Past research has shown that being obese, roughly 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight, increases the risk of premature death. But scientists have debated whether being overweight, one pound to 29 pounds over a normal weight, is linked to early death.

To investigate this, researchers with the National Cancer Institute examined the lifestyle habits of more than 527,000 men and women, ages 50 to 71, who were members of AARP. Participants completed surveys, including giving their weight and height. Researchers also looked at participants' death records over 10 years. Findings in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine:

• People who were overweight at 50 had a 20% to 40% higher risk of death than normal-weight people.

• Those who were obese had 100% to 200% higher risk of death.

"Even carrying a few extra pounds is associated with increased risk of dying prematurely," says Michael F. Leitzmann, senior author of the study. 

Obesity was strongly associated with death in both men and women in all racial and ethnic groups and at all ages, he says. USA Today

The report, by researchers at think-tank the Royal Institute for International Studies in London - also known as Chatham House - says: "There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East. 

"The United States, with Coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments - the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 - but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures." The Independent

The poll found that 51 percent of those surveyed saw no link between the war in Iraq and the broader antiterror effort, a jump of 10 percentage points since June. That increase comes despite the regular insistence of Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans that the two are intertwined and should be seen as complementary elements of a strategy to prevent domestic terrorism. NYT (reg/req)

Official State Department calendars, provided to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage held a one-hour meeting marked "private appointment" with Woodward on June 13, 2003.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has investigated whether Bush administration officials intentionally revealed Plame's identity as a one-time CIA covert operative to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for criticizing the administration's march to war with Iraq.

When contacted at home Monday night, Woodward declined to discuss his meeting with Armitage or the identity of his source in the CIA leak case. Instead, he referred to his statement last year that he had a "casual and offhand" discussion about Plame with an unidentified administration official in mid-June 2003.

A person familiar with the information prosecutors have gathered, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the material remains sealed, said Woodward's meeting with the confidential source was June 13, 2003.

The calendar released to the AP is the first confirmation that Woodward and Armitage met during the key time in the CIA leak case that was the focus of Fitzgerald's probe. The AP

Douglas Giles is a recent casualty. He used to teach a class on world religions at Roosevelt University, Chicago, founded in memory of FDR and his liberal-inclined wife, Eleanor. Last year, Giles was ordered by his head of department, art historian Susan Weininger, not to allow students to ask questions about Palestine and Israel; in fact, nothing was to be mentioned in class, textbooks and examinations that could possibly open Judaism to criticism.

Students, being what they are, did not go along with the ban. A young woman, originally from Pakistan, asked a question about Palestinian rights. Someone complained and Professor Giles was promptly fired. Guardian

In June, Google won a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, while "to google", with a lower case "g", was included last month in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, America's leading reference book.

The online service WordSpy, meanwhile, defines "google" as: "To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend." This is also what pops up first if you type "googling" into Google.

But the California-based company is becoming concerned about trademark violation. A spokesman confirmed that it had sent the letters. "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues." The Independent

Six Indian states have announced partial or complete bans on the soft drinks after claims that the drinks contain harmful pesticides. BBC

Steve Marshall, president of BP Exploration Alaska, Inc. said Sunday night that the eastern side of Prudhoe Bay would be shut down first, an operation anticipated to take 24 to 36 hours. The company will then move to shut down the west side, a move that could close more than 1,000 Prudhoe Bay wells.

Once the field is shut down, BP said oil production will be reduced by 400,000 barrels a day. That's close to 8% of U.S. oil production or about 2.6% of U.S. supply including imports, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The AP

Speaking in Tehran, Ali Larijani, the country's chief nuclear negotiator and head of the supreme national security council, said Iran would be reluctant to cut its oil exports. "We do not want to use the oil weapon. It is them who would impose it upon us." Guardian

Framing studies have shown that how a question is posed — think negative ads, for instance — skews decision-making. But no one showed exactly how this effect worked in the human brain until the brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London.

