Latin American, are to blame for 67 percent of all meat wasted annually.
So what can we do to stop this madness? Thankfully the FAO report is comprehensive and comes with its own accompanying “tool kit” with recommendations on how food loss and waste can be minimized at every stage of the food chain. The kit also provides examples of projects from around the world that show how governments, farmers, businesses and individual consumers are attempting to solve this problem.
Da Silve puts it quite succinctly, “All of us – farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers – must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t.”
At home or at work, we may not be able to do much about other factors that contribute to excess greenhouse gases in our atmosphere or Climate change, but we can do something about our relationship with food. For one, we can actually develop a healthy relationship with it, where we are not just conscious consumers, but are also in tune with how what we purchases goes from our shopping carts into our trash bins.
Image source: Masahiro Ihara / Flickr

domain: agronomy


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In letters, CRISPR companies respond to a Nature Methods report of off-target editing effects, Technology Review reports.
Business Insider reports that the science for tailoring diet advice on genetic and microbial analysis isn't there yet.
In PLOS this week: root-knot nematode sequencing study, somatic mutations linked to uveal melanoma, and more.
Proove Biosciences responds to its visit by federal investigators and concerns surrounding its tests and business approaches.
Molecular and Cellular Biology won't consider misconduct allegations for papers that are more than six years old, Retraction Watch reports.
In Science this week: tumors with mismatch repair defects are responsive to immunotherapy, and more.
Federal investigators have searched the offices of Proove Biosciences, Stat News reports.
Michelle Lee, the director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, has resigned, IP Watchdog reports.
A technical comment in Science Advances argues that the data don't support a finding reported last year that eastern and red wolves are recent hybrids.
In Nature this week: high-quality de novo assembly of the apple genome, and more.
President Donald Trump has announced that Francis Collins will remain director of the US National Institutes of Health.
An opinion piece at Wired says that pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and in vitro fertilization could prevent many rare genetic diseases.
US News & World Reports discusses how gene-editing approaches could be used to treat breast cancer.
In Nucleic Acids Research this week: efforts to recode the Salmonella typhimurium LT2 genome, Human Genome Variation Archive database, and more.
A new analysis has uncovered clinical trial papers that have reported suspicious data, the Guardian reports.
Researchers find a site on Mars that — if there ever had been life on the planet — would be a likely candidate for where to find it, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Technology Review writes that targeted cancer therapies require genetic testing, which many patients' insurers don't cover.
In PNAS this week: statistical method for gene regulation evaluation, sea urchin gene regulatory networks, and more.
A new analysis finds that collagen thought to have belonged to Tyrannosaurus rex was likely contamination, the International Business Times reports.
A nursing professor got her genome sequenced to see whether her students would be ready for patients with such results, CBS SF reports.
The company Publons aims to make being a peer reviewer a more attractive task, the Economist reports.
In PLOS this week: biobank for sleeping sickness research, skin microbiome of cats with allergies, and more.
23andMe is asking its customers to do some at-home research in order to find genetic variants that affect pain levels, says Technology Review.
According to Nature News, researchers are moving toward measuring biodiversity by the quality of functional variants rather than just the quantity of species.
A study of bias in US National Institutes of Health grant-awarding process is to start later this year, ScienceInsider reports.
A research duo finds that science and technology graduate students who turn away from academic careers do so because of changes in their own interests.
Students whose classmates are interested in science are more likely to think about a career in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, a new study says.
CNBC reports that the genetic counseling field is expected to grow as personalized medicine becomes more common.
Gladys Kong writes at Fortune that her STEM background has helped her as a CEO.

domain: biology


text: A former Albemarle County developer faces up to five years in prison for evading federal income taxes. The Daily Progress reports that Michael Wayne Harding pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to underreporting his income and avoiding about $87,000 in federal taxes. Harding had pleaded guilty in March to two fraud-related counts. He faces up to 25 years in prison on these charges. Sentencing on all three charges is scheduled for September. Prosecutors say Harding secured mortgages by faking improvements made to properties owned by his company. He then had checks from the mortgage companies converted for his personal use. The money wasn’t reported in his 2007 tax return.

domain: finance


Stylish Star Allu Arjun spoke frankly and freely at the audio launch of ‘Oka Manasu’, starring Naga Shourya and Niharika Konidela. Bunny was recently in the news for making the ‘Cheppanu Brother’ statement, when fans asked him to talk about Pawan Kalyan.
The issue became a bit of a minor controversy and Allu Arjun remained silent about it. But at today’s audio launch, Bunny decided to open up and explain about his statement. “I did it on behalf of all Mega heroes. I love Pawan Kalyan very much and I am a big fan. But functions are being disturbed by some fans with unnecessary behaviour. To let them know that it was unacceptable, I did it”, he said.
The audio launch was attended by all young Mega heroes including Ram Charan, Varun Tej and Sai Dharam Tej.
- Suriya and Vijay: Clash of the Titans confirmed for Diwali
- 13 back-to-back 100 Cr movies in 8 years, Salman’s stunning record
- Interesting details about Nani’s Jersey revealed
- Talented actor joins Anjali’s Geethanjali 2
- Mayhem in June: 7 films to release on the same day


