Ran out of time today. Found out my husband and I are expecting our first child this morning. Yippee! That's our own private good news. :) Here's the good news for today. I'll come back to edit it later, but right now I have to bring my husband his work out uniform. :)
Enjoy the articles! (I'll separate them later, I promise!)
Top 5:
1. Gosh Darn! Cussing Banned in California Town (CNN)
2. Russian Arms Dealer Accused of Breaking U.N. Embargoes Arrested in Thailand (Fox News)
3. Nine Militants Killed' in Iraq (BBC)
4. Men Who Do Housework May Get More Sex (Yahoo)
5. Solo Sailor will Now Navigate Wave-powered Boat to Japan (Honolulu Advertiser)
Honorable Mentions:
1. Rare Helen Keller Pic with Doll Discovered (CNN)
2. Tenn. family extricated safely after trees fall on car (Firerescue1.com)
3. 101-yr-old all set to run in marathon (Times of India)
4. Airplanes Avert Close Call Collision (Fox News)
1. Gosh darn! Cussing banned in California town
Updated 7:23 am EST, Thurs Mar 6, 2008
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/06/cuss.free.zone.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
SOUTH PASADENA, California (AP) -- What the $%*&*? This community on the edge of Los Angeles has become a cuss-free zone.
McKay Hatch, right, the founder of the No Cussing Club, jokes with his father, Brent Hatch, on Wednesday.
So if you're headed to South Pasadena this week, be sure to turn down the volume on that Snoop Dogg CD, and, if the little old lady from Pasadena cuts you off in traffic, don't even think about flipping her the bird.
Not that police will slap cuffs on you and haul your sorry, er, butt off to jail in light of the proclamation passed Wednesday by the City Council. But you could be shamed into better behavior by the unsettling glares of residents who take their reputation for civility seriously.
"That's one of the purposes of this," Mayor Michael Cacciotti said of his city's proclamation designating the first week of March as No Cussing Week. "It provides us a reminder to be more civil, to elevate the level of discourse."
The proclamation will be in effect until Friday, and then the first week of every March hereafter.
South Pasadena, a tranquil city of tree-shaded cottages at the base of a mountain range eight miles north of downtown Los Angeles, isn't the first to try to rein in potty mouths. Earlier this year, the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, Missouri, proposed banning swearing in bars. Last year, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons called for an industrywide ban on racially and sexually charged epithets.
But what's different about the latest push to stop public cussing is that it was proposed by a 14-year-old boy.
Don't MissGeorge Carlin looks back on "seven dirty words" 'Today,' Fonda apologize for vulgarity "My mom and dad always taught me good morals, good values, and not cussing was one of them," said McKay Hatch, the founder of South Pasadena High School's No Cussing Club, during a recent break between study hall and tennis practice.
"I've cussed before, I'm not gonna lie to you," Hatch quickly added. "But I try not to cuss any more."
He was in junior high school when he became fed up with all the blue language around him.
He understood why his friends use foul language: "They just want to fit in like everybody else and they don't know how. They figure if they cuss maybe it's an easy way to do that."
But it wasn't for him.
"I finally told my friends, `I don't cuss.' And I said, `If you want to hang out with me, you don't cuss."'
It took a couple of years, but enough friends finally came around that Hatch formed a 50-member club, handed out fliers and called the group's first meeting, held June 1.
Nine months later, the No Cussing Club has a Web site, claims a membership of 10,000 and boasts chapters in several states and countries. Hatch considers his greatest achievement, though, to be getting his hometown of 25,000 to become a cuss-free zone.
Cacciotti, the mayor, isn't surprised that South Pasadena started the movement. He noted that the city broke off from its much bigger neighbor 120 years ago when residents unhappy with the saloon trade in downtown Pasadena voted 85-25 to go their own way.
By midweek, however, it was unclear just how many people in South Pasadena knew about the no-cussing edict.
A clerk behind the counter at Buster's Ice Cream & Coffee Shop just laughed and said, "That sounds pretty funny."
David Salcedo, who manages High Life Burgers, a popular hangout near the high school, hadn't heard of it either.
But, come to think of it, he said, the language among the after-school crowd has been pretty clean lately. The biggest problem these days, Salcedo said, is kids talking too loudly.
