WASHINGTON — Parking an aircraft at a distant gate may help keep potentially infectious travelers away from the general public, according to a manual released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Airline crews are responsible for spotting and reporting sick passengers who might spread a dangerous illness, the manual noted, but health officials should decide whether to call police to help subdue those unwilling to be isolated. The manual also reminds airline staff to make sure passengers have water and access to toilets while they wait to see if they must be isolated after exposure to a sick passenger. ‘The best way to protect the public is to be prepared for the worst,’ Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said in a statement. ‘This manual will help airports, airlines, and local officials take steps now to get prepared, save lives, and keep our transportation network running.’ The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the authority to decide whether to isolate or quarantine travelers who may have an infectious disease and those they have come into contact with. It has not had to invoke that power, but can do so in the case of […]
RALEIGH — Citing the controversy surrounding the Dakota Fanning film Hounddog, the leader of the state Senate Republicans says he wants the government to review scripts before cameras start rolling in North Carolina. That system, said state Sen. Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, would apply only to films seeking the state’s lucrative filmmaker incentive, which refunds as much as 15 percent of what productions spend in North Carolina from the state treasury. ‘Why should North Carolina taxpayers pay for something they find objectionable?’ said Berger, who is having proposed legislation drafted. It is not known whether Hounddog’s producers have or will apply for the incentive. A call Thursday to the N.C. Department of Revenue, which oversees incentive payments, was not returned. Sen. Julia Boseman, D-New Hanover, one of the backers of the new law that created the current incentive system, said she couldn’t say much until she saw Berger’s proposal in writing. ‘There’s no bill yet to take a look at,’ she said. ‘But I am always willing to consider reasonable ways to improve the program.’ She did say she thought looking at scripts before shooting starts might be meaningless because a script could be changed […]
DAVOS, Switzerland — Google’s decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday. Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its ‘Don’t be evil’ motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets. Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: ‘On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.’ The company has only once expressed any regret and never in as strong terms as yesterday. Mr Brin said the company had suffered because of the damage to its reputation in the US and Europe. Last year in a speech in Washington Mr Brin admitted the company had been forced to compromise its principles to operate in China. At the time, he also hinted at a potential reversal of its stance in the country, saying ‘perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense’. From […]
President Bush likes to say that his health-care proposal would ‘level the playing field’ between people who get health coverage through their job and those who buy it on their own. But experts said yesterday that it would tilt that field toward a kind of health insurance that Bush has long favored — a high-deductible plan paired with a special tax-exempt health savings account, or HSA. ‘I think it would be a big push for HSAs,’ said Mark B. McClellan, a health economist and former top health-policy adviser to Bush. While McClellan thinks that would be a good thing, other experts said it would benefit the wealthy and undercut Bush’s goal of bringing fairness to the private health insurance system. In contrast with traditional health plans that typically charge $20 co-payments for visits to the doctor, high-deductible plans require consumers to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars out of pocket for medications, physicians’ services and hospital care before most insurance coverage kicks in. The deductibles are steep, at least $2,200 for family coverage, compared with about $220 in a traditional plan. But the special savings accounts enable people to accumulate a tax-free pool of their own […]
Children in homes full of books and educational games are less likely to get spanked, new research shows. Recent studies have found that corporal punishment can cause significant antisocial behavioral, such as lying, cheating, and hitting, in children as they grow older. So Andrew Grogan-Kaylor of the University of Michigan and his colleague Melanie D. Otis of the University of Kentucky wanted to find out what factors, independent of others, predict whether or not a parent is likely to ‘spare the rod.’ Their analysis of answers from 800 respondents on questions about their use of corporal punishment as well as many other family issues arrived at the intellectual stimulation factor. ‘This is a little bit surprising for parenting researchers that cognitive or intellectual stuff would cross over into behavioral stuff,’ Grogan-Kaylor told LiveScience. ‘Real people may know this altogether, but researchers have tended to separate the two areas.’ Hard Facts Other studies have shown that: More than 90 percent of parents of toddlers say they have spanked their child at least once. About 61 percent of mothers of 3- to 5-year-olds had spanked their child in the past week. Boys […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