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Ebe, Koji Takao Hospital
Muneta, Tetsuo Muneta Maternity Clinic
Bando, Masahiro Tokushima University
Yonei, Yoshikazu Doshisha University
Low-carbohydrate diet (LCD)
Morbus value (M-value)
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM)
Background: As to nutritional therapy, continuous discussions were observed concerning calorie restriction (CR) and low-carbohydrate diet (LCD). Authors and colleagues have applied LCD for lots of diabetic patients and reported the detail relationship with ketone bodies and Morbus (M) value.
Methods: Ninety-three patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) were considered as subjects in the study, among which 51 were male and 52 were female, 58.3±13.2 years old on average, 60 years old in median. Methods were as follows: 1) patients were admitted and provided formular diet, which included CR diet (60% carbohydrates, 1400 kcal/day) on day 1-2, and LCD (12% carbohydrate, 1400 kcal/day) on day 3-14; 2) several biomarkers on fasting were measured on day 2, 4 and 14; 3) daily profile of blood glucose were done on day 2 and day 4.
Results: According to the M-value, subjects were classified into 4 groups, which were less than 25, 26-100, 101-250, more than 251, and number was 24, 24, 24, 21, respectively. The average HbA1c in 4 groups were 6.6%, 7.4%, 8.5% and 9.5% respectively. The median M-values decreased from day 2 to 4, which were 10.4 to 9.1, 53.5 to 7.7, 150 to 19.1 and 438 to 87, respectively. The average uric acid in each group revealed significant increase from day 2 to day 14. There were significant correlation between uric acid increment and creatinine increment, and among creatinine, creatinine clearance (CCr) and Cystatin C.
Conclusion: LCD showed efficacy for glucose variability with significant decrease in glucose and M-value. Renal study showed increase of serum uric acid. In addition to correlations of Cystatin C and biomarkers, current results would be from some dehydrated state and/or relative decrease of total calorie intake. These findings would become the fundamental data of efficacy of LCD and its physiological influences for renal function.
Diabetes Research : Open Journal
©2017 Bando H. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
droj_3_2_31.pdf 497 KB


text:
IFM’s $8 billion cash bid for a 23 per cent stake in gas and electricity company Naturgy has hit hurdles as the Spanish group’s top shareholder, Criteria Caixa, buys more shares rather than selling them.
The Australian investment group’s global infrastructure fund offered to buy up to 220 million shares in Madrid-based Naturgy in January at €23 per share (including a 63¢ dividend) to secure a stake in a multinational company with an expanding renewable-energy portfolio.
Naturgy’s stock is tightly held, with some 65 per cent controlled by just three investors before IFM’s offer: Spanish investment group CriteriaCaixa with a 24.8 per cent holding; Luxembourg’s Rioja Acquisition with 20.7 per cent; and the US’s Global Infrastructure Partners with 20.6 per cent.
Spanish media have reported that Rioja and GIP will not sell their shares to IFM, making it crucial for the investment group to get the support of CriteriaCaixa and other minority shareholders.
General institutional investors own about 22 per cent of Naturgy, while retail investors hold about 8 per cent.
But CriteriaCaixa said last week it would strengthen its position in Naturgy, increasing its holdings up to 30 per cent (the highest stake it can hold without being required to make a formal takeover bid.
Trading in Naturgy’s shares has jumped since CriteriaCaixa’s statement on May 18, with almost 5 million changing hands over the past five trading days compared with 2 million shares in the preceding five days.
Spanish business and finance newspaper Cinco Dias has reported that CriteriaCaixa has bought about 1 million shares since May 18 and lifted its stake to 24.9 per cent.
Naturgy’s share price, which was trading around €19 in December, has risen to €21.55.
IFM declined to comment.
CriteriaCaixa said the dividends it received from Naturgy, which reported €323 million ($509 million) of ordinary net income for the quarter to March, up 4 per cent on a year earlier, covered some of the expenses of welfare projects for its banking foundation.
It also said it wanted to keep Naturgy listed in Spain and to help ensure security of energy supply, as well as preventing the sale of any Naturgy businesses without first making sure that the proceeds are “suitably reinvested”.
Naturgy runs Spain’s largest gas distribution network, and the country’s third-largest electricity distribution network, providing stable, regulated revenues that appeal to IFM and its investors, mostly big superannuation and pension funds.
IFM was also attracted to Naturgy’s push into renewable energy.
While gas and electricity distribution remain Naturgy’s biggest businesses, it has been investing in wind, solar and hydro power projects, including some wind farms in Australia.
In January, it made its first renewable investment in the US, buying solar energy and storage developer Hamel Renewables.
Naturgy, which has closed down its coal-fired power plants, has also told investors it is targeting investments in renewable gases, hydrogen and biomethane.
IFM’s offer requires regulatory approval from the Spanish Council of Ministers and Spain’s National Securities Market Commission.
Naturgy is run by Francisco Reynés, the outspoken former CEO of Spanish toll road group Abertis, which was acquired in 2018 by Spanish construction group ACS (which owns Australia’s CIMIC) and Italy’s Atlantia.
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domain: economics


