March 2014 archive

Six In The Morning

On Sunday

Malaysia flight MH370: Chinese families ‘seek answers’

30 March 2014 Last updated at 07:01

  The BBC

Relatives of Chinese passengers from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane have flown to Kuala Lumpur to seek answers from the Malaysian authorities.

The family members say they have not been given enough information, and want to meet Malaysia’s prime minister and transport minister face to face.

Ten planes and eight ships are looking for remains of the airliner in a vast area of the Indian Ocean.

The airliner disappeared on 8 March with 239 people on board.

Some relatives of the flight’s 153 Chinese passengers have refused to accept the Malaysian account of events and have accused the authorities of withholding information.




Sunday’s Headlines:

China seizes $US14.5bn assets linked to ex-spy chief Zhou Yongkang – report

Egypt sentences additional Morsi supporters to death

‘Nanobionics’ aims to give plants super powers

How young is too young? Bolivia debates child labor law

Toyota case shows it’s hard to prosecute execs

Formula One 2014: Sepang

It’s Spring.  It’s Sepang.  And it’s raining.

Now yesterday that delayed qualifying for almost an hour and there’s no telling what it will do to today’s race if repeated.  It will certainly wreck my beauty sleep which is just beginning to recover.

If I may summarize the 2 most trenchant developments without having to source them they are these.

Tires are much harder and fall off faster than ever.  Formula One seems committed to controlling the race via rubber.  Some teams were preseving their stock of full Wets during yesterday’s qualifying which ruined their grid position but may pay off today if conditions are damp.

Only Mercedes has successfully created a new 6 cylinder power plant (and only somewhat given that one blew up under Lewis Hamilton at Albert Park).  The Renault guzzles too much gas putting Ricciardo in technical violation of fuel flow rate rules and erasing his second place finish.  Scuderia Marlboro has produced a mediocre product that seems beyond even the legendary Alonso’s ability to turn into a Sow’s Ear, let alone a Silk Purse.  ‘Lord bless his soul because nobody else will’ Bernie is unhappy about the noise, which creats excitement you see and gives you the impression the cars are moving fast even when they’re not.  You no longer have to buy commemorative $20 earplugs and can actually hear the tires and the turbo and KERS kick in.

What We Learned This Week

MSNBC’s “Up” host, Steve Kornacki discusses what he and his guests have learned this week.

March Madness 2014: Men’s Regional Final

Time Network Seed School Record Seed School Record Region
6:00 TBS 1 Florida (35 – 2) 11 Dayton (26 – 10) South
8:30 TBS 1 Arizona (34 – 4) 2 Wisconsin (29 – 7) West

Parallelogram

“Voting is to politics as praying is to religion”

— Yours. Truly.    

^ ^          
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Random Japan

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Daughter of Osamu Tezuka, God of Manga, discovers his stash of hand-drawn sexy mouse artwork

  Casey Baseel

Do you think Walt Disney ever scratched his butt in public?

Sure, it may not be the classiest thing to do, but sometimes when you’ve got an itch, it needs to be scratched right away. It doesn’t make him a monster, it just means, like all of us, he occasionally his base urges won out against social propriety.

Still, it’s a little hard to reconcile the man responsible for Mickey Mouse having an itchy behind. Just like it’s a little shocking to learn that Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, kept a stash of sexy mouse drawings locked in his desk.

In Japan’s sizeable pantheon of beloved comic artists, Tezuka is Zeus. He’s uniformly referred to as Manga no Kami-sama, literally the “God of Manga.” Despite having passed away more than 25 years ago, Tezuka is still so famous and uniformly revered that fans will come to see exhibitions of things as mundane as a desk he worked at.

Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Health and Fitness NewsWelcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Chicken and Citrus with Greens

Chicken Piccata photo 24recipehealth-master675_zps8f7ae9ad.jpg

Chicken ‘Piccata’ With Chard or Beet Greens

Pound chicken breasts thin, to about 1/4 inch. This way, you can get a good two servings, if not more, out of each boneless, skinless breast.

Lemon and Garlic Chicken With Spiced Spinach

When you add the rinsed spinach to the pan after cooking the chicken it will wilt in the liquid left on the leaves after washing, and it will deglaze the pan at the same time.

Lemon and Garlic Chicken With Cherry Tomatoes

This is a summery dish to make in the middle of a cold winter (or early spring), but you can find decent cherry tomatoes even now, from Florida or from Mexico.

Soy-Ginger Chicken With Asian Greens or Arugula

Serve these spicy pan-cooked pounded chicken breasts over a mound of pungent wild arugula or Asian salad greens.

Lemon and Garlic Chicken With Mushrooms

In this Provençal rendition of pan-cooked chicken breasts, the mushrooms take on an added dimension of flavor as they deglaze the pan with the help of one of their favorite partners, dry white wine.

Source: Martha Rose Shulman, New York Times Recipes for Health

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board: Antibiotic Use, and Abuse, on the Farms

The Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to get the voluntary cooperation of drug companies to curb the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed is off to a rousing good start.

The agency announced on Wednesday that 25 of the 26 manufacturers of the antibiotics of greatest concern had agreed to modify their labels to block such usage. They account for almost all sales of these drugs. [..]

The F.D.A. issued new policy guidelines in December that called for drug companies to revise their labels voluntarily to reduce overuse. This week, it announced that 25 companies agreed to remove “growth promotion” as one of the purposes for which their drugs can be used.

That effectively makes it illegal for farmers and ranchers to use the drugs to grow fatter animals faster. Although some skeptics worry that these voluntary steps can be reversed in the future, that appears unlikely.

Jared Bernstein: A Football Slamdunk

Not to mix metaphors, but as I read it, that National Labor Relations Board ruling that footballers at Northwestern are actually employees of the university and thus can form a union looks like a slamdunk.

You’ve got capital and labor. The university owns the franchise, produces football, and captures hundreds of millions in profits. But the owners play not on the gridiron. They neither block nor tackle, pass nor punt. The players do so, according to the NYT, sometimes for 50 hours a week. That’s how they earn their scholarships. That’s “earn”…as in work.

That’s labor, and importantly, labor that generates profit. No one’s saