Geraldo Rivera Takes on Anti-Immigration Forces

Immigration may not be the overcharged political issue this presidential campaign that many had predicted it would be - especially with the top three candidates having moderate to liberal positions on immigration - but it will still play an important role in this presidential campaign.

And into the fray jumps Fox News host Geraldo Rivera. Rivera has a new book, His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S. , that looks at the immigration issue. And Rivera, whose never been afraid to voice a controversial opinion, believes that "The hostility by some anti-immigrant activists against Hispanics is no different from that directed against earlier generations of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants."

"It's a hysterical whipping up of a mob frenzy on an issue that should be recognized that it is part of a process that makes this country unique," Rivera (who has a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother) tells Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. "And by exacerbating the differentness of the newcomers, what they do is a gross disservice."

Rivera says it was the shouting match (seen directly below) he had with fellow Fox News host Bill O'Reilly (image that, a screaming match with Bill O'Reilly ...) that inspired him to write the book.

"Many of the most fervent anti-immigrant activists are themselves the children or grandchildren of immigrants," he says. "The style changes, the accents change, the geographical antecedents change, but it's the same. You can track headline for headline the response to the Irish wave of immigration in the mid-19th century to the reaction of the Minutemen and similar radical anti-immigration groups today."

And he has little time for the argument that some people make about border security being the reason reason behind their opposition to immigration.

"Are you really concerned about 'border security,' or are you concerned about the changing demographic face of the United States? [For] example, if it is terrorism that you are concerned about and you want this fence built between the United States and Mexico, why don't you want the same fence built between the United States and Canada? Why isn't there this clamor ... ?

"It's not [fear of] crime, it's not terror, it is demographics that is the true fear. If we wanted secure borders, what about the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts?"

10:54 AM ET | 03- 4-2008 | permalink | comments (35) | e-mail post

How Dixville Notch Got to Vote First

In Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the local residents take their status as the first community in the U.S. to vote on election day quite seriously. (The community is also the first to vote on the state's primary day.) But did you know that they achieved this honor because of a competitive news wire photographer?

Boston.com has a great video piece on the "Legend of Dixville Notch" that tells the story of how in this small community of less than a dozen people became famous in 1960. United Press International chief photographer Don Robinson convinced the owner of the local hotel, Neil Tillotson, to hold the first vote in the nation.

And in order to make sure that Dixville Notch voted first and beat his journalist competitor, The Associated Press (whose photographers were gathered at the previous first-in-the nation site Hart's Location, New Hampshire) Robinson moved the hands on the clock in the hotel where the voting took place five minutes ahead.

"Those were the kind of things you did back in the golden days of journalism," says retired UPI photographer Dan Wolfe. "It was just a great scam."

8:17 PM ET | 01- 7-2008 | permalink | e-mail post

Kerrey Apologizes to Obama for Muslim Remark

Former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey has apologized to follow Democrat Barack Obama.

The Associated Press is reporting that the apology was for any unintentional insult Kerrey committed by raising the presidential candidate's Muslim heritage while endorsing rival candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Obama is a Christian.)

In an interview with the Washington Post on Sunday detailing why he was supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton, Kerrey (who is currently the president of New School University in NYC) also mused on some of the qualifications Obama had for president: "It's probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims and I think that experience is a big deal."

Kerrey sent a letter to Obama yesterday, lauding the Illinois senator's qualifications to be president and saying that he "never meant to harm his candidacy." Kerrey told AP in a telephone interview that he sent the letter on his own and had not spoken to Clinton or her campaign about the comments he made Sunday in Iowa. Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the senator accepted Kerrey's apology, sent to the campaign in the mail and via e-mail.

11:51 AM ET | 12-20-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

Many Voters Won't Pay Attention Until '08 World Series

For people who've been following the two presidential nomination campaigns for several months now, and are looking forward to see what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, the suggestion that many Americans won't even start to pay attention to who is running for president until after the 2008 World Series might seem wildly mistaken. But that what Charles Cook — the writer of the nonpartisan newsletter, the Cook Political Report, which has been analyzing national elections since 1984 — believes.

Cook made the remark as part of a speech he gave at Fordham University about the 2008 elections. He also called the current political environment the "weirdest" he has ever seen.

New York political consultant Jerry Skurnik, who went to hear Cook's talk and blogged about it on his website, Room 8. Skurnik says this notion of Cook's that people start to pay attention to politics at different times supports a theory that he has.

For people who follow everything in politics, there has never been a better time. Thanks to 24x7 cable, the Internet, broadcast radio, satellite radio, newspapers, magazine, etc. political junkies (apologies to Ken Rudin) can follow almost every door-to-door visit of a candidate in Iowa or New Hampshire.

But there is a dark lining to this silver cloud, Skurnik suggests. For people who don't follow politics, those many folks who don't pay attention until after the last pitch of the series, this is the worse time. In the past, when there were fewer choices, they would rely primarily on the evening newscast, or their local paper, to relay the latest political information the needed. But now, with the wide range of choices of media, many people don't regularly watch any newscast of any kind, or even subscribe to a paper.

So in the end, Spurnik argues, this section of the public is actually less informed that they were before, despite all the information available.

He writes that this difference in when people begin to follow an election could explain why some pundits make predictions that are decidedly off the mark, or miss some trend that ultimately propels a candidate to victory.

1:16 PM ET | 12-17-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Bush Countdown Calendars Popular Holiday Gift

Does former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore have shares in a calendar publishing company? Speaking in Bali, Indonesia, to a group gathered to discuss a new global climate treaty, Gore said the U.S. is the principal obstacle to a comprehensive new treaty. And then he said, to loud applause, that it was only one more year and 40 days until current president George W. Bush leaves office.

Gore is apparently not the only one counting. If you can judge by the displays in books stores in the downtown Washington area, counting down the days until Mr. Bush leaves has turned out to be a popular past time. The calendars titles are a bit blunt ... "His Days Are Numbered," "The Bad President," "The End is Near," and "The Official Countdown," and feature sayings like "Hang in there!"and "Almost done." (Publishers say the sale of Bush calendars are up about 30 percent this year.) A gift, perhaps, for your favorite liberal?

But already there are plans afoot to give conservatives something to "gift" next year. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, some publishers are already talking about a "Bill Clinton, First Lady" calendar.

1:50 PM ET | 12-13-2007 | permalink | comments (20) | e-mail post

Romney's Inner Business Consultant Comes Out

One-time business consultant Mitt Romney showed off his famous appetite for data Tuesday, in the midst of a campaign photo op.

While shaking hands and posing for pictures in a Des Moines shopping mall, Romney and his wife Ann wandered into a business that refills toner cartridges. The couple consulted for a moment over what model of cartridge their home printer uses, then Romney snapped up a price list. "I didn't know how much you wanted to know about it," said the surprised counter clerk.

Romney quickly scanned the list for his model (HP-56 from Hewlett Packard). "There it is," he said. "Nine bucks and ten cents. "Wow, that's a lot less than we pay for a new one." On his way out the door the former venture capitalist said, "That's a good business."

Romney's curiosity might have also carried him — and the scrum of photographers following him — into a beauty salon, but his wife steered them away. "That's the last place I'd want to have a camera watching me, when I'm getting my hair done," Ann Romney said.

- Scott Horsley

8:51 AM ET | 12-12-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

It's Obama Versus (Bill) Clinton For Grammy Award

There's another Clinton-Obama battle shaping up, this one away from Iowa and New Hampshire. This time its the other Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, versus Illinois Senator Barack Obama at this year's Grammy Awards. Both Democrats have been nominated in the Best Spoken Word Album category. (Do they still call them albums? Wait, I've having a flashback to the 70s.)

Clinton's been nominated for the reading of his book "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World" and Obama for his book "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream."

Oh yea, there are other nominees, including another president: Maya Angelou, Jimmy Carter and Alan Alda.

Obama is actually the reigning champ in this category. He won it last year for his reading of the autobiographical "Dreams of My Father."

5:16 PM ET | 12- 7-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Clinton Dumps Celine Dion Song at Campaign Events

It's a parting of the ways that can only be rivaled by the split up of Lewis and Martin, Abbot and Costello, and "Benifer" ... OK, maybe it's not quite that dramatic, but reports indicate that Sen. Hillary Clinton team has decided to drop Celine Dion's song, "You and I."

Clinton had selected the song after thousands of suggestions were submitted to her website. It was used to set the stage as she entered a campaign event. "I can hear your voice calling out to me, Brighter than the sun and darker than the night, I can see your love shining like a light," a recording of the Canadian singer would croon.

But ABC News' Eloise Harper Reports that the "shining" seems to be over. Big Head Todd and the Monsters are in and their "Blue Sky" appear to be the Clinton campaign's new musical selection. (I'm not so sure if it's a good idea for a politician to be associated with anything involving the phrase 'big head.")

So all that hoopla about people sending suggestions and the funny YouTube videos showing the songs submitted... all for nothing?

No word from Celine Dion feels about being replaced. No doubt she's too upset to talk about it right now.

5:54 AM ET | 12- 6-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Looking for a Fitting Place for a Romney Interview

Sometimes the best-laid plans of mice, men and NPR hosts go astray. Particularly when an ice storm hits. All Things Considered host Robert Siegel had planned to go to Iowa on Saturday to watch presidential candidate Mitt Romney give a speech and then interview him. But Siegel had to scramble when the weather grounded him, and his editor, Quinn O'Toole in Milwaukee and Romney canceled the speech. Senior editor Susan Feeney was already in Des Moines, juggling communications between Siegel, the NPR engineer and the Romney campaign. Here's Siegel with the rest of the story:

The new plan: Our engineer would go to Romney's hotel room and record the candidate. Quinn would record me at the airport. Romney and I would talk by cell phone, then NPR would mix the two recordings together. Patrick Murray, our engineer, was off buying a snow shovel at a Des Moines hardware store and made a beeline to Romney's hotel. Our window was now just a half an hour away, as Romney's staff had hopes of getting him out of Des Moines.

We needed a place that was reasonably quiet for me to do my end of the interview. Quinn and I started looking as I tried to formulate questions (which I had assumed I would do after watching him campaign in Iowa). The Milwaukee airport conference rooms were locked. We found an "executive work station." It had a noisy air duct overhead that would have made me sound like I was doing hurricane coverage on The Weather Channel.

Then we found a quiet, open, empty office and set up. It wasn't empty for long. Then the man whose office it was turned up. Many NPR reporters have experienced the moment when we have taken outrageous advantage of some situation, could easily have been booted out, but encountered a friendly listener who bent some rule to make a public radio show come together. On the other hand, many NPR reporters have also experienced what we experienced on Saturday. He booted us out of his office. No ifs, ands, buts or kind words for public radio.

As I moved us into the din of the executive work station, where all sorts of other travelers could enter, Quinn scouted again and hit pay dirt. The man at the desk in the airport PGA store told him the quietest, most private room was next door, at the airport Brooks Brothers. A kind lady named Marion permitted us use of that room. It was the fitting room. It was not entirely fitting for an interview (someone rang a Salvation Army bell outside) but, at least, no one interrupted us. So, we can say it was somewhat suitable, which I guess is what Brooks Brothers is all about.

- Robert Siegel

1:07 PM ET | 12- 3-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

Neil Diamond Reveals Identity of 'Sweet Caroline'

Neil Diamond performs in 2005.

Scott Gries/Getty Images

As a Boston Red Sox fan, I probably sing the words to Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline a couple hundred times a year. The 1960s tune has become one of the Sox's theme songs.

But it wasn't until today that Diamond publicly revealed "Sweet Caroline's" true identity. He told The Associated Press that the Caroline of his song is none other than Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, the daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy.

Diamond says he was a "young, broke songwriter" when a picture of the president's daughter caught his eye. "It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony," Diamond said. "It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there."

Years later, Diamond quickly wrote the song in a Memphis hotel. It went on to become his biggest hit and eventually a Boston baseball staple. Diamond says he's even become a Red Sox fan.

4:25 PM ET | 11-20-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

GPS Devices Catch Workers Goofing Off

State and municipal governments, as well as private employers, are finding ways to use global positioning devices to their advantage, relying on them to help save money — and to catch employees goofing off or doing other work on the job.

For instance, The Associated Press reports, Islip, N.Y., saved nearly 14,000 gallons of gas in a three-month period compared to the previous year after GPS devices were installed on its vehicles. (And when you consider the price of gas, that's a lot of tax money being saved.) Islip Supervisor Phil Nolan says gas consumption is down because town employees, who know they are being tracked, are using the vehicles less often for personal business.

GPS units also have cost some workers their jobs. In Fort Wayne, an administrator in the county health department bought three GPS devices out of her own pocket and moved them around between 12 department vehicles. Six employees were fired when they were caught going to stores, gyms, restaurants, churches and their homes. The administrator was later reimbursed for her purchases.

Needless to say, some employees and their unions don't like this use of GPS and complain that Big Brother is spying on them. That's made the use of GPS a bargaining point in contract negotiations. The Teamsters' tentative contract with United Parcel Service, for instance, says that a new employee cannot be fired for a first offense detected by GPS unless there is proof of intent to defraud.

But the devices also are being used in less controversial ways. In my old town of Boston, GPS units are installed on school buses, allowing the district to tell worried parents how far away a late bus is.

5:36 PM ET | 11-16-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Blame It on Your Name

Every once in awhile, you run across a study that boggles the mind.

Case in point: Psychologists in marketing at Yale and the University of California, San Diego, have found that "a preference for our own names and initials — the 'name-letter effect' — can have some negative consequences," USA Today reports.

The study of the unconscious influence of names and initials, which will be published in the December issue of Psychological Science, finds that students whose names begin with "C" or "D" get lower grades than those whose names start with "A" or "B." (Heaven knows how this affects the Franks and Felicias of the world.)

The researchers' work supports a series of studies published since 2002 that have found the "name-letter effect" causes people to make life choices based on names that resemble their own. Those studies by Brett Pelham, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY University at Buffalo, have found that people are disproportionately likely to live in states or cities resembling their names, have careers that resemble their names and even marry those whose surnames begin with the same letter as their own.

The USA Today story provides a few examples based on the research, including one that caught my eye. Apparently, a guy named Tom is likely to live in Toronto and marry someone named Tonya.

I don't know about all this. Never mind the Carls or Denises we all know who did well in school. I'm a Tom ... who lives in Virginia ... and married a Barbara.

However, the authors of the study do say that while the effect is more than coincidence, it is small.

Maybe very small.

5:17 PM ET | 11-15-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

Not His Brother's Keeper?

If it had happened in a courtroom, it would have been the Perry Mason moment.

Instead, it was during a congressional hearing that State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard learned, apparently for the first time, that his brother is serving on the advisory board of Blackwater — the U.S. security firm under federal investigation after a Baghdad shooting.

Henry Waxman, chairman of the House oversight committee, started the session by noting Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard's Blackwater connections, but Howard Krongard strongly denied them. "When these ugly rumors started recently, I specifically asked him. I do not believe it is true that he is a member of the advisory board that you stated. And that's something I think I need to say," he told the committee.

But Democrat Elijah Cummings of Connecticut produced e-mails from Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater, welcoming Buzzy Krongard to the board.

After a break, Howard Krongard said he had spoken with his brother and that Buzzy was connected to Blackwater. He immediately recused himself from all matters concerning the security firm.

Even Howard Krongard's supporters on the committee were upset. "He has done you tremendous damage by that," Republican Chris Shays of Connecticut told Krongard.

The Associated Press reports Krongard also has relinquished his role in an investigation of corruption allegations related to the new U.S. embassy in Iraq and is under heavy pressure to resign.

NPR's Michele Kelemen told me there is no word yet on whether the controversy will affect Howard Krongard's long-term position. But she notes that he didn't appear to have anyone from the State Department with him at Wednesday's hearing. A former staffer who quit in August said he didn't recognize anyone from Krongard's office there.

1:28 PM ET | 11-15-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Marvel Puts Comics Online

Spider-Man is getting a chance to use his skills on a completely different kind of web.

Marvel Comics has put 2,500 of its comics online. For $9.99 a month — or $4.99 a month if you sign up for a year — you'll get access to all of them (including the first 100 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four). The company is also offering 250 comics for free for a limited time.

Twenty new comics will be added each week, but titles will have to be in print for at least six months before they go online.

Marvel is hoping to recapture the attention of the young people it may have "lost" to the Web, but some see pitfalls for online comics. Dennis Webb, owner of the Comics and Cards Collectorama in Alexandria, Va., told me that he thinks real collectors will want the issues in print and the Web offerings won't change their habits. He adds: "No one has mentioned it at all. There hasn't been any buzz."

4:51 PM ET | 11-14-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Bringing Up Baby ... at Work

Ksenia Kozlovskaya/iStockphoto

After my son, Liam, was born, I started taking him to the office with me on Fridays so my wife could get some work done. Liam would spend most of the day sleeping in his carrier, but he would also come with me to meetings and crawl around on the floor in my office playing with toys. His Friday visits lasted about six months, and aside from a few bumps, the system worked pretty well.

Turns out that maybe I was ahead of the curve. A growing number of businesses are experimenting with on-the-job parenting, The Boston Globe reports. Some are allowing parents to regularly bring babies to work. A larger number are allowing employees to bring their children in if the nanny is sick or the school has a snow day. A national survey by the Virginia-based Society for Human Resource Management found that companies with policies for those emergency situations increased from 22 percent to 29 percent over the past year.

However, a baby on the job can raise concerns about distractions for a parent's co-workers. So consultant Carla Moquin recommends companies implement specific policies to handle kids at work, such has having the option to decide a baby is too much of a disruption to be at the office.

When I wanted to do the same Friday routine with my daughter, a fellow worker told me privately that she felt uncomfortable with the idea. So I didn't do it. I felt I needed everyone to be OK with the visits, or they would only cause problems.

1:57 PM ET | 11-14-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

Christmas Gift Cards a Bad Deal for Consumers?

Ah, gift cards ... Just thinking of them brings back all the happy Christmas memories I have of being too lazy to think about that really personal gift I could get someone close to me, panicking at the last second and buying a nice, shiny gift card instead. And I know I'm not the only one. The National Retail Federation predicts that there will be a 6 percent increase in gift card sales this holiday season, meaning that shoppers will spend about $26.3 billion on them.

The Chicago Tribune actually describes that as a "sober 6 percent" because gift card sales went up by a whopping 34 percent last year. However, Consumer Reports' executive editor also says more people are complaining to his magazine about the cards, concerned about lost cards and expiration dates.

This week, Consumer Reports launched a public education campaign aimed at warning shoppers about gift card pitfalls. It started with a full-page ad in The New York Times that read: "Dear Shopper, Last year, shoppers like you were out $8 billion because of unused, lost, or expired gift cards. Easy money for retailers. Lost money for you. Yours truly, Consumer Reports."

The consumer advocacy group's research shows 27 percent of people who received gift cards last year haven't used them yet, the Detroit Free Press reports. And all that unspent money can really pile up: After last year's holiday season, Nordstrom recorded $8 million in income from gift cards unused for five years or more.

The rules on how long you have to use a gift card vary from store to store and state to state. (Here's a chart that details the rules in each state.) Consumer Reports advises using gift cards quickly if you get them.

So does knowing that a sizable number of people never actually use their gift cards change your mind about buying them?

10:07 AM ET | 11-14-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Research Finds Many Blacks Earn Less than Parents Did

A trio of new reports about the economic mobility of Americans is encouraging in some ways but disquieting in others: Two out of three Americans have higher incomes than their parents, and 50 percent of that group is upwardly mobile, meaning that they have moved up at least one rung on the economic ladder from their parents.

But the studies released today as part of the Economic Mobility Project from the Pew Charitable Trust also found that nearly half of the children born to middle-class black families in the late 1960s fell down the ladder. Forty-five percent of black children whose parents were in an income bracket with median earnings of $55,600, adjusted for inflation, in 1968 are now in the lowest fifth of wage earners.

The reports, written by Julia B. Isaacs, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which followed 2,367 people from across the country, including 730 African-Americans, since 1968.

A summary of key findings for the three reports states, "In every income group, blacks are less likely than whites to surpass their parents' family income and more likely to fall down the economic ladder."

The reports don't offer any reasons for the disparity (that will be looked at more closely in the project's next series of studies), but Isaacs did offer some theories based on other studies to The Wall Street Journal: Black parents have fewer assets, like houses or stocks, to pass on to their children, and marriage rates are lower for blacks than whites, so black children are more likely to grow up to be single parents. A third possibility is that more black women were working 30 years ago than white women, so whites have benefited more economically from women entering the workforce.

3:20 PM ET | 11-13-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Brits Pay Less for Beer than Bottled Water

Now, here's a bit of good news for beer drinkers: In Britain, beer costs less than bottled water and soda in many supermarkets.

After living in Canada and the United States, where every simple pleasure seems to be heavily taxed, I am heartened to see that in England, a bloke can still get a pint for a decent price. (Years ago, when I was a columnist at a newspaper in Canada, one of my senior editors suggested I run a joke campaign for public office on a platform of lowering beer prices, just to see how people would respond. Readers loved the idea, but the publisher didn't — and killed my budding political career.)

Alas, the British beer drinker's good fortune may not last long. Morning Edition reports that anti-alcohol campaigners, aghast at the idea that beer is cheaper than water, want the government to increase taxes. But even without a tax hike, prices for microbrews at least are likely to rise because of a shortage of the hops used to flavor beer.

11:55 AM ET | 11-13-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Employers Cracking Down on Unhealthy Behaviors

Earlier this year, Scotts Miracle-Gro announced that smokers could no longer work for the Ohio-based lawn and garden company and that it would test randomly for nicotine. Starting in January, employees of media giant Tribune Co. will have to pay an additional $100 a month in insurance premiums if they or their covered family members smoke.

Welcome to the new world of "tough love" health care, where some companies are trying to limit rising costs by cracking down on potentially unhealthy behaviors, The Washington Post reports.

A survey of 450 major employers this year found that two-thirds were considering more aggressive health care programs for employees. The costs are a big deal for employers. The nonprofit Partnership for Prevention says employers spend an average of $1,685 per employee on absenteeism, low productivity and other indirect costs of individual and family health problems, for a grand total of $226 billion a year.

However, workers in 30 states are protected from penalties for lawful activities, such as smoking, outside work. Union contracts also offer some protection. For instance, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild has filed a grievance about the smoking penalty at The Baltimore Sun, a Tribune newspaper.

A lawyer representing a former Scotts worker who was fired after testing positive for nicotine argues that if employers can implement these kinds of measures against smokers, it's only a matter of time before they also penalize people "who are overweight or have high cholesterol, or ride motorcycles or sky-dive."

How far should a company be able to go to force employees to adopt healthier lifestyles? What about not hiring people who smoke or who are overweight?

9:57 AM ET | 11-13-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

Online Trading Firm's Stock Value Drops by Half

E*Trade has had better days. Shares in the online stock-trading firm lost more than half their value today following a warning from a Citigroup analyst about a higher "probability of a run on the bank."

TheStreet.com reports that analyst Prashant Bhatia downgraded the stock to a "sell" rating after E*Trade announced Friday that it expected to take additional hits from the subprime mortgage crisis. The firm also said that the Securities and Exchange Commission had launched an informal inquiry into the firm's loans and securities portfolios.

Now, I know next to nothing about the stock market and securities portfolios, but I do know that everyone pulling their money out of a bank is not a good thing. (Anybody who has ever seen It's a Wonderful Life understands that.) So I wondered what would happen if you did have some money in an E*Trade account, like a margin-selling account that day traders like to use, when the company went kaput. Would you lose it all because the company is online rather than a bricks-and-mortar entity?

Well, the message from Karen Petrou, a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics in Washington, D.C., is that you can relax. A bit. E*Trade, she told me, is an insured depository, which makes it just like a bank (even if it doesn't have ATMs). That means it's protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to the tune of $100,000 per customer. (The FDIC doesn't protect stocks, mutual funds and money market accounts, but those wouldn't be affected by what happens to E*Trade as a company.)

Then again, TheStreet reports that 50 percent of E*Trade accounts, about $15 billion, are in excess of $100,000. So maybe only half of its customers can relax. And I'm guessing that there might not be any E*Trade commercials during the Super Bowl this year.

6:04 PM ET | 11-12-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Broadway, Hollywood Strikers Share Money Concerns

Members of the Broadway stagehands' union picket during the weekend.

Eric Bechtold/Scoopt/Getty Images

The strikes involving Hollywood writers and Broadway stagehands have more in common than just showbiz. The strikers from the two unions share at least one bargaining concern: They want producers to take revenue from nontraditional sources into account in their contracts.

For TV and film writers, this additional revenue is the main reason for their strike. They are fighting for a share of the money generated from their work through new technologies like the Internet and mobile phones. The creation of revenue from sources other than ticket sales is an issue for the stagehands, particularly in terms of determining a production's profitability.

"When you go into a show like Legally Blonde or Young Frankenstein, you walk past a phalanx of souvenir kiosks," NPR contributor Jeff Lunden told me. And it's these revenue streams that the union says should be considered in a show's bottom line. That will help determine, the union argues, what kind of contract producers can afford.

However, producers argue that old rules force them to pay people who do little or no work and doom many productions to financial failure. Right now, Lunden told me, about one in five Broadway shows is profitable, and it can take around two years to get there.

That leads to another concern the stagehands share with TV and film writers — not everyone works all year long. The stagehands' union argues that the work rules in the contract exist to help protect members who don't work 12 months a year.

Lunden reported for Morning Edition today that no new negotiations have been scheduled in the Broadway strike. But the heat on both sides to reach a settlement might be turned up as tourists cancel trips to New York and economic losses start to hit other businesses, like restaurants and hotels.

3:38 PM ET | 11-12-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Report Calls for Access to Birth Records for Adoptees

When it comes to making adoption policy, the struggle between one person's right to know and another's right to privacy is often central. But The Associated Press says a report being released today by a leading adoption institute comes down solidly for the right to know, calling for adult adoptees to have access to their birth records, which will allow them to learn their birth parents' identities.

"States' experiences in providing this information make clear that there are minimal, if any, negative repercussions," says the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, which is based in Boston. "Outcomes appear to have been overwhelmingly positive for adult adopted persons and birthparents alike."

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the institute argues that open records for adoption "do not result in increased abortion rates, decreased adoptions or fractured adoptive families." Currently, eight states allow this kind of access to adults who were adopted.

But opponents of open records, like the National Council for Adoption, say that they violate the birth mother's privacy and point out that sometimes birth parents don't want to develop relationships with the children they gave up for adoption. The president of the council, which favors mutual consent before any contact between an adopted adult and a birth parent, also says that taking away the confidentiality option removes adoption as a choice for some women who feel they would have to have it.

However, some adopted children argue that they need to know their biological background. "There are so many adoptees who want to know who they are," said Paula Benoit, an adoptee and state senator in Maine who lobbied for an open records law. "Can you imagine being denied your identity?"

So what serves the greater good here: the right to know or the right to privacy?

10:53 AM ET | 11-12-2007 | permalink | comments (16) | e-mail post

How High Are the Levels of Chemicals in Our Bodies?

How's your "body burden"? That's the term being used to describe the levels of sometimes toxic chemicals Americans carry in their bodies.

A new study by a group of nongovernmental organizations measured those levels. The chemicals examined can often be found in personal cosmetics like hand creams, in flame retardants put on furniture or in plastics used in shower curtains, to make water bottles harder or to keep teeth from getting cavities.

Thirty-five people from seven states were tested for the toxins. Sharyle Patton, director of Commonweal's Health and Environment Program, one of the NGOs conducting the study, told Day to Day's Alex Chadwick that the levels found in human bodies were equivalent to levels that have been shown to produce "bodily changes" in animals.

Journalist and author David Ropeik says this study contributes to a growing body of evidence that we all carry chemicals we weren't born with. But he says it's important to remember that when a study comes out — especially one with a small sample — it's just one brick in a wall of evidence, "not the defining answer."

6:38 PM ET | 11- 8-2007 | permalink | comments (11) | e-mail post

Study: Caffeine May Help Treat Alzheimer's

My mother, who is approaching 80, used to drink 15 to 20 cups of coffee a day. I kid you not. Finally, her doctor told her she just had to cut back. And she did ... to about 10 cups a day.

So I think she'll be glad to hear that a study has found that the caffeine equivalent of drinking five cups of coffee a day may help prevent or treat Alzheimer's disease. ScienceDaily reports that separate studies also show that using certain blood pressure drugs or taking fish oil may help as well.

The blood pressure drugs appear to block the formation of the sticky wads of protein called amyloid plaques that build up in brains of Alzheimer's patients. Tests with caffeine and fish oil showed they were effective in reducing the plaques in animals.

Gary Arendash, a researcher at the Byrd Alzheimer's Institute in Tampa, Fla., says giving Alzheimer's mice the human equivalent of five cups of coffee, or 500 milligrams of caffeine, breaks apart the sticky plaque. His institute has begun clinical trials with older people. "Caffeine could be a surprisingly effective treatment against this disease,'' Arendash told Bloomberg. "It's almost too good to be true.''

I used to give my mom a hard time about drinking so much coffee. But maybe it's not so bad.

1:33 PM ET | 11- 8-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

MIT Sues Architect Gehry Over Unusual Building

The Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was designed by Frank Gehry, opened in 2004.

Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

The unique design of the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology certainly catches your attention. Frank Gehry, the architect who designed it, once said it "looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate."

But MIT, apparently, is no longer celebrating. The university is suing Gehry and the construction company that built the $300 million center, which opened in 2004, alleging that design and construction failures "resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs," The New York Times reports.

Gehry, whose firm was paid $15 million for the project, told the Times that issues involved in the lawsuit, which was filed in Boston last week, are "fairly minor. MIT is after our insurance."

Gehry's work has often played a role in debates about form versus function in buildings. For instance, John Silber, former president of Boston University, tells The Boston Globe that Gehry thinks of himself as a sculptor, but that "you don't live in a sculpture."

So should someone who commissions a striking design like this expect to sacrifice some functionality?

5:46 PM ET | 11- 7-2007 | permalink | comments (13) | e-mail post

Media Web Sites Try Selling Words in Stories

Ads seem to be everywhere online: pop-ups, side links, ads that float across your screen, banner ads. Now some online publishers are picking up on yet another idea: selling words in their editorial content and linking them to ads.

It's known as in-text advertising, and it's being used by newspaper sites like AZCentral, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Reno Gazette-Journal and The Indianapolis Star. (For an example, in this AJC story about Georgia football, the words "football" and "sports" have been purchased by a deodorant company. Look for the green text and double underlining.)

Bill Mitchell, editor of Poynter Online, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists and journalism teachers, finds the idea intriguing but sees some problems.

"Reader confusion is a big issue here," he told me. "When you see links in the body of editorial content, you believe that it leads to material that is likely to add to your understanding of the content or enables you to go deeper into the story. You don't think that you're going to an ad."

Continue reading "Media Web Sites Try Selling Words in Stories" »

6:54 PM ET | 11- 6-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Survey: Fears About Getting Older Differ Around Globe

I confess to having a few worries about growing old since passing the big 5-0, especially when the AARP tried to sign me up. But I was intrigued to see that what people fret about when it comes to aging differs from country to country, according to an international survey.

The survey, conducted by GfK Roper Consulting, a global market-research firm, found that Germans worry most about losing their memories or mental sharpness, The Boston Globe reports. The Dutch worry about gaining weight, while Brazilians fear losing their sex drive and their teeth. Thais are concerned about their eyesight. And Egyptians don't seem to worry about aging much at all.

(My wife, an expert on the Middle East, offered an interesting take on Egyptians' attitudes toward growing old. The trade-off for aging is supposed to be that you become a respected elder in your community, right? Well, that's the case in much of Egyptian society, she says, but perhaps not as true in the West, where so much value is placed on youth.)

And Americans ... well, we worry about a few things: loss of energy, trouble caring for ourselves, memory loss and weight gain.

I fall into the weight-gain concerns camp. Anyone else willing to 'fess up to what worries them about growing old?

1:50 PM ET | 11- 6-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

A Bicycle Built for ... Millions

People rent bicycles in Paris during a transportation strike last month.

Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images

It's apparently an idea that's pedaling its way around the globe. A growing number of cities worldwide are starting self-service bike rental operations, many modeled after a system in Paris.

Der Spiegel reports that once people sign up for the Paris service, they can take as many trips as they like. Basic fees run from $1.45 a day to $42 for a year. People can use bikes from any one of the 750 stations in the city (that number is expected to double to more than 1,400 this year) and return it to any station. The first half-hour is free, but after that, the additional fees climb sharply.

JCDecaux, the French advertising firm that came up with the Paris model, offers cities the ability to pay for the service straight-up or work out a deal that gives the company the rights to sell advertising space on the city's billboards. The cities showing interest in the Paris model include Sydney, Moscow, London and even Chicago.

But would it work in the United States' car-dominated culture? If a similar rental system existed in your city, would you bike rather than hail a cab?

11:17 AM ET | 11- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

Super Mouse Can Run For Almost Six Hours

Look, there on the treadmill, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... super mouse!

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University say they have bred a new kind of "mighty mouse." Officially known as PEPCK-Cmus mice, they can run for three miles and for up to six hours before they tire. They also live up to a year longer, eat 60 percent more -- and don't gain any weight -- are very aggressive and are sexually active far longer than regular mice in a control group.

If you want to see just how amazing these creatures are, check out this video of the mice running.

I talked with Prof. Richard Hanson at Case Western, who was the senior author of the article on the mice that appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He told me the discovery was total "serendipity." The original research aimed to look at an enzyme involved in the production of glucose, or sugar, as a source of energy in the liver and kidneys. Dr. Hanson said the researchers "over expressed" (or really souped up) the role of the enzyme phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase - or PEPCK-C for short - in muscle tissue to see what would happen to the muscle.

The result was the super mice.

As for the future of the research, Dr. Hanson told me he doesn't see the research being used as a performance-enhancer for humans. 'It's unethical and inappropriate," he said.

Instead, he sees the discovery of the mice's new abilities heading in three directions: 1) looking at the possible link between exercise and cancer, building on previous studies showing exercise may reduce cancer; 2) looking at the role of calorie-reduction because "it may not be the calories you eat as (much as) what you do with them"; 3) looking at the possible link between the muscles and the brain.

'It's unexpected and interesting," he told me.

4:27 PM ET | 11- 2-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Is It OK for the Government to Withhold Data?

After a year of refusing, NASA said this week that it will reveal the results of an aviation survey that found near collisions, runway interference and other safety problems happen far more frequently than previously believed. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin apologized to members of Congress for saying earlier that the agency had held back the survey data because it would upset travelers and hurt airline profits.

Griffin, however, called into question his own agency's research, saying that NASA doesn't consider the survey's methodology or data to have been sufficiently verified. But a non-NASA expert who worked on the study disagreed with Griffin.

If Griffin had legitimate concerns about the data, was it OK to withhold it? Or is it not a government agency's place to hold back information that would be of interest to many Americans?

9:38 AM ET | 11- 2-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

I Ain't 'Fraid of No Ghost

My grandparents' house in Windsor, Nova Scotia, had a reputation for being haunted. An old man dressed in mid-19th century clothing would suddenly appear in a hallway or in a room, and then when you looked again, he was gone. We eventually found out that the original owner hung himself in the attic after his wife ran off, adding to the mystique.

Belief in ghosts is fairly common in the United States. A poll released last week showed that one in three people believe in ghosts, and 23 percent say they've actually seen or felt the presence of one. But Sharon Begley, science writer for Newsweek, writes that seeing those ghostly images might have something to do with the way the brain tends to fill in the blanks when it gets only partial information and to see patterns in random data. So if wind whipping through a house sounds like a voice, and if we believe in the supernatural, it becomes a voice.

So have you ever seen a ghost? Or do you think it's just your brain getting tricked when you hear things that go bump in the night?

10:57 AM ET | 10-31-2007 | permalink | comments (15) | e-mail post

Furniture Store's Customers Win Along with Red Sox

It seemed crazy. Jordan's Furniture, based just outside Boston, started a promotion earlier this year that promised customers who bought certain items during a month-long period that they would basically get them for free if the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.

Customers took Jordan's up on the offer, placing nearly 30,000 orders. And then, when the Sox beat the Colorado Rockies on Sunday, they hit the jackpot. They are all getting their money back. I've seen estimates that it will cost Jordan's more than $15 million.

But it's not quite as nuts as it might appear: Jordan's took out an insurance policy.

These kinds of promotions are getting more popular each year, says Tiffani Stovall, marketing manager for Odds On Promotions of Reno, Nev. The company underwrites insurance policies like the one Jordan's took out.

Stores use this kind of "conditional rebate" promotion to draw in more shoppers. Many are tied to a sporting event — like, if your team hits a grand slam in the seventh inning, all tires are free — but they don't have be. Stovall's company once insured a promotion that offered rebates if it snowed on Christmas Day.

However, Stovall says few are as big as Jordan's Red Sox giveaway. Odds On Promotions didn't insure that one, but it is handling a similar contest for Shavarsh Jewelers, a Boston-area store that will rebate purchases if the New England Patriots are undefeated this season. The jewelry store is insured for a much smaller amount.

And the rebate ointment is not without its flies for customers. The New Hampshire Union Leader reports that Jordan's will send the "winners" a Form 1099 and notify the IRS because federal law requires taxpayers to report prize income of more than $600.

6:20 PM ET | 10-29-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Standard Time Switch Caught in Time Warp

iStockphoto

I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever get this time-change thing down.

When I went to pick my wife up at the airport on Sunday, it took me a second to figure out why the pay-and-go parking machine wouldn't let me pay and leave. I had spent almost an hour in the lot, but the machine was telling me that I was trying to leave 10 minutes earlier than I had actually arrived — it had changed back to standard time a week early. (So I ended up leaving without paying.)

The time warp was a result of an energy bill Congress passed in 2005 that moved daylight-saving time three weeks earlier in the spring and a week later in the fall, starting this year. Instead of falling on this past Sunday, the switch will be next Sunday.

Now, Congress built in a two-year waiting period to give people ample opportunity to make changes to computer software, clocks, etc. But that didn't stop problems from cropping up last spring.

David Prerau, who literally wrote the book on seasonal time changes, Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time, told me he expected that. "It's human nature. Look at Y2K. People had 10 years to make that change and still many waited until the last second," he said.

But he figured people would remember to make the change for the fall at the same time. Turns out that not everybody was so forward-thinking.

The Baltimore Sun reports that parking meters in the city fell back an hour, meaning some people got tickets. The New York Daily News notes that many BlackBerry phones, laptop computers and other gadgets switched back as well.

So did you lose an hour? Or like me, end up saving a few bucks because the time worked in your favor?

1:06 PM ET | 10-29-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Weighing the Chances of the Sanctions Against Iran

The White House announced tough new sanctions against key elements of the Iranian regime on Thursday, but what are the chances they'll actually work?

To find out, one thing you can look for is a "black knight" lurking in the background, says Daniel Drezner, associate professor of international politics at Tufts University. He tells me that a "black knight" is a country that provides the sanctioned regime with the very things the sanctioner just tried to take away.

Considering the rhetoric coming from Moscow these days, Russia might fit that description for Iran. China might try on a knight's helmet as well.

Other things to look for that can help predict sanctions' success? Drezner, who wrote The Sanctions Paradox: Economic Statecraft and International Relations, says there's also the expectation of future conflict. If the sanctioned country believes that bowing to the sanctions won't rule out clashes in the future, then the penalties are ineffective. The leaders just shrug and say, "What's the difference?"

And, as Drezner says, Iran is expecting a lot of future conflict with the United States.

Another factor to consider comes from NPR's global finance guru, Adam Davidson. Adam tells me that most economists believe that the more totalitarian the regime, the less likely financial sanctions are to work. And the more entrepreneurial the country, the more effective sanctions can be. (So they didn't work very well against Saddam Hussein, who controlled the Iraqi economy, but they did have an effect in South Africa, where there was a strong independent business class.)

Iran? Well, it does have a small business class, but most of the key sections of the economy are controlled by the regime and its agents, like the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force. What's likely to happen, Adam says, is that the entrepreneurs will get squeezed, while those targeted by the sanctions will increase their share of a shrinking pie.

12:02 PM ET | 10-26-2007 | permalink | comments (13) | e-mail post

Twins, Separated as Babies, Become Sisters Again

The story of Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, identical twins who were put up for adoption and separated as babies, seems like something from a movie.

While I listened to the twins talk about their lives today on Talk of the Nation, I found it hard not to feel angry that their separation was part of (as host Neal Conan put it) an "ethically dubious" 1960s psychological study investigating the effects of nature versus nurture.

But it's amazing that they were able to find each other. After their adoption, the sisters lived separate lives. Then, more than 30 years later, Elyse decided to find out what she could about her birth mother from the adoption agency and discovered she had a twin. The rest of the sisters' story is chronicled in their new book, Identical Strangers.

All Things Considered reports that the sisters are trying to find out more about the "one-of-a-kind experiment" that resulted in their separation. The sisters hope that the documents that detail the research, which are locked up for several more decades, will be released early to the twins who were its subjects.

6:03 PM ET | 10-25-2007 | permalink | comments (10) | e-mail post

California Fires: What Would You Take with You?

What really hits you about the California fires is the randomness. The images of neighborhoods where some homes have been destroyed, while the neighboring houses still stand.

I kept wondering if there was some way to take action against this randomness. After all, California has been hit by big wildfires before. Much of the same area was burned just four years ago. Haven't we learned something that would help homeowners protect their property from the blaze?

Unfortunately, not really. Scott Horsley, who has done an admirable job reporting on the fires for NPR, tells me that there isn't much that can be done. Scott wrote in an e-mail that fire officials encourage homeowners to maintain "defensible space" around their homes — that is, no dry brush up against the house — but he spoke to one man who followed all the rules and still lost his home. And in a neighborhood Scott visited Wednesday, brush wasn't so much the problem as embers that blew from burning houses onto others.

So, if there's no way to really protect your house from destruction, it comes down to choosing what to save when the evacuation order comes. I was struck by the comment of one man, whose house was lost while his Porsche was saved, who said he would rather the firefighters had rescued his daughter's stuffed animals.

How about you? Assuming that people (and pets) were safe, what things would you choose to take with you — understanding that you might lose everything else to the fire?

12:19 PM ET | 10-25-2007 | permalink | comments (26) | e-mail post

Nightmare on Your Street

Under the covers may actually be the scariest place of all.

Paul Hebditch/iStockphoto

Did you know that most of your dreams are not sweet — but bad? Really. Studies have found that about three-quarters of the emotions described in dreams are negative. But it also turns out that all those bad dreams could be pretty useful.

The New York Times reports that sleep scientists say dreaming may serve an evolutionarily adaptive purpose. (I can only imagine the kind of dreams our distant ancestors had — getting eaten by a saber-toothed cat?) Two scientists have proposed that when you dream you are cleansing and then trashing scary memories to clear space in your brain for any new threats that are coming down the road.

But just don't wake up — that's when those bad dreams become nightmares, and the only purpose they seem to serve is to scare the blazes out of you.

6:36 PM ET | 10-24-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Broccoli Extract May Help Repair Sun Damage to Skin

Sondra Paulson/iStockphoto

In the future, if you get a sunburn, you might be reaching right past the aloe vera gel and rubbing on some broccoli.

That's right. Scientists say early test results show that chemicals in broccoli extracts may significantly reduce the redness and inflammation caused by lingering too long in the sun. Reducing that damage could in turn decrease the risk of skin cancer. But, as usual, more tests are necessary.

I like broccoli, so the idea of rubbing it on my skin is not all that gross. I guess. But my kids don't seem to like it. My oldest daughter made a face when I told her about it. My 11-year-old son wrinkled his brow and said, "Is this just some weird way to get us to eat more vegetables?"

5:35 PM ET | 10-23-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post

Officials Expect Significant Damage from Wildfires

Flames engulf a house during a massive brush fire today in Poway, Calif.

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

The San Diego-area fires of 2003 were bad. But the fires of 2007 might be worse.

Dozens of buildings have been burned and at least one person has been killed in the wildfires in Southern California. But The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the worst may be yet to come — the damage could hit record totals in the next 48 hours. "This fire will probably be the worst this county has ever seen — worse than the Cedar [2003] fire," Sheriff Bill Kolender said.

Earlier today there were still seven fires burning in San Diego County. Four had been put out overnight. CNN reports that more than 250,000 people in the county have been evacuated so far.

If you want more information about the fires:
-A Google map shows the locations of the fires, along with updates on road closings and evacuation centers in the area.
-The Union Tribune has a breaking news blog and a map.
-The Firefighter Blog offers video and webcam views of the blaze.
-Flickr has a series of photos taken by people in the San Diego area.

4:51 PM ET | 10-22-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

'Hannah Montana' Takes America by Storm

Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus performs during the Disney Channel Games 2007 Concert in April in Kissimmee, Fla.

Gerardo Mora/Getty Images

Hannah Montana lives in my house.

OK, she doesn't really. But her records do. And her posters. And her magazine covers. And while I don't let my children watch much TV, she always seems to be on whenever they've earned the right to watch the tube. I swear there are a couple of episodes of the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana that I've seen a dozen times. My daughters can recite the dialogue by heart.

Blake Farmer reported on Morning Edition today from Nashville about the Hannah Montana phenomenon, which is also the Miley Cyrus phenomenon. Cyrus plays the title character on Hannah Montana, alongside her co-star dad, former country sensation Billy Ray Cyrus. For the next few months, Miley is taking her musical act on the road, and she has sold out shows across America.

One marketing consultant Blake interviewed says the demand for Cyrus tickets shows the power that tweens have over what their parents buy. But what is it about Hannah Montana that has all those 8-to-12-year-olds clamoring for tickets that are selling for hundreds of dollars?

On the show, Cyrus' character lives a dual life. By day, she's a regular middle schooler, constantly bullied and humiliated by the cool girls. But at night, she puts on a wig and becomes Hannah Montana, super pop star. It's that fantasy that I think my girls love: living a regular life and hanging out with friends and family, yet secretly being way cooler than the cool kids. And as someone said to me, the idea that people who are mean to you can't see who you really are (but would like you if they did) is pretty appealing.

4:20 PM ET | 10-18-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Study: British Pulling Their Own Teeth

OK, there are lots of jokes about the allegedly sorry condition of British teeth. But this is weird.

A new report from Britain's Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health finds that 6 percent of those surveyed had treated themselves, including pulling out their own teeth or using superglue to put crowns back on. (Not just a stiff upper lip there.)

The self-treatment is being attributed to the declining number of dentists covered by Britain's state-financed medical system.

The Independent reports that "one person questioned in Lancashire spoke of carrying out 14 separate extractions with pliers."

5:18 PM ET | 10-15-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Will Cell Phones Replace Boarding Passes?

For several years now, air travelers have been able to skip paper tickets and use an "e-ticket," which allows them to get boarding passes printed right at the airport.

But what if you could skip this step? Just go straight to security and head to your plane? It could happen sooner than you think. On Thursday, the International Air Transport Association announced plans for travelers to check in using their cell phones or other mobile devices.

Mobile phone check-in enables airlines to send 2D bar codes directly to a passenger's mobile phone, personal digital assistant or smart phone. Passengers simply register their mobile number with their airline at the time of booking to receive a text message with a 2D bar code, or instructions to download it. The bar code becomes the passenger's boarding pass and it is read directly from the screen of the mobile device, eliminating paper completely from the check-in process.

The industry wants to have this in place by 2010 and hopes to save $500 million annually.

Marketplace's Jill Barshay reported on Day to Day that this system is already in place in Japan, and Air Canada has just started to use it. But the Transportation Security Administration will have to approve it in the United States. Continental Airlines has just begun trials with TSA to see how it works.

The airline industry says it will try to give back some of the potential savings to customers, but Barshay says "seeing is believing" on that statement.

That's all for this week. If you see anything interesting over the weekend, drop us a line at newsblog@npr.org.

4:39 PM ET | 10-12-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Former Vice President Al Gore attends a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer on Thursday in San Francisco.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It seems the rumor mill was right on the money. The Nobel Committee today named former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The committee said Gore was "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted." The judges cited his "political activity, lectures, films and books."

The Nobel Committee also explained why it was awarding a Peace Prize for environmental work:

Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.

Gore said he was "deeply honored" to win the award. A spokeswoman for the U.N. panel said members were surprised. "We would have been happy even if he had received it alone because it is a recognition of the importance of this issue," spokeswoman Carola Traverso Saibante said.

However, NPR's senior Washington editor Ron Elving said on Morning Edition that he doesn't think this means Gore will run for president — at least not this time around.

9:25 AM ET | 10-12-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Progressives, Evangelicals Launch Plan to Cooperate

At first glance, they seem unlikely bedfellows. But a group of progressives and evangelicals say they want to work together to find common ground on divisive issues like gay rights, abortion and religion's role in public life.

Members of both groups gathered Wednesday to announce a new working paper released by the left-leaning think tank Third Way that they hope will start to bridge their differences. The paper, entitled Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values Between Progressives and Evangelicals, states that one-fifth of evangelicals can be described as progressive, a third as moderate and half as social conservatives.

The Christian Post reports that Robert P. Jones, an author of the paper and a religion scholar, said this means half of the evangelicals in the United States may be more open to progressive ideas than many had imagined.

However, a leader of the National Right to Life Committee has dismissed the new initiative, calling the Third Way approach "a political ploy to silence the debate."

3:01 PM ET | 10-11-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Fans Take Up Radiohead on Pay-What-You-Like Offer

I'm just going to write it. Radiohead's decision to let fans pay what they want for its newest album, In Rainbows, is just sheer bloody genius.

On Morning Edition, Jacob Ganz talked about sitting by his computer at 3:30 this morning, waiting for the e-mail with the activation code that would enable him to download the album from the band's Web site. The Daily Telegraph reports predictions that too many people would request the album at the same time and crash the system seemed unfounded as "tens of thousands of fans" downloaded it.

While it's impossible to tell what people are paying for their online copies, Billboard reports that "unofficial sources suggest" most customers are paying around $10.17. If that's true, it could make the album a financial as well as a musical success. (Billboard says musically, the album "represents solid progression, rather than radical departure, from previous Radiohead albums.")

The genius of the Radiohead move is letting fans choose what the album is worth rather than giving it away for free (giving it the tinge of being worth less than something paid for). That plays to the core strength of the Internet — choice. You can pay based on the change in your pocket or you can give them a hundred bucks. It's up to you.

Now that the Radiohead experiment appears successful, no doubt other bands will try it. But Jacob told me it probably will only work for some bands, ones with a strong online following in particular. It will likely kill others, he believes, who will find out that there aren't as many people willing to buy as they thought. Jacob adds that it's going to make life even more difficult for music companies, who are already struggling to deal with how the Internet has changed their business.

4:19 PM ET | 10-10-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Greenpeace: Budweiser Uses Genetically Modified Rice

I'm a big beer guy, so I was interested to read in The Boston Globe that Greenpeace, the environmental group, has accused Anheuser-Busch of using genetically modified rice in its Budweiser beer. (The company brews its beer with rice to give it a "crisp" taste.)

According to an analysis released Monday by Greenpeace, "three of four samples of unprocessed rice from the beer maker's mill in Arkansas showed the presence of the strain, Bayer LL601." In a statement, Doug Muhleman, Anheuser-Busch's vice president of brewing, said the U.S.-grown rice "'may have micro levels' of a genetically engineered protein called Liberty Link, but added that the protein is 'substantially removed or destroyed' during the brewing of beer sold domestically."

Muhleman said the "false and defamatory" statements were made by Greenpeace in retaliation for the company's refusal to side with it in a boycott against U.S. farmers who grow genetically modified crops. But Greenpeace said Americans have a right to know if this type of rice is used in Budweiser's beer. The organization even made a YouTube video called "Wassup With Your Beer?"

But Jason Alstrom of BeerAdvocate.com told the Globe in an e-mail, "As for your typical Bud drinker, I doubt they would care or even know what g-e food actually is."

4:59 PM ET | 10- 9-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Computerized Pillow Aimed at Stopping Snoring

Spouses and significant others of snorers everywhere, rejoice! (Maybe.)

Daryoush Bazargani, a computer science professor in Germany, has invented a computerized inflatable pillow as a way to stop snoring.

"The pillow is attached to a computer, which is the size of a book, rests on a bedside table, and [analyzes] snoring noises," Bazargani told Reuters. "The computer then reduces or enlarges air compartments within the pillow to facilitate nasal airflow to minimize snoring as the user shifts during sleep," he said.

The American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery says "forty-five percent of normal adults snore at least occasionally, and 25 percent are habitual snorers. Problem snoring is more frequent in males and overweight persons, and it usually grows worse with age." So, if this works, it could be a big moneymaker for Bazargani.

Hmm. I could mention this to my wife, but she insists she never snores, and I'm not one to contradict her, despite the evidence. I'm sure she would just say that I need it. But I never snore. Nope, never.

Enjoy the long weekend. We'll be back on Tuesday. If you see anything interesting, let us know at newsblog@npr.org.

4:58 PM ET | 10- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Some Experts Say Gore Likely to Win Peace Prize

Al Gore ... former senator and vice president, presidential nominee, best-selling author, Academy Award winner ... Nobel Peace Prize winner?

That's the speculation out of Norway, Reuters reports. Gore and other climate campaigners lead experts' choices for the award that will be announced Oct. 12. Two Norwegian parliamentarians nominated Gore and Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who has helped show how global warming affects Arctic peoples, to share the prize. "I think they are likely winners this year," said Stein Toennesson, director of Oslo's International Peace Research Institute and a long-time Nobel Peace Prize watcher.

Toennesson says the committee also could choose to award the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If the award is given for climate work, it will "accentuate a shift to reward work outside traditional peacekeeping and reinforce the link between peace and the environment," Reuters writes.

But David Kuo at Beliefnet says he doesn't get it.

I'm sorry, I don't see it. I'm very, very pro-environment. I believe we are to be careful stewards of God's creation. I still don't see Al Gore on the list of potential nominees for the Peace Prize let alone being its recipient. What has he done? He made a very good documentary. He is clearly committed to fighting for the Earth. But world peace? I'm sorry, I'm not there.

Others with a chance include former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari for decades of peace mediation work; dissident Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Do for his pro-democracy efforts; Russian human rights lawyer Lida Yusupova, who has fought for victims of war in Chechnya; and Rebiya Kadeer, an advocate for China's Uighur minority.

3:56 PM ET | 10- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Something Fishy About Mothers and Fish Story

Health editor Joe Neel sent me this note about a story the science desk has been looking into today:

When they picked up The Washington Post this morning, NPR's science editors wondered if there might be something fishy going on in a front-page story about how much fish pregnant women and new mothers should eat. As NPR reported last summer, the Institute of Medicine recommends that these women eat no more than 12 ounces of fish and seafood per week. That's because of concerns about mercury contamination of fish and the effects it can have on fetal and infant brain development.

But the Post was reporting about a new recommendation telling pregnant women and new mothers to eat at least 12 ounces a week. The advice came from a nonprofit group calling itself Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies. It's been around since 1981, according to its Web site, and as of this morning, it listed 150 rather august members, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the March of Dimes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, some big drug companies and a few community groups, among others. So you'd tend to trust them...

But something wasn't right. We get to look at scientific studies early here, before they are released to the public — and there wasn't anything new about fish safety that we were aware of. So the editors assigned NPR's consumer health reporter Allison Aubrey to find out what was going on.

And as it would happen, as she cast about, Aubrey started netting some big ones.

Continue reading "Something Fishy About Mothers and Fish Story" »

6:12 PM ET | 10- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (22) | e-mail post

It Ain't Cheap to Outfit a Soldier

Modern soldiers, with their night-vision goggles and high-tech vests, are starting to look more and more like they might have dropped out of a popular video game. But it's a pretty expensive one:

It now costs 100 times more to outfit a soldier than it did during World War II. Back then, it cost $170, even adjusted for inflation. These days, The Associated Press reports, it costs $17,000 and could reach $28,000 or even $60,000 by 2015.

In the 1940s, a GI went to war with little more than a uniform, weapon, helmet, bedroll and canteen. He carried some 35 pounds of gear that cost $170 in 2006 inflation-adjusted dollars, according to Army figures. That rose to about $1,100 by the 1970s as the military added a flak vest, new weapons and other equipment during the Vietnam War.

Today, troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are outfitted with advanced armor and other protection, including high-tech vests, anti-ballistic eyewear, earplugs and fire-retardant gloves. Night-vision eyewear, thermal weapons sights and other gear makes them more deadly to the adversary.

These days, soldiers are responsible for more than 80 items, weighing a total of 75 pounds. And in the future, their gear could include "a weapon that can shoot around corners so soldiers don't have to expose themselves to their enemy and a helmet-mounted 1.5-inch computer screen showing maps of the battlefield."

All this new technology stands to increase the pressure on the military to retain well-trained personnel because of the cost to train and equip new ones.

4:24 PM ET | 10- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

ABC Takes Bold Step into Brave New Digital World

ABC News is taking a bold step into a new kind of reporting. The trend has been for TV news operations to cut back foreign bureaus, relying on freelancers and others to provide coverage from overseas. But technology has changed the game.

On Wednesday, ABC announced it was creating seven one-person foreign bureaus. It's the largest expansion of ABC News' international reporting in two decades. The Hollywood Reporter says these mini-bureaus, "staffed by a reporter-producer with the latest in hand-held digital technology, cost a fraction of what it takes to run a full-time bureau." They will be opened in Seoul; Rio de Janeiro; Dubai; New Delhi and Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Nairobi, Kenya.

The reporters will file for both TV and ABCNews.com.

While smaller media operations have been using technology to get by with fewer people for years, ABC is the first big one to try it on a broad scale. The chief of the network's London bureau says it's possible because of the explosion in technology that's affordable and hand-held.

The cheaper setup (the seven mini-bureaus will cost as much as the old fully staffed Paris bureau did) also allows ABC to report from places where it couldn't afford to otherwise.

However, handling reporting, recording and producing is a lot to put on one person's shoulders. Can one reporter turn in stories of the same quality as the ones put together by an entire bureau? As a viewer, do you think this a good move by ABC?

11:41 AM ET | 10- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Airlines Still Running Late ... But Planes Crashing Less

Got a flight tonight? Be prepared to wait. The latest government data shows that the airlines' dismal performance has continued, with nearly 30 percent of flights in August delayed. The news comes less than a week after President Bush said he would help fix the problem. As The Associated Press reports:

The nation's 20 largest carriers reported an on-time arrival rate of 71.7 percent in August, down from 75.8 percent a year ago, the Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics said Wednesday. The on-time rate was 69.8 percent in July and 68.1 percent in June.

Through August, more than 25 percent of flights have arrived late — the industry's worst on-time performance since comparable data began being collected in 1995.

And people are mad as hell about it. The number of complaints almost doubled to 1,634 in August compared with 864 in the same month last year.

But here's the silver lining in air travel: Since 1997, The New York Times reports, the domestic rate of fatal plane crashes has dropped 65 percent. That means about one fatal accident in about 4.5 million departures, down from one in nearly 2 million 10 years ago. (The government's stated goal for the airlines back in 1997 was to cut the rate by 80 percent.)

Do you think the government's influence can spur a similar cut in delays?

4:06 PM ET | 10- 3-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Antibiotic May Enlarge Window for Stroke Treatment

Both my grandfather and my father had strokes in the last years of their lives, so I've seen up close how debilitating they can be. Now, new research from Israel indicates that an antibiotic may help decrease the damage.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Israeli researchers have found that "administering the antibiotic minocycline within 24 hours after a stroke significantly reduces brain damage and physical impairment." Minocycline is widely used to combat acne.

Clot-dissolving drugs currently used to treat strokes must be administered within the first three hours to help reduce the effects, and many patients just don't get them in time. If the Israeli team's research can be reproduced, it would greatly enlarge the "golden window" during which strokes can be treated.

The findings have nothing to do with infections, even though the drug is an antibiotic. Rather, the drug's anti-inflammatory properties may block damage to neurons from toxins released when other brain cells die, said Dr. Raymond A. Swanson of UC San Francisco.

The study is in the latest issue of Neurology.

1:54 PM ET | 10- 2-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

'Bryant Park Project' Launches

NPR launched its newest show, The Bryant Park Project, today. The show is a departure for NPR, aimed at a younger audience that might consider other programming a little too "old fogy" at times.

I called Luke Burbank, one of the hosts, to see how the launch went. "It went well, all things considered," he reported. (I'm pretty sure that pun was intended.) Luke said at the end he was ready to do another hour — always a good sign. He described it as a little bit scary, a little bit fun.

If you want to learn more about the genesis and direction of The Bryant Park Project, you can read The New York Times' write-up from the weekend. You can also check out the show's blog, which features videos and other content created while the show was getting off the ground.

(If the show isn't airing in your neck of the woods, you can listen online or download the show as a podcast.)

6:24 PM ET | 10- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

Sputnik Launched Space Age 50 Years Ago

Sputnik I is displayed on a stand shortly before its launch on Oct. 4, 1957.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Last week, my 10-year-old daughter pointed out a large, round ball with spikes hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. I looked up and immediately recognized the unusually shaped object as a model of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite.

It was 50 years ago this week that Sputnik's distinctive beeping noise was first heard as it circled the Earth. I was only a year old, so I had no idea of the impact that odd ball with spikes had on America. As The Wall Street Journal writes today, it was "the loudest alarm clock since Pearl Harbor. For the first time since World War II another nation had beaten the United States to a major scientific achievement."

NPR's Daniel Schorr was in Moscow reporting for CBS when the Soviets launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957. While the Soviets said Sputnik was purely scientific, it still sparked plenty of fear among Americans. Schorr also remembers that many average Russians talked with pride about their government, which was rare in those days.

Larry Abramson reported on All Things Considered on Sunday that Sputnik sparked a "much-needed revolution in scientific education in the U.S." It energized the whole country and the new focus on science made it "sexy."

NPR will continue looking at Sputnik's legacy throughout the week.

3:59 PM ET | 10- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day

A few months back, someone proposed designating Dec. 8 as "Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day." And it's gaining steam online. The rules are simple: You can be from a utopian future or a dystopian one, or, "for beginners," the past.

Here's my favorite, the dystopian, from the proposal:

- If you go [for] the "prisoner who's escaped the future" try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you've never seen it before.

- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"

People from places as far afield as Florida, Holland, Australia, Canada, Belgium and California have already signed up. There's a Facebook event with more than 2,000 confirmed guests. There are pages and pages of ideas and costume proposals.

One of my faves:

One of the ones I've done in real life was to get my friend to shave his head, draw a bar code on the back of his neck, stagger up to people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS" then run off. Then a second person walks up to that same person later with a photo and says "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN"? It helps if you have a little eyepiece or small piece of obtuse technology on you.

Now, I have no idea if anyone will actually pull this off, but the enthusiasm seems to be running high, with blogs and sites talking about it. It's similar, perhaps, to the zombie day in San Francisco earlier this year. Or the incredibly insane anime dance number done in Tokyo, where a bunch of people met up online and decided to do the dance in the street, until the cops came. Kind of like a flash mob, like the 4,000 people who showed up during rush hour at London's Victoria station and danced. For two hours.

Of course, these kinds of things can be used in ways besides just odd public art pieces: protests, marketing, whatever. It might be the next step in linking virtual and "meat" space. And it's not moderated or organized by anyone really; it just comes from an idea that people build on. Open-source action.

- JJ Sutherland

2:20 PM ET | 09-28-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Study Finds Men Are Happier Than Women

This report caught me completely by surprise because I thought the results would be reversed. A new study by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that men are happier than women. It's a major change from surveys 30 years ago.

And the main reason? While women do have more opportunities, the study found they are also being asked to handle many responsibilities, like a job and the housework. The guys? It seems they just get to "play a lot more than women do," as one of the survey subjects put it. (Which is shorthand for they're not doing housework.)

[Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the Wharton School] said that choosing between work and family is a major source of stress. "If you are at work, you feel torn you should be home," she said. "And if you are home you feel you should be at work. And if you cut back your hours as a stay at home mom, you feel you are a failure as a career woman."

But one big difference between today and past decades is that women do not intend to suffer in silence. "Perhaps one of the achievements of the women's movement is they feel more honest, and capable of being honest about their lack of happiness," Stevenson said.

5:07 PM ET | 09-27-2007 | permalink | comments (26) | e-mail post

DEA Busts Steroid Rings with Links to China

One sports columnist is calling it "Armageddon for athletes."

The International Herald Tribune reports that federal officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration have made 124 arrests and seized millions of dollars' worth of illegal drugs as part of a bust that exposed "a sprawling underground distribution network for steroids, human growth hormone and other illicit bodybuilding drugs supplied by 37 companies in China." The DEA revealed the scope of the 18-month operation Monday, which also included raids and arrests in Mexico, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Thailand.

The authorities seized $6.5 million cash, 25 vehicles, 3 boats, 27 pill presses and 71 weapons while executing 143 search warrants at 56 makeshift steroid labs and other locations, the drug enforcement agency said.

The DEA estimates that 99 percent of the steroids were made with materials imported from China. A spokesman said if the agency comes across the names of athletes who received the illegal drugs during their investigation, they will leave it up to the Justice Department to decide if the players' leagues should be notified.

The Washington Post reports that the arrests "could have unusual and unnerving repercussions for the clientele of the labs" because the DEA is creating a database of people who received the drugs.

3:53 PM ET | 09-25-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

It's Global Warming Week in America

If you're interested in global warming, this is the week to pay attention to the news.

Starting with a meeting today at the United Nations in New York, there will be a series of gatherings designed to confront the problems created by global warming — like the news that the Arctic polar ice cap retreated farther this summer than apparently any other time in more than a hundred years — and find political solutions. Today's gathering, designed to coincide with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, will include representatives of more than 150 countries.

On Wednesday, the Clinton Global Initiative will bring together business and international political leaders for three days to discuss "grass-roots" solutions to global warming. Then on Thursday, President Bush will host the leaders of the world's top carbon-emitting countries, including India and China. (Some critics have charged that Bush is trying to upstage the U.N. meeting, but his supporters deny it.)

All these meetings come just a few days after 200 governments agreed at a U.N. conference in Montreal to speed up a treaty to phase out hydrochlorofluorocarbons, chemicals that harm the ozone layer.

12:12 PM ET | 09-24-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Ahmadinejad Comes to the Big Apple

This may be the most-watched visit to New York since, well, King Kong.

Controversial Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will drop by Columbia University today to address students and bring "alternative views" to a U.S. audience. It's my guess that his reception will be somewhat similar to a heckling Red Sox fan who shows up at Yankee Stadium. Then again, he probably won't get beaten up ... physically.

Police rejected Ahmadinejad's request to visit the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In an interview on CBS' 60 Minutes Sunday night, Ahmadinejad said he wanted to visit to honor the victims of the attacks. Sort of.

"Usually, you go to these sites to pay your respects," Ahmadinejad said. "And also to perhaps air your views about the root causes of such incidents."

Ah, I'm not sure I've heard that one before. (And reading the transcript of the interview shows the Iranian leader is pretty dogged when it comes to spin, noting that "70, 80 percent of the American people are against their troops, their sons and daughters being in Iraq and war.")

Speaking of Iraq, The Associated Press reports that tensions between Iran and the U.S. continue to grow, most recently over the U.S. arrest of an Iranian official there, with the Iraqi government seeming to lean toward Iran.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the arrest, saying the official had been invited to Iraq. U.S. forces say he is a member of the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which is accused of smuggling weapons into Iraq.

"The government of Iraq is an elected one and sovereign. When it gives a visa, it is responsible for the visa," al-Maliki told AP. "We consider the arrest ... of this individual who holds an Iraqi visa and a (valid) passport to be unacceptable."

9:46 AM ET | 09-24-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Study Shows Quitters Are Winners

Winners never quit and quitters never win. Unless you count being healthier and happier. Seriously.

Two Canadian psychologists, Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia and Carsten Wrosch of Concordia University in Montreal, wondered about the link between tenacity and health. So they developed a way to distinguish between "people who are relentless by nature and those who are much more accepting of life's curveballs." Or Bulldogs and Quitters.

For a study published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, the two men followed a group of teenagers for a year. Their results indicate that people who know their own limits are healthier in almost every measure than people who won't give up.

As Wray Herbert writes at Newsweek, "knowing when to throw in the towel is only half the story."

The psychologists also sorted both the Bulldogs and the Quitters by their willingness to re-engage and set new goals after they gave up on something important. While they did not find a direct link between re-engagement and physical health, they did find that people who readily jumped back into life had a greater sense of purpose and mastery and were less likely to ruminate about the past. Setting new goals appears to buffer the emotional consequences of failure, especially for those, like the Bulldogs, who have the hardest time admitting defeat.

Or, quoting Herbert quoting W.C. Fields, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."

That's all for this week. If you see anything interesting, e-mail us at newsblog@npr.org.

6:05 PM ET | 09-21-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

'TimesSelect' Goes the Way of the Dinosaurs

At midnight, the content of TimesSelect, The New York Times' fee-based section that includes its top columnists and its archives, will be accessible free of charge. (Well, at least most of it. You'll still have to pay for archived stories from 1923-86.)

In a statement on the Times' Web site today, Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager, acknowledged that the times (and the Times) have changed.

Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion — as well as share it, link to it and comment on it.