text:
Calling All Dogs has been a life-saver for my senior dog, Molly. She loves her dog-walker, Jen, and it gives me such incredible peace of mind to know that she's getting some love and attention while I'm stuck at work. The pictures Jen sends me are a highlight of my day! I also love the fact that I can call on them when last-minute appointments pop up that make it difficult for me to get home in a timely manner for my pup. They really treat your babies like they are their own. I give them my highest recommendation.
Calling All Dogs does a great job. The send pictures and updates after each visit. Website is easy to use and navigate. They help me a lot when my work schedule gets busy.
I am so excited to have discovered this company!!! I travel fairly regularly but have always experienced anxiety, leaving my furry family. I have 2 older dogs who require daily meds, and 2 cats. All four critters are very spirited and attention driven. Cori and Arielle were fantastic... total animal lovers!! I got photos and updates after every visit. The girls even brought in my mail and watered my plants. The company is so organized and detailed, preparing for any contingency. It is truly a find for anyone requiring this service!!!!!
We have been using CAD since we moved to St. Pete from California in 2011. There have been different walkers and two in particular are our dogs best noontime friends, and not just because they get treats. its good to be able to count on their reliability and care for our pets.

domain: pet


text:
Manitoba Communities: Brooklands (Unincorporated Town)
In the early 1900s Brooklands was a working-class enclave centred around Notre Dame Avenue and Keewatin Street, part of the Municipality of Rosser. Most of the residents were employed by the CPR’s Weston yards and shop. Between 1906 and 1911, Brooklands grew from 250 people to 800 and took on many of the trappings of an independent village. There was a constantly expanding school, it made up its own district on the Rosser municipal council and it had an active Ratepayers Association. Brooklands also fielded successful teams in various municipal and provincial sports leagues. In 1909 the district’s relationship with Rosser grew tense over the lack of basic services such as sewer and water hookup to its approximately 250 homes. The Ratepayers Association threatened to seek independence or amalgamate with neighbouring Winnipeg, but nothing came of it.
In the spring of 1921 the Brooklands Ratepayers Association and the Brooklands and District Labour Party led another campaign for independence. A formal request was made to the province and the first village election was held in July. George R. Brown became the first Mayor. During the 1920s and 1930s, offices for the municipality were located in Cressey School.
The area was hit hard during disease epidemics and economic downturns. In 1915 a relief camp operated in the Brooklands area for its 120 or so unemployed. During the Depression, 75% of its men were out of work. In 1932 the village went bankrupt and the province had to appoint a third party manager to run its affairs until 1944. Brooklands struggled to provide basic services like sewer and water and its council was regularly embroiled in political turmoil and infighting. The once-promising community ended up an underfunded, industrial enclave on the edge of two growing cities.
“Brooklands seeks union,” Manitoba Free Press, 29 December 1909, page 3.
“Town develops on western limit,” Manitoba Free Press, 12 November 1910, page 32.
“Brooklands relief camp,” Manitoba Free Press, 8 February 1915, page 14.
“Brooklands ratepayers to let labor party represent them,” Manitoba Free Press, 29 March 1921, page 3.
“Made first Mayor of Brooklands village,” Winnipeg Tribune, 7 July 1921, page 20.
“Planned merger stirs St. James,” Winnipeg Free Press, 19 April 1966, page 29.
“Mayor explains proposed merger of St. James and Brooklands,” Winnipeg Free Press, 25 March 1966, page 13.
“St. James will grow by 4,000 January 1” by Steve Melnyk, Winnipeg Tribune, 19 December 1966, page 7.
“The end of the year is the end of Brooklands,” Winnipeg Free Press, 31 December 1966, page 7.
“Identity won’t be lost in St. James-Assiniboia,” Winnipeg Free Press, 31 December 1971, page 19.
Obituary [Harry Stiller], Winnipeg Free Press, 11 May 1987, page 39.
A Short History of Brooklands Elementary Schools including Woodsworth, Cressey, Krawchyk, Butterworth, St. James Assiniboia School Division.
We thank Nathan Kramer and Kenneth Normand for providing additional information used here.
Page revised: 13 October 2021


