| 37 | On a trip to the Italian mainland from his home on Capreae, the emperor Tiberius dies on the Bay of Naples. | |
| 1190 | The Crusades begin the massacre of Jews in York, England. | |
| 1527 | The Emperor Babur defeats the Rajputs at the Battle of Kanvaha, removing the main Hindu rivals in Northern India. | |
| 1621 | The first Indian appears to colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts. | |
| 1833 | Susan Hayhurst becomes the first woman to graduate from a pharmacy college. | |
| 1850 | Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is published. | |
| 1865 | Union troops push past Confederate blockers at the Battle of Averasborough, N.C. | |
| 1907 | The British cruiser Invincible, the world's largest, is completed at Glasgow shipyards. | |
| 1913 | The 15,000-ton battleship Pennsylvania is launched at Newport News, Va. | |
| 1917 | Russian Czar Nicholas II abdicates his throne. | |
| 1926 | Physicist Robert H. Goddard launches the first liquid-fuel rocket. | |
| 1928 | The United States plans to send 1,000 more Marines to Nicaragua. | |
| 1935 | Adolf Hitler orders a German rearmament and violates the Versailles Treaty. | |
| 1939 | Germany occupies the rest Czechoslovakia. | |
| 1945 | Iwo Jima is declared secure by U.S. forces although small pockets of Japanese resistance still exist. | |
| 1954 | CBS introduces The Morning Show hosted by Walter Cornet to compete with NBC's Today Show. | |
| 1964 | President Lyndon B. Johnson submits a $1 billion war on poverty program to Congress. | |
| 1968 | U.S. troops in Vietnam destroy a village consisting mostly of women and children, the action is remembered as the My-Lai massacre. | |
| 1984 | Mozambique and South Africa sign a pact banning support for one another's internal foes. | |
| 1985 | Associated Press newsman, Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut. |
The United States spends an estimated $2 trillion annually on healthcare expenses, more than any other industrialized country. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States spends two-and-a-half times more than the OECD average, and yet ranks with Turkey and Mexico as the only OECD countries without universal health coverage. Some analysts say an increasing number of U.S. businesses are less competitive globally because of ballooning healthcare costs. U.S. economic woes have heightened the burden of healthcare costs both on individuals and businesses. The U.S. healthcare reform law signed by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010 includes measures aimed at making health care less expensive and more accessible, including upgrades to government-run Medicare and Medicaid.But far too many companies, and their henchmen in Congress, keep standing in the way of real reform to address the absurd cost of medical care in this country. So, when we pass laws requiring them to actually provide a decent amount of insurance for their employees, they whine about the cost, but at the same time refuse to help do anything to reduce those costs.
The largest U.S. bank “mischaracterized high-risk trading as hedging,” and withheld key information from its primary overseer, sometimes at Dimon’s behest, according to a report today by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The 301-page document also shows how managers manipulated internal risk models and pressured traders to overvalue their positions in an effort to hide growing losses in a “monstrous” credit derivatives portfolio in London.This hardly sounds like an organization that is even trying to cooperate with government officials. It also sounds like an organization that cares little for the financial obligations of taxpayers who have been there to back up the bank in the past. According to these reports, JP Morgan has problems in its management at the highest levels.
“We found a trading operation that piled on risk, ignored limits on risk taking, hid losses, dodged oversight and misinformed the public,” Chairman Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, told reporters today after his investigators spent nine months combing through 90,000 documents and interviewing current and former executives.
“As a female news editor on a TV newscast deciding what to show and what not to show. The chickification of the news. In fact, in the stack I have a story about that. Some guy, I think his name is Nolte, I have to find this. It’s in the stack here and it’s not a very big stack today, I’ll get to it, about the chickification of television and how more and more women are determining what everybody watches on TV.Lush’s rant was based one of the most poorly researched pieces of ratings comparison ever written. Over at Breitbart, one of their crack geniuses is contending that reruns of “The O’Reilly Factor” are more popular than HBO’s Girls. His conclusion is that the success of “Girls” is nothing but left wing hype by the mainstream media. Of course, this wingnut “intellectual giant” doesn’t bother to tell his readers that HBO is pay channel with 25-30 million US subscribers while Faux News is available in 90 million American homes. Faux News is in more than twice as many homes, so they should have twice as many viewers. Something would be seriously wrong if they didn’t. In the facts optional conservative mind O’Reilly beats all, so the “liberal mainstream media” are a bunch of liars.
This guy cites this rave show on HBO, starring Lena Dunham. Is that her name? The woman did the commercial for Obama saying, “Your first time is really important”? Yeah. First time. Don’t just do it with any guy. You know, pick from five or six. And she was talking about your first vote. Well, she’s got this show on HBO called Girls. That show. Now, if you knew nothing other — and let me do a test, Snerdley, you react. What do you know of that show? So you watched 20 minutes, fine. What is your impression of that show, as you listen to media buzz, Lena Dunham’s all over the place. She’s a guest on Letterman. She’s apparently the architect for what young women ought to be today. What is the impression that you have? The show is huge, right? Is that the impression you get in the media?
Everybody’s watching, everybody. And that show’s cutting edge. Only 600,000 viewers. That is this guy’s point, not even a million. Fewer viewers than The Daily Show. This has been my point all along about media buzz, how they go out and create this notion that something’s hotter and more popular than anything in the world, when it isn’t. And his point is that you’ve gotta be very careful in assessing what really is popular and what really isn’t and how things that aren’t popular are kept on the air by virtue of buzz or bias or what have you. And his point was that it’s because women are making programming decisions on an emotional basis. I am just telling you what he said.”
