America has always been a competitive religious marketplace, but a major survey released yesterday shows a country increasingly exploring different faith identities and ways of worship. More than 40 percent of respondents told pollsters that they had changed their religious affiliation since chil...
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
In Major Poll, U.S. Religious Identity Appears Very Slippery
Red Carpet Fashions
Rainy weather notwithstanding, lots of women screen stars wore red and rosettes in celebration of an event that nearly didn't happen.
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Bernanke: Fed ready to act to boost economy
WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress that the nation is in for a period of sluggish business growth and sent a fresh signal Wednesday that interest rates will again be lowered to steady the teetering economy.“The economic situation has become distinctly less favorable”
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Taliban have Kabul in their sights
The indications are that whoever takes power in Islamabad - be it the Pakistan People’s Party or the Pakistan Muslim League of Nawaz Sharif or a combination of both - the real battle will be in Afghanistan between the Taliban and al-Qaeda-led militants and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and its allies.
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World powers mull changes to Iran nuclear offer
BRUSSELS: World powers are mulling whether to reformulate an offer to Iran to persuade it to suspend uranium enrichment, even as they discuss new UN sanctions, an EU diplomat said Wednesday.
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efforts for democracy restoration in Pakistan
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari Wednesday said he would continue his struggle for the elimination of dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in the country.Addressing a luncheon arranged in honour of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), ANP and independent representatives.
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Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Follow the Leader
54 percent of Democratic voters said they would want to see Obama nominated compared to 38 percent who preferred Clinton
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Pakistan bans YouTube for these videos of Muhammed
The Pakistani government caused a worldwide two-hour long YouTube outage on Sunday after it ordered Internet service providers to block the site.
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Thursday, February 14, 2008
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What is critically important to remember is the very significant
connection between heart disease and Alzheimer's disease. And, beyond
that, it's very important to realize the importance of keeping your
weight down to a good level.
Why? As you can probably imagine, obesity is a risk factor for both
heart disease and memory loss. It just goes round and round, doesn't
it.
Let's skip the usual but important discussion of eating less and
exercising more for a moment and focus on a point that is often
forgotten or perhaps under appreciated: increasing your metabolic rate
so you burn more calories at rest.
As human beings, we have a unique ability to store ingested calories
as fat. That was vitally important a long, long time ago and saved
countless lives during things like famines and plagues and wars when
food wasn't readily available.
Today however, it sometimes seems as if excess food has become a
curse in areas where there is an overabundance of food (of course,
some areas of the world are suffering from famine as we speak).
Many people with excess weight and body fat have tried various diet
and exercise programs. The failure rate of relying on these approaches
alone can be seen by walking through an airport or going to the mall
or going grocery shopping. It's quite a challenge, isn't it?
A major reason people accumulate excess body fat, especially with
age, is that the aging process itself is associated with a profound
drop in metabolism and calorie burning. I remember very vividly myself
that when I was in my 30's and 40's - all I had to do to lose weight
was to think about it.
Now it is much more of a challenge.
One recent study revealed that that as we age, we suffer a greater
decrease in resting metabolism; what scientists call resting energy
expenditure. This helps explain why dieting alone so often fails to
provide long-term weight control, and why it is so important to boost
your resting metabolic rate if you want to lose weight and body fat.
Until recently, besides diet and exercise, the only supplements that
were available to boost metabolism were frankly very dangerous. In
fact many of them have been removed from the market.
With the development of the Longevity Green Drink and the Longevity
Energy Caps you now have very safe and effective ways available to you
to boost your metabolism and get a welcomed side effect: you can boost
your brain power with both of them as well.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Sometimes You Get the Trees, Sometimes They Get You [PICS]
The beauty of running are the things you pass by as you run along. You get to see things that you don’t notice as you drive by in a car. You may have run the same route 50 times but you find yourself seeing something different each time. I ran by a tree than had grown over a fence and it got me to thinking ...
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Hollywood Writers Consider Studio Offer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Hollywood writers got their first look Saturday at details of a tentative agreement with studios that could put the strike-crippled entertainment industry back to work, an offer the union's East Coast president said he was endorsing.
A summary of the proposed deal crafted this week was posted on the Writers Guild of America's Web site hours before members attended meetings in New York and Los Angeles.
Compensation for projects delivered via digital media was the central issue in the 3-month-old walkout, which idled thousands of workers, disrupted the TV season and moviemaking and took the shine off Hollywood's awards season.