Marketplace reports that the change comes because of pressure to "increase revenue from advertising." The first sponsor for the now-free TimesSelect content will be American Express.

One person who I'm betting will be happy about the development is award-winning Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He had been critical of the move because he felt it would cut him off from members of his global audience who couldn't afford to pay. Now they can read him all they want, all the time.

11:56 AM ET | 09-18-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Car Companies Lose Big in Little State

A federal judge's decision in Vermont on Wednesday means it's OK for the state to use the same emissions standards for vehicles that California created recently. The California rules would require car makers to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 30 percent by 2016.

One of the most interesting things about the decision is that Judge William Sessions didn't buy a single argument put forward by the car makers against the tougher state standards. Not one.

As the Burlington Free Press reports, the companies testified during the hearing in April that if the standards were adopted, they would stop selling cars in the states that had them. Nonsense, Sessions said.

"It is not credible that the regulation will actually drive auto manufacturers to take such drastic steps," he wrote in a 240-page decision that rejected every one of the automakers' challenges to the California rules.

"It is improbable that an industry that prides itself on its modernity, flexibility and innovation will be unable to meet the requirement of the regulation, especially with the range of technological possibilities and alternatives before it," he wrote.

His ruling comes after a Supreme Court decision in April that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by not regulating vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, Congress plans to look at fuel-efficiency legislation that could prompt a big change in the car-making business.

The fight is not over, of course. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers says it might appeal the Vermont decision. And before any state can go ahead with the standards, the EPA must approve California's rules, Elizabeth Shogren reported for All Things Considered. The agency says it will rule by the end of the year.

Vermont's attorney general says he thinks the issue will end up in the Supreme Court.

9:44 AM ET | 09-13-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Hope for Fossett Fades, Even as Web Expands Search

Hope is fading that aviator Steve Fossett is still alive. The Associated Press reports that the search for Fossett continues in the area of Nevada where he was believed to have flown his single-engine plane 10 days ago. But experts are now publicly expressing doubt that he is still alive.

"There's no news of him signaling for help and that's a problem," said David McMullen of Berkeley, Calif., a leader of the hiking group Desert Survivors, whose members frequently venture into some of the country's harshest terrain. "He's either so injured he can't signal or he's perished."

Dan Charles reported on Morning Edition today that thousands of Internet users have joined in the search. They're hunting for his missing airplane by looking at satellite photos of the area where Fossett disappeared. The Internet company Google contacted the two companies it relies on for photos for its Google Earth service, GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, and asked them to focus on the section of Nevada where the search has been centered.

Google passed those images along to Amazon.com, because Amazon has a way to let thousands of people share the job of searching for Steve Fossett.

Amazon's tool divides the whole search area — 6,000 square miles — into small squares about 300 feet across. It assigns each of those small squares to anyone who signs up to help.

If you're interested in helping to search for Fossett, Amazon is still looking for volunteers.

5:41 PM ET | 09-12-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Kanye West and 50 Cent Fake a Faceoff

Kanye West (left) and 50 Cent face off literally while presenting an award at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday in Las Vegas.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Well, all the hype about Kanye West and 50 Cent "facing off" is just that — hype.

Both artists released albums today, and 50 Cent has vowed to stop recording solo albums if West's Graduation sells more than his Curtis. (I'll believe it when I see it.) Christopher Johnson reports for Day to Day that their rivalry is not real and has more to do with marketing — because these are desperate times for rap. Hip-hop is just not selling like it used to.

Time reported last month that while all music sales are down, no genre has fallen harder than rap. But it's the reason cited by one manager that will raise eyebrows.

"It's collapsing because they can no longer fool the white kids," says Richard Nickels, who manages the hip-hop band the Roots. "There's only so much redundancy anyone can take."

So while the whole Kanye-50 Cent showdown is fun to watch (the two are actually friends), it all seems designed to sell a few more albums.

At last look, Graduation was No. 1 on Amazon's top sellers list. Curtis was No. 6 — behind the soundtrack to High School Musical 2. Ouch.

5:16 PM ET | 09-11-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post

'American Gladiators' Coming Back

Watch part of an episode of American Gladiators.

YouTube

American Gladiators, that really great over-the-top show from the '90s, is back!

Yes, the one with the joust, the monkey bars, the obstacle courses. I don't know if the really tight men's shorts will be back, but I know the big hair is gone on the women. I wonder if the names will be the same: Thunder, Gemini, Blaze, Nitro ... and my all-time favorite, Zap. (Why couldn't my parents have named me Zap?)

NPR's Robert Smith, who gets many cool assignments, was in Los Angeles this weekend for the auditions of the new American Gladiators show. He asked contestants why they wanted to audition and even what names they would choose for themselves: Iron Hands (because he'll smash things up), Mercury (because she's on fire), Ferret (not going to work, as Robert noted) and Christy Crash (her roller derby name — sign her up!).

The new show is due out sometime "midseason," according to a report last month in Variety. It will be modeled more closely after the British version of Gladiators, which focused on the "back story" of the amateur competitors who took on the gladiators each week.

All I can say is: Go, Zap!

5:37 PM ET | 09-10-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

This Just In: Liberals, Conservatives Think Differently

This is one of those studies that make you go, "Well, duh." But it's always nice when science confirms what we've suspected all along.

A new study by scientists at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, shows that the brains of conservatives and liberals work differently. The researchers used a simple experiment to reach their conclusion, the Los Angeles Times reports. "Scientists instructed [volunteers] to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W. M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter."

Participants were wired to show "the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key)."

Liberals made fewer mistakes, tapping less often when they saw a W. (Although I guess you could argue that liberals had an advantage — their aversion to anything "Dubya"-related.) Apparently, this supports the idea that liberals are more "open" to new experiences, while conservatives tend to be more structured and "persistent" in their views.

I always suspected poor typing skills lay at the root of differences between liberals and conservatives.

2:31 PM ET | 09-10-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

G.I. Joe Becomes 'Global Integrated' Joe

The original hand-carved, hand-painted G.I. Joe prototype (third from left) sits with fellow original G.I. Joe prototyes.

Victoria Arocho/AP

Ah, G.I. Joes. I had lots of them when I was a kid. Back in the '60s, Joe was still fighting Nazis and the Japanese. And he was a lot bigger than the G.I. Joe action figures are today. My father would drive me crazy when he would say they looked just like dolls. Dads ... What do they know?

But G.I. Joe has changed over the years, and now he may be in for the biggest change of all. Instead of the "Real American Hero," G.I. Joe is being made over as "a Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity" for Paramount Pictures' new movie, Variety reports. No more "Government Issue." Joe is being changed to appeal to a wider, more international audience.

Traditionalists are upset. Retired Army Col. David W. Hunt, a Fox News military and terrorism analyst, called it "a shame."

Well, as weird as it may be, it's life. Joe is a "brand" after all, and brands change all the time in an effort to reach new audiences and make more money. (Hasbro has not said if it will change the toys it sells to match the movie's new look. But it's my guess that we'll have new Joes and the old Joes. Joe has probably been made in China for years now, anyway.)

However, I've seen some stretches to come up with names from acronyms before, but "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity"? Geesh.

That's all for this week. If you see anything interesting, e-mail us at newsblog@npr.org.

5:24 PM ET | 09- 7-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

Air Force Bomber Mistakenly Carries Nukes

Maybe the conversation went something like this:

"Hey, have you seen my nukes?" ... "No, I haven't touched anything." ... "I just put them down here a minute ago." ... "Don't worry. They're probably under a pile of papers. They'll show up."

OK, well, maybe it didn't sound quite like that. There must have been some panic last week when Air Force officials realized that several cruise missiles with nuclear warheads had been, well, missing. The Military Times reports that they were mistakenly strapped onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on Aug. 30, meaning for a few hours, they were unaccounted for.

Of course, the Air Force says the missiles were always under its control and that, because the bomber was flying over the United States, there was no chance of the missiles being seized by a hostile force. So the big question becomes, "But what if they crashed and took out half of some state with them?"

At no time was there a risk for a nuclear detonation, even if the B-52 crashed on its way to Barksdale, said Steve Fetter, a former Defense Department official who worked on nuclear weapons policy in 1993-94. A crash could ignite the high explosives associated with the warhead, and possibly cause a leak of the plutonium, but the warheads' elaborate safeguards would prevent a nuclear detonation from occurring, he said.

Right. Just like the safeguards that keep nuclear warheads from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think Don Shepperd, a retired Air Force major general and military analyst for CNN, was on the money when he said, "This is a major gaffe, and it's going to cause some heads to roll down the line."

One commander has already been fired.

4:05 PM ET | 09- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

The Power of Positive Thinking, Circa 2007

Good old Norman Vincent Peale. Fifty years ago, he was telling people in The Power of Positive Thinking that if you had more positive thoughts, your life would get better. I read all his books when I was a teen, and I have to say, they did help. Then I grew up and discovered that positive thinking won't solve all of life's problems, even if it does make them a little more palatable.

Positive psychology looks to be a stepchild of Peale's ideas — with a bit more scientific sheen. Basically, it's psychology that looks at the positive aspects of being human to understand "What's it all about?" And just like Peale's work, it includes a healthy dose of religion.

This has some psychologists upset. In almost an echo of the argument over evolution and intelligent design, traditional psychologists worry that this new field will be twisted into a vehicle to advance religious beliefs. But religion has been of interest to many prominent psychologists and thinkers over the last century, including William James and Carl Jung.

John Shook of the Center for Inquiry says that as long as positive psychology remains rooted in the real world, it could teach us a lot about what makes people happy. In fact, when Chantal Allan interviewed Shook, an atheist, for Day to Day, he said that research into positive psychology could show that what makes a person happy is basically the same for believers and atheists.

4:36 PM ET | 09- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Craig Venter's DNA for All to See

Craig Venter is, by some accounts, pretty full of himself. The "celebrity scientist," who led the team that finished second in the race to publish the first complete human genome in 2003, has never seemed afraid to let it all hang out in public. But this might be taking it to extremes.

Venter and his team unveiled the first individual genome ever sequenced today. And who did the DNA belong to? Venter himself — all 2.8 billion contiguous bits of genetic code of him.

Self-promotion aside, scientists say it's an important breakthrough, especially for research in preventative medicine. And Venter's DNA shows that we're not all that alike. The old thought had been that humans were about 99.9 percent similar. But now we know that it's more like 99.5 percent (and maybe even just 99 percent). That may still sound pretty close, but the 0.4 percent allows for a multitude of differences.

Yet, there is something unsettling here as well. Venter's code shows that he has a propensity for heart disease and Alzheimer's. The argument is, of course, that knowing about these potential diseases means that he can try to avoid them.

But how much do we want to find out about our futures? How would you feel about knowing what diseases you might get or how long you may live?

3:28 PM ET | 09- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Myths Have a Way of Sticking in the Mind

For years, I've been puzzled by the persistence of the myth that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. The myth continues to thrive among a significant portion of the population, despite numerous studies, reports and investigations that have shown it to be false.

Well, a recent study seems to show why: Myths have a way of sticking in the mind.

The research centered on a flier from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that labeled statements about the flu vaccine "true" or "false." (For instance, the statement "Only older people need flu vaccine" was false.) The idea behind the flier was to combat myths about the vaccine. Only it didn't quite work.

The Washington Post reports that Norbert Schwarz, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, had volunteers read the CDC flyer. Within 30 minutes, older volunteers had "misremembered" 28 percent of the myths as true. Within three days, it was 40 percent. Younger volunteers did better at first, but within three days they had misremembered as much as the older volunteers had after the first 30 minutes.

So what does this mean (besides that our memories are not the greatest)? Well, as the Post notes, "The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths."

Wow. So the more we try to correct a myth, the more we can actually help perpetuate it. Which helps explain Saddam and Sept. 11. And the Loch Ness Monster. And Bigfoot. Etc., etc....

12:43 PM ET | 09- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

A Web That Can Accommodate More Than Itsy Bitsies

As we prepare to take off for the Labor Day weekend and enjoy the traditional end of summer, we'd like to leave you on a note of utter revulsion. That is, unless you like spiders. (Ick.)

A worker at a park in Texas has found a HUGE spider web — we're talking hundreds of yards here — that's home to millions of the creepy crawlies. It has scientists fascinated and park workers determined to protect it from human hands.

But has anyone stopped to consider that maybe this is just a clever marketing ploy for Rob Zombie's Halloween?

We'll be back on Tuesday. Send any good leads to newsblog@npr.org.

- Erica Ryan

4:42 PM ET | 08-31-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

New Study Shows Renters Are in Trouble Too

I'm actually working from home today. I'm moving into a new house, and in between posts I'm packing boxes. But I'm not buying — I'm renting. Until my house in Massachusetts sells and I save enough for a reasonable down payment ... and the housing market picks itself up off the floor ... renting is my only option.

Apparently, I'm not alone. As more and more owners lose their homes to foreclosure in the housing crunch, increasing numbers of people are going to need to rent.

The Center for Housing Policy issued a study today that shows a quarter of renters are shelling out more than half of their income to landlords. And the market is likely to get worse for middle- and low-income people as more former homeowners move back to renting or as people who might have gone from renting to buying decide to stay put. The two worst places in the country to rent are side-by-side: Anaheim and Los Angeles.

Sam Eaton of Marketplace tells Day to Day's Alex Cohen that rents are likely to increase by about 4 percent this year and next. And renting is not just getting harder in big cities — Denver and Indianapolis are two medium-sized cities being hit hard.

Eaton says this is only the calm before the storm. As more people default on loans, experts are saying that 2008 is going to "a pretty bad one."

3:45 PM ET | 08-30-2007 | permalink | comments (12) | e-mail post

When 'Witness Protection' Is Really a Misnomer

"Witness protection," eh? Perhaps it might be better called the "We'll help you hide out for a few months, and then you're on your own" program.

That's the feeling I had after listening to Scott Shafer's All Things Considered report on San Francisco's witness protection program. Witness protection is an idea that TV and movies have turned into a cultural touchstone. (For instance, it was one of the options bandied about when people were debating what might happen to Tony at the end of The Sopranos a couple of months ago.)

But in real life, only 14 states offer this kind of deal for potential witnesses. (The federal program covers all the states but only covers federal crimes, and it has problems of its own.) And as Shafer reported, "...the programs don't literally protect anyone. There's no round-the-clock surveillance, and no fancy safe house; witnesses are simply moved out of the place where the crime occurred into a safer location."

The San Francisco program lasts three months after a criminal is convicted and then "the witnesses are basically on their own." Efforts are being made to improve the program — California is doubling the funding available for witness protection next year to more than $6 million.

But I can see why people might be reluctant to talk if witness protection often isn't.

10:52 AM ET | 08-30-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Report on Iraq Conflicts with Administration Assessment

This could make it a little harder for the president to get that extra $50 billion for the war in Iraq.

The Washington Post has obtained a draft of a report that the Government Accountability Office will present Tuesday to Congress, and it ain't pretty. According to the Post, the GOA report, entitled Securing, Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq, says that the Iraqi government has "failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress."

"While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

"Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised.

And there's a dig at the White House in the report as well. Future assessments from the administration would be more useful, the draft suggests, if "they backed up their judgments with more details and 'provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies.'"

Interestingly, the Post says the person who provided the draft said it was being passed on from a government official who was afraid it would be "watered down" before it was officially released.

(Tom's Update: Well, there you go. The Associated Press is reporting that the Pentagon has asked for changes to be made in the GAO report before its final release, asking that some of the negative assessments be revised. A Pentagon spokesman said that "policy officials 'made some factual corrections' and 'offered some suggestions on a few of the actual grades' assigned by the GAO.")

9:28 AM ET | 08-30-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Study: Cramming Works for SATs, But Not Long Term

I always suspected this was true, but now there is scientific research showing that you can study too much for nothing. I just wish someone had told me that in college.

Cognitive Daily reports on a new study about studying by University of South Florida psychologist Doug Rohrer and Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego. The two researchers had groups of students study vocabulary in different ways. Here's a good description from the blog on the Web site of the Association for Psychological Science, which published the research in one of its journals.

So what did they find?

Well, cramming actually makes sense if you're studying for something with a lot of questions on stuff you might not need to know forever, like the SATs. The research showed people could retain stuff like that really well for about a week, and then it kind of disappeared from their brains. At four weeks, the advantage that the crammers had over the non-crammers had totally disappeared.

If you want to study for something that you need to know over a long period of time, like medicine or law, let's say, then cramming is not a good idea. Instead, building in breaks between studying helps students retain knowledge over a much longer period of time. If you really want to remember something, "massing knowledge" is your worst option.

This may explain why I can't remember a thing from my college physics or calculus courses.

11:44 AM ET | 08-29-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Could the Idea of Civil Unions Be 600 Years Old?

You know how it is with history. We keep doing the same things, again and again. Now, a new study suggests unions between people of the same sex might be another thing to add to the list.

A new study in the Journal of Modern History "reviews historical evidence, including documents and gravesites" and finds that civil unions may have existed in France as long as 600 years ago. The term "affrerement" — roughly translated as brotherment — referred "to a certain type of legal contract, which also existed elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe." While they were often used for members of the same family when parents left the same property to two brothers who continued to live together, they were also used between men of the same sex who weren't related.

The author of the report can't prove it one way or another conclusively but says the evidence seems to point to, well, something that looks remarkably like homosexual civil unions. Which would only prove, as the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

3:52 PM ET | 08-27-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Model-Turned-TV Anchor's Show Lasts One Episode

Friends, couch potatoes, remote control freaks, lend me your TVs. I come here not to praise Anchorwoman (because that would seem darn near impossible) but to bury it. And I mean way deep.

The much ballyhooed Fox reality show about Lauren Jones, a former model and wrestler who becomes a news anchor at a local channel in Texas, drew a tiny rating of 1.0 in the 18-49 demographic, according to Broadcasting and Cable ... proving that being an anchor is not just about the hair, teeth and, er, other attributes.

Apparently, Rupert Murdoch's folks had seen enough. Literally. The show was immediately canceled, bringing back painful memories of Emily's Reasons Why Not, the ABC series that also only lasted one episode. If you're REALLY interested ... or looking for a way to cure insomnia ... you can watch the "lost" episodes of Anchorwoman on Fox's Web site or Fox On Demand.

But this could also be a lesson for the journalists who jumped the gun and spilled a lot of ink while hand-wringing over the show. Turns out that it wasn't the "nadir" for women journalists that some people said it would be.

It was just a bad TV show.

OK, that's all for this week. If you see or hear anything interesting, don't forget to send it along to newsblog@npr.org.

6:00 PM ET | 08-24-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

'Jihad: The Musical' — Terrorism as Musical Comedy

Watch Jihad: The Musical's big number, "I Wanna Be Like Osama."

YouTube

Years ago, my brother and my sister and I wrote, produced and performed a satirical look at our hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The great thing about satire is that there are no sacred cows. We tried to offend everyone we could think of, in a funny way, of course.

But even I might think twice before creating a musical about terrorism. Not the producers of Jihad: The Musical, though. The satirical musical comedy is playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is billed as a "madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism." It's already drawn protests, of course, from people who don't get the joke.

Which is great for the show because, as Oscar Wilde once said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

And uneven reviews, I'm afraid. Some folks loved it; others thought it was stupid.

It seems most reviewers actually wanted the show to be a little more offensive than it is. Alan Chadwick of the Evening Standard described it this way: [The protests were] reminiscent of the furore surrounding Monty Python's Life Of Brian, which the show resembles in style and tone if not quality. But Zoe Samuel and Benjamin Scheuer's knockabout musical comedy — in which a naive Afghan flower-seller finds himself co-opted into becoming a suicide bomber — no more causes offense or offers a Jihadi blueprint than The Producers advocated Nazism, or The Sound Of Music nunneries."

In his piece for All Things Considered, Rob Gifford says the real target of the show seems to be terrorists and the rightwing media in America who — a song in the play claims — can't live without one another.

Well, you can judge for yourself. The link to Rob's piece includes a couple of the toe-tapping numbers (including a tune sung by a Frenchman called "Turned and Ran," a joke that, I confess, is getting a little old). And here's a YouTube video of the big number, "I Wanna Be Like Osama." Pretty catchy, actually.

But you're not going to want to be singing it to yourself as you walk around, OK?

4:59 PM ET | 08-24-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post

FDA: It's Time to Tell the Truth About Sunscreens

I am the whitest guy on the planet. I am day-glo, all-Canadian white. In the summer, I never attempt to tan; I just try to neutralize the blue. One of the most humbling experiences of my life was when a group of smiling Turkish children danced around on a Mediterranean beach several years ago calling me "Uncle White" — they told my wife, who speaks Turkish, that they had never seen anyone so pale before.

In the old days, before SPF 45, I kept completely covered up at the beach. I looked like a mugger on holiday — pants, hoodie, ball cap pulled low. But sunscreen freed me to be able to entertain small children on foreign beaches.

So I was interested to find out that government regulators, under pressure from Congress, have proposed, as the Los Angeles Times reports, new "truth in labeling" rules for sunscreen to "give consumers clearer, more complete information on protection against cancer-causing ultraviolet rays."

Seems that the sunscreen industry, which is worth $450 million a year, has only been testing for one type of ultraviolet radiation — UVB, which can burn the skin. But, as NPR's Patricia Neighmond reports on Morning Edition, it turns out that UVA rays, which tan the skin, can also cause cancer. So the Food and Drug Administration says it wants to change the rules to force manufacturers to test for both.

And forget all that waterproof stuff. The FDA says it doesn't believe those claims are accurate. Lotions would also carry warnings that they alone offer "no guarantee against the sun's rays, and that consumers should also stay out of the midday sun and consider wearing hats and long sleeves," the Times writes.

Ah! The return of my mugger look.

9:44 AM ET | 08-24-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Google Adds Space to Its List of Offerings

Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Google. Its mission — to boldly go where no online site ... OK, maybe NASA was there first.

Anyway, I digress ... The folks at Google, working together with astronomers, are giving you THE UNIVERSE. Really. As an addition to Google Earth (the feature that allows you to get an up-close and personal look at almost every spot on the planet), you get to whirl around and look out into space. And not just the randomized dots that they generated on Star Trek to make it seem like you were traveling at warp speed.

They are, as The Baltimore Sun described them, "digitized photos — a million of them — stitched seamlessly together from some of the world's most complete sky surveys." One hundred million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. That's a lot of space.

It is wicked cool and one day will be a great way to plan the family's next visit to Wolf 359 or Epsilon Eridani. And, just like Google Earth, you can create a version with your own stuff in space. You know, for Valentine's Day, give your loved one a real star with her face on it; don't just name one after her.

Sky at Google Earth is available on the newest versions of Google Earth, which can be downloaded for free at http://earth.google.com.

11:13 AM ET | 08-23-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

YouTube Starts Showing Ads with Videos

It's fairly safe to say that we all knew this day was coming. Google, the owner of YouTube, has decided to combine ads with videos it shows on the video-sharing site. After all, Google spent $1.65 billion on YouTube -- I guess it's time to start making a little of that investment back for the shareholders.

But I give the Google folks full marks for creativity -- they may have finally figured out a way to get people to watch ads on the 'Net. Just as long as it doesn't interfere with the old Monty Python skits I'm watching or the latest Obama Girl video.