"But they're good kids," he added. "They just eat their chili fries and go home."
For his part, Hatch hopes his No Cussing Club will lead to cuss-free zones in other cities. He believes it could be a quality-of-life issue, and that there may be less violence if people behave better.
"You have to start with the little things," he said.
2. Russian Arms Dealer Accused of Breaking U.N. Embargoes Arrested in Thailand
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,335437,00.html
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Thailand — A Russian arms dealer accused of breaking U.N. arms embargoes by supplying weapons to African war zones was arrested Thursday in Bangkok, Thai police said.
Viktor Bout was arrested in the heart of the capital city on a warrant issued by a Thai court, said Police Lt. Gen. Pongpat Chayapan, head of the Crime Suppression Bureau. The warrant stemmed from an earlier one issued by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, he said.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman "congratulated" Thai police for the arrest but could not provide details about the role U.S. officials played in it. Details of the charges against Bout were also not immediately available.
Bout allegedly has been trafficking weapons to Central and West Africa since the early 1990s. United Nations reports say he set up a network of more than 50 aircraft around the world and trade experts have said the illicit diamond trade was likely one source of funds for his smuggled arms shipments.
Although Bout has been investigated by police in several countries, he has never been prosecuted for arms dealing.
A 2005 report by Amnesty International, a Britain-based human rights watchdog, alleged Bout was "the most prominent foreign businessman" involved in trafficking arms to UN-embargoed destinations from Bulgaria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and other countries.
The report also implicated Bout in transferring "very large quantities of arms" from Ukraine that were delivered to Uganda via Tanzania aboard a Greek-registered cargo ship.
In 2003, the U.N. imposed an arms embargo on the provinces of North and South Kivu and the Ituri regions of eastern Congo, and also on groups that were not a part of the 2003 peace agreement for the region.
3. 'Nine militants killed' in Iraq
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7281355.stm
Last updated: Thursday, 6 March 2008, 13:54 GMT
The US military in Iraq says American and Iraqi forces killed nine suspected al-Qaeda fighters in a raid near Talafar in Ninewa province last Sunday. Three Iraqi troops were killed in the operation, which the US said targeted a suspected militant training camp.
The Americans said militants based at the camp had carried out assassinations and roadside bomb attacks throughout the Talafar area.
It said troops had found bomb-making equipment and weapons at the scene.
In another operation, US soldiers shot and killed a man who was said to have drawn a pistol and then tried to detonate an explosives vest.
US and Iraqi government forces are pushing to take control of Ninewa province, where correspondents say insurgent fighters are making a stand after their influence diminished in Baghdad and other areas during 2007.
4. Men who do housework may get more sex http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080306/ap_on_re_us/sharing_chores;_ylt=AhaQJMI3XP3wsrnEpUrPXn.s0NUEBy DAVID CRARY
2 hours, 56 minutes ago
NEW YORK - American men still don't pull their weight when it comes to housework and child care, but collectively they're not the slackers they used to be. The average dad has gradually been getting better about picking himself up off the sofa and pitching in, according to a new report in which a psychologist suggests the payoff for doing more chores could be more sex. The report, released Thursday by the Council on Contemporary Families, summarizes several recent studies on family dynamics. One found that men's contribution to housework had doubled over the past four decades; another found they tripled the time spent on child care over that span.
"More couples are sharing family tasks than ever before, and the movement toward sharing has been especially significant for full-time dual-earner couples," the report says. "Men and women may not be fully equal yet, but the rules of the game have been profoundly and irreversibly changed."
Some couples have forged partnerships they consider fully equitable.
"We'll both talk about how we're so lucky to have someone who does more than their share," said Mary Melchoir, a Washington-based fundraiser for the National Organization for Women, who — like her lawyer husband — works full-time while raising 6-year-old triplets.
"He's the one who makes breakfast and folds the laundry," said Melchoir, 47. "I'm the one who fixes things around the house."
Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-area psychologist and author of "The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework," said equitable sharing of housework can lead to a happier marriage and more frequent sex.