De Martino and colleagues asked 20 men and women to undergo three 17-minute brain scans while being asked to gamble — or not — with an initial pot of English pounds worth about $95. When told they would "keep" 40% of their money if they didn't gamble, the volunteers chose to gamble only 43% of the time. Told they could "lose" 60% of the money if they didn't gamble, they rolled the dice 62% of the time.

Their chances of winning the money were carefully explained beforehand, and participants knew the odds were identical. But the framing effect still skewed their decisions significantly. USA Today

Research shows that the female brain naturally releases oxytocin after a 20-second hug. The embrace bonds the huggers and triggers the brain's trust circuits. So ... don't let a guy hug you unless you plan to trust him. 

"And if you do...make sure it lasts 20 seconds." San Francisco Chronicle

Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag.

People tend to become ''independent of reality'' in these circumstances, said opinion analyst Steven Kull. 
The AP

The dagger, made of an alloy of gold and platinum, was found near the village of Dubovo. 

Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of Bulgaria's National Museum, told Reuters news agency the discovery was "sensational". It is the latest in a string of finds in the area in recent years which has excited archaeologists and has provided more details of the skills of the still mysterious Thracian civilisation ...

The Thracian civilisation thrived on the edge of the ancient Greek and Roman empires in what is now Bulgaria, Romania, northern Greece and Turkey, and is believed to have lasted up to 4,000 years. BBC

Maine's welfare agency, she heard, was offering help for poor parents to go to college full time. With the state paying for day care and $513 a month in living expenses, Riordan, 37, has been on the dean's list every semester at the University of Southern Maine, expecting to graduate and start a social work career next spring. But this summer, her plans -- and Maine's Parents as Scholars program -- suddenly are on shaky ground; under new federal rules, studying for a bachelor's degree no longer counts by itself as an acceptable way for people on welfare to spend their time.

A decade after the government set out to transform the nation's welfare system, the limits on college are part of a controversial second phase of welfare reform that is beginning to ripple across the country. The new rules, written by Congress and the Bush administration, require states to focus intensely on making more poor people work, while discouraging other activities that might help untangle their lives. Washington Post (reg/req)

Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton also say in "Without Precedent" that their panel was too soft in questioning former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — and that the 20-month investigation may have suffered for it.

The book, a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation, recounts obstacles the authors say were thrown up by the Bush administration, internal disputes over President Bush's use of the attacks as a reason for invading Iraq, and the way the final report avoided questioning whether U.S. policy in the Middle East may have contributed to the attacks. The AP

The agency, the Pentagon’s office of inspector general, said the Defense Department’s initial inaccurate accounts could be attributed largely to poor record-keeping. NYT (reg/req)

A federal jury ruled in March that Custer Battles LLC, which operated out of Fairfax, defrauded the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority of $3 million during work to furnish Iraq with a new currency in the first months after the invasion. The ruling was the first civil fraud verdict arising from the war effort.

The company's founders, Army veterans Mike Battles and Scott Custer, were ordered by the jury to pay more than $10 million in damages. Custer Battles has challenged the verdict, arguing that the CPA was not a U.S. entity and that federal anti-fraud law does not apply. A judge has yet to rule on the challenge, and the money has not been paid. Washingon Post (reg/req)

Lord Rees says a pledge to increase governments' investments in energy technologies should have been made at the recent G8 summit in Russia. He describes a "worrisome lack of determination" among world leaders. BBC

That number now stands at 55%, with 19% supporting immediate withdrawal and another 36% wanting it done by August 2007. Editor & Publisher

The duplicity and flagrant disregard for the destruction of an entire nation by the Israeli government; and an American president, his neocon cronies and "Yo Blair," have demonstrated beyond doubt that the return of two Israeli soldiers (even though thousands of their Arab counterparts rot in Israeli prisons) equate with the deaths of hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians. While the rest of the world desperately awaited the announcement of a cease-fire that only America has the clout to negotiate, Auntie Condi arrived to play the fiddle to Israel's tune, as Lebanon burned to a crisp in the background. Arab View, Saudi Arabia, via WatchingAmerica.com

The Spinoza anniversary didn't get a lot of attention. But it's one worth remembering - in large measure because Spinoza's life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable.

