After gunmen killed scores of police cadets in an audacious attack on a police training academy, people across Pakistan discuss whether the ‘war on terror’ is working for Pakistan. ATIF K BUTT, LAHORE This is one of the most tragic incidents in our nation’s history. The government must take some concrete steps to eliminate the roots of terrorism so that we can live peacefully. This has been the second incident in Lahore this month. On 3 March the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked. The attackers are showing their strength in the capital of Punjab and they are showing that they have a stronghold here. People are really fearful and pointing their fingers at the government. They are talking about why the government is failing to tackle this issue. Pakistan is paying a high price for the war against terrorism. We were not involved in this war before 2001. Back then we were leading peaceful lives. Now we are a part and an ally of the war against terror. We are paying a higher price than any other country in the world. The government must think of how we move forward with international […]
ORLANDO, Fla. — It’s been a dream for a decade: a single daily pill combining aspirin, cholesterol medicine and blood pressure drugs - everything people need to prevent heart attacks and strokes in a cheap, generic form. Skeptics said five medicines rolled into a single pill would mean five times more side effects. Some people would get drugs they don’t need, while others would get too little. One-size-fits-all would turn out to fit very few, they warned. Now the first big test of the ‘polypill’ has proved them wrong. The experimental combo pill was as effective as nearly all of its components taken alone, with no greater side effects, a major study found. Taking it could cut a person’s risk of heart disease and stroke roughly in half, the study concludes. The approach needs far more testing - as well as approval from the Food and Drug Administration, something that could take years - but it could make heart disease prevention much more common and more effective, doctors say. ‘Widely applied, this could have profound implications,’ said Dr. Robert Harrington, an American College of Cardiology spokesman and chief of Duke University’s heart research institute. ‘President Obama is […]
DETROIT — Michigan’s two largest newspapers were missing from front porches Monday as the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News began an era of reduced home delivery and announced a plan to eventually transmit their print editions to thousands of new electronic devices. The newspapers were hawked for free on sidewalks and streets for one day only to remind people that the News and Free Press are not going out of business but undergoing significant change at a time of vanishing ad revenue and a deep recession. The papers will continue to be printed and sold each day, but home delivery is limited to Thursday, Friday and Sunday, the biggest ad days of the week. Subscribers can see the exact print version online on any day, and free content is available at freep.com and detnews.com. Detroit Media Partnership, which runs the business side of the papers, also announced a plan to test 100 e-reader devices by summer, a thin, 9-ounce electronic slate to read the print editions. ‘You could see 20- to 30,000 of these devices in a short period of time,’ said David Hunke, Free Press publisher and chief executive of the partnership. […]
The worldwide event to call attention to climate change puts up its strongest numbers in the three-year history of Earth Hour. From the remote Chatham Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean to Sydney’s Opera House to the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building to Seattle’s Space Needle, lights dimmed for 1 hour in a symbolic call to change the Kyoto Protocol. It began over the remote Chatham Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean and from there-time zone by time zone-Earth Hour 2009 marched around the globe March 28, with hundreds of cities and communities and millions of individuals dimming their lights to call attention to climate change. In all, nearly 1,000 global landmarks went dark for an hour, including New York’s Empire State Building, Paris’ Eiffel Tower, the dome of St. Peters in the Vatican and the Christ the Redeemer statue on Mount Corcovado overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro. While Earth Hour sponsor World Wildlife Foundation did not have all the data yet, it predicted that participation in the third annual event exceeded 2008, when some 53 million people in 371 cities in 35 countries participated. The 2007 inaugural Earth Hour was limited to Sydney, […]
There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb’s impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb’s interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless ‘tough-on-crime’ hysteria, an increasingly irrational ‘drug war,’ and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan — and virtually every other country in the world — to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a ‘a nation of jailers’ whose ‘prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history.’ What’s most notable about Webb’s decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is. He isn’t just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America’s oppressive prison state. His critique of what we’re doing is fundamental, not incremental. And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