"I believe it is a good deal. I am going to be recommending this deal to our membership," Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America, East, told reporters before the New York meeting at a Times Square hotel.
Winship said afterward that he was encouraged by the membership's response.
"We had a very lively discussion. I'm happy with what happened. ... At the moment, I feel strongly it (the proposed deal) has a strong chance of going through," he said.
Writers leaving the two-hour-plus New York meeting characterized the reaction as generally positive and said there was cautious optimism that the end of the strike - the guild's first in 20 years - could be near.
"There's a general feeling of tremendous success. I was delighted," said TV writer John Simmons, who estimated that about 500 writers were on hand. "We agreed that this looks pretty good. ... It bodes well for the future."
He added that there are "always some people who will dissent" and that the complex deal required further scrutiny.
Carmen Culver, a film and TV writer, lauded the guild "for hanging tough."
"It's a great day for the labor movement. We have suffered a lot of privation in order to achieve what we've achieved," Culver said.
Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker ("Bowling for Columbine") and a nominee this year for his health-care film "Sicko," attended the New York meeting.
"It's an historic moment for labor in this country," Moore told The Associated Press.
Hundreds of writers filed into the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to hear from union leaders about the proposed deal. Some were cautiously optimistic that they could begin work by next week.
"I'm hopeful. We've been jerked around so much by the studios," film writer Brian Suskind said. "I don't think we're feeling vindictive, but we're angry about how we've been treated."
If guild members on both coasts react favorably to the proposed deal, the guild's board could vote Sunday to lift the strike order and the industry could be up and running Monday. This month's Oscars ceremony, which has been under the cloud of a union and actors boycott, also would be a winner.
Sunday's Grammy Awards ceremony has a picket-free pass from the union.
Winship cautioned that it's not a "done deal" until the contract is ratified by members. He also said that several steps must be taken before the West guild's board and East guild's council decide to lift the strike order.
"It conceivably could be Monday, but there are several different alternative ways that the board and council could determine how this should be dealt with," Winship said.
An outline of the three-year deal was reached in recent talks between media executives and the guild, with lawyers then drafting the contract language that was concluded Friday.
According to the guild's summary, the deal provides union jurisdiction over projects created for the Internet based on certain guidelines, sets compensation for streamed, ad-supported programs and increases residuals for downloaded movies and TV programs.
The writers deal is similar to one reached last month by the Directors Guild of America, including a provision that compensation for ad-supported streaming doesn't kick in until after a window of between 17 to 24 days deemed "promotional" by the studios.
Writers would get a maximum $1,200 flat fee for streamed programs in the deal's first two years and then get a percentage of a distributor's gross in year three - the last point an improvement on the directors deal, which remains at the flat payment rate.
"Much has been achieved, and while this agreement is neither perfect nor perhaps all that we deserve for the countless hours of hard work and sacrifice, our strike has been a success," guild leaders Winship and Patric Verrone, head of the Writers Guild of America, West, said in an e-mailed message to members.
Together, the guilds represent 12,000 writers, with about 10,000 of those involved in the strike that began Nov. 5 and has cost the Los Angeles area economy alone an estimated $1 billion or more. Studios are represented by Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
One observer said the guild gained ground in the deal but not as much as it wanted.
"It's a mixed deal but far better than the writers would have been able to get three months ago. The strike was a qualified success," said Jonathan Handel, an entertainment attorney with the TroyGould firm and a former associate counsel for the writers guild.
The walkout "paved the way for the directors to get a better deal than they would otherwise have gotten. That in turn became the foundation for further improvements the writers achieved," Handel said.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Thousands gather for chehlum of Benazir Bhutto
Thousands of people massed around Benazir Bhutto's tomb in Garhi Khuda Bukhsh early Thursday to mark the end of the 40-day mourning period for the slain opposition leader. The day of Muslim prayers and rituals also signals the launch of campaigning by her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) for elections on February 18, with her widower Asif Ali Zardari set to deliver a keynote speech. Many mourners spent the night in tents outside the huge white Bhutto mausoleum in the rural village of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, listening to mourning songs on tape recorders and reciting verses from the Koran. "We have to win this election -- in our leader's words, democracy is the best revenge," mourner Nabi Bux Kalhoro told Agencies. Party officials said they expected tens of thousands of people to turn out to mark Bhutto's 'chehlum' -- the completion of the mourning period following her assassination on December 27.
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