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life - he died in 1677 at the age of 44 - studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance. NYT (reg/req)

"Heat wave projections all agree. They are going to intensify in length and frequency" in this century, says climate scientist Claudia Tebaldi of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. 

Global warming is projected to raise average temperatures worldwide about 3 to 9 degrees in this century, according to a U.N. climate panel. Warmer temperatures load the dice in favor of extreme weather such as heat waves, says climate modeler Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. 

According to the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an unusually strong ridge of high pressure lasting for weeks across most Central and Eastern states caused the heat wave now gripping the country. NOAA scientists have generally been more cautious than climate modelers about linking global warming to extreme weather such as heat waves.

But climate models generally agree that looking ahead to 2100, heat waves will become more frequent, Tebaldi says. The models very closely reproduce the high temperatures and air pressures that spawn heat waves in real-life weather, she says. In the future, global warming may create stronger and larger high-pressure "domes" of air that will block cool air from entering the regions they cover, Tebaldi says. USA Today

The opposite side of that coin is that people who criticize actions by the Israeli government often are deemed “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic,” just as Americans who question Bush’s judgments are called “un-American” or “treasonous.”

But the reality is quite different. Endorsing a misguided policy doesn’t make Israel safer nor does it advance the interests of the United States. Indeed, there is a powerful argument that the violent course of action now being pursued by Tel Aviv and Washington will prove disastrous to both countries. consortiumnews.com

So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.... 

Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work. 

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Most of these missing men are, like Mr. Beggerow, former blue-collar workers with no more than a high school education. But their ranks are growing at all education and income levels. Refugees of failed Internet businesses have spent years out of work during their 30’s, while former managers in their late 40’s are trying to stretch severance packages and savings all the way to retirement. NYT (reg/req)

There's a video featuring a bearded Gibson juxtaposed with a bearded Saddam Hussein labeled "mel gibson has a long lost brother!" Old photos from Gibson's previous movies are woven together -- each with him looking wild-eyed and surprised. Then there's Gibson starring in a "South Park" episode with the introduction: "Passion of the crazy Mel Gibson coming to a highway near you."

In what has become a predictable pattern, the most-talked-about events of the day are quickly finding their way to the Internet and then "mashed up" by people who use the films as a form of commentary or entertainment. A mash-up video mixes original images or sounds with music, quick-witted narrations or creative transitions. The result is a video dialogue of sorts that makes a statement that is political, personal or merely entertaining. 
Washington Post (reg/req)

That the nation is in the hands of the most hated man on the planet, who has dragged America’s good name through the mud, a stain that will take two generations to remove, if indeed it can be removed?

That America is always right, even when she’s wrong?

Or that America is proud even when the government behaves in ways that collectively shame us?

On the other hand, maybe the people who put it on their cars don’t think about it, or much of anything, at all. Chances are they have a child or a loved one in uniform and this sticker is their hedge against their being harmed, a charm to ward off evil spirits. Nearly 3,000 American families know that feeling, tens of thousands more are coming to grips with loved ones wounded in body in spirit. And many more will experience that unimaginable pain before we are rid of the cancer in the White House and Congress. American Politics Journal

Iran is a decade away from gaining access to the bomb, according to the administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate, and despite all the talk about the ugliness of the theocratic regime in Tehran, the likely showdown is, at bottom, driven by the geopolitics of oil. With one-tenth of the world’s petroleum reserves and one-sixth of its natural gas reserves, Iran sits in a strategic geographical position that makes it the cockpit for control of the entire Middle East. Mother Jones