The Los Angeles Times explains it this way: "Fifteen seconds into a music video for the band Madina Lake, an animated pink doughnut rolls along the bottom portion of the video with Homer Simpson in hot pursuit. Viewers can click on Homer to watch a trailer for 'The Simpsons Movie' while the video they originally chose is paused. If they don't click on the ad, it disappears after 10 seconds."

The ads are called "transparent" and use a Flash-based overlay. And if you don't like 'em, you don't have to wait until they disappear -- you can click to kill them right away. (The Times piece says Google executives claim their test runs show people watch the entire ads 75 percent of the time.)

I see this creating a whole new kind of ad -- the five-second ad, designed to get the message across before the viewer can hit the cancel button. Talk about our shrinking attention span.

1:18 PM ET | 08-22-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Doctor Once Charged in Terror Case Gets Visa Back

It seems the Australian government just doesn't want to admit that maybe it made a mistake. Almost as soon as a federal court ruled today that Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews had erred when he canceled the work visa of Dr. Mohamed Haneef, the government announced it would appeal the decision.

Haneef, you might remember, had originally been charged with providing support to a terrorist organization because he had given his mobile phone's SIM card to his cousin several months before the relative was charged in the failed bombing plot in London and Glasgow in June. The charge against Haneef was dropped after it was reported that the police and prosecutors had made misleading statements in court. But the immigration minister did not reinstate Haneef's visa, citing character issues.

The New York Times reports that a federal judge dismissed Andrews' application of the character criterion.

In the court's ruling today, the judge, Jeffrey Spender, said that perhaps even he could not pass that test, because as a defense lawyer, he had "associated with" known criminals. And a woman who was the victim of domestic violence would theoretically fail the test because she had "associated with" her partner, he said.

But the government still might win: The court left open the possibility that the government could cancel the visa for a different reason.

9:57 AM ET | 08-21-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Quick! ... Name America's No. 1 Trading Partner

OK, pop quiz. Can you name America's No. 1 trading partner in 2006?

China? Nope. It's No. 2, despite the glut of news stories about potentially dangerous toys, toxic pet food and contaminated toothpaste.

Mexico? Wrong -- No. 3. Japan? Germany? Britain? Korea?

No, the correct answer is ... Canada! Yes, the land of Celine Dion, curling and socialized medicine is both the United States' largest market for exports and its biggest source of imports. Must be all those BlackBerries -- assuming they're not counting comedians and media types.

In honor of this honor, allow me to present "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Canadian Idiot." Apologies to Green Day.

2:52 PM ET | 08-20-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

ADL Struggles with Dispute over Armenian Genocide

Between 1915 and 1923, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks in what many historians consider a genocide -- a deliberate policy of extermination. Turkey has vigorously denied this label for decades. And now, that term has thrown a prominent Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League, into a serious internal dispute.

The irony of this story is that the conflict began over a program called No Place for Hate. The Armenian-American community in Watertown, Mass., objected to the town's involvement in the program because the ADL refuses to call the massacre a genocide.

Soon after, the ADL's New England regional director, Andrew Tarsy, who had first defended the organization's position, was fired for saying he now supported calling the massacre a genocide. On Friday, two prominent members of the ADL's New England board resigned in protest.

National ADL Director Abraham Foxman has been getting hammered by members of the Jewish and Armenian communities in New England over the Tarsy firing, The Boston Globe reports. So why is the national ADL refusing to back what many of its members seem to consider a fact? The group appears to want to avoid angering Turkey, one of the few Muslim governments in the world to have a solid relationship with Israel. (Although Foxman says the group officially has no position on the issue.)

The conflict is not likely to disappear soon. This fall, the House of Representatives plans to debate a resolution that would officially recognize the killings as a genocide.

(Tom's Update: On Tuesday, the ADL posted the following statement on its Web site: "We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities. On reflection, we have come to share the view of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide. If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide."

You can read the ADL's entire statement here.)

12:32 PM ET | 08-20-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

U.S. Toy Sellers Afraid of a Nightmare at Christmas

If Chinese toy makers were counting on getting Christmas cards from the U.S. companies that sell their products, they shouldn't hold their breath. On the contrary, American toy companies and stores that sell toys are already saying that they're worried safety concerns and extra testing in the wake of recalls could lead to the nightmare at Christmas.

We all know that companies count on Christmas as much as the kids do. Many companies live or die on the profits they make at Christmas, and toy companies are in that situation more than most.

"This could be a disaster," Jeff Holtzman, president and chief executive of Goldberger, which sells dolls made in China at stores like Toys 'R' Us, told the International Herald Tribune. "Everything is planned and is very time-sensitive. There are millions and millions of dollars at stake."

It's my guess that the 20 percent of toys sold in the U.S. that are not made in China -- like those of the Danish company Lego -- are going to have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

3:45 PM ET | 08-16-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

It's Cough Medicine Deja Vu

The Food and Drug Administration is warning parents against giving children under the age of 2 over-the-counter cough medicine without doctors' orders. Seems some parents have been overdosing their kids on the stuff.

I can't figure out, however, why so much ink is being spilled. I mean, the packages themselves say not to do it, right? At least every one I remember seeing. Shouldn't parents be a little more on the ball here?

Even more important, over-the-counter cough syrup doesn't even work on coughs that come along with colds -- at least according to the American College of Chest Physicians (everybody has a college these days).

Last year, it published a report (in its aptly titled journal, Chest) that said not to bother wasting your money on OTC cough medicines. Cough medicine companies disputed it, of course, arguing that people would stop buying them if they didn't work.

The doctors' response: Can you say "placebo effect"?

2:22 PM ET | 08-16-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

So Why Can't Conservatives Do Political Humor?

I am about to postulate Regan's Comedic Theory #876: Conservatives' ability to do political humor is inversely proportional to their ability to do talk radio. The right wing rocks on talk radio, while the left comes off sounding like a bunch of whiny losers (Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller being the most notable exceptions). But when it comes to political humor, the right is just plain unfunny (P.J. O'Rourke and Dennis Miller ... sometimes ... being those exceptions.)

I write this as I read that the Fox News Channel has decided to cancel The 1/2 Hour News Hour, a show designed to be the conservative answer to The Daily Show. It was a pretty good idea, but it just didn't work. I tuned in twice and it was painfully unfunny, straining at times for a hint of humor. Producer Joel Surnow will just have to go back to helping Jack Bauer save the world on 24.

It doesn't have to be this way. O'Rourke makes me roar with laughter because he finds the things in liberal culture that are naturally humorous -- he doesn't strain to make them funny, and he's not an ideologue. The same is true of Jon Stewart on the liberal side.

The 1/2 Hour News Hour failed, in my opinion, because being conservative came before being funny. Next time, let the folks who write King of the Hill or Family Guy do it.

3:43 PM ET | 08-15-2007 | permalink | comments (14) | e-mail post

Harry Potter Makes Journalists Do Strange Things

One of the first things I learned in journalism was that the public had a right to know what was going on. The moment you got news and had it confirmed, you printed it. And that was true whether the story was about the president or your mother.

So how come Harry Potter got so many breaks? I mean, newspapers and broadcasters have gone out of their way for weeks not to let people know what happens at the end of the seventh and final book, even when copies made their way to the public before the official publishing date. There were more spoilers on articles than on cars at the Daytona 500.

In a very interesting piece, Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune writes that maybe that was a good thing. That the decency that journalists showed to a fictional boy should also be shown to other people. That maybe all the news isn't fit to print, and we need to be a little more discerning.

Reardon wonders if we really need to know so much about Elizabeth Edwards' battle with cancer, or anything at all about the blonde woman seen recently with New York Yankees' slugger Alex Rodriguez.

Do people in the public eye deserve to be treated with Potter-like care? Would that kind of journalistic discretion make the country a more civil place or just encourage some people to try and get away with behavior the public might deem unfit?

3:23 PM ET | 08-13-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

Next Big Health Fear: Too Many Espressos

Watch out for that espresso!

iStockphoto

I always knew that there was something about drinking espressos that seemed dangerous.

Jasmine Willis, a 17-year-old British girl, was hospitalized when she "developed a fever and began hyperventilating" after drinking seven double espressos at her family's sandwich shop, the BBC reports.

Jasmine has had a "full recovery" and is now warning people about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking. (She needs to come and do a seminar for NPR staff; I can tell you that right now.) Before the side effects of her binge wore off, however, she also cleaned every house on her block from top to bottom and wrote 37 versions of her final essay for school. Just kidding.

So America, tell your children to stick to the safe caffeine pleasure of lattes, coffee ice cream and decaf before they too fall victim to the scourge of demon espresso.

2:06 PM ET | 08-13-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Life and Death Decisions in the Middle of War

I hear a lot of radio, but few pieces can actually make me stop what I'm doing and just stand there listening. However, Steve Inskeep's interview with former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell on Morning Edition had me riveted this morning. Seldom have I heard a better example of the conflicting moralities that slam together during war.

Luttrell's tale of sparing the lives of several Afghans -- which in one case he believes led to horrific results and in the other kept him alive -- shows how hard it is to make life and death decisions when you're not sure who's your friend and who's your foe.

Luttrell questions in his book Lone Survivor, co-written by Patrick Robinson, if Americans should be following the rules of war if they really want to win against foes like the Taliban and al-Qaida. After all, these bad guys don't seem to follow any rules. On the other hand, Luttrell's experience shows how important those rules can be. Would any Afghan villager have tried to save him if the U.S. military had a policy of shoot first and ask questions later?

During vacation, I read in The New York Times that our British allies in Afghanistan already think that U.S. troops aren't careful enough -- resulting in more civilian casualties than necessary. I was struck by the words of one Afghan villager, who said that, after his village was allegedly bombed by U.S. airplanes by mistake, most of the surviving men joined the Taliban.

What do you think? Is it important for us to "be different" from our enemies in the way that Luttrell was, even if lives are lost? Or do we just need to forget the rules and fight in whatever way will ensure victory?

11:30 AM ET | 08-13-2007 | permalink | comments (11) | e-mail post

Computers Can Waste Time More Efficiently Than You

And... solved! The zero-move solution.

iStockphoto

It's official. No matter how long it took you to solve a Rubik's Cube back in the '80s, it was way too long. Mathematicians have proven that no matter how scrambled a cube is, you can theoretically solve it in 26 moves or less. Or at least a computer can.

I would love to print some elegant formula here that would allow you to solve it faster or do the cube with your feet or nose. But alas, they used a supercomputer to churn through the 43 quintillion possibilities (after cutting them down a bit). Cheaters!

Before you dust off the cube and start to work on the 26-move solution, you should know that it is probably not good enough. Mathematicians suspect that 20 moves are likely enough to solve any Rubik's Cube. They just can't prove it yet.

By the way, there is a zero-move solution. Take off the stickers.

- Robert Smith

4:34 PM ET | 08-10-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Dawn of the Dead Bacteria

Isn't this the way horror films start?

Scientists in New Jersey have taken bacteria from 8-million-year-old polar ice and brought it back to life. The blob was last seen approaching Manhattan. Just joking. The bacteria are in a lab. But it could mean that as global warming melts ancient ice around the world, some of our old bacteriological friends could return to haunt us. The authors of the research say that glaciers and polar caps can be considered "gene popsicles." Yum.

The folks at the New Scientist blog say it's probably not worth worrying about because the process has been going on for billions of years and the bugs are unlikely to cause human disease. Besides, the old bacteria grow really, really slowly. You could definitely outrun them.

There are some questions about the research. It is apparently very easy to contaminate ice samples with younger bacteria. More testing will need to be done to make sure the Lazarus cells are really 8 million years old and not trying to pass off some fake ID.

- Robert Smith

1:10 PM ET | 08- 7-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

The Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World

If you followed the voting last month on The New 7 Wonders of the World, you might have noticed that the romantics won out. Sure, Machu Picchu and the Taj Mahal are beautiful and uplifting, but what about the other side of the coin? What about the tacky, egotistical monuments to self that only a dictator can erect?

Esquire magazine takes us through The Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World.

It must have been hard to pick a favorite in North Korea, but the truly ugly hammer, sickle and painter's brush won out. Then there's the atrocious giant gold fist crushing a U.S. fighter plane in Libya. I don't know if all the good artists are in prison or if ugly art is a cunning method of psychological control. Perhaps it might have helped the U.S. in Baghdad if we had spent some time putting up a monument to our victory.

Just make sure you visit the Seven Wonders soon. These things have a tendency to get pulled down and blown up after the inevitable coup.

- Robert Smith

12:04 PM ET | 08- 7-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

If NASA Faked Moon Landings, It Did a Heck of a Job

An image of the moon from the Apollo 15 mission.

Courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center and Arizona State University

Check out these fascinating, detailed photos of the surface of the moon (or is it a soundstage in Area 51 of the Nevada desert? I always get confused.)

For almost 40 years, the complete photographic record of the Apollo moon missions has been locked in a freezer. But now, Arizona State University is teaming up with NASA to scan the 36,000 photos and make them freely available on the Web. The project will take three years, as each negative has to be carefully warmed back to room temperature, cleaned and scanned down to the very grain of the film. The digital files are so large (some up to 11.8 gigabytes!) that the photos are copied to a hard drive and shipped via UPS, rather than bogging down the university's Internet system.

So, other than the coolness factor, why bother? Scientists say that they can use the digital photos to find changes in the surface of the moon over the last 40 years. Plus, it will keep the conspiracy theorists busy for the next 40 years looking for suspicious flaws. (Somebody over at the blog Slashdot already found a stray hair on a photo. Hmmmmm.)

Now, if we could just get the government to release detailed scans of the Zapruder film.

- Robert Smith

11:45 AM ET | 08- 6-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Bush Invites Nations to Climate Change Conference

When I first saw this headline from The Associated Press, "Bush invites nations to climate change summit," I thought the next one I'd see might be: "Hell freezes over." (The last time hell froze over was, of course, in October 2004, when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.)

Not that I'm questioning the president's intentions. He wants "to bring India, China and other fast-growing countries to the negotiating table so they are part of the solution, not the problem." Maybe the relentless beat of reports that have confirmed the reality of global warming has changed his mind. Or maybe his buddy, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who feels very passionately about global warming, convinced the president that he could no longer ignore the elephant in the corner of the Oval Office.

Whatever. For the most part, Bush appointees have relentlessly underplayed the effects of global warming, if not denied them altogether, or have said it's not a problem we necessarily need to "wrestle with."

But if the president is really serious now about dealing with climate change, then, as Blair has often said, he could have a huge positive effect.

The conference is set for September and will be hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The United Nations also has a similar meeting set for a few days before the Bush conference.

4:47 PM ET | 08- 3-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Worries About Organ Donations After Doctor Charged

I'm signed up to be an organ donor. I'm sure lots of you are as well. The way I figure it, when the day comes that I can't use them anymore, I'm glad to let someone else have them.

But I do want to make sure that day has actually come and that I'm not being "helped along" by anyone who wants a new liver or gall bladder or something.

That's why accusations that a transplant surgeon tried to hurry the death of a patient so his organs could be harvested have experts in the field worried that fewer people will be willing to be donors. The Associated Press reports that "prosecutors on Monday charged transplant surgeon Hootan Roozrokh, 33, with prescribing massive amounts of drugs in an attempt to hasten the death of 25-year-old Ruben Navarro, who was physically and mentally disabled."

The Los Angeles Times reports that Roozrokh is believed to be the first doctor in the country charged in a case of this kind. Roozrokh's lawyers say he is innocent and did nothing wrong.

But the idea of a doctor "hurrying up" a potential organ donor's death can send chills down the spines of people considering signing a donor card and give those who don't support the idea of people being taken off life support for any reason grist for their mills.

Does this case change your mind about donating your organs? If you're already part of a donor program, does it make you consider dropping out?

12:17 PM ET | 08- 2-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Survey: Young People Slack Off More at Work

Morning Edition reported today on a new survey that shows young employees waste more time at work than their older co-workers. But I don't think that necessarily means that young people don't work as hard.

The survey by salary.com finds that we all waste about 1.7 hours out of 8.5 hours a day. (In fact, the number of hours wasted is down from 2.09 in 2005.) Well, what did you expect? As Peter Cappelli, a professor at Wharton Business School, pointed out to ME host Steve Inskeep this morning, who the heck works eight hours a day nonstop, particularly in a white-collar job? As comedian George Carlin once remarked, no one has ever seen a memo marked "9:01."

While those aged 20 to 29 reported spending about 2.1 hours a day on activities that qualified as "wasting time" -- like going on the Internet or making personal calls -- it's been my experience that young people are regularly called on to work more than their fair share.

We old timers more often have to deal with kids getting sick at school or caring for an ailing parent, etc. When we need to take time off to deal with these situations, young people are almost always expected to fill in, with little complaint, because more are single and "have the time." Not to mention that those lower on the totem pole often get less vacation time.

And, as Cappelli points out, even if young people "waste" more time, if you factor in that they are almost always a lot cheaper, they're probably getting more done per dollar spent on them.

So take that, all you number crunchers!

5:26 PM ET | 08- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Child Abuse Rises When a Military Parent Is Deployed

A new study shows that child abuse rises, particularly by mothers, when military spouses are deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. And I think I understand why.

The Pentagon-funded study found that cases of neglect, abandonment, physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse rose by about 40 percent when a parent was deployed in families with previously confirmed cases of abuse.

Women were far more likely to mistreat children during their partners' deployment. Researchers say it suggests that fathers whose wives go off to war are able to get help from extended family or elsewhere. As we all know, our culture doesn't really expect men to be able to handle childcare by themselves, while women are often expected to be able to handle the load singlehandedly.

The Associated Press reports that the military will add more than 1,000 additional "family readiness support assistants" to work with stressed-out military parents. The Army also "recently added $8 million to its respite child care program" and increased home visits at bases that have high levels of reported neglect.

I can understand the pressures that build on a parent left alone because I've lived it -- to a much lesser degree. As I've noted, my wife was recently away for a month. Her job requires that she frequently take such trips. And when she goes away, I feel a lot more stress. I'm more tired because I literally go from 5 in the morning to 11 at night with work and family stuff, seven days a week, no breaks. I'm happy to say there's no abuse, but I'm a lot more short-tempered with my four kids, for sure.

And that's in only one month. I can only imagine how stressed and tired parents on their own would be after 18 months or even longer in some cases.

9:33 AM ET | 08- 1-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Teaching Inner-City Kids About Death

Tell Me More has an interview with Todd Walker, a football coach in Oakland, Calif., who has started a program, Restoring Inner-City Peace, or R.I.P., that brings urban kids to funeral homes to help them understand the reality of death. Walker shows the kids -- some as young as 6 -- a casket, a gurney and a cremation box, items that can help make the often fatal consequences of violence more real.

I applaud Walker's efforts, especially in an area where violence can be an everyday event. But I'm not sure if the sterile surroundings of a funeral home are enough to make a difference. In my experience, it's only the death of a close friend or a relative that pushes you to consider your own mortality. Otherwise, I fear the effect is only temporary.

I can still remember the first time I saw a dead person. The mother of my parish priest. I was about 7 years old, and our Cub Scout master had taken the entire troupe to the funeral home to pay our respects. I remember kneeling beside the open coffin, but it seemed more gross than scary.

5:03 PM ET | 07-31-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Learning About Bergman from His Film Editor

While I never had the pleasure of meeting Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director who died today, I did have the opportunity to learn from someone who worked very closely with him on some of his greatest films.

In the mid-1980s, I was chosen to learn about screenwriting as part of a Canadian film program called DramaLab. The person who was supposed to teach us dropped out at the last second, and Ulla Ryghe stepped in. I had no idea who she was. But one of the DramaLab organizers told us that she had edited some of Bergman's films: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, to name a few.

Some of my fellow screenwriters grumbled because screenwriting wasn't her specialty. But no way was I going to waste a chance to learn from a person who had worked with one of the world's greatest directors. Ryghe saw I was interested and, as a result, made me work pretty hard. But I learned a lot about making movies.

Occasionally she would talk about working with Bergman, how hard he pushed her, how creative he was, how intimidating he could be at times. I knew a lot of what she was teaching me was what she had learned from him, combined with her own deep knowledge about film.

In particular, the things she taught me about how to observe the world -- to pay attention to the obvious things we miss every day -- serve me very well in my current job.

9:18 AM ET | 07-30-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Mr. Spock Makes a Logical Return

Leonard Nimoy

Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Fans at San Diego's big Comic-Con festival got more Spocks for their money than they had anticipated.

During a Paramount Pictures panel Thursday about the new Star Trek movie, which will feature the crew of the Enterprise during their early years in Starfleet, director J.J. Abrams (known for his work in Mission: Impossible III and Lost) introduced the actor who will play the young Spock -- Zachary Quinto of Heroes. But then Abrams told the audience he had more casting news ... and he introduced Leonard Nimoy, who will also have a small role in the film as the older Spock.

When asked why he was returning to the Trek film universe, Nimoy said the decision was logical.

Well, what else would you expect him to say? All I can say is that I hope the film lives long and prospers.

11:29 AM ET | 07-27-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Researchers Say Being Obese Is 'Contagious'

It seems each day brings a new report in the battle of the waistline. But this one is a real eye-opener. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that obesity is "contagious." Just one example: If you have a close same-sex friend who becomes obese, there is a 71 percent chance that you'll start packing on the pounds as well.

Using the Framingham Heart Study (which we mentioned Wednesday -- it's a study that has been following thousands of people's health for almost 50 years), researchers concluded that obesity spreads through social ties in subtle ways. Bloomberg reports that it seems to be largely a matter of rationalization.

"What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size,'' investigators led by Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, wrote in the July 26 edition of the New England Journal. "People come to think that it is okay to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads.''

When I mentioned this study to my wife, she commented that it will "make it easier to hate fat people." And sure enough, Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the comprehensive weight control program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell, tells the New York Daily News that he has the same concern. "Is a mother going to say, 'I'm not going to let my kid play with an overweight kid because it's going to make my kid overweight'?"

Here's another thing -- if your friends influence your weight, how did that first person in your group get fat? It had to start somewhere. The report really doesn't address this. And there's a certain "well, duh" element here, too. We know that our social networks influence the clothes we buy, the shows we watch, the music we listen to. It makes perfect sense that they would influence our opinions on body image as well.

But there's a silver lining, as Morning Edition reports. If you lose weight, your friends are more likely to do so. I recently lost about 40 pounds ... Anybody want to be my friend?

11:19 AM ET | 07-26-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Soda Linked to Heart Attack Risk Factors?

"This is the Health Police. We want you to slowly place that soda on the ground, put your hands in the air and move away from the can. Just move away from the can and your heart will be fine."

OK, maybe it's not that dramatic, but you can bet a new report that soda -- regular or diet -- appears to have a distinct link to heart disease risk factors is going to cause a stir. ABC News reports that a study published in the current issue of Circulation, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association, suggests that drinking even one soda a day is associated with an increase in risk factors for heart disease.

The study's researchers report that those who said they drank a soda or more per day had a 31 percent greater chance of developing obesity, a 30 percent increased risk for gaining inches around the waist, a 25 percent chance of developing high blood sugar levels and a 32 percent greater chance of developing lower "good" cholesterol levels.

The study was based on data collected for the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the health of thousands of people for decades.