"If a guy does housework, it looks to the woman like he really cares about her — he's not treating her like a servant," said Coleman, who is affiliated with the Council on Contemporary Families. "And if a woman feels stressed out because the house is a mess and the guy's sitting on the couch while she's vacuuming, that's not going to put her in the mood."
The report's co-authors, sociologists Scott Coltrane of the University of California, Riverside and Oriel Sullivan of Ben Gurion University, said they were addressing a perception that women's gains in the workplace were not being matched by gains at home.
"The typical punch line of many news stories has been that even though women are working longer hours on the job and cutting back their own housework, men are not picking up the slack," Coltrane and Sullivan wrote.
They said this perception was based on unrealistic expectations and underestimated the degree of change "going on behind the scenes" since the 1960s. The change, they said, "is too great a break from the past to be dismissed as a slow and grudging evolution."
Among the findings they cited:
_In the U.S., time-use diary studies show that since the '60s, men's contribution to housework doubled from about 15 percent to more than 30 percent of the total. Over the same period, the average working mother reduced her weekly housework load by two hours.
_Between 1965 and 2003, men tripled the amount of time they spent on child care. During the same period, women also increased the time spent with their children, suggesting mutual interest in a more hands-on approach to child-raising.
Sullivan and Coltrane predict men's contributions will increase further as more women take jobs.
"Men share more family work if their female partners are employed more hours, earn more money and have spent more years in education," they said.
Pamela Smock, a University of Michigan sociologist who also works with the council, said a persistent gender gap remains for what she called "invisible" household work — scheduling children's medical appointments, buying the gifts they take to birthday parties, arranging holiday gatherings, for example.
Marriage equality is more elusive among blacks than whites, with black women shouldering a relatively higher burden in terms of child care and housework, said council collaborator Shirley Hill, a sociology professor at the University of Kansas.
The report's overall findings meshed with what Carol Evans, founder and CEO of Working Mother magazine, has been observing as she tracks America's two-income couples.
"There's a generational shift that's quite strong," she said. "The younger set of dads have their own expectations about themselves as to being helpful and participatory. They haven't quite gotten to equality in any sense that a women would say, 'Wow, that's equal,' but they've gotten so much farther down the road."
5. Solo sailor will now navigate wave-powered boat to Japan
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080306/NEWS11/803060347/1021/NEWS11
Posted on: Thursday, March 6, 2008
By Sudhin Thanawala
Kenichi Horie of Japan stands in front of his wave-powered boat, the Suntory Mermaid II, at the Hawaii Yacht Club in Waikiki. Later this month, Horie plans to start a solo voyage across the Pacific to Japan. Kenichi Horie, who has sailed nonstop around the world and crossed the Pacific in a solar-powered boat made of recycled aluminum beer cans, is getting ready for his next solo adventure.
In less than two weeks, Horie is expected to begin what he says is the world's longest voyage in a wave-powered boat. He plans to travel more than 4,000 miles from Honolulu to Japan aboard a 3-ton catamaran called the Suntory Mermaid II at a speed of up to 5 knots.
The boat, made of recycled aluminum, relies on the energy of waves to move two fins at its bow and propel it forward.
The journey, which would take a diesel-powered boat about 10 days to complete, is expected to take Horie about 2 1/2 months.
Horie, 69, said Tuesday at the Hawaii Yacht Club in Waikiki that he will carry rice, canned food, microwavable meals and beer on the trip. Solar panels on top of the catamaran will power a microwave.
"With so many people supporting me, even by myself, I won't feel lonesome," Horie said through a translator.
He will have a satellite phone and access to e-mail. He said he will take books to read and listen to the radio.
Horie said the boat is sturdy and designed to right itself if it capsizes. Still, it is equipped with an engine and 35-foot sail mast for emergencies.
"I still think he's crazy for doing this," said Howie Mednick, vice commodore of the Hawaii Yacht Club, adding the voyage will be "historical" and "amazing."
Ken Dota, who is promoting Horie's voyage, said the sailor hopes the shipping industry will eventually adopt the clean wave technology.
The journey would not be Horie's first time traveling the seas using green technology. In 1992, he powered a boat by pedaling from Hawai'i to Okinawa. And in 1996, he sailed nearly 10,000 miles from Ecuador to Tokyo aboard a solar-powered boat made from recycled aluminum beer cans.