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text:
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It says in all the papers the well has run dry. The commentators keep writing that Canadian conservatism has died on the vine, that four years into his reign of tactical obsession and fiscal profligacy, Stephen Harper has forgotten why he ever went into politics.
“Where’s the big, strategic agenda for the next election?” John Ivison quoted a senior Conservative in the National Post. “I haven’t found one yet.” In the same paper, Terence Corcoran ran a string of columns identifying programs the feds should cut, because Harper seems unwilling to do the work himself. And Andrew Coyne delivered his annual post-budget verdict of despair and mourning. “Those Conservative faithfuls who have been hanging on all these years, in the hopes that, eventually, someday, with one of these budgets, this government would start to act like conservatives, must now understand that that is not going to happen. Conservatism is not just dead but, it appears, forgotten.”
But it’s a funny thing. If Canadian conservatism is dead, somebody forgot to tell Canadian conservatives.
Earlier this month, the Crowne Plaza hotel in downtown Ottawa played host to two consecutive conferences, a small one by the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada followed by a big one by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. Both were well attended by current and former ministers, employees and strategists of the Harper government. Both drew energetic crowds of activists and ordinary people. Both gave free rein to an unabashed social conservatism that is rarely mentioned, and even less frequently championed, by even prominent fiscal conservatives in the big papers and magazines. And the mood at both gatherings was overwhelmingly optimistic, because the kind of conservatism that appeals to these organizations is demonstrably on the march in Ottawa and across Canada.
Look at the victories in only the past few months. At the quasi-governmental agency Rights and Democracy, a Harper-appointed board majority comprising unequivocal supporters of Israel’s Likud government and evangelical Christian social activists began firing employees left over from an earlier, more secular regime.
Harper announced, in the vaguest terms, a new plan to make women and children overseas the focus of Canada’s development assistance. When Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff insisted that such programs include funding for contraceptives and abortion, as they have consistently done under past Liberal and Conservative governments, Conservative MP Shelly Glover said no such schemes would be funded in the future. Bev Oda, the minister for CIDA, backed her up. When Ignatieff pushed back, he wound up on the front page of the Catholic Register newspaper next to the headline, “Ignatieff Urges Abortion for World’s Poor.”
In Winnipeg, the Christian charity Youth for Christ managed to secure $3.2 million in federal infrastructure stimulus funding toward building an $11.5-million community centre in one of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods. Even without provincial support, which is usually sought for these stimulus projects, the Youth for Christ centre looks set to go ahead. NDP MP Pat Martin didn’t like the idea of government money going to an organization that seeks converts. “What if this group was called Youth for Allah?” he asked.
(The project seems an odd fit for the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund, whose website says it will prefer “construction-ready” projects that can “be built during the 2009 and 2010 construction seasons.” Youth for Christ declined to answer questions from on how quickly construction can begin and when it can be completed. However, a spokesman for John Baird, who is responsible for the infrastructure program, said Youth for Christ is committed to finish by March 31 next year—just inside the fund’s final deadline.)
In Vancouver, the Insite safe-injection site for heroin addicts, which was once championed by federal Liberals like Allan Rock and Ken Dryden, learned Harper will appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in his long-running legal battle to shut the centre down.
And throughout the two-month period of Parliament’s prorogation, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson played a running blame game with Liberals over the slow progress of Conservative bills that would toughen penalties for a wide range of offences. Nicholson blamed the Liberals for stalling the bills. Each time, Liberal senators and MPs hurried to the nearest microphone to insist they shared the Conservatives’ punitive philosophy and were, in fact, in a greater hurry than the Conservatives to pass the bills. It was an odd dynamic. The Liberals (and often the NDP) were at pains to give the Conservatives free rein to replace rehabilitation with punishment as a cornerstone of Canadian criminal justice.
Taken together, all this news gives heart to Canadian conservatives who vote on other matters besides budget balance. Of course, some of the biggest fights of old—over abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty—remain far outside the bounds of ordinary political debate in Canada. Social conservatives have had to content themselves with incremental victory. But it had been many years since they could expect even that. Conservatives who vote on faith, family and criminal justice felt so left out by Brian Mulroney’s governments that millions of them fled to Reform and smaller groups like the Christian Heritage party. Now they are back, rubbing elbows with power, not always running the show but never ignored. They have not had so much good news from Ottawa in half a century.
