NEW YORK — Maybe they’re outside in the garden. They could be playing softball. Or perhaps they’re just plain bored. In TV’s worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show. Everyone has a theory to explain the plummeting ratings: early Daylight Savings Time, more reruns, bad shows, more shows being recorded or downloaded or streamed. Scariest of all for the networks, however, is the idea that many people are now making their own television schedules. The industry isn’t fully equipped to keep track of them, and as a result the networks are scrambling to hold on to the nearly $8.8 billion they collected during last spring’s ad-buying season. ‘This may be the spring where we see a radical shift in the way the culture thinks of watching TV,’ said Sarah Bunting, co-founder of the Web site Television Without Pity. The viewer plunge couldn’t have come at a worse time for the networks-next week they will showcase their fall schedules to advertisers in the annual […]
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is facing growing difficulties in filling a rising number of high-level vacancies following a recent spate of senior departures. In the last 10 days alone Mr Bush has lost four senior officials and more resignations are expected to follow. ‘I wouldn’t describe this as disintegration,’ said one senior official. ‘But there are worrying large gaps opening up and it is very hard to recruit high-quality people from outside.’ Recent departures include J.D. Crouch, the deputy head of the national security council, who wants to spend more time with his family, and Randall Tobias, the head of USAID, who resigned after it was revealed that he used a call girl agency for ‘legal’ erotic services. Mr Bush has also lost Dina Habib Powell, the administration’s most senior Arab-American, who is leaving the State Department to join the private sector, and Timothy Adams, the number three at the Treasury department. Officials say that the flurry of departures is not unusual during the latter part of a second term and deny there are common themes driving their exits. But they come at a time when Mr Bush is having difficulty filling the new position of […]
Three months of intense training in a form of meditation known as ‘insight’ in Sanskrit can sharpen a person’s brain enough to help them notice details they might otherwise miss. These new findings add to a growing body of research showing that millennia-old mental disciplines can help control and improve the mind, possibly to help treat conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ‘Certain mental characteristics that were previously regarded as relatively fixed can actually be changed by mental training,’ University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson said. ‘People know physical exercise can improve the body, but our research and that of others holds out the prospects that mental exercise can improve minds.’ Paying attention to facts requires time and effort, and since everyone only has a limited amount of brainpower to go around, details can get overlooked. For instance, when two pictures are flashed on a video screen a half-second apart, people often miss the second image. ‘Your attention gets stuck on the first target, then you miss the second one,’ Davidson said. This is called ‘attentional blink,’ an effect akin to how you might overlook something when you blink your eyes. Still, the […]
WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday asked a former acting Justice Department civil rights chief to answer accusations that he was a central figure in a broad Republican strategy to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning minorities. The committee, which has been investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, asked Bradley Schlozman to appear voluntarily and describe his activities as a senior civil rights official and later as a U.S. attorney for Kansas City, Mo. Schlozman was a U.S. attorney there for one year. ‘We believe the committee would benefit from hearing directly from you in order to gain a better understanding of the role voter fraud may have played in the administration’s decisions to retain or remove certain U.S. attorneys,’ the panel’s chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the committee, wrote Schlozman. They noted that White House political guru Karl Rove voiced concern to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last year about voter fraud in three states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. After that conversation, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico was added to the list of top prosecutors to be replaced. Two other fired prosecutors – […]
WASHINGTON — Stem cells made from human embryos can home in on damaged eyes, hearts and arteries of mice and rats, and appear to start repairs, a U.S. company said on Monday. Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology said it had devised a straightforward way to make blood vessel precursor cells out of the stem cells and plans to test them in humans. ‘We figured out how to produce literally billions of so-called ‘hemangioblasts’ — the mythical cell in the embryo that gives rise to our entire blood and immune system as well as to the blood vessels in our body,’ Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president of research and scientific development at ACT, said in an e-mail. ‘We’ve also tested these cells in animals for the first time, and it turns out that they have incredible reparative potential.’ Embryonic stem cells are the ultimate master cell of the body, giving rise to all of the tissues and organs. The use of human embryonic stem cells is controversial because many people oppose destroying the embryo. The U.S. Congress has passed several bills that would expand federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research but President George W. Bush […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