I see a lot of young women here today. Here’s some more advice from political elites who know what’s best for you:Some members of the Colorado State Legislature think women are too emotional to deal with a violent attack. Senator Jessie Ulibarri said that, instead of using a firearm, you would be better off using “ballpoint pens” to stab an attacker when he stops to reload.Let’s take this to it’s logical conclusion. A woman who is in the process of being attacked by a rapist is supposed to be armed, have access to the weapon, have it loaded, and shoot their rapist.
A ballpoint pen?
At the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, officials recommend that women defend themselves against a rapist with quote, “passive resistance.”
Passive resistance? The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun!
They call me crazy, yet the people doing the finger-pointing are saying things that are absolutely bizarre.
Now
that's craftsmanship! A 400-year-old bed has been identified as the oldest
piece of furniture that has remained in continuous use by the same family
the longest. It has been slept in by 15 generations of the Berkeley family:The antique four-poster with its ornate carved headboard has been providing a good night's rest for residents of the Berkeley Castle estate in Gloucestershire since 1608.
Far from being roped off into retirement like many pieces of historic furniture, John Berkeley, 81, and his wife Georgina, 73, still use the bed in the castle's Great State Bedroom.
The atrocities of the former Soviet Union’s gulags are forever enshrined in world history; Butugichag, a corrective labour camp open for a decade between 1945 and 1955, forced its prisoners to mine dangerous nuclear materials and experimented on them mercilessly. It’s estimated that up to 400,000 people perished in these horrific conditions, mostly through exposure to radiation. The Russian government still refuses to recognise Butugichag on its list of abandoned settlements, shamelessly attempting to avoid investigating the tragedies which occurred in this remote corner of eastern Russia. Today, the sparse, icy camp is barely reachable by road, its abandoned workhouses, mines and experimental facilities hidden away by a nation which wants to forget its brutal past.Butugichag is just one of twenty fascinating stories of ghost towns from all over, which you can read at Urban Ghosts.
Rob Rhinehart – a 24-year-old software engineer - ...found himself resenting the inordinate amount time it takes to fry an egg in the morning and decided something had to be done. Simplifying food... Rob has come up with an odourless, beige cocktail that he calls Soylent...
Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced diet, but with just a third of the calories and none of the toxins or cancer-causing stuff...
"Everything the body needs – that we know of, anyway – vitamins, minerals and macronutrients like essential amino acids, carbohydrates and fat. For the fat, I just use olive oil and add fish oil. The carbs are an oligosaccharide, which is like sugar, but the molecules are longer, meaning it takes longer to metabolise and gives you a steady flow of energy for a longer period of time, rather than a sugar rush from something like fructose or table sugar...
I think it's possible to use technology to make healthy food very cheap and easy, but we'll have to give up many traditional foodstuffs like fresh fruits and veggies, which are incompatible with food processing and scale.I don't think we need fruits and veggies, though – we need vitamins and minerals. We need carbs, not bread. Amino acids, not milk. It's still fine to eat these whenever you want, but not everyone can afford them or has the desire to eat them. Food should be optimised and personalised. If Soylent was as cheap and easy to obtain as a cup of coffee, I think people would be much healthier and healthcare costs would be lower. And I think this is entirely possible."
Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the full story: Here.
But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.
Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is a Higgs.
On 29 December 2012, a fireball lit up the early evening skies over the Sri Lankan province of Polonnaruwa. Hot, sparkling fragments of the fireball rained down across the countryside... officials forwarded the samples to a team of astrobiologists at Cardiff University in the UK for further analysis.Claims similar to this have been made before; it will be interesting to see how this one pans out. Panspermia explained.
The results of these tests, which the Cardiff team reveal today, are extraordinary. They say the stones contain fossilised biological structures fused into the rock matrix and that their tests clearly rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination...
The most startling claims, however, are based on electron microscope images of structures within the stones. Wallis and co. say that one image shows a complex, thick-walled, carbon-rich microfossil about 100 micrometres across that bares [sic] similarities with a group of largely extinct marine dinoflagellate algae.
They say another image shows well-preserved flagella that are 2 micrometres in diameter and 100 micrometres long. By terrestrial standards, that’s extremely long and thin, which Wallis and co. interpret as evidence of formation in a low-gravity, low-pressure environment.
“If we’re talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this,” says Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales who has championed de-extinction for years. Some people protest that reviving a species that no longer exists amounts to playing God. Archer scoffs at the notion. “I think we played God when we exterminated these animals.”Some are leery of the idea, because if those animals went extinct because of changes in their environment, how will they ever thrive again? Others believe resources spent on de-extinction would be better aimed at preventing endangered animals from disappearing. National geographic magazine looks at the progress we've made in de-extinction, and the ethics of the practice. More
Other scientists who favor de-extinction argue that there will be concrete benefits. Biological diversity is a storehouse of natural invention. Most pharmaceutical drugs, for example, were not invented from scratch—they were derived from natural compounds found in wild plant species, which are also vulnerable to extinction. Some extinct animals also performed vital services in their ecosystems, which might benefit from their return. Siberia, for example, was home 12,000 years ago to mammoths and other big grazing mammals. Back then, the landscape was not moss-dominated tundra but grassy steppes. Sergey Zimov, a Russian ecologist and director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy in the Republic of Sakha, has long argued that this was no coincidence: The mammoths and numerous herbivores maintained the grassland by breaking up the soil and fertilizing it with their manure. Once they were gone, moss took over and transformed the grassland into less productive tundra.