Honorable Mention:
1. Rare Helen Keller Pic with Doll Discovered
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/05/helen.keller.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
Updated 10:57pm EST, Wed March 5, 2008
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Researchers have uncovered a rare photograph of a young Helen Keller with her teacher Anne Sullivan, nearly 120 years after it was taken on Cape Cod.
The photograph, shot in July 1888 in Brewster, shows an 8-year-old Helen sitting outside in a light-colored dress, holding Sullivan's hand and cradling one of her beloved dolls.
Experts on Keller's life believe it could be the earliest photo of the two women together and the only one showing the blind and deaf child with a doll -- the first word Keller spelled for Sullivan after they met in 1887 -- according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which now has the photo.
"It's really one of the best images I've seen in a long, long time," said Helen Selsdon, an archivist at the American Federation for the Blind, where Keller worked for more than 40 years. "This is just a huge visual addition to the history of Helen and Annie."
For more than a century, though, the photograph was hidden in an album that belonged to the family of Thaxter Spencer, an 87-year-old man in Waltham.
Spencer's mother, Hope Thaxter Parks, often stayed at the Elijah Cobb House on Cape Cod during the summer as a child. In July 1888, she played with Keller, whose family had traveled from Tuscumbia, Alabama, to vacation in Massachusetts.
Spencer, who doesn't know which of his relatives took the picture, told the society that his mother, four years younger than Helen, remembered Helen exploring her face with her hands.
In June, Spencer donated a large collection of photo albums, letters, diaries and other heirlooms to the genealogical society, which preserves artifacts from New England families for future research.
"I never thought much about it," Spencer said in a statement released by the society. "It just seemed like something no one would find very interesting." Spencer has recently been hospitalized and could not be reached for comment.
It wasn't until recently that staff at the society realized the photograph's significance. Advocates for the blind say they had never heard of it, though after they announced its discovery Wednesday they learned it had published in 1987 in a magazine on Cape Cod and a half-century earlier in The Boston Globe. It is unclear whether there was more than one copy of the photograph.
D. Brenton Simons, the society's president and CEO, said the photograph offers a glimpse of what was a very important time in Keller's life.
Sullivan was hired in 1887 to teach Keller, who had been left blind and deaf after an illness at the age of 1½. With her new teacher, Keller learned language from words spelled manually into her hand. Not quite 7, the girl went from an angry, frustrated child without a way to communicate to an eager scholar.
While "doll" was the first word spelled into her hand, Helen finally comprehended the meaning of language a few weeks later with the word "water," as famously depicted in the film "The Miracle Worker." Sullivan stayed at her side until her death in 1936, and Keller became a world-famous author and humanitarian. She died in 1968.
Jan Seymour-Ford, a research librarian at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, which both Sullivan and Keller attended, said she was moved to see how deeply connected the women were, even in 1888.
"The way Anne is gazing so intently at Helen, I think it's a beautiful portrait of the devotion that lasted between these two women all of Anne's life," Seymour-Ford said.
Selsdon said the photograph is valuable because it shows many elements of Keller's childhood: that devotion, Sullivan's push to teach Helen outdoors and Helen's attachment to her baby dolls, one of which was given to her upon Sullivan's arrival as her teacher.
"It's a beautiful composition," she said. "It's not even the individual elements. It's the fact that it has all of the components."
2. Tenn. family extricated safely after trees fall on car
http://www.firerescue1.com/extrication/articles/387659/
March 05, 2008
By Ansley HamanThe Knoxville News-Sentinel
GATLINBURG, Tenn. — A Hendersonville, Tenn., family survived a brush with nature when three trees fell across the car in which the group was traveling through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Monday night.
Jillian McHenry, 20, was driving a 2001 Nissan Altima southbound on Newfound Gap Road, also known as U.S. 441, when three locust trees uprooted and fell across the roof of the car, said Nancy Gray, park spokeswoman.
Brenda McHenry, 54, was in the backseat, and Michael McHenry, 22, was in the front passenger seat. The incident occurred about 6 p.m. a mile south of the Chimney Tops trailhead.