This month is the crunch time for the whole of 2006, and quite possibly for a long time after that as well.  There are three main factors during August.  Initially, there is the Sun coming together with Saturn, bringing a degree of dissolution to a number of political processes and leaders’ ambitions.  Political figures will tumble in the first two weeks of the month.  This is alongside the Mars/Uranus opposition, both aspects in the first two weeks of August.  Mars opposite Uranus is truly unpredictable, something volatile and dramatic, personal freedoms and independence at the top of the wish list.  At the end of the month, Mars followed by the Sun squares Pluto, indicative of intrigue and elimination at the highest (or deepest) of levels.  From end August through to mid September, the Saturn/Neptune/Jupiter t-square rules the roost, and I have grave misgivings about the financial structure and stability of commercial and economic affairs.  Watch the bubbles burst.  Then, and only then, by end September, it gets easier.  Collective sanity may again prevail.  Sorry to be so negative, but this is it.  This is not a drill; this is what the escalation of the previous seven years has been for.  Long term future patterns are being set now.  Time to claim your right to a free voice. SteveJudd.com

There was no place in the annals of empirical science, beginning mainly in the 18th century, for the occult practices of obsessed dreamers who sought most famously and impossibly to transform base metals into pure gold. So alchemy fell into disrepute.

But in the revival of scholarship on the field, historians are finding reasons to give at least some alchemists their due. Even though they were secretive and self-deluded and their practices closer to magic than modern scientific methods, historians say, alchemists contributed to the emergence of modern chemistry as a science and an agent of commerce. NYT (reg/req)

Dr. DeAngelis, editor in chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, has the Italian grandmother thing down, thanks to growing up in a Pennsylvania mining town with a millworker father and a waitress mother. One of her e-mail addresses is jama.mama.

She also pretends she has an Uncle Guido to break legs for her. On her office door are postcards of statues of guys named Guido.

But Dr. DeAngelis, who is at the center of a controversy over conflicts of interest for journal authors, does more than play at being tough. In 2001, she was briefly taken hostage by Chechens in Turkey and, after collapsing from dehydration, woke up in restraints in an Istanbul hospital. And 18 months ago, at age 64, she walked out of a Chicago hospital on canes four days after a bus jumped a curb and broke her pelvis.

“Uncle Guido took care of the bus,” she said. “It’s still in the garage.” NYT (reg/req)

• In Chicago, low walls wide enough to sit on surround flower beds and protect the 100-story John Hancock Building. They replaced temporary barricades. 

• In Seattle, a large lily pond outside the 2-year-old federal courthouse acts as a moat. 

• At the state Capitol in Sacramento, bollards linked by steel cables are being installed around the building, but they will be hidden inside hedges. 

• At the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, concrete barriers will be replaced with a low granite-walled embankment by the end of the year, according to National Parks Service spokesman Bill Line. USA Today

Many of these exhibits are extremely large files; to view them, a broadband Internet connection is strongly recommended. United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui 

At a social gathering of 85 faculty members, graduate students and staff workers in the department of food science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the partygoers served themselves ice cream. They did not realize that they were also the subjects of an experiment. Half the participants were given 17-ounce bowls, and half 34-ounce bowls. In addition, half were given 2-ounce spoons to scoop out their ice cream, and half were given 3-ounce serving spoons.

With larger spoons, people served themselves 14.5 percent more, and with a larger bowl, they heaped on 31 percent more. With both a large spoon and a large bowl, the nutrition experts helped themselves to 56.8 percent more ice cream than those who used the smaller utensils. And all but three of them ate every bit of the ice cream they took.

People who used small spoons took more spoonfuls, but not nearly enough to compensate for the total amount taken by those with larger equipment. 

The results of the experiment will appear in the September issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine. NYT (reg/req)

The cable news network on Tuesday plans to announce it has created a new program to let users send in digital audio and video from breaking news events in their region. Users can e-mail or upload these so-called "I-Reports" directly from CNN's site.

Contributions are vetted by seasoned editors much in the same way all news tips are followed up, Susan Bunda, senior vice president of news at CNN/U.S. said in an interview.

The news network also has created a new Web site, CNN Exchange, which will house user-generated audio and video submissions.

"This is an opportunity to hear the very personal stories of people who know the events ... and are able to share with the world," Bunda said.

Although news organizations have accepted user contributions for years -- one of the most memorable being the 1991 videotaped beatings of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department -- viewers armed with cheap digital cameras and camera phones have now taken to sharing glimpses of their world with increasing frequency on the Web. Reuters

It's a common perception, but it's false. Google and Yahoo, along with dozens of other Internet companies, have been quietly agreeing to deals that compensate some of the country's top news organizations for their content and help drive more traffic to their Web sites. Mercury News

In a polemical scientific essay to be published in the August issue of the journal Climate Change, he says that an "escape route" is needed if global warming begins to run out of control.

Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research. The Independent

The British author, who wrote the best-seller "A Brief History of Time" _ said that the pope made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican.

Hawking, who didn't say when the meeting was held, quoted the pope as saying, "It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not enquire into the beginning itelf because that was the moment of creation and the work of God."

The scientist then joked during a lecture in Hong Kong, "I was glad he didn't realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo." The AP

These are among the blood-and-guts stories featured on NBC's "Dateline" in the last three months.

CBS's "48 Hours" has covered murders almost exclusively for the past two years. "I stopped thinking of ourselves as a general newsmagazine," says Executive Producer Susan Zirinsky. "I am Darwinian in my core, and to survive I've adapted."

Television news -- especially local television -- has always been drawn to crime. But in a country in which more than 16,000 murders were committed last year, are the killings of ordinary people, however tragic, really worth all this airtime? Washington Post (reg/req)

How come there is not one single adviser to tell the White House that U.S. enemies whether in Iraq and the Middle are the product of its policies.

The world's only superpower gathers its own enemies, nourishes them, solidifies them and buttresses their platforms by its own hands.

As a result U.S. policies in the region are heading for the abyss.

And for this reason the U.S. flag and the U.S. tank are both powerless to contain the murderous militias in Iraq.
Azzaman, Iraq

But the convoy stopped, and an officer politely ordered the surprised drivers and guards to lay down their guns while his men searched the vans for bombs. 

Within minutes all eight drivers and guards had been handcuffed and locked in the back of one of the vans on a suffocating 120-degree day, the cash had been stolen by the men in the convoy — whoever they were — and the Iraqi banking system marked another day of its slow slide into oblivion.

The only thing atypical about Thursday’s robbery, which was described by bank and Interior Ministry officials, is that most private banks try to avoid using armored vans, because they draw too much attention, and instead toss sacks of cash into ordinary cars for furtive dashes through the streets of Baghdad.

However the cash goes out, it risks being lost in the wash of robbery, kidnapping and intrigue that now plagues the system. NYT (reg/req)

The critic, Patrick J. Michaels, is a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and Virginia’s state climatologist. NYT (reg/req)

Visiting with the most recent stars of the Fox TV show is the latest example of Bush being a regular guy, exuding a down-home style that has been both a blessing and curse to the president.

His aides say Bush likes to show a lighter side, taking the edge off weighty matters that come with his job. Some critics, though, say some of these moments demonstrate a lack of seriousness. USA Today

Embarrassing. Shameful. A travesty. Those kinds of words begin to describe the alliance between the United States and Israel. Here are a few more: Government criminality. High-tech terror. Mass murder from the skies. The kind of premeditated action that the U.S. representative in Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials -- Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson -- was talking about on August 12, 1945, when he declared that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy." 