The Manning Centre’s annual networking conference, organized by Reform party founding leader Preston Manning, ran a crowded exhibition hall. Firearms activists from the new Canadian Firearms Institute stood cheek by jowl with representatives of Dr. Charles McVety’s Canada Family Action Coalition (“founded in early 1997 with a vision to see Christian principles restored in Canada”) and campaign strategy consultancies run by former Conservative campaign officials. One, Responsive Management Group, tells potential clients that it “works exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns to design and execute integrated programs that use direct mail, the telephone and online tools to build relationships that deliver results for our clients.” It boasts that it has helped elect over 400 conservative candidates and raised $75 million for their campaigns. The group’s founder, Michael Davis, won a Manning Centre Pyramid Award for Political Technology at the conference.
Earlier at the Institute of Marriage and Family gathering, a few dozen attendees listened to Miriam Grossman, a U.S. physician and author of You’re Teaching My Child What?: A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Ed and How They Harm Your Child. “When sexual freedom reigns, sexual health suffers,” she told the audience sternly. (Dave Quist, the institute’s executive director and a former federal Conservative candidate, says the organization is the policy branch of the fundamentalist Christian group Focus on the Family Canada. And while Quist’s group is notionally secular, it knows what kind of message it likes to hear.)
Then Mike Savage, the burly Liberal MP for Dartmouth-Cole Harbour, N.S., debated Diane Finley, the minister of human resources and skills development, on family policy. Savage is a friendly and plain-spoken fellow whose corny jokes about Sidney Crosby’s lost hockey stick drew ready laughter, but he didn’t stand a chance debating this issue in front of this crowd. Finley was defending the Universal Child Care Benefit, which delivers taxable $100 monthly cheques to every Canadian parent to care for each child under 6. Savage was defending some approximation of Paul Martin’s 2005 national child care program, which would pay for daycare centres for a smaller number of the nation’s children.
A man in the audience asked Savage why parents should pay into such a program through their taxes if they were going to raise their own children at home. “I know a lot of people feel that way,” Savage said, helplessly. “A lot of people felt that way about universal health care in Canada. I think we’ll be a stronger society when we have a national system of early learning and child care. And there’s no question that it will benefit some families more than others. But that’s your choice.”
Finley, by contrast, was in her element. She quoted the institute’s own research on child-rearing preferences chapter and verse. It’s true that $100 a month doesn’t pay for luxury, she said, but sometimes folks just need to buckle down. “You know, parents need to make choices every single day. And we say that, well, they can’t afford not to have both work. In some cases that’s absolutely true. In other cases it’s because parents have chosen a lifestyle.” She pronounced the last word the way somebody else might pronounce “pestilence.”
“When I grew up, we had one phone in the house, no extensions. It also functioned as the business phone. We had one car, we had one black and white television, no cellphone, no dishwasher, no microwave. No computer, no Internet. A lot of families expect that they should have all of those now. But I’ve met a lot of people, particularly in my riding, who tell me, ‘No, we don’t need all of those electronic things. What we need is time with our family.’ ” The audience applauded warmly.
In the crowd I spotted a fellow who sometimes does strategy work for the Harper Conservatives. I took him aside to ask about the contrast between the ink-stained fiscal conservatives of the press, who see so little to redeem this government, and the social conservative grassroots.
“The days of winning on economic conservatism are over,” the Conservative adviser told me. “No real conservative government is going to win without having a significant portion of our agenda on social issues.”
An election run on free trade, deficit reduction, tax cuts and productivity is one where any of the major national parties can appeal to voters who care about those issues—certainly the Liberals, under Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin or Michael Ignatieff, perhaps even one day the NDP. “If we have an election about deficits, it’s going to be, do we get rid of them in three years or four years? It’s not going to be, do we get rid of deficits or not?”
But social conservatism offers Harper what he has always coveted: a sharply divided electorate where he owns a sizable chunk of the voters and the other parties fight over what’s left. My interlocutor reminded me that social conservatism is not always, or even often, an explicit appeal to religious values, because Harper sees social conservatism as a set of values that can reach voters across and beyond denominational boundaries, but simply a constant appeal to “education, children’s welfare, family—the institutional foundations of our society.”
In this context, the debate between Savage and Finley wasn’t of merely anecdotal interest, the adviser said. “This is the future of conservatism. This is an absolutely fundamental question: do we take children out of homes so they can be raised by the state, or do we put money into homes so parents can raise them?”
It has been habitual in Liberal campaigns since 2000, when Jean Chrétien shut down the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day, to deliver dark warnings about a Conservative “hidden agenda” at odds with Canadian progressive values. This has been getting harder for two reasons. First, very little about what Harper is doing is hidden. Second, much of it is solidly in line with the values of millions of Canadians. Not the ones who used to be in power, to be sure. Just the ones who support this government.
