Thursday, August 19th, 2010
ASHISH KUMAR SEN, - The Washington Times
Stephan: This is why the teabaggers and wingnuts like Newt Gingrich are so dangerous. First they defined the New York Muslim Center as the issue of the moment, a huge deal, then oppose it in such raw and crude terms that the Muslim world comes to see it as a point of honor. The debate thus becomes yet another way for America to offend a billion people -- with no upside, only the price. It is unspeakably stupid of the Republican Right Wing to have played this as a fear card.
Muslims around the world see the ground zero mosque debate raging in the U.S. as a litmus test of American tolerance, and generally appreciate President Obama’s involvement.
In Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, Mr. Obama has won praise from commentators for his support for Muslims’ right to build a place of worship where they like.
Endy M. Bayuni, a former editor-in-chief of the Jakarta Post, even jokingly suggested trading Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for Mr. Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia.
‘Obama could have refrained from making any statement, directly or indirectly, to the mosque controversy and help his Democrat congressmen face the November election. But he did what any decent democratically elected leader and statesman would do, which is to uphold the Constitution and defend the right of minority Muslims,’ Mr. Bayuni wrote.
Yet not all Muslims think the Islamic center should be built near ground zero.
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television, wrote in the Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that Mr. Obama adopted ‘an unnecessary and unimportant stance, even as far as Muslims are concerned,’ by supporting the construction of the center.
‘The mosque is not an issue for Muslims, and they are not […]
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Thursday, August 19th, 2010
ROBERT PREIDT, - Bloomberg Business Week - Executive Health
Stephan: Further evidence of what psycho-physical self-regulation can achieve. People ask me what they can do to be more open to nonlocal consciousness, the source of creativity, and spiritual epiphanies. Develop a technique like meditation, and practise your discipline consistently.
Positive brain changes take hold after just 11 hours of practicing a form of meditation, the results of a new study suggest.
The study included 45 University of Oregon students who were randomly selected to be in either a study group that did integrative body-mind training (IBMT) or a control group that did relaxation training. IBMT was adapted from traditional Chinese medicine in the 1990s.
A comparison of scans taken of the students’ brains before and after the training showed that those in the IBMT group had increased brain connectivity. The changes were strongest in connections involving the anterior cingulate, an area that plays a role in the regulation of emotions and behavior, Yi-Yuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in China, University of Oregon psychologist Michael I. Posner, and colleagues found.
The boost in brain connectivity began after six hours of IBMT and became more apparent after 11 hours of practice, according to the report published in the Aug. 16-21 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The meditation-induced changes may be due to a reorganization of white-matter tracts or due to an increase of myelin that surrounds the brain connections, the study authors suggested.
‘The importance of our finding […]
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Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
MATT GERTZ, - MediaMatters for America
Stephan: This is a virtual corporate state basically buying influence over government. It couldn't get more transparent than this.
Bloomberg News reports today (h/t Daily Kos’ KingOneEye) that News Corp. — the media giant which owns Fox News and The Wall Street Journal — has donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, the GOP organization that helps coordinate Republican gubernatorial campaigns and pays for independent ads in support of their candidates.
Media Matters has confirmed Bloomberg’s report using publicly available IRS filings. We also found no evidence of corresponding donations to the Democratic Governors Association in the current political cycle. News Corp. wants Republicans elected to office, and they’re willing to spend money to make it happen.
According to the article, News Corp. is actually the RGA’s ‘biggest corporate donor.’ Bloomberg suggests that News Corp. has made these donations due to their opposition to ‘proposed federal rule changes that would weaken the position of its Fox network in negotiations with cable companies,’ stating that ‘Governors may have a stake in the issue.’
Whether or not that is the case, this large corporate donation to the GOP underscores News Corp.’s role as an appendage of the Republican Party.
UPDATE: Politico’s Ben Smith has received the following quote from a News Corp. spokesman: ‘News Corporation believes in the power of free markets, and the […]
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Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
Stephan: Ignorant, obese, and deaf. That is our next generation.
Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. teenagers has some hearing loss, a sharp increase from just 15 years ago, according to a new study.
Josef Shargorodsky of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and colleagues examined data collected from more than 4,600 12-to-19-year-olds by two ongoing federal surveys. The first covered 1988 to 1994, and the other 2005 to 2006.
The prevalence of hearing loss increased from 14.9 percent in the 1988-94 period to 19.5 percent in the 2005-06 period, a rise of about 31 percent, the researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The majority of hearing loss was slight, but the prevalence of mild or worse hearing loss increased 77 percent. One in 20 children in this age group had mild or worse hearing loss, according to the most recent survey. High-frequency hearing loss was more common than that in low frequencies. Most of the time the loss was in one ear. Girls were much less likely than boys to have lost some hearing.
Although the study did not examine the reasons for the hearing loss, the researchers said that other research has found that listening to music on portable stereo devices can play a role. They also noted […]
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Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
Stephan: It is hard to find this material in the American mainstream media. Few in this country want to talk about what is really going on in Iraq. This is what we got for a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths, including thousands of Americans.
Attacks in Baghdad have led to the deaths of at least 68 people with scores more injured.
In one strike at about 9:30pm (06:30 GMT) on Tuesday in a mostly Shia neighbourhood of the Iraqi capital, a bomb attached to a fuel truck exploded, killing eight people and wounding 44 more.
The tanker, which was filled with kerosene, was blown up in the northwestern Ur neighbourhood. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
Earlier in the day, at least 60 people were killed in a suicide bomb attack at an army recruitment centre in the Iraqi capital.
Iraqi officials said at least 125 other people were wounded in that blast, when a suicide attacker detonated a bomb as men queued outside the centre in central Baghdad.
The attack occurred at the historical site of the country’s defence ministry, a building that was turned into an army recruitment centre and military base after the 2003 US-led invasion.
Yasir Ali, who had been waiting outside the military headquarters said that he saw the bomber, describing him as a blond young man who walked up to an officer and blew himself up.
‘Severed hands and legs were falling over me,’ the Associated Press news agency quoted Ali […]
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