Well, as you can imagine, the soda industry is not taking this lying down. The Baltimore Sun reports that Jeff Stier, associate director of the American Council on Science and Health, an industry-friendly consumer education group, said the study's effect on public health is nil. "This study doesn't conclude that drinking soda will give you a heart attack," he said.

That's something the researchers agree with, by the way. But they do theorize that drinking soda every day could be a "marker" of a lifestyle that is generally unhealthy. That someone who is drinking that much soda is also likely to be the person who orders the extra-large burger, a super-sized order of fries and a cherry pie for lunch.

11:46 AM ET | 07-25-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Canadian City Tells Doctors to Clean Up Writing

You would think that people who spent so much money -- not to mention years of their lives -- studying to become doctors would pay attention to something as simple as their handwriting. But, alas no, doctors are often described as having handwriting that would take an Egyptologist to decipher. (Personally, I think having really bad penmanship is part of the whole mystique that doctors want to cultivate.)

But it's not really a joking matter. The Globe and Mail of Toronto reports that the "Winnipeg Regional Health Authority has launched a campaign to stamp out hastily scrawled prescriptions after an audit revealed a third of the orders issued in its hospitals could have compromised patient safety, either because they were illegible or contained banned abbreviations."

Confusing abbreviations were the worst offenders. Also, as the Globe writes, even the names of drugs, which are often similar, "can be confused by a pharmacist struggling to read an illegible squiggle or an unclear abbreviation, often with disastrous results."

Eventually doctors will move to electronic records and prescriptions, which have been shown to drastically reduce legibility problems.

We'll be back on Monday morning. If you see anything interesting, drop us a line at newsblog@npr.org.

5:23 PM ET | 07-20-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

America: Once We Were Giants, Now We're Just Short

You know, I thought we were all looking relatively shorter these days.

Research shows that, basically, the world is getting taller ... and we're not. The Associated Press reports Americans, formerly the tallest people, reached a height plateau just after World War II and started falling behind the rest of the world.

And don't dismiss that height advantage as a tall tale. Many economists say it indicates a country's well-being.

It's not that being tall actually makes you smarter, richer or healthier. It's that the same things that make you tall -- a nutritious diet, good prenatal care and a healthy childhood -- also benefit you in those other ways. ... New research suggests that America's diet and its expensive, inequitable healthcare system may be the problem.

Some conservatives aren't impressed with that argument. Perry Eidelbus of the Eidelblog called the AP story "propaganda" promoting socialized healthcare.

Regardless of the political argument, researchers have put together some interesting statistics. For instance, people from rural areas like the Midwest are, on average, 1.75 inches taller than people who live in big cities like New York. (This could be why the great basketball movie Hoosiers is about players from Indiana, not Brooklyn.)

6:24 PM ET | 07-16-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Driving and Text Messaging: A Deadly Combination?

Many young people seem to love text messaging -- anywhere, anytime. But there's growing concern that "anywhere, anytime" could lead to some serious, if not deadly, consequences.

Police say text messaging could have played a role in a crash in June near Rochester, N.Y., that killed five recent high school graduates. The Buffalo News reports that records show that seconds before the crash, the driver's cell phone received a text message, and the sender received a response.

Police don't know if driver Bailey Goodman was the one who responded to the text message. They say driver inexperience, a dangerous passing maneuver and speed were factors in the crash.

I got a taste of how pervasive the text-messaging phenomenon is on Saturday as I stood in line to buy groceries. The young man who was bagging the purchases was only using one hand -- and with the other, he was furiously text messaging on his cell phone.

When it was my turn, I asked him to put away the phone and focus on my groceries. He mumbled "OK" and stowed his phone, but I noticed that he pulled it out again as soon as I walked away.

Obviously, that kind of multitasking would become serious behind the wheel. As Joe Gandelman notes at the Moderate Voice blog about the New York crash, "the most dreaded person on the road is now the person with the cell phone."

Do you agree? Has text messaging made cell phone use while driving too dangerous to be ignored? What about the idea of an age limit on cell phone use while driving?

2:54 PM ET | 07-16-2007 | permalink | comments (14) | e-mail post

Wizard Rock Casts a Spell over Harry Potter Fans

Every night after supper for the past month, my four children and I have curled up on our couch and read aloud another chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The kids are so into the book that they don't want to go and see the movie before I finish.

But there's even another way they can enjoy the trials of Mr. Potter -- "wizard rock." While I remember hearing vaguely about a band whose members dressed like Harry and even named their group after him, I confess I was unaware of just how popular this new musical genre had become until I heard Melody Kramer's piece on Day to Day.

(It was one of those moments when I realized just how old I am. How had I missed this stuff when my house is full of kids who want nothing more in life than to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?)

The trend started with a couple of guys from Boston who called themselves Harry and the Potters, and there are now bands called Draco and the Malfoys, The Whomping Willow and The Remus Lupins. The groups are particularly popular with -- go figure -- librarians.

Cindy B. Haynes, the children's librarian at the Fairfield Public Library in Fairfield, Conn., says she's amazed that more than 100 people have showed up to the library on a Friday night to see Draco and the Malfoys and The Whomping Willow. A typical Friday, she says, draws maybe 10.

If you want to listen to some wizard rock, you can find songs posted along with Melody's piece. You can also check out the MySpace pages of Harry and the Potters (if you're in Seattle, you can catch them tonight at the main public library) and Draco and the Malfoys.

This leads me, of course, to come up with ideas for other band names inspired by literary figures ... Ahab and the White Whales ... Hawkeye and the Mohicans ... The Catch-22's ... The possibilities are endless.

4:08 PM ET | 07-13-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

FDA: Little Evidence Tomatoes Help Stop Cancer

Damn. It seems that all the "cancer-preventing" ketchup I've doused my food with during the past year may have been for naught.

Researchers at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in College Park, Md., wrote in an article published online at the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that there is no credible evidence that tomatoes and lycopene (the pigment that gives tomatoes that bright red color) cuts the risk of lung, colorectal, breast, cervical or uterine cancers. They did say there is "very limited evidence" that tomatoes can reduce the risk of prostate, ovarian, gastric and pancreatic cancer.

The MedPage Today site notes that the FDA's explanation of its position on tomatoes comes 18 months "after the agency refused a request from food companies to allow them to make unfettered claims that both fresh and cooked tomatoes have anti-malignancy properties, and that lycopene, the anti-oxidant in the fruit, is responsible."

ABC News reports that Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said the report only reaffirms what scientists have already learned.

"There is no silver bullet in food. Dietary pattern influences health very powerfully. But that power does not tend to reside in a single food, and certainly not in a single nutrient. Lycopene joins the ranks of vitamin C, beta carotene, and vitamin E in this regard."

But there is that one ray of hope. In an editorial accompanying the report, Dr. Edward Giovannucci of the Harvard School of Public Health writes, "Although it may be premature to espouse increased consumption of tomato sauce or lycopene for prostate cancer prevention, this area of research remains promising."

OK, so maybe I'll still put ketchup on everything.

4:10 PM ET | 07-12-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Could Merit Pay Lead Teachers to Game the System?

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich -- speaking in a commentary about the No Child Left Behind act on Marketplace Wednesday -- said teachers' unions are going to have to accept a merit-pay system if they want higher salaries.

"Great teachers should be generously rewarded. Lousy ones should be sacked," he said.

The argument makes sense to a lot of people. But, interestingly enough, before I heard Reich I had just finished reading a rather compelling deconstruction of the merit-pay system over on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish.

The posting came from a reader who claimed to have been a public school teacher for eight years, teaching in the barrio in San Diego and in southeast Washington, D.C. The reader said experience in a school that had a merit-pay system convinced him or her that the idea as it is now practiced is a mistake.

Basically, teachers game the system to assure a good showing and, thus, more money, the reader wrote.

... experienced teachers would fight to get the higher proficiency classes leaving the lower classes for the inexperienced or rookie teachers. The lower performing classes tended to also be the discipline problems and therefore many young teachers simply would get frustrated and leave the profession.

So students who needed to work with the most experienced teachers instead ended up with the least experienced.

The reader wrote that it would make more sense for a merit-pay system to be based on improvements in each class instead of the test-score targets primarily used now. What do you think? I'd especially love to hear from teachers who have worked under a merit-pay system or who support the introduction of one in their schools.

12:20 PM ET | 07-12-2007 | permalink | comments (21) | e-mail post

UN Report Shows Canadians Smoke a Lot of Dope

This statistic may actually explain a lot about Canada.

The CBC reports that the United Nations, which has regularly ranked Canada No. 1 on its Human Development Index, has put the country near the top of another list. It appears that Canadians smoke marijuana at four times the world average. That makes Canada the most stoned ... er, I mean, leader of the industrialized world in cannabis consumption.

Only four other nations were higher (if you'll pardon the pun): Papua New Guinea, Micronesia, Zambia and Ghana.

And the study has led this Canadian/American to a jarring realization -- Canadians smoke more dope than Jamaicans, contrary to stereotype.

Dude!

5:20 PM ET | 07-10-2007 | permalink | comments (10) | e-mail post

Some Hope Saturday Will Roll Them Lucky Sevens

Oh, but we are a superstitious species. Saturday is, of course, 7/7/07. And all those sevens together are just too much for people to pass up.

Morning Edition reports that marketers are calling it the "luckiest day of the century."

Taco Bell is holding a contest called "7 Layers of Love." The winner will propose to his sweetheart on a virtual sign broadcast during a Major League Baseball game.

Wal-Mart's contest is called "Lucky in Love." The seven winning couples will win a $5,000 Wal-Mart gift bag and a free wedding ceremony. Of course, the winners do have to get married at a Wal-Mart store.

But Americans don't have a monopoly on numerology. Just two examples: Despite the current instability in Lebanon, "lucky 777" wedding fever is sweeping that country, and they're lining up at the altar in Australia, too.

We'll be back on Monday. Remember, if you see something interesting that you would like to share with other readers, send it to us at newsblog@npr.org.

5:23 PM ET | 07- 6-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Please Pass Me a Helping of T-Rex Noodle Soup

I understand that people can make mistakes. But do dinosaur and dragon taste the same?

The Associated Press reports that villagers in central China dug up a ton -- that's right, a ton -- of dinosaur bones and boiled them in soup or ground them into powders for traditional medicines, thinking they were dragon bones with healing powers.

The calcium-rich bones were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps. Other times they were ground up and made into a paste that was applied directly to fractures and other injuries, he said.

The practice had been going on for at least two decades, he said.

Maybe they got the kids to eat it by saying it tasted just like chicken.

Once the villagers discovered that the bones were not, in fact, from dragons, they donated some 440 pounds of fossils to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

It's kinda cool to still believe in dragons in the 21st century. There's no word if the knowledge the bones were from dinosaurs has extinguished that belief.

5:04 PM ET | 07- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Va. Theme Park Wins Site's Award for Best in World

If you're planning to head to a theme park for fun and fireworks on the Fourth of July, you might want to check this out.

ThemeParkInsider.com, which covers the theme park industry (and has often served to bring its problems to light) has announced the winners of its annual awards. Busch Gardens Europe in Williamsburg, Va., took the top prize as the best theme park in the world for the second year in a row.

The awards are decided by the site's more than 12,000 registered users. Other winners include the Mystery Mine roller coaster at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., as the year's best new attraction; Disney's Polynesian Resort at Walt Disney World as the world's best theme park hotel; and, for the fifth consecutive year, Mythos Restaurant at Universal's Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Fla., as the world's best theme park restaurant.

Hmmm. I like Busch Gardens, but I'm partial to Sea World in Orlando. I also like the restaurant there, the Sharks Underwater Grill. How about your picks?

We're taking Wednesday off to enjoy the Fourth. We'll be back as usual on Thursday.

5:11 PM ET | 07- 3-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Even Eating 'Athletes' Can Be Sidelined by Injuries

Because July 4 this year falls on a Wednesday -- a slow sports day -- all eyes will turn to a different kind of athletic event: what's been called the annual Super Bowl of eating competitions, the Nathan's Famous July 4th International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

There is much talk in competitive eating circles about the reported injury of Takeru Kobayashi, the six-time Nathan's champion. Kobayashi says he has been slowed down by arthritis in his jaw, supposedly brought on by opening his mouth so wide to stuff in all that food.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that there's suspicion that he's faking it, trying to gain an edge on his main rival, San Jose's Joey Chestnut, who recently swallowed Kobayashi's world record by eating 59 1/2 frankfurters and buns. (Kobayashi denies he's faking.)

The International Federation of Competitive Eating's site says Kobayashi is (I can't believe I'm writing this about a guy who eats hot dogs) "day to day." And speaking of Day to Day, the show plans to air an interview on the Fourth with Jason Fagone, the author of Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream. Fagone will talk about the injuries common to the sport.

I can think of a few, but this is a family blog, so I won't mention them. But I think the fact that I am actually writing about injuries suffered by "competitive eaters" is a sign of the coming apocalypse. (As long as it doesn't come before Wednesday afternoon, so we can see if Kobayashi competes after weighing in today.)

(Tom Update: Joey Chestnut seized the "Super Bowl of Eating Competition" - the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest - title from Kobayashi today, who did compete. Chestnut ate a world record 66 hotdogs in 12 minutes.

2:26 PM ET | 07- 3-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post

Stressed Out? Move Away from the Doughnuts!

This bit of science news made complete sense to me once I heard it. The Washington Post reports that researchers -- using mice as subjects (because they are so much like humans inside their furry little bodies) -- have discovered that living a high-stress lifestyle, accompanied by a junk-food diet, is one sure way to pack on the pounds.

"There is a lot of uncontrollable stress right now in our societies. There's also a lot of inexpensive high-fat food," said Mary F. Dallman of the University of California at San Francisco, who co-wrote a commentary accompanying the research. "This could help explain the obesity epidemic."

Well, duh! They could have just come and asked me about this. After the birth of every child... every time my wife goes on a monthlong research trip and I have to handle the whole kit and kaboodle... while watching the Red Sox play the Yankees in September... I EAT. And I don't eat healthily. I'm hurried and hassled and flummoxed and I grab the Oreos and eat the entire pack. Or make multiple trips to McDonald's.

The researchers say a nasty little substance triggers all this -- neuropeptide Y. But they also found a way to block its effect on mice "even if they were stressed and ate a high-fat diet -- and could shrink fat deposits by 40 percent to 50 percent within two weeks." I sense a new diet pill coming soon.

Maybe yoga or a little mediation and exercise might be better, eh.

12:36 PM ET | 07- 2-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Journalists Get Goofy over the iPhone

While we journalists are a skeptical lot most of the time, we've totally lost it, it seems, over the iPhone. The media coverage of iPhone has seemed like a tsunami. And NPR wasn't immune from it.

In fact, judging by the coverage on NPR alone, you would have thought someone had found a cure for cancer -- not created an overpriced piece of technology. (I counted at least 14 pieces in the last two weeks in our search engine.) There was a review for Morning Edition last week by David Pogue of The New York Times (who called it "flawed, but absolutely beautiful"), along with stories about the business, marketing, cultural impact, hype and humor of the iPhone.

An analyst quoted in the Financial Times points out that journalists started by giving Apple chief Steve Jobs a pass when he announced the iPhone several months ago: "If the chief executive of Nokia had stood up and said he was launching a phone that was big and heavy, had no keyboard, was only 2G and not available for six months, he would have been crucified," says Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight. "It is unique that Apple have been able to get away with that."

But, in the end, who cares about what journalists have to say about the phone's features and how it works? As Neil McIntosh, the blog guru at The Guardian, says on his personal blog, Complete Tosh, "Few iPhone buyers will be making a rational judgment on feature set when they buy one - brand, design and wow factor come first."

In other words, no one gives a Fig Newton if the thing even works right now, they just GOTTA HAVE ONE. (See this Opus cartoon for an example of what I mean.)

According to Marketplace Morning Report, Apple sold just over half a million iPhones over the weekend. One person apparently bought one for $12,000 online. (The phones cost $500 or $600 in stores.)

Personally, I'll stick with my regular old cell phone for a while. I'll pay $600 for an iPhone when it can also do my laundry. What about you folks? If you have one, what is it like? (Morning Edition says it's getting mixed reviews.) If you want one but don't have one, how much would you be willing to pay?

11:56 AM ET | 07- 2-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Cats First Domesticated People in the Near East

Our last piece of the week comes to us from the journal Science.

Research now indicates that the common cat (well, humans think they're common -- we all know what cats think) first became domesticated in the Near (or Middle) East. Meanwhile, all the cats that nowadays tear up the curtains ... or walk across computer keyboards ... or lie on top of the TV, one paw hanging in front of the screen, have common ancestors that lived in the Near East about 130,000 years ago.

And, as we all already knew, it's really the cats who domesticated people. Well, in a way. The Washington Post's report notes that the study indicates we didn't go looking for cats, they "sort of domesticated themselves," as a researcher put it. They likely came to us because we had a food source -- rodents that ate the grain stored in humans' first agricultural settlements more than 9,000 years ago, NPR's Nell Boyce reports. Fortunately, cats continue to let us hang out with them.

My cat, Alibey, is actually from Turkey -- my wife found her on a Turkish island during a research trip and brought her back to America. I have no plans to tell Alibey all this news about the Near East as the home of all cats. She thinks she's special enough as it is.

If you see anything interesting this weekend, don't forget to drop us a line at newsblog@npr.org.

4:49 PM ET | 06-29-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

What Will We Look Like in a Few Thousand Years?

An interesting piece in The New York Times science section today describes how new findings from decoding human DNA appear to show that we didn't stop evolving long ago, but, in fact, are continuing to evolve right now.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

Some of the changes that look to have evolved more recently include the pale skin of Europeans -- perhaps around 7,000 years ago (a heartbeat in the evolutionary time scale) -- and the emergence of lactose tolerance in adults first in northern Europe about 5,000 years ago, but also possibly only about 3,000 years ago in part of Africa.

Who knows what we'll look like or be able to eat in another few thousand years?

3:43 PM ET | 06-26-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Al Gore's 'Do What I Say, Not What I Do' Message?

When I saw An Inconvenient Truth, I walked out of the theater certain that the end was nigh. How could you not? For the 100-odd minutes of the documentary, former Vice President Al Gore sounded like a prophet who had showed up in Sodom and Gomorrah a couple of weeks before Lot and was trying to give a heads up.

And while the documentary argued persuasively that global warming is a serious problem that humanity needs to take action against, I wasn't so sure how people would react to Gore's "be afraid, be very afraid" approach.

So I was interested to read Slate's Emily Yoffe's take on Gore's message in today's Washington Post. She said she found herself put off by his relentless "gloom and doom." "An essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change," she writes.

She also notes that for Gore, this seems to be a bit of a contradiction:

In his new book, "The Assault on Reason," Gore denounces what he sees as today's politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion -- any such campaign -- is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It's about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

I'd love to get people's thoughts on this one.

3:33 PM ET | 06-25-2007 | permalink | comments (15) | e-mail post

AFI: 'Citizen Kane' Still Greatest Film of All Time

Finally this week, the American Film Institute has released a new version of its top 100 films of all time, and the winner is the same film that topped the list when it first appeared a decade ago -- Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

Which makes sense with all those flashbacks and camera stunts that Welles practically invented. The only thing missing was bullet time.

And I'm sorry, I love The Godfather, but it's no Casablanca. I totally disagree with them switching places at two and three. DeNiro and Brando together couldn't carry Bogie's dinner jacket.

And Hitchcock's 1958 thriller Vertigo going from No. 61 to No. 9? ... What's up with that? How does a film move 50 places in 10 years? It just goes to show how subjective this list is -- it has all the authority of my kids picking their favorite ice cream flavor this week.

There is one change I heartily approve of. Dances with Wolves, which had been No. 75, disappeared from the list. Woo hoo! I still have nightmares about Kevin Costner in buckskin. OK film, but top 100 of all time? Not a chance.

We'll see you on Monday. Don't forget to e-mail us at newsblog@npr.org if you see something interesting.

5:06 PM ET | 06-22-2007 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post

Reports: Blair Plans to Become Catholic

British newspapers report that Tony Blair, the outgoing prime minister, has decided to become a Catholic and will travel this weekend to Rome to meet with the pope, where he may discuss his final preparations, according to sources in London and Rome.

The Guardian reports that Blair's decision could be officially announced either before or after he leaves office next week.

Blair's wife and four children are Catholics, and he has attended Catholic services for almost 30 years. Because of security concerns, Catholic Mass also has been held on Saturday evenings at Chequers, the prime minister's country residence.

Britain has never had a Catholic prime minister. This is almost surely the reason that his conversion has taken so long, The Daily Telegraph reports. Although there is no constitutional bar to the prime minister of the overwhelmingly Anglican nation being Catholic, it could have compromised the role Blair played in choosing Church of England bishops.

Religion also plays a much smaller role in Britain's political life than it does in the U.S. In one famous incident, The Guardian reports, Blair "dropped his wish to end a prime ministerial broadcast on the eve of the Iraq invasion with the words: 'God bless' on the advice of Alastair Campbell [his PR guru], who famously told him 'We don't do God.' "

10:23 AM ET | 06-22-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Potential Breakthrough in Treating Brain Diseases

A team of American doctors and researchers have announced what could be a major breakthrough in the treatment of brain diseases, including Parkinson's disease, using the sometimes controversial gene therapy method. Parkinson's patients in an initial small study saw their mobility increase by as much as 65 percent in some cases after the new treatment, The Daily Telegraph reports.

The study, begun in 2003, was carried out on 11 men and one woman with an average age of 58, who had all had severe Parkinson's for at least five years and for whom current therapies were no longer effective. They were given injections of billions of copies of a genetically altered virus into part of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus ...

Three months after the injections, the patients had shown up to 30 per cent improvement. Several showed improvements of up to 65 per cent.

Scientist Live reports that the research team feels the new gene therapy method is in some ways superior to the deep brain stimulation method now used to treat Parkinson's patients because it's less invasive and would require fewer hospital visits.

The research team, lead by Professor Matthew During of the Weill Medical College at Cornell University, will report its findings in today's edition of the British medical journal The Lancet. The Associated Press reports that the scientists will use these initial positive results to conduct a larger test.

9:26 AM ET | 06-22-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Would Rowling Really Kill Off Her Golden Goose?

July looks like it's shaping up to be national Harry Potter Month.

USA Today gives a preview of the coming Potter onslaught. On July 11, the fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will hit (and I do mean hit) theaters across America. Then 10 days later, at midnight, the last book, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will take over the country's bookstores.

Some Potter fans are calling it a cross-promotional nightmare. Emerson Spartz, who founded the Potter fan site MuggleNet.com eight years ago, when he was 12, says, "I would think that both Warner Bros. and Scholastic would want to spread the buzz out for a longer period of time."

Oh, nonsense, I say. Won't make a philosopher's stone worth of difference. Both the book and the film will generate millions, dare I say, a billion or more dollars, for these companies and for author J.K. Rowling.

And this leads us to the question that has dominated Potter talk ever since Rowling hinted she might kill Harry off. Allow me to offer an answer:

It won't happen. Because (as we saw above) it's all about the Benjamins.

Harry Potter is an economic engine of a ferocious nature. I know this because I have four children who have read the books, seen the movies, bought themed Lego sets, wands, costumes, computer games, etc. They LOVE Potter. But if Potter were not to survive the final book ... I'm not so sure their attention would either.