For many years, Harris Decima pollster Allan Gregg has asked respondents whether they consider themselves conservatives, liberals or centrists, and he’s also asked them how they vote. In recent years, he told the Manning Centre conference, the number of self-identified conservatives has been growing. But what’s almost more interesting is that the political allegiance of self-identified centrists has shifted, too. In 1997, 41 per cent of centrists voted for the Chrétien Liberals. In 2008, 48 per cent voted for the Harper Conservatives. Two things have happened. As the population ages and is buffeted by polarizing events like the struggle against international terrorism, the centre has shifted rightward. And the Harper Conservatives have pushed the Liberals, sometimes with their hearty co-operation, off-centre.
Gregg found that 89 per cent of respondents, nearly everyone, agrees that “nothing is more important than family.” Sixty-seven per cent agree that “marriage is, by definition, between a man and a woman,” 60 per cent that “abortion is morally wrong.”
For as long as he’s been observing politics, many of them as a pollster for Progressive Conservative leaders Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, Gregg has watched conservatives argue about whether to satisfy an activist base or reach out to a broader, less partisan coalition. Clark and Mulroney opted for the latter and their party did not long survive the fragmentation that ensued. The former strategy has its dangers, too: Conservatives could “set a ceiling on their support,” a real concern to Harper as he consistently falls short of electoral majorities. But while the debate has been going on, “the centre has moved to become more conservative,” Gregg said. So a strategy of explicit appeal to social conservatives is “much more available than it used to be.”
You know who has provided the most elaborate analysis of that phenomenon? Stephen Harper. He delivered it in private, at a closed-door meeting of the conservative social group Civitas in April 2003, but a month later he published it in the now-defunct Citizens Centre Report magazine. Rereading it in the context of current politics is an uncanny experience.
Speaking as the new leader of a Canadian Alliance that had not yet merged with Peter Mackay’s Progressive Conservatives, Harper argued that “on a wide range of public policy questions—including foreign affairs and defence, criminal justice and corrections, family and child care, and health care and social services—social values are increasingly the really big issues.”
First, he said, “Conservatives have to give much higher place to confronting threats posed by modern liberals” to the family, a “building block of our society.” That meant Conservatives must push hard on such issues as “banning child pornography, raising the age of sexual consent, providing choice in education and strengthening the institution of marriage.”
Harper then laid out guidelines for choosing issues to fight on. First, the issues “should not be denominational, but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths. It also helps when social conservative concerns overlap those of people with a more libertarian orientation.”
Second, gains would have to be slow and incremental. Third, “rebalancing means there will be changes to the composition of the conservative coalition.” “Old Conservatives” like Joe Clark might leave, as Clark soon did. But “many traditional Liberal voters, especially those from key ethnic and immigrant communities, will be attracted to a party with strong traditional views of values and family. This is similar to the phenomenon of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ in the United States.” It is no coincidence—it is a keystone of Harper’s strategy—that perhaps his closest cabinet ally is Jason Kenney, a devout Catholic and former federal Liberal in his student days who has been responsible for ethnic outreach since long before he became immigration minister.
Because it is incremental, Harper’s social project is not close to being done. For next steps, many conservatives are turning to Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, a new book by Brian Lee Crowley, an economist and founder of the new Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Crowley does not regard himself as a social conservative. But many who do see themselves that way like what he’s saying.
To caricature a complex argument, Crowley says the modern welfare state has overextended itself, is unsustainable, and causes more harm than good to institutions like the family. These trends will only get worse when an aging population sharply increases the cost of delivering most social programs. One size can no longer fit all. Social services will have to be narrowly aimed at those who need them most, and delivered only as long as recipients are willing to improve their behaviour by attending to their family, keeping or seeking a job, and so on. Government is no good at any of that and, in the opinion of most, shouldn’t try.
“It is precisely for this reason, in my view, that we have seen in both the United States and the United Kingdom a growing use of the private sector, including the not-for-profit and so-called faith-based charities, for the delivery of social services,” Crowley writes. “Such private agencies may be more demanding of their clientele and expect more in the way of improvements in behaviour.”
Crowley’s book was published last autumn. It seems to have been barely one step ahead of the news. This month’s Throne Speech contained a single line saying the government “will look to innovative charities and forward-thinking private-sector companies to partner on new approaches to many social challenges.”
Such charities and companies were much in evidence at the Manning Centre conference. The changes Crowley anticipates are expected and embraced by social conservatives. Meanwhile, the federal Liberals are still defending policies from five years ago, policies Harper has taken pains to ensure future federal governments won’t be able to afford, with his GST cuts and his massive cash transfers to the provinces. If the Liberals cannot begin to make a case for a return to larger, more activist—and more expensive—state-run social welfare, then Stephen Harper’s social conservative revolution will only accelerate.