"It compacted the rooftop right into the passenger compartment. The locust trees over the top of the vehicle extended across the roadway," Gray said. "Park rangers cut the trees off of the vehicle, and the Gatlinburg Fire Department used their extrication equipment to remove the passengers."
The three McHenrys were transported to Fort Sanders Sevier Medical Center, where they were treated and released. Officials couldn't specify how the three are related.
The trees, one of which was about 10 inches in diameter, fell simultaneously, Gray said. "It lookedlikethelargeronebrought down the other two," she said.
Gray said the park's vegetation specialist would examine the locust trees Tuesday to see if thetheywerehealthyatthetime of their fall.
"We did have strong winds last night coupled with recent snow melt and ground saturation," Gray said Tuesday.
A national park weather station on Cove Mountain, about seven miles from the scene, registered average winds of 22 mph and gusts of up to 56 mph between 6 and 7 p.m. Monday, according to Bob Miller, park spokesman.
Such conditions might have caused the trees, which have shallow roots, to fall, Gray said.
"It is not that unusual for trees to fall in their natural environment," Gray said. "More often trees fall without injuring anybody."
In 2001, a hiker was killed by a tree on one of the park's trails, Gray said.
3. 101-yr-old all set to run in marathon
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/101-yr-old_all_set_to_run_in_marathon/articleshow/2840842.cms
5 Mar 2008, 1934 hrs IST,REUTERS
LONDON: Already Britain's oldest employee, 101-year-old Buster Martin now aims to become the world's oldest marathon runner by completing the London Marathon and celebrating with a pint of beer and a cigarette.
Sprightly and bearded, he completed a half marathon at the weekend in five hours 13 minutes. The former Army physical training instructor works three days a week for a London plumbing firm and says he has trained for the April 13 race in his spare time.
"I've said I'll attempt it," he told by telephone from his workplace at Pimlico Plumbers. "I haven't said I'll complete it. If I do make it, all the better. I hadn't thought of doing it before but someone asked me and the money goes to charity so why not?"
His sponsorship money will go to the Rhys Daniels Trust, which provides temporary accommodation for families of patients in specialist children's hospitals.
Martin, who had 17 children and returned to work at the age of 99 saying he was bored after two years of retirement, would beat the previous record for world's oldest marathon runner by eight years.
"If I finish, I'll do what I always do and have a pint and a fag," he said. "People ask what is my secret but I haven't got one. They say fags and booze are bad for you - but I'm still here, aren't I?"
4. Airplanes Avert Close Call Collision
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,335796,00.html
Thursday, March 06, 2008
OBERLIN, Ohio — Two airplanes with more than 100 passengers averted a collision in air east of Pittsburgh after an Ohio air traffic control trainee told a Delta Air Lines pilot to turn into the path of an oncoming plane, officials said.
One pilot flew up and the other went down, and the planes never came closer than about 400 feet in altitude and 3 miles in lateral separation, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said Thursday. Standard separation is 1,000 feet vertical and 5 miles lateral, Cory said.
A cockpit collision avoidance system alerted the pilots to the danger.
Delta Flight 1654 was en route from Cincinnati to LaGuardia Airport in New York Tuesday morning and was carrying 57 passengers. The other plane, PSA Flight 2273, was flying from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to Charlotte, N.C. It had 70 people on board.
PSA is a subsidiary of U.S. Airways.
The controller only had about a year on the job, said Melissa Ott, National Air Traffic Controllers spokeswoman at the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Oberlin.
"We watched the recording of the incident three times and each time I said, 'Oh my God,"' Ott said. "It was the closest call I have ever seen in my 18 years of air traffic control."
/**/
She said a second controller was working with the trainee at the time.
"This ended with the aircraft taking the appropriate action," Cory said. "The controllers will be retrained."
Cory said the controllers union was highlighting the issue to press contract demands. "The union has publicly stated they want to get attention because they want that contract reopened," she said.
"We feel that the union is needlessly scaring and terrorizing the public."
A Delta spokeswoman said the passengers were never in danger.
Ott said the air traffic industry has downsized over the past year.
"A year ago that area would have been worked by 12 to 14 controllers," Ott said. "Now it's handled by nine or 10. New controllers are controlling airplanes much sooner than before. They used to train two or three years before doing it."
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