I can see young and old fans not going to the final two movies if they knew of such an outcome, regardless of how noble it might be. And future fans hesitating. (Would Star Wars be as popular if Luke died in the final episode?) And all the peripheral marketing bits would suffer as well.

Rowling may still risk all by killing Harry (Arthur Conan Doyle tried the same tactic with Sherlock Holmes and it didn't work), but I can't see her walking away from her Golden Goose.

2:48 PM ET | 06-21-2007 | permalink | comments (12) | e-mail post

Scantily-Clad Women Used to Promote Israel

When this idea first came up at the Israeli consulate in New York, somebody should have had enough common sense to put it in the "Just Asking for Trouble" file.

In an effort to boost Israel's image with 18-to-35-year-old men in the United States (or as the site Truthdig put it, "Israel reaches out to horny U.S. men"), the Israeli Foreign Ministry consulate in New York encouraged the laddie's magazine Maxim to create a feature called "Women of the Israeli Defense Forces" for its July issue. The pictorial features four former Israeli women soldiers posing in Tel Aviv while wearing -- not much.

The magazine, which The Guardian reports was first approached with the idea by the consulate, said it's "pleased with the results of our work together."

Women in the Israeli Knesset aren't so pleased.

Zahava Gal On, the leader of the Meretz party, said it was inappropriate for western countries to market themselves using half-naked women. "It is unfortunate that the New York consulate thinks that Israel's relevance will be expressed by the use of naked women who are treated as an object, and not as women of substance who exude achievement and success," she said.

The New York Post featured a picture of one of the young women on its front page with the headline "Piece in the Middle East." The Jerusalem Post notes that if Israel's beaches fill up this summer with "an unusually high number of leering, beer-guzzling young American men," people will know who to blame.

In fact, if all the consulate wanted to do was promote Israel to testosterone-riddled U.S. males, they might have achieved the same result by dressing four beer cans in IDF uniforms.

9:34 AM ET | 06-21-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

State Dept. Takes Advantage of Attention from Jolie Film

There's nothing like appearing in a film with Angelina Jolie to help boost one's self-esteem. Or even an entire government agency's.

The State Department's little-known law enforcement and protection arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, is trying to parlay the depiction of one of its agents in the film "A Mighty Heart" -- about the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl -- into better public recognition of what it does. (Which is probably a good idea -- I had never even heard of it before today.)

The Associated Press reports that diplomatic security officials are focusing in particular on the real-life role of Randall Bennett, who helped capture Pearl's killers. Along with arranging media interviews for Bennett, the State Department has posted a three-part interview with him about the Pearl story.

Some people may question the agency's self-promotional efforts. But as Oscar Wilde once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

5:05 PM ET | 06-20-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

TMZ Taken to Court over Link to Simpson Manuscript

This time, TMZ.com, the well-known Hollywood gossip site that played a key role in the recent Paris Hilton jail saga, might have gone too far.

TMZ itself is reporting that "The legal trustee who is in control of the OJ Simpson manuscript 'If I Did It' is upset at TMZ for publishing a link to the manuscript on its website and running a story with several excerpts."

Last week, a judge awarded the trustee the rights to sell the book and give the proceeds to the family of murder victim Ron Goldman. The judge also ordered the parties involved and their agents not to disseminate the manuscript, TMZ reports. But TMZ somehow obtained what it said was a copy, and it soon appeared on its Web site. Thousands of copies were downloaded, according to court papers filed today.

The lawyer for the trustee has asked that TMZ be held in contempt because it "blatantly and intentionally violated the automatic stay," the documents say. The trustee's lawyer also wants TMZ to show how it obtained the manuscript.

I smell a First Amendment case here. But if I worked at TMZ, I wouldn't be feeling totally comfortable, curled up with my copy of the Constitution. A number of recent legal decisions -- including in the cases of the CIA leak investigation and the investigation of leaked testimony that Barry Bonds gave in the probe of an alleged steroids ring -- show that judges aren't looking too favorably on reporters who say they need to protect their sources when their actions conflict with a court's order.

4:32 PM ET | 06-20-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Vatican Issues 'Ten Commandments' for Drivers

I've often thought that it was only religious intervention preventing me from killing certain fellow motorists every day. Now religion really is intervening: The Vatican has actually issued a "Ten Commandments" for drivers.

They include: Don't drink, don't kill and don't turn left from a right-hand lane. All right, maybe that last one isn't in there, but it should be. The guidelines also note that a car should not be used as an "occasion for sin," including prostitution and dangerous passing. HA! I always knew those guys in muscle cars who swerved by in no-passing zones were going to hell.

The Vatican also advises prayer behind the wheel -- already normal practice for anyone venturing out on the roads in Boston or Washington, D.C., during rush hour.

5:38 PM ET | 06-19-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Underwear for the Ages

It's confession time. I'm not good when it comes to underwear. I tend to, well, keep it around longer than is probably necessary. My wife insists that I've had a couple of T-shirts and briefs in my drawer longer than I've known her -- which is about 15 years. But she's just exaggerating to make a point ... kind of.

So when I saw this piece at The Navy Times, I saw the answer to my problem. The Air Force Special Operations Command is working on creating a new kind of underwear -- including T-shirts, socks and a full-length model (for winter). The idea behind the new garments is that you can wear them for several days and they don't ... how shall I put this? ... stink. "I wore one of the T-shirts for three, four days," Dan Beal, a civilian working on the project, told the paper. "It wasn't like wearing a fresh shirt, but it wasn't bad."

Hmmm. "Wasn't bad" in a military context might be a tad riper than the normal civilian expects, but this project looks promising. The military calls it "austere environment undergarments" -- well, that describes how I live, for sure. And a lot of other guys, too.

But the project ain't cheap. The Navy Times reports Congress has set aside $2.2 million for testing and research since 2005 and the House has requested $2.7 million for 2008.

In a few years, after the military has figured out the proper smell versus weight ratio, the underwear may sell for about $20 a set. You'll be able to get both summer- and winter-wear sets. And then maybe my wife will stop making nasty remarks about my personal habits.

11:31 AM ET | 06-19-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Dealing with Va. School's Total 'No Touching' Policy

It's not too often that stories in the news affect me in a personal way -- as in, address a situation that I'm going to face -- but this one does.

Next year, my son, who just finished sixth grade, will attend Kilmer Middle School, which has a great reputation for scholastic excellence in Fairfax County, Va. Its reputation makes me happy. But today's Washington Post has a story about Kilmer's no-touch policy. And I do mean NO touch. This, I'm not so sure about.

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

The school says that the policy keeps "crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable." The principal says she has seen handshakes used as gang signs. In a very culturally diverse school -- and that's sure true of the area where I live -- kids' families have different ideas of what's appropriate, school officials say.

I understand it's hard to make a policy work for 1,100 kids in such a diverse school, but there's a little too much "Another brick in the wall" mentality here for me. My son always has been physically demonstrative, and my wife and I have encouraged it. I feel odd telling him he can't pat a friend on the back, or poke a friend teasingly, or even shake hands with a new student or adult he's meeting at Kilmer.

I'm also not sure if a total ban is the best way to teach kids to respect other people's cultures. But, then again, I'm not teaching a class with so many kids from different backgrounds. We'll just have to wait and see.

2:52 PM ET | 06-18-2007 | permalink | comments (34) | e-mail post

California GOP Fills Key Post with Canadian, Eh

If you've got a really tough job to fill, and you just can't find the right American, there's only one thing to do -- hire a Canadian. Beauty, eh.

That's just what the California Republican Party has done. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the GOP hired Albertan Christopher Matthews for the post of state deputy political director "through a coveted H-1B visa, a program favored by Silicon Valley tech firms that is under fire for displacing skilled American workers."

Matthews was hired for the job by Michael Kamburowski, an Australian, who is the state GOP's chief operations officer. (Although Kamburowski is a permanent U.S. resident in the process of obtaining American citizenship, he can't vote either.) And with so much in the news these days about immigration, it didn't take long for critics to point out that it makes state GOP officials seem like a bunch of hosers -- saying they couldn't find an American for the job after many Republicans have been critical of businesses that say they need to hire Mexican immigrants because Americans don't want the jobs.

While, on one hand, it would be hypocritical of me to knock the choice -- I am, after all, from the Great White North myself (although I became an American citizen in 2000) -- on the other hand, it does seem a bit of a stretch to hire a Canadian to help run part of a political operation in a state (and country) where he or she can't even vote.

1:14 PM ET | 06-15-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

I Want a Guy Just Like the Guy Who Married Dear Old Mom

Ah, Father's Day. The day when the children who we spend so much time, effort ... and money ... raising, reward us dads with showers of affection and attention. Basically, they let us sleep in on Sunday.

But I've learned that there is a better way to determine how your children feel about you. At least, how your grown-up daughters feel about you. Just take a close look at that guy she's with. (Yeah, I know, you never trusted him from the get-go.)

Women who get along really well with their dads are more likely to seek out guys who look a lot like them. But if that father-daughter connection isn't strong, or if it's a negative one, then they will probably will go after somebody who doesn't look like dad at all. Those findings are from a study that's being published in the July issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Apparently, if you're a good dad, that gets imprinted in your daughters' brains, so they look for a guy who looks like you, thinking, "That old guy did a good job with kids, maybe this guy will, too." But that's about as far as it goes, say the researchers.

"If the guy was a carbon copy of your dad, that would be creepy ... If somebody feels too much like family, you can't see them in a romantic way," explains [Lynda Boothroyd, co-author of the study and psychologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom]. "But a certain degree of familiarity, combined with (the mate) being different in other respects, is actually very, very attractive."

9:29 AM ET | 06-15-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post

A Flip of the Coin for Laura Bush

First lady Laura Bush

Volker Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images

Unlike the old days of our Mixed Signals blog, it's not my bailiwick to write about stuff that happens in-house here at NPR. But this story is so delicious, my boss gave me permission to pass it along.

NPR, like most media outlets, can be a pretty competitive place. We have a lot of good shows and good journalists here, and often they want to work on the same story when a great one comes along. This happened Wednesday when we learned that we could have an interview with first lady Laura Bush. Both of our flagship shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, wanted it.

Well, there were senior management meetings, surveys on audience ratings and demographics were consulted, negotiations between shows lasted into the wee small hours ...

OK, I just made that up.

Actually, it was a coin flip. Chris Turpin, executive producer of All Things Considered, called tails, and thus was another great moment in NPR journalism decided. (The show plans to talk to her sometime next week.)

You oughta see how we pick who gets to go work in Baghdad ...

12:26 PM ET | 06-14-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

And Now, a Man Dressed in a Crocodile Suit

OK, I know that TV naturalists are always trying do something, well, dangerous to get ratings. (I can just hear the producers saying, "Mr. Corwin, can you pick up that extremely deadly snake in your bare hands one more time?")

But getting dressed up as a crocodile in a look-a-like suit smeared with hippo dung (the latest in croc fashion, I guess) to get close to an almost 20-foot example of the real McCoy?

That's what zoologist Brady Barr did for a TV special for National Geographic, The Daily Telegraph reports. "People may think I'm mad," he says, "but this is the only way I can get close to the creatures without scaring them. Trouble is, I'm more scared than the crocs."

Well, I would hope so. Barr, who lives near Washington, D.C., says he hates being compared to the late Steve Irwin, also known for his crocodiling ways. But one has to note that when you're crawling into a den of wild crocs in Africa to attach a monitoring device to one of their tails, you risk becoming the latest naturalist to die on the job. (The link to The Daily Telegraph above includes a short video of Barr sneaking up on the crocodiles. Rather him than me.)

9:25 AM ET | 06-14-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

The Amazing Disappearing Watch Trick

Watch the exculpatory watch video.

YouTube

OK, I'm back in the blogging saddle today after my day in court, where I went as a witness against the guy who took my wife's purse out of our car about a month ago. Many thanks to JJ Sutherland for manning the fort while I was gone. I can't blog about the court stuff yet, but as I was pondering my own situation Wednesday, I saw this story about what looked like a fellow victim of crime: President Bush.

Those cheering crowds that greeted him in Albania last week appeared to be after more than his smiles and waves. A clip of an Albanian TV news segment, appearing on YouTube, seemed to show that, as Bush pressed the flesh, a hand grabbed his arm and stole his wristwatch.

The wristwatch is clearly visible on Bush's arm as the segment starts, but then at about 56 seconds into the video, a hand grabs Bush's arm and the watch disappears.

But NBC offered a video, filmed by its own crew in Albania (and also available on YouTube), that shows Bush removing the $50 Timex and putting it in his pocket. (Bush has even shown it to photographers since then to prove he still has it, calling the speculation "ludicrous.")

The reputation of the people of Albania, it would appear, is safe.

9:19 AM ET | 06-14-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

A Pearl Among Swine

Watch Paul Potts Perform

YouTube

OK, maybe I've been away for too long, and ordinarily my cynicism is worn on my sleeve, but I find this absolutely amazing. On "Britain's Got Talent," a spinoff of "America's Got Talent," they have discovered something truly remarkable. Which is surprising in a show judged by Simon Cowell of "American Idol" and featuring, according to the the Scottish newspaper The Daily Record:

"A piano-playing pig, a monkey puppet miming to Michael Jackson and a flaming knife-wielding Scot dressed as a Native American..."

It's the kind of show that seems to be one more sure sign of the apocalypse. As Cowell himself says in the show, "It says a lot about the world today when I'm enjoying a monkey puppet more than Michael Jackson."

But it also says a lot about the world when you see a pudgy Welsh cell phone salesman with bad teeth open his mouth and out comes something magical and moving. Leave all prejudgment at the door.

- JJ Sutherland

5:02 PM ET | 06-13-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' a la Monty Python

Now and then, you find something online that just begs to be seen by a wider audience.

The subject of this YouTube video is a sobering one: "enhanced interrogation techniques." But it's sent up in a way that shows how silly a theme can become when it's repeated again and again. (Hat tip to my buddy Deborah Bloom for sending this my way.)

Once you've finished annoying that guy in the cubicle next to you with your laughing, you can find a more serious take on the subject in a 2005 ABC News story that looked at the methods reportedly used by the CIA.

3:12 PM ET | 06-12-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

Last Curtain Call: Grey's Star Not Coming Back

As we wrap things up for the week, we note that actor Isaiah Washington has made his final curtain call on ABC's very popular "Grey's Anatomy."

TV Guide broke the story Thursday night that Washington would not be asked back for the show's next season.

Washington made headlines several months ago when he used an anti-gay slur while denying to the media that he had used the word to insult a fellow cast member. Washington later apologized and said he was going to seek counseling.

Following the announcement that he wouldn't return, Washington issued a statement saying he was "mad as hell and not going to take it any more" -- the famous line uttered by Peter Finch's character in the award-winning film "Network."

Personally, I think if Washington had followed the advice of fellow cast member Katherine Heigl, he might have been OK. "He just needs to stop talking," she told Access Hollywood at one point.

We'll be back on Monday. Remember, if you see anything interesting, e-mail us at newsblog@npr.org.

5:14 PM ET | 06- 8-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Crime Novelist Fights Online Stalker in Court

The Internet can be a scary place sometimes. Ask the 18-year-old pole vaulter from California who has become an Internet celebrity based on one picture of her at a meet. Or people who have had their identities stolen. It's even scary for well-known people like crime novelist Patricia Cornwell.

The Boston Globe reports that her problem started in 2000 when Cornwell, then living in Richmond, Va., sued Leslie R. Sachs, who was putting stickers on his own books that hinted Cornwell copied his idea and plot. When a judge told him to remove the stickers, he "started a campaign of attacks, using various websites, against Cornwell and those he accuses of conspiring with her against him, including 'the infamous rogue judge' ... his own former lawyer, the Bush administration, the FBI, the media, unidentified thugs, US corporations, and the legal profession."

This week, another judge ordered Sachs to stop his online attacks.

Sachs, who is now in Europe, said in an e-mail to the Globe, "Even if you have to write phoney [sic] and biased articles to keep your job ... even if you feel you must kiss up to USA corporate gangsters to remain employed -- why are you taking such sadistic and Heinrich-Himmler-like pleasure in abusing a victim of those criminals?" Cornwell, who now lives in Massachusetts with her wife, is trying to get Internet service providers and search engines to help her counteract Sachs' attacks.

Cornwell's case is particularly unnerving because it shows how someone can use the Internet to defame a person and yet remain beyond the reach of authorities.

3:18 PM ET | 06- 7-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Creationist Museum Director Sued by Australian Group

Last week, Kenneth Ham launched a $27 million museum designed to highlight the views of creationists. Now, he's being sued in Australia by the evangelical organization he helped set up and that helped him enter the U.S. evangelical movement two decades ago.

The Australian reports that the conflict revolves around a three-year power struggle between the Brisbane-based Creation Ministries International and Ham's U.S.-based group, Answers in Genesis -- in particular, over the Aussie organization's production of a creationist magazine that has 35,000 U.S. subscribers.

A report prepared for the Australian group by former New South Wales chief magistrate Clarrie Briese accuses the American organization of "unbiblical/unethical/unlawful behaviour" toward the Australian ministry, which Briese says was intended to force the Australian organization into bankruptcy.

Bartholomew's Notes on Religion blog offers some notes on the conflict. Ham and his organization have made no public comments on the lawsuit.

(Tom Update from Friday: Sometimes bad luck takes on a life of its own. Ken Ham's creationist museum has removed a short-film exhibit about Adam and Eve because the guy playing Adam has a rather risque past. The Associated Press reports that Eric Linden said he only playing a role.

"For the Creation Museum, I did what I did as an actor. It doesn't necessarily mean I believe in evolution or a believe in creation," Linden said. "I'm hired to get a point across. On the flip side, if I was hired to play a murderer, that doesn't mean I'd go out and kill somebody. It's make-believe."

Ironically enough, many of Ham's critics have made the same remark about his entire museum.)

12:17 PM ET | 06- 7-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

In 1492 ... the Polynesians Had Already Gotten Here?

OK, so we know that the Vikings were here before Columbus. And some believe the Chinese were here before Columbus. And now, thanks to some leftover chicken bones, researchers think the Polynesians were here before him, too.

LiveScience reports that chicken bones dating back to about a century before Columbus came to America were discovered at an archaeological site called El Arenal on the southern coast of Chile. Researchers believe the bones match a kind of chicken found in the Polynesian islands in the South Pacific.

"Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own - they had to be taken by humans," said anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Polynesia was first settled by sailors from mainland Southeast Asia about 3,000 years ago. But researchers aren't really sure which island the New World explorers might have come from -- the DNA sequence found in the chickens matches that of chickens found on several islands.

5:44 PM ET | 06- 6-2007 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

How Our Political Brain Works

It would seem that our brains don't let a pesky thing like reason get in the way of a partisan political belief.

With presidential debates in full swing, The Frontal Cortex, a blog run by Jonah Lehrer (an editor-at-large for Seed Magazine), looks at a study about the way our brains deal with the contradictions of our favorite politicians.

The study led by Drew Westen of Emory University (an occasional commentator on All Things Considered), first released as a paper in January 2006, used MRI technology to image the brains of voters during the run-up to the 2004 election. Researchers showed each of the participants a statement made by either George Bush or John Kerry, followed by a contradictory statement or action they had made.

Then, they watched the way the voters' brains reacted. While a Bush supporter was typically quick to believe that Kerry would contradict himself, when confronted by a similar action by Bush, the brain would try and find a way around this contradiction. Reason was abandoned, and it was the emotional circuits in the brain that lit up. (Kerry supporters did the same for him.) Leher notes:

The voters were literally censoring their cognitive dissonance. Instead of using their reasoning faculties to logically analyze the facts, they use reason to buttress their opinions. Once they arrived at a favorable (and irrational) interpretation of the evidence - it supported their prior convictions - they experienced a subtle rush of pleasurable emotion, as their internal reward circuits were activated. Self-delusion felt good.

Great. Not only do we delude ourselves about politics, we actually enjoy doing it.

If you're interested, you can read more in Westen's new book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

11:39 AM ET | 06- 6-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

The Week's Last Call

OK, folks, time for last call. We'll be back on Monday. If you see anything interesting over the weekend, shoot me an e-mail at newsblog@npr.org.

And now, my last tidbit for the week.

Seems that Lindsay Lohan, et al., may have pushed the envelope (marked "underage drinking binge") too far. I mean, didn't you find it interesting that so many underage celebrities were regularly stumbling drunk as sailors on shore leave from all these trendy Hollywood clubs?

But now Lohan's most recent adventure in Boozeville has finally forced the state to do something about the problem. The Los Angeles Times reports that this "wave" of reports of underage drinking has prodded the California Alcohol Beverage Control Board to increase undercover surveillance of these clubs. As a result, the board wants to close down Mood, one of the hottest of the Hollywood clubs, for 15 days for serving alcohol to minors.

A friend of the bar owner said Mood is being "unfairly targeted" and that everybody does it. Well, as they like to say on cop shows ... Tell it to the judge.

4:56 PM ET | 06- 1-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Blogging Leads Doctor to Make Malpractice Settlement

The Boston Globe called it "a Perry Mason moment updated for the Internet age."

It came during a malpractice case in a Boston courtroom, when well-known pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman made the dramatic confession that he was the blogger known as Flea.

Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day. In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

The next morning, May 15, Lindeman agreed to what local experts called "a substantial settlement" with the parents of a 12-year-old boy who had died of complications from diabetes. Otherwise, now that Lindeman's secret was out, the plaintiffs' lawyer could let the jury know what he had said about them and the judicial process.

Elizabeth N. Mulvey, the plaintiffs' lawyer who asked the question that prompted Lindeman's confession, said what shocked her about his blog, drfleablog, was that so many other bloggers who knew little or nothing about the case came to Flea's defense. Other defense lawyers say they always check online for things their clients may have written, but it's hard to do when they blog under assumed names.

As for the drfleablog, well, as of this morning it is completely empty. But as my grandfather would say, that's closing the barn door after the horse has already run away.

11:46 AM ET | 05-31-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Have Notebook, Will Travel

Remember the 16-year-old from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who decided one day that he would just skip a few classes at his prep school and go to Iraq so he could see firsthand what was happening there? Well, Farris Hassan is now 17, and he has a new travel itinerary.

The Miami Herald's Cuban Colada blog reports that Farris wants to go to Cuba so he can write about what it's like to live as a "loser" in Fidel Castro's Cuba.

In a pitch e-mailed to several news organizations, Farris says he'd spend five to seven weeks in Cuba writing about dissidents, peasants, prostitutes, government workers and "passive city folk and professionals." He just asks that a real live news organization, like The Miami Herald for example, promise to run his stories, so that he can get around that pesky U.S. rule that prohibits travel to Cuba - but exempts journalists.

Farris has said that this time he will tell his parents that he's going. That's good. But a word of caution. Letting the Castro regime know that you're going to write about the "losers" of its culture might not be the smartest way to finagle your way into the country. Just a thought.

So far, no media outlet has taken Farris up on his offer.

8:56 AM ET | 05-30-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Is Being Good Based on Biology?

Being a good person isn't just the right thing to do -- it's a really smart survival tactic honed over millions of years of evolution that rewards you by making you feel good.

That's the finding of a team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health, and I can see this one is going to cause a little heat along with any light it generates. The article in The Washington Post notes that this discovery, and several others, suggest that altruism is not a sign of a "superior moral faculty" but is "basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable."