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PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — The Salvation Army’s annual Red Kettle Campaign comes to a close on Friday.
Major Heath Sells, Tri-County coordinator at Salvation Army, said they are 80% of the way towards their $1.7 million goal.
He said COVID-19 has had a negative impact on the campaign. It made it difficult to find bell ringers, which then affects donations.
“You know this has been an odd year as we can come into the second Christmas season with COVID where we’ve just struggled quite frankly to have volunteers and enough people to man our kettles in front of the store fronts here throughout the Tri,” said Sells. “Not having bell ringers in front of storefronts means that people aren’t making donations,” he said.
He said the campaign itself goes through the end of January, so there is still time to donate through the virtual kettle.


text:
Parents should approach conversations about weight with teenagers carefully, a new study suggests.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School looked at survey data on nearly 6,000 teens and parents. They found that when discussions between parents and children focused on their weight and size, teens were more likely to resort to unhealthy dieting and other weight-control measures, such as laxative use and skipping meals.
This effect was particularly apparent in cases when fathers commented on teens' weight.
Experts suggest focusing conversations on healthy eating. The study also found that when parents engaged in healthful eating conversations, overweight or obese adolescents were less likely to use unhealthy weight-control behaviors.

domain: medical


text:
The Bright Star’s misery continues as S. Sudan loses to Gabon at home
Goalkeer Juma Jinaro was in the right position to save Gabon striker Axel Meye Me Ndong’s header.(Photo by David Mono Danga)
South Sudan’s midfielder Wurube Robert (R) tackling Gabon’s winger Dennis Bouanga. In July 2018, Bouanga joined Nîmes Olympique from FC Lorient on a three-year contract (L) ((Photo by David Mono Danga))
By David Mono Danga
The Bright Stars of South Sudan lost to Gabon by a goal to nil in the 2nd leg of the 2019 African Cup of Nations (AFCON2019) qualifiers at Juba Stadium in a wet Tuesday evening.
The Panthers of Gabon took the lead through center back Ondele Appidangaye just 3 minutes into second half after an overwhelming goalless first half. South Sudan lost to Gabon 3-0 in the 1st leg at the Stade d’Angondjé in Libreville on Friday last week.
Axel Meye Me Ndong missed couples of chances, heading wide two free headers from winger Dennis Bouanga’s corners and missing a one-on-one with the Bright Stars goalkeeper Juma Jinaro, shooting over the crossbar.
The win takes Gabon to seven points in Group C and leaves South Sudan pointless in the bottom of the table after four successive losses.
Substitute Khamis Leon Uso came in the second with an immediate impact as South Sudan held possession of the ball. The Merriekh FC’s skipper came close to netting when he fired a low show direct into the hands of the Panther’s goalkeeper, Ovono Ebang Didier.
Mali is top of the group on seven points, two ahead of second placed Burundi who they hosted on Friday night.
South Sudan has lost all four games, including back to back matches against Gabon, conceding ten goals in total and scoring none.
The Bright Stars have only won three matches in nations cup qualifiers since gaining independence in 2011. South Sudan’s first ever win came against Equatoria Guinea in September 5, 2015 when they beat the visitor’s one nil through Atak Lual.
South Sudan’s thrashing of Djibouti 6-0 in March, 2017 and Somalia’s home and away (2-0 and 2-1) loses in April last year were the Ultras Bright Star’s 2nd and third wins respectively.
The Bright Star’s Caretaker coach Ramzey Sebit told the media that he was impressed with the performance of the team irrespective of the results.
He blamed the loss on the heavy drizzles that wetted the pitch compromising their strength. Ramzey also noted poor preparation as an alert factor prior to both ties.
Meanwhile, his counterpart, Daniel Cousin told the Juba Monitor after the match that Gabon needed the points more than South Sudan and hence deserved to win the tie.
“It was a must win for us today. So we deserved the 3 points compared to South Sudan,”coach Cousin said.
It was Coach Ramzey Sebit’s second match in charge after the German Coach Ait Abdelmalek’s resignation last month. It was also former Gabon international Daniel Cousin’s second game in charge after replacing Jose Antonio Camacho.
The match was officiated by Niger referees; Centre referee Mohamed Ali, assisted by Mohamadou Yohaya and Abdoulaziz Moctar Saley.
South Sudan Coach: Ramzey Sebit
- Juma Jinaro- GK. ©
- Atir Thomas
- Hassan James Martin
- Friday Zico
- Abdu Awad
- Chol Peter
- Aguer Joseph
- Wurube Robert
- Thok Koang
- Aluk Akech
- Atak Lual
- Robert Joseph
- Omot Sebit
- Yassir Khamis Biansi
- Duach John
- Khamis Leon
- Joseph Celestino
Coach: Daniel Cousin
- Ovono Ebang Didier
- Paulun Lloyd
- Ecuele Mounga
- Ondele Appindangale
- Biyogo Poko
- Loufilou Ndele
- Bouanga Attani
- Madinada Levi
- Mbigni Samsoh
- Ebane Ebessolo
- Axel Meye Me Dong


Suffice it to say, CloudOn never quite stops polishing its iOS / Android productivity app, with the service often adding feature after feature and reaching more and more folks around the world -- with that in mind, today's update will be no exception. With the introduction of version 3.0, CloudOn's now bringing its handy Microsoft Office tools to the iPhone, marking this the first time the application will be available on any smartphone. In addition to making its debut on the smaller screen, CloudOn has also included optimization for 7-inch tablets like the ASUS-made Nexus 7 and the slightly larger iPad mini, while integration with Redmond's SkyDrive cloud and support for Mountain View's Jelly Bean OS can be found inside v3.0 as well. All in all, CloudOn's third major installment could very well be considered its most substantial yet -- and, according to CEO Millind Gadekar, there are no plans to slow down anytime soon, telling us that this is just another step toward the outfit's "mission of reinventing mobile productivity." Very well, then.


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April 29, 2010
Various music artists unite in a new version of the Chilean song, “Gracias a la Vida.” The project, spearheaded by Beto Cuevas and produced by Humberto Gatica, will be digitally released on May 4. Funds raised will be donated to Habitat for Humanity´s reconstruction efforts in Chile.
CHILE — Juanes, Alejandro Sanz, Juan Luis Guerra, Laura Pausini, Fher (Maná), Shakira, Michael Bublé and Miguel Bosé have united with Beto Cuevas in “Voces unidas por Chile” (Voices united for Chile), an initiative to support this South American country after the devastating earthquake that occurred in February. The project consists in the recording of a new version of Violeta Parra’s classic “Gracias a la Vida,” a symbolic song for Chileans, and also very well-known worldwide as a Latin American traditional theme for the past four decades.
“Voces unidas por Chile” will be released digitally on May 4th. Funds raised from sales will be donated to Habitat for Humanity’s reconstruction efforts in Chile after the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck near Santiago on February 27. Habitat for Humanity is an international organization that helps families to access their basic human right to adequate housing. The organization is already rebuilding alongside affected families in Chile, but financial help and volunteers are still needed to cover the basic reconstruction needs.
Despite their busy schedules, the artists found the way to record their part of the song somewhere around the globe. Beto Cuevas recorded in Los Angeles; Juanes in London; Alejandro Sanz in Santiago, Chile; Juan Luis Guerra in Miami; Laura Pausini in Italy; Fher in Guadalajara, Mexico; Shakira in Nassau; Michael Bublé in New York; and Miguel Bosé in Madrid. The song was produced by the highly acclaimed Chilean producer Humberto Gatica.
Throughout the next five years, Habitat plans to serve a total of at least 10,000 families from the five regions affected by the quake, giving priority to the most vulnerable.
About Habitat for Humanity Chile
Habitat for Humanity Chile works with at-risk families and communities to provide housing solutions, facilitate community support and offer diverse services in an efficient and sustainable manner, benefitting the nation as a whole. For more information, visit www.hphchile.cl/ .