The United States and Israel. Right now, it's the most dangerous alliance in the world.
The Columbus Free Press

A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin. He presented the country with a fait accompli: the "gift" of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped across an international frontier. Nasrallah never let the Lebanese government in on his venture. He was giddy with triumphalism and defiance when this crisis began. And men and women cooped up in the destitution of the Shiite districts of Beirut were sent out into the streets to celebrate Hezbollah's latest deed. 

It did not seem to matter to Nasrallah that the ground that would burn in Lebanon would in the main be Shiite land in the south. Nor was it of great concern to he who lives on the subsidies of the Iranian theocrats that the ordinary Lebanese would pay for his adventure. The cruel and cynical hope was that Nasrallah's rivals would be bullied into submission and false solidarity, and that the man himself would emerge as the master of the game of Lebanon's politics. Wall Street Journal

Certainly that is the case for President Bush, who has been reduced to helplessly hoping the United Nations can get Syria "to stop doing this s---," and for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who blithely announced Monday that we are just watching the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." 

By Rice's logic, Hurricane Katrina was just the labor contractions of the new New Orleans. All the Mideast needs now, apparently, is a nice epidural and some ice chips to suck on. The Nation

The test I took was something called the Authentic Happiness Inventory, and the man who designed it, Chris Peterson, is one of the first people I meet at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Unlike many who study happiness for a living, he seems to embody it, though he tells me that’s a recent development. He offers me an impromptu tour of the place (walls of salmon and plum and turquoise; tables piled high with complimentary granola bars), then wanders toward his office, absently hugging an orange-juice bottle to his stomach as he drifts, having graciously offered to check, at my request, which Zip Codes are the happiest and the most miserable in his 350,000-person database. At the end of the day, I check in with him.

The happiest, he reports, is Branson, Missouri’s. New York magazine

Based on a review of the blatantly one-sided collection of guests and experts FNC has booked to discuss the conflict recently, it's obvious Fox News has opted to present an hermetically sealed version of events from the Middle East and spoon feed its viewers a pre-school-like version of the news. Fox News has moved beyond the warmongering it trademarked during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 and slipped into a conscious, company-wide decision to purposely cordon off topics of discussion. 

That the Middle East battle is told primarily through the eyes of Israelis is not surprising. American news organizations have more resources inside Israel, better sources within the Israeli government and most Americans clearly sympathize with the Israelis in their never-ending conflict with Arabs. And Fox News has certainly had its thumb on the scale. Last week Bill O'Reilly warned about a coming Holocaust. And during one of the endlessly looping FNC conversation about Iran's alleged puppet-like manipulation of Hezbelloh, Fox News' on-screen text asked, "Are Saddam Hussein's WMDs Now in Hezbollah's Hands?" 
The Huffington Post

The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself.

The discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell.

The new code is described in the current issue of Nature by Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute in Israel and Jonathan Widom of Northwestern University in Illinois and their colleagues. NYT (reg/req)

All 12 parks are located in the American West, where temperatures have risen twice as fast as in the rest of the United States over the last 50 years, said Theo Spencer of the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

"Rising temperatures, drought, wildfires and diminished snowfalls endanger wildlife and threaten hiking, fishing and other recreational activities" in the parks, Spencer said in a telephone news conference. "Imagine Glacier Park without glaciers or Yellowstone without any grizzly bears." Reuters

Mistakes in giving drugs are so prevalent in hospitals that, on average, a patient will be subjected to a medication error each day he or she fills a hospital bed, the report says. Washington Post (reg/req)

All these topics are subject to review by Israel's chief military censor, who has -- in her own words -- "extraordinary power." She can silence a broadcaster, block information and put journalists in jail.

"I can, for example, publish an order that no material can be published. I can close a newspaper or shut down a station. I can do almost anything," Col. Sima Vaknin said Wednesday. 

Israel believes that as a small country in a near constant state of conflict, having a say over what information gets out to the world is vital to its security. Critics say the policy is a slippery slope not fit for a democracy. 
Editor & Publisher

Apparently, many folks feel that way, as the slowing economy dulls the nation's appetite for casual dining. For the first time in years, the $70 billion casual dining industry — sit-down eateries that generally serve alcohol and sell entrees from $10 to $20 — is taking a hit. 

Some of the big names — from Applebee's to Cheesecake Factory to Outback Steakhouse — report recent slides in sales at stores open at least one year. Many of their stocks are hovering at 52-week lows.

Some folks are eating out less. Others are trading down to fast food. Some are skipping dessert or ordering less wine. The result is that casual dining's growth is slowing, and no longer outpacing the industry. USA Today

The army of die-hard "Kossacks" assembled in the Riviera's ballroom to hear Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga couldn't have agreed more. They roared in approval as Moulitsas spent nearly half his keynote address repeatedly deriding "the media elite." At the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas in early June, the attacks on journalists--invariably described as lazy, incompetent toadies of the ruling elite--came fast and furious, a close second to those on the Bush Administration. Slamming the press was a guaranteed applause line. 

The media rage on the left--at least among those politically active online--now matches that on the right. 
The Nation

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical. London Review of Books

The network plans to announce today that it will place laser imprints of its trademark eye insignia, as well as logos for some of its shows, on eggs — 35 million of them in September and October. CBS’s copywriters are referring to the medium as “egg-vertising,” hinting at the wordplay they have in store. Some of their planned slogans: “CSI” (“Crack the Case on CBS”); “The Amazing Race” (“Scramble to Win on CBS”); and “Shark” (“Hard-Boiled Drama.”). Variations on the ad for its Monday night lineup of comedy shows include “Shelling Out Laughs,” “Funny Side Up” and “Leave the Yolks to Us.” NYT (reg/req)

The scientists found in their study that a monkey's brain did not keep track of different parts of a face, storing and then accessing the information to recognize others. Instead it keeps a statistical average of the faces it has seen and uses it as a basis for comparison. Reuters

The letters were released by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem which had held the collection for many years. Einstein's stepdaughter, Margot, had stated in her will they should not be revealed until 20 years after she died. 

Einstein is known to have had a dozen lovers, two of whom he married, said Barbara Wolff of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives. BBC

Then, off the coast of Georgia, early on Saturday, April 16, 2005, a giant, seven-story wave appeared out of nowhere. It crashed into the bow, sent deck chairs flying, smashed windows, raced as high as the 10th deck, flooded 62 cabins, injured 4 passengers and sowed widespread fear and panic.

“The ship was like a cork in a bathtub,” recalled Celestine Mcelhatton, a passenger who, along with 2,000 others, eventually made it back to Pier 88 on the Hudson River in Manhattan. Some vowed never to sail again.

Enormous waves that sweep the ocean are traditionally called rogue waves, implying that they have a kind of freakish rarity. Over the decades, skeptical oceanographers have doubted their existence and tended to lump them together with sightings of mermaids and sea monsters.

But scientists are now finding that these giants of the sea are far more common and destructive than once imagined, prompting a rush of new studies and research projects. The goals are to better tally them, understand why they form, explore the possibility of forecasts, and learn how to better protect ships, oil platforms and people.

The stakes are high. In the past two decades, freak waves are suspected of sinking dozens of big ships and taking hundreds of lives. The upshot is that the scientists feel a sense of urgency about the work and growing awe at their subjects. NYT (reg/req)

Police have databanks of palm prints, ear prints and handwriting at their disposal, as well facial recognition systems that can match fugitive faces with those in a crowd. But the next step could be swagger surveillance. 
The Times

They analyzed data from trials that showed men who had been circumcised had a significantly lower risk of infection with the AIDS virus, and calculated that if all men were circumcised over the next 10 years, some two million new infections and around 300,000 deaths could be avoided.

Researchers believe circumcision helps cut infection risk because the foreskin is covered in cells the virus seems able to easily infect. The virus may also survive better in a warm, wet environment like that found beneath a foreskin. So if men were circumcised, fewer would become infected and thus could not infect their female partners. Reuters

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women. 

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates. NYT (reg/req)

According to several polls taken in late spring, Americans rank gasoline prices slightly ahead of the Iraq war as a major issue, believe Bush has no clear plan for lower prices, and regard Republicans as far more influenced by big oil companies than Democrats. They think government can—and should—do something about the price at the pump. In These Times

Q: Your new book, "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End," argues that the Bush administration should stop insisting that Iraq can ever be a unified nation. 

A: Iraq still exists on a map, but it no longer functions as a single country. We're trying to build national institutions right now — like the army and the police — when there is no nation. 
NYT Sunday Magazine (reg/req)

The reason: While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall at the Ithaca, N.Y., school.

College students don't turn down much that's free. But when it comes to online music, even free hasn't been enough to persuade many students to use such digital download services as Napster, Rhapsody, Ruckus and Cdigix. As a result, some schools have dropped their services, and others are considering doing so or have switched to other providers.

To stop students from pirating music, more than 120 colleges and universities have tried providing free or subsidized access to the legal subscription services over campus networks in the past few years. About 7% of all four-year schools and 31% of private research universities provided one of the legal downloading services, according to a 2005 survey of 500 schools by the Campus Computing Project, a nonprofit that studies how colleges use information technology. Universities typically pay for the services, some with private grants and others through student fees. While a typical monthly subscription to Napster is $9.95, the schools have been able to cut special deals, funded in part by record companies. The Wall Street Journal

According to a recent news item, the city police in Hamburg felt relieved when the American football team was defeated and thrown out of the World Cup matches. It was because the police needed to give special protection to the US team as they were the targets of people’s hatred. Arab News

This gene is responsible for hair-colour in some modern mammals, too. In humans, reduced activity of the Mc1r gene causes red hair, while in dogs, mice and horses it results in yellow hair. BBC

Up to 122 amphibian species have become extinct since 1980. Since the 1960s these vertebrates have gone into sharp decline as humans have encroached on their habitat. Climate change and infectious diseases have also taken their toll. The Guardian

But the Fourth of July also marks the 40th birthday of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And in contrast to the nation, this most important law is showing all the worst signs of middle age. It's flabby and out of shape, insufficiently exercised -- and slowing down dramatically. Editor and Publisher

They had no search warrant, grand jury subpoena or court order. Instead, a local FBI official hand-delivered a National Security Letter — one of more than 9,000 sent to finance, telephone and Internet companies last year — that described the records needed. 

Under a federal law expanded by the anti-terrorism USA Patriot Act of 2001, the written request was all the authority the FBI needed. The Patriot Act also barred the librarians from disclosing the request to anyone.

The librarians refused to hand over the information. Instead, they filed a federal lawsuit challenging the secret letters as an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. 

The e-mailed threat proved to be a hoax. Yet the lawsuit it sparked, only the second legal challenge to National Security Letters in their 20-year history, provides a rare public glimpse of the vast amount of banking, credit, telephone and Internet records that anti-terrorism or counterintelligence investigators can have simply by asking. USA Today

New information about the Catholic church's views on the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s may also be unearthed. 

Pius XI's successor, Pius XII, has long been accused of failing to help Jews during the Nazi genocide during WWII. 

But the key records potentially contained in Pius XII's archive will remain closed, despite requests from rabbis and Jewish historians when current Pope Benedict XVI was elected. 

Historians have clamoured for greater access to the Vatican's secret archives in an attempt to demystify the role of the church in the run-up to WWII. BBC

We know George Bush was a Naval Aviator because it says so right on his toy box. Actually, he never was a Naval Aviator and never once landed a plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier. During the Vietnam War, our future President flew in the Texas Air National Guard protecting Houston from Viet Cong attack. Our President obtained that job the same way he got the current one: The fix was in. 
American Politics Journal - originally published by gregpalast.com