I predict that some theologians, ministers and philosophers might have a few problems accepting this scientific research, based on previous reactions to similar research.

Evolutionary biologists have been saying for years that altruism developed as a survival technique. (Read Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal" for a better understanding.) But this new research goes beyond the mere reciprocal approach of evolution to show that when we do something nice for someone, a part of our brain is activated that makes us feel good. So not only do we get to survive longer, we can feel good while we're doing it.

11:36 AM ET | 05-29-2007 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post

Adieu Until Tuesday

It's the beginning of Memorial Day weekend, and work is wrapping up around here. Just wanted to let you know that we'll be back Tuesday morning.

But before I go, I wanted to pass along this story and a warning to my many British friends: it's time to shape up -- or else. The Guardian reports that the principal of Wycliffe Hall (one of the leading Anglican theological training colleges) in Oxford, England, thinks 95 percent of all Brits are going straight to hell. Which basically means that outside the royal family and Anglican clergy, the entire country is doomed. (And when I think about some of the things the royals have done ... maybe only the queen is safe.)

Richard Turnbull made the comments in a speech last October to an evangelical group within the Church of England. They were first made public Wednesday on the Thinking Anglicans liberal Web site.

4:37 PM ET | 05-25-2007 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

The Debunking Of The Five-Second Rule

It never ceases to amaze me how science consistently breaks through the barriers of ignorance that we have erected around our most sacred beliefs ... like the five-second rule. You know, the one that says if you drop a piece of food on the floor, you have up to five seconds to pick it up and pop it in your mouth. After that -- to the trash! Every grade school kid knows this rule, for heaven's sake.

A complete myth! Totally untrue! Mere superstition!

A crack team of student researchers at Connecticut College vigorously tested the five-second rule, leaving both wet and dry food on the floor for various lengths of time. And zounds if they didn't discover that you can leave that gooey bit of macaroni and cheese or that apple slice on the floor for up to 30 seconds! Thirty seconds!

And hard food, well, it's unbelievable. Skittles, for instance, can be left for about (dare I write this) FIVE MINUTES before any sign of bacteria is present. (I have Skittles that have been in the back of my minivan for five years -- that's probably too long.)

When I told my colleagues about these findings, they had immediate questions. What about different kinds of floors? What about that really cheap outdoor carpeting that some restaurants use? What about spilled beer? There is immediate need for more research. I have no doubts that a federal grant could be found that would provide all needed funding.

4:03 PM ET | 05-22-2007 | permalink | comments (15) | e-mail post

Jack Bauer ... er, Kiefer Sutherland's Family Tree

So yet another season of "24" ends on a dramatic note. Generally, the buzz about the last episode is that it saved an otherwise ho-hum season. (Here's a synopsis of the last show -- don't read it if you've TiVoed the episode and want to watch it first.)

Personally, if the superb Kiefer Sutherland weren't playing Jack Bauer, I doubt I would pay attention to the show. His acting talent is not surprising, however, considering his family lineage. His dad, Donald, is another well-known TV and movie actor and his mother, Shirley Douglas, is one of Canada's best stage actors. But the relative I admire the most had no acting experience: his grandfather, Tommy Douglas.

In a nationwide contest held in November 2004 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in which 1.2 million people voted, Douglas was named the greatest Canadian who had ever lived. Among other things, he is known as the father of universal health care in Canada.

For me, his finest moment came when he literally stood alone against the entire Canadian political establishment during the so-called October Crisis of 1970. A Quebecois terrorist group, known as the FLQ, kidnapped two men and killed one of them. Then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared martial law under the War Measures Act and suspended civil liberties.

Only one major Canadian politician refused to support the draconian War Measures Act -- Douglas. As the CBC notes, "The move was devastating to his popularity at the time, but he would be heralded years later for sticking by his principles of civil liberty."

So while the grandson plays a hero, you could say that the grandfather was the real McCoy.

9:33 AM ET | 05-22-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

It's A Dog's Life ... We Should All Be So Lucky

Remember when being a dog meant being a dog? Dogs chased a stick, a cat or the mailman. They peed on fire hydrants. They ate, they slept. They licked their... well, never mind. Pretty basic stuff.

Not anymore. Living a dog's life has taken on a whole new high-maintenance meaning, according to these stories.

The New York Daily News reports that pet owners in the Big Apple are getting (I find it hard to write this) testicular implants for their dogs "that look and feel like the real thing." I'll have to take their word on that.

"We did it so Truman could still walk proudly down the street," says Penny Glazier, a Manhattan restaurateur, of her 8-year-old bullmastiff. "We felt it would be good for him psychologically," she adds.

Apparently, this "replacement" therapy is becoming increasingly popular in New York. No doubt.

After the implants are ready, you and your dog can go for something less, er, surgical. Like pet yoga. NPR reported Friday on yoga classes in Seattle that encourage dog owners to bring their pets to the workouts in order to enhance the human-animal bond.

After a hard workout, there's nothing like a good massage. And Fido can have one of those now, too.

According to this AP story (written by my editor, Erica Ryan, before she came to NPR to labor under my cranky moods and bad spelling), advocates for pet massage say "it can help pets relax, recover more quickly from injury or surgery, improve performance in competition and be more comfortable if they have chronic conditions." In Utah, you have to be able to do human massage before they even let you touch a dog.

Let me be honest here. I love my dog, Reggie. She is the best dog I've ever had. I don't mind spending hours playing or combing out her old fur or having her sleep on my feet at night. But when it comes to a massage, I would actually prefer if she could give one to me, thanks. I think I need it more.

11:19 AM ET | 05-21-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Reopen The Kennedy Files ... Again?

Sigh. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It would be nice if we knew for sure, I suppose. It would make Oliver Stone happy. And it would put the assassination in an entirely different light.

So here we go (deep breath) ...

The Washington Post is reporting that new tests done on the bullets from the batch Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have used when he shot President John F. Kennedy indicate that there (ready for it?) may have been more than one gunman who shot Kennedy.

The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.

While the researchers, who used new scientific methods to test the bullets, were careful to say they don't know if there was a second gunman, they didn't rule out that possibility either. Tobin was largely responsible for the FBI admitting in 2003 that its methods of matching bullets to crime suspects through their lead content was flawed. Tobin now believes the five bullet fragments found after Kennedy was shot need to be reexamined.

3:48 PM ET | 05-18-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Divers Find Treasure Estimated at $500 Million

Sci-Tech Today reports that deep-sea explorers say they have found what could be the richest shipwreck in history. While they aren't sure about the origins of the ship in question, they are sure about its treasure -- an estimated $500 million worth of silver and coins. While the company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, is staying mum about where it was found, court records hint that it may be from a 400-year-old ship off the English coast.

[Odyssey co-chairman Greg Stemm] wouldn't say if the loot was taken from the same wreck site near the English Channel that Odyssey recently petitioned a federal court for permission to salvage.

In seeking exclusive rights to that site, an Odyssey attorney told a federal judge last fall that the company likely had found the remains of a 17th-century merchant vessel that sank with valuable cargo aboard, about 40 miles off the southwestern tip of England. A judge signed an order granting those rights last month.

3:16 PM ET | 05-18-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Victory for Child Care Providers in New York

In a move that could have national ramifications, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer last week signed an executive order giving the right to unionize to New York City's 28,000 home child care providers and thousands more throughout the state.

Tula Connell writes at FireDogLake that this is only the first step for the child care providers.

Lots of people think workers don't join unions because they don't want to. The nation's flawed federal labor laws are a big reason standing in workers' way. But this example illustrates yet another reason why U.S. workers are hampered from easily forming unions. New York's day care workers, like home care workers in California and Illinois, and others across the nation, can't just automatically form unions.

The day care workers, who, on average, are paid less than $19,000 a year and have no pensions, health insurance or paid sick days, first needed a law that gave them an employer -- in this case the state's Office of Children and Family Services -- before they could join a union and negotiate a contract. The New York United Federation of Teachers/AFT (UFT/AFT) will work with the day care workers, and AFSCME's Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) will reach out to the home care workers.

The New York Times reports that New York becomes the seventh state to give home-based child care providers the right to unionize, but Spitzer's approval could give union organizers momentum to target other states.

Not everybody was happy with the development. E.J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, wrote in the New York Post said that "with a stroke of his pen," Spitzer had undermined any effort to control the budget in the state. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the new legislation may result in fewer child care spots -- perhaps as many as 15,000 fewer spots, according to the Times -- because of the added costs to the city.

9:25 AM ET | 05-18-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Birds and Bees Are in Big Trouble

Seriously. West Nile virus has swept through entire bird species, particularly on the Eastern Seaboard. According to one scientific study, more than one-third of all American crows have died. In the Baltimore-Washington area, The Associated Press reports, the death toll is at 90 percent. I'm not the biggest crow fan in the world, but even I was stunned by that number.

Meanwhile, honeybees are disappearing by the millions. Scientists have a name for this: Colony Collapse Disorder, but they don't know what causes it. Insects like bees pollinate one-third of all foods grown in America. But one potential clue exists -- organic bee growers, who do not use pesticides, say they haven't seen colony collapse.

This Morning Edition report from earlier this month looks at some of the causes of colony collapse, including new pathogens, disruptive human communications or even the possibility of a "bee rapture" event.

11:15 AM ET | 05-17-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Somebody Pull That Galaxy Over For Speeding

One of the things I've learned as a parent is not to tell my kids about the future of our solar system -- you know, that the sun will burn out and swallow all the planets in several billion years and all that. When one of your kids is 5 years old, they can translate billions of years into tomorrow morning. Kinda scary.

So I definitely won't tell them that our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy two billion years sooner than expected, according to a report in news@nature.com. Worse, the scientists exploring this future phenomenon using computer simulations say there is a chance Andromeda will steal our sun! Scoundrels! Rapscallions!

Scientists have long known the two galaxies were headed for a crash -- they are headed toward each other at a speed of 120 kilometers a second. (Do you feel like we're moving that fast? No wonder I feel dizzy.) But we are still 2 million light years apart, so we've got eons to get ready. Now they believe there is a chance that humans will still be on the Earth when the two galaxies actually start to mingle with each other. Although in 2 billion years, all humans will look like Ziggy Stardust ... just kidding.

Over a period of half a million years, the two galaxies will pass through each other, with individual stars passing through the gaps (the chances that two stars might collide are very slim). Many of the stars will be gravitationally perturbed by the collision -- some may even be ripped from one Galaxy and take up residence in the other.

The galaxies will brush by each other again in 3.5 billion years, and then, in 5 billion years, turn into a big blob of galaxy, which the scientists have named "Milkomeda."

Milkomeda? Sounds like a 24-hour cable channel about all things bovine.

Still, who knew our galaxy was so troublesome? Meteors that barely miss the Earth. Suns burning out. Now it might be ripped away. You would think if life was going to develop anywhere in the universe, it could have picked a quieter neighborhood.

5:12 PM ET | 05-15-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Papers Tell Different Stories on Wolfowitz

One advantage of the explosion of news on the Internet is that you don't have to rely on only one or two sources to get the entire picture behind a story. Take, for instance, the news this morning that World Bank investigators sent a report to the institution's governing body that was highly critical of the way current bank President Paul Wolfowitz arranged for his girlfriend (who also works at the bank) to get a promotion and a pay increase.

European papers focused largely on the report's most negative aspects. For instance, the Guardian story zeros in on a "four-letter tirade" that Wolfowitz apparently launched when it appeared that his actions would be made public. The quotes used by the Guardian include several references to the "f-bomb," as we say stateside. The article reported that he sounded "more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international leader."

The more conservative Daily Telegraph avoids the colorful language in the Guardian piece, but also focuses on the negative consequences of the investigator's report for Wolfowitz. The German magazine Der Spiegel took a similiar tack.

Then with a click of the mouse, take a look at the same story as told by The Washington Post. While it focuses on the investigator's report in the top two paragraphs, the majority of the article is made up of Wolfowitz's rebuttal of the issues raised by the investigators. The New York Times also covers this angle of the story. Neither American paper mentions the swearing tirade so prominently featured in the Guardian version.

When you read the pieces in the European media, you are left with the impression that Wolfowitz has disgraced the bank and without a doubt deserves to be fired. But when you read the Post piece, you can get the opposite impression -- that the former deputy defense secretary was someone who was just trying to handle a difficult situation in as delicate a manner as he could. The split in newspaper coverage also reflects the split among policy makers about Wolfowitz. Europeans and others want him to go, while the Bush administration and many American politicians want him to stay.

None of the stories is "wrong," but they illustrate how editors can choose a particular angle to emphasize -- normally an angle that reflects local thinking. Thanks to online media, we can now read several takes on a story before we make up our own minds about an issue, rather than having an editor in a single newsroom decide what the story is for us.

12:25 PM ET | 05-15-2007 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Spies Like Us

When I was growing up in the Great White North, one of the things that drove me crazy was hearing people suggest that Canada was always about five years behind whatever they were doing in the U.S. Now that I've been living and working in the U.S. for almost two decades, I'm afraid I can see what people were talking about.

Take these stories from the Toronto Star, one of Canada's main newspapers.

Apparently, more than 14,000 Canadians applied last year to join the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Canada's spy agency. Only 100 were accepted. I guess it's good that so many people applied, but it has been almost six years since the Sept. 11 attacks and all that ... so it seems rather late for a spike in interest. (To its credit, CSIS gets high marks from many in the Muslim Canadian community for improved relations since Sept. 11, and 45 percent of intelligence officers are women. Very Canadian.)

Then again, I did notice that the Star also reported that Canada will start its own no-fly list in June. (Again, one is inclined to point out that, well, it has been six years...) A lawyer says it appears that Canadian airlines have been using the U.S. list. (Shh, don't tell anybody ... Canadians hate to give the U.S. credit for anything that Canada does.)

So I guess this means that Maher Arar, the Canadian who was detained by U.S. officials in New York in 2002 and sent to Syria where he was tortured before his release, won't have to worry. The U.S. has refused to take Arar off its no-fly list, even though a long and expensive Canadian judicial investigation completely cleared him of all terrorist connections. Until he was cleared by the investigation late last year, Arar still had to go through extra security in Canada ... because, his lawyer believes, officials were using that list from the country no Canadian wants to publicly acknowledge borrowing from.

6:09 PM ET | 05-14-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Charges Dropped Against 'Hunger Force' Defendants

Remember Boston's great "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" scare of winter '07? I was living in Boston at the time. I remember the traffic jams that resulted.

Well, today all charges were dropped against the two men who planted the light panels (first thought to be bombs) that were intended to promote the Cartoon Network show. When Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens first appeared in court, they treated the entire process as a joke, which outraged almost everyone in town. They quickly changed their ways, and at their subsequent court appearances they were models of decorum. But before charges were dropped, the men did several dozen hours of community service and issued apologies for their actions.

There was a lot of fallout from the stunt. Turner Broadcasting agreed to pay Boston $2 million to cover the cost of responding to what it thought was a terrorist situation, and the head of Cartoon Network resigned over the controversy. Not such a funny stunt after all.

4:57 PM ET | 05-11-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

A Digital Noah's Ark

It will be called the "Encyclopedia of Life."

The Guardian reports that over the next 10 years researchers will gather "every scrap of information" available on the planet's 1.8 million known species of animals, plants and other organisms. And once scientists and researchers gather this information, it will be available on the Internet entirely for free.

"Bringing this critical mass of information together, and for people to have it at their fingertips wherever they are in the world, will create a fantastic resource for understanding our ecosystems," said Jim Edwards, executive director of the project. "This will be an enormously powerful tool for professional scientists, the general public, educators, school kids, and citizen scientists."

The project has been launched by a consortium including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Field Museum in Chicago and Harvard University. The Natural History Museum in London and Royal Botanic Garden at Kew are to make vast collections of historic records available through the encyclopedia.

The project will also be "open source" -- like Wikipedia, birders, amateur naturalists, school children and others will be able to contribute to the project in a special section. Unlike Wikipedia, however, all the articles in the main section will be reviewed and approved by scientists before they are published.

Although the pages will only be in English, countries like China and India are already investigating ways to translate the articles into their languages.

You will be able to read the Encyclopedia of Life at eol.org.

2:15 PM ET | 05-10-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Could Smaller Companies Help Better Equip Troops?

Ward Carroll's DefenseTech.com blog offers an interesting take on the problems associated with procurement bottlenecks for the military. At a time when these bottlenecks are growing and research dollars are shrinking, there is a new trend: Smaller companies that can develop needed military equipment and move it where it is needed much faster are springing up.

These smaller companies would act as middlemen, especially on smaller projects -- "low hanging fruit" as it is referred to in the blog -- that many believe the Department of Defense procurement system has trouble dealing with. Owners of these smaller companies believe they could produce the needed materials in months rather than years.

Defense experts like Edward "Otto" Pernotto have the potential to make a difference because they understand how to exploit the system in effective ways. Otto recently launched Excalibur R&D, LLC, which he calls a "small business focused on providing rapid, innovative, and collaborative national security solutions."

"We cannot continue to throw money at huge military programs that in many ways are breaking the bank of this country," Otto said during a discussion with DT at the recent Milblogging conference in DC. "We need to do things smarter and quicker."

Carroll admits that individuals like Pernotto may be "tilting at windmills" when working against the huge bureaucracy of the Pentagon and fighting the big companies that eat so much of its budget, but "Those who really care about the heath of America's forces aren't waiting around for the machine to fix itself."

11:27 AM ET | 05-10-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

The Zen of Branding

We all know what brands are -- they surround us. They're on the TV, in ads, on the sides of buildings, on our underwear for heaven's sakes. Authors make millions writing about the importance of them, and companies constantly preach to employees about "protecting the band." (Years ago, I met a guy who traveled the country for Coca-Cola, visiting restaurants to make sure that when someone ordered a Coke, they weren't given a Pepsi or an RC Cola -- "It's all about branding," he told me.)

But seldom have I seen the concept of branding explained as eloquently or usefully as in this posting I found on the "Presentation Zen" site. Written by Garr Reynolds, it argues that real branding is not a logo, but actually the service a company provides.

Organizations, then, should worry less about advertising and spend more effort in making insanely great products and services that are worth talking about. That is, they should show us (prove to us) how great they are rather than just telling us how great they are through expensive media buys, and placing their identity graphics in every conceivable place, including PowerPoint slides.

Reynolds also looks at how the shows featuring Bill O'Reilly on Fox News and Paula Zahn on CNN use logos and branding to accentuate the host and take the focus away from the guest.

3:36 PM ET | 05- 9-2007 | permalink | e-mail post

Mom, Pass My Rattle and the TV Guide

As I was going through the ritual of making sure my water was running, my phone service activated and my electricity turned on, I was asked a question by the woman helping me work my way down the list of new house to-dos: Would you like cable TV?

I paused. In Boston, I had digital cable, On Demand, 3 million channels, you name it. I thought a long five seconds. No, I said, I don't want cable. I don't want TV in my house. On the surface, I did it for my four children, who were turning into zombies despite my efforts to restrict their viewing time.

I wondered if I had made the right decision, and then I saw this Toronto Globe and Mail piece on a University of Washington study that shows children as young as 3 months are watching TV. (No word on if they can reach the phone to vote for their favorite "American Idol" contestant.) By the time they are 2, 90 percent of them are watching "Teletubbies," or "Sesame Street" or "Dora the Explorer." Now, a U.S. company wants to launch a 24-hour channel for babies: BabyFirstTV.

On the Internet, no one can hear you scream.

Then a few hours ago, I saw this piece on CBS: 14-year-olds who watch three or more hours of TV a day are "far more likely to have a negative attitude toward school, skip homework and to have trouble paying attention than kids who watch one hour or less a day. In turn, kids in that group are less likely to go to college." So I'm feeling much better about my decision now.

Want to know the real reason I got rid of TV? For me. I was one of those parents who just turned on the darn thing whenever I was busy and the kids were trying to get my attention. Only they got hooked, and whenever I did want to do something, they just wanted to watch TV. Now, we'll all have to make different decisions about how to use our time.

3:03 PM ET | 05- 8-2007 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

You Want Me to Take Off My Clothes and Do What?

Imagine asking someone to take off his or her clothes ... and not being arrested, sued or slapped. Now imagine convincing 20,000 people to take off their clothes in a public square for the sake of art.

Well, American artist Spencer Tunick, who has made a career out of asking large groups of people around the world to disrobe, would have been happy if only 7,000 people had come. But the final number of people who came to Mexico City's main square, the Zocalo, surprised even him. You can find several of the pictures he took here at the Los Angeles Times (no naughty bits, as Monty Python would say, or it's just too far away to see).

"Nudity is part of human life," said Liliana Velasco, 30, an anthropologist. "Being naked is being in the moment, and being naked in the Zocalo gives everyone a chance to celebrate our culture." ...

A few shouted for Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera to join them. Tunick had promised while negotiating for city permission that he would not include the cathedral in any of the photographs.

I find myself left with the same overwhelming question, however, that I've had when Tunick has done this in the past. Where the heck does everybody put their clothes while they are standing around naked? Do people just come to the photo shoot naked? I mean, is there a big pile of stuff? Imagine trying to find your shoes in that jumble. I only have six people in my house and I struggle each morning to find mine.

9:15 AM ET | 05- 7-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl ...

... but the Beatles were wrong, she doesn't change much day to day. And that may be part of the reason why Queen Elizabeth is not attracting the big crowds she did in her first few trips to the United States. (Witness the comments in NBC journalist Jim Long's postings on Twitter). I think this new lack of interest can be chalked up to overexposure in the 24/7 media universe - although, as this article from the Hampton Roads Daily Press points out, she may be more popular in the U.S. than in her native England.

H.R.H. (Her Royal Highness) and her husband, Prince Phillip, took a carriage ride Thursday through Colonial Williamsburg, Va., to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first British settlement in what was then the "New World." Saturday, she's at Churchill Downs to watch the running of the Kentucky Derby, and then on to D.C. for some chow with President Bush, then home on Tuesday.

Several decades ago, the queen made a now well-known decision to open up the royal family more to the media. She understood that the institution of the British monarchy was in danger of becoming an anachronism in the late 20th century. In many ways, that decision has indeed kept the royal family in business.

But it's a double-edged sword. I'm not sure when the queen made this important decision in the '60s (really starting when she very publicly invested her son Charles as the Prince of Wales in 1969) if she envisioned the kind of pop-culture dominated, 24/7 media world that we now live in. (This was captured perfectly in the recent film "The Queen" about H.R.H.'s struggles with how to deal with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car accident in 1996.)

So once upon a time, a visit from the queen was something special, as was a story about the inner workings of the royal family. These days, however, there is a veritible publishing industry centered around the monarchy, made up of books written by former employees, those who had relationships with members of the family, historians, gossip columnists, etc. They can hardly sneeze without it being reported by the British or world press. And this has drained much of that all-important sense of "specialness" from the royals. Now they just seem like another group of celebrities.

I've been fortunate enough to see or meet the queen five or six times over the years, as she frequently visited my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. (I'm still a Canadian citizen, so technically, I'm still her subject). The hair is a little grayer, the hats look slightly different. But otherwise, she really is pretty much the same as the first time I saw her 35 years ago.

10:02 AM ET | 05- 4-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post