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“Much of any relationship is formed out of habit – if the habits you once had aren’t there anymore, develop new ones.” – Love by Design
Moving OUT of your old habits: moving out of a home, screaming neighbors in the new complex, not knowing how to fix things in your own house, splitting time with the kids and not having control of them during their time with the “other” parent, fighting for custody, and managing your kids’ emotions and outbursts during this massive change – sound familiar?
Or how about the below scene with the children?
Kid outburst: “Why does YOUR divorce have to ruin MY life?!”.
Kid outburst: “You’re just jealous that she’s so pretty and young. Dad found someone awesome. Because he’s awesome. So it’s too bad you kicked him out. So It’s not my fault that you’re alone and can’t handle it.”
O-U-C-H… but hearing those difficult words will make you realize it’s time to Move ON.
We are definitely keeping it real here, folks!
Moving ON: I vividly remember my first “ME TIME” night…. The very first night my son left our home to go stay with his Dad. I trusted his Dad completely, and knew my son was well-loved, yet I sat on the stairs of my completely quiet house and cried my eyes out. I knew this was the right path to take, yet my life as I once knew it was over. Darn those “old habits” are hard to accept and break.
Speaking of crying, have we seen Lyla shed any tears at all? Where do all those emotions go?? She definitely wins the best adult anger outburst! Are you a Lyla?
My LBD relationship coaching advice this week goes to….Jake. Listen, you agreed you weren’t going to introduce the kids to the hot new girlfriend… but you DID! And to add insult to injury, pictures were immediately posted by your daughter on Instagram. (We will discuss SOCIAL MEDIA challenges in relationships on a different day!) Not being true to your word during this arduous time causes unnecessary damage to your credibility, as well as the on-going co-parenting relationship you will need to have with your soon-to-be-ex. Suck it up. Manage your kids’ meltdowns. Learn how to be a single parent. It’s not easy, yet it’s absolutely 1000% worth it!
LBD Moving OUT & Moving ON advice: Be true to your word to help your family manage potential meltdowns. Short term pain for long term gain.
Kudos this week goes to….. Abby: You owned it, girlfriend! You said you were going to be fine on your first night without the kids, aka “ME TIME”, but you weren’t…. so you called your girlfriends. You cried. You asked yourself honest questions, “How is this all going to be ok?” And after all was said and done, you communicated your feelings and owned your mistakes. (Darn that’s REALLY hard to do!) You admitted to your brother you were hurt because your ex, the kids, and he all had fun without you. You owned screwing up with your teenage daughter by snapping at her when it wasn’t her fault. Your husband is moving on and you need to learn to deal with it. That is some serious end-of-relationship reflection and self awareness that most people simply do not own this early on. Great job Moving ON!
To quote Lyla: “It’s a different kind of alone. Like alone alone”. This painful feeling is all too familiar to those in the throes of a breakup. Much of any relationship is formed out of habit – the habit of talking to them, spending time with them, etc. Once those habits are not an option, you’re left with… I don’t know what!?!? And that itself can bring heart-opening NEW emotions.
LBD Moving OUT & Moving ON advice: After a breakup, commit to getting comfortable with being alone. Feel your emotions. Ask for help. Better yet, ask your girlfriends for help. They will understand why you’re drinking wine, dancing in your underwear with black marker drawings on your body, and NOT even blink an eye. Your new “ME TIME” is a learning time.
A learning time that will help you #GoFindYourself

domain: psychology


Reports last week that Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones was heading for surgery on Monday turned out to be true.
On Monday night, the former Alabama star posted on Instagram about his surgery and thanked those who had prayed for him.
Jones missed two games in December with a sprained toe. For the Falcons' final seven games -- four regular-season and three postseason contests -- Jones was listed as a full participant on the game-week practice report once. He missed eight practices and was a limited participant in 10.
But after Atlanta lost to the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl on Feb. 5, Jones and the Falcons said he would wait and see about the need for surgery.
"He's going to visit with the docs again coming up next week, and we'll make a determination after that," Atlanta coach Dan Quinn said at the NFL Scouting Combine on Wednesday.
Jones visited Dr. Robert Anderson in Charlotte, N.C. Anderson surgically repaired Jones' fractured right foot, which he suffered in the fifth game of the 2013 season and kept him sidelined for the rest of that campaign.
Jones' latest surgery isn't expected to interfere with his availability for the bulk of Atlanta's offseason program.
Jones also suffered a foot fracture in 2011, had surgery after the NFL Scouting Combine and was ready to play when the Falcons opened his rookie season.
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Despite his foot ailments, Jones still caught 19 passes for 334 yards and three touchdowns in the playoffs as the Falcons won the NFC championship and played in Super Bowl LI, where they lost to the Patriots 34-28 in overtime.
Jones led the NFL in receiving yardage for the third straight season in 2016, catching 83 passes for 1,409 yards and six touchdowns.
Jones was the 2007 Class 6A Back of the Year at Foley High School before going to Alabama, where he set school records for receptions and receiving yards in a season. The Falcons traded five draft picks to the Cleveland Browns to move to the No. 6 selection in 2011 to choose Jones.
In the NFL, Jones has caught 497 passes for 7,610 yards and 40 touchdowns. His career average of 96.3 receiving yards per game is the highest in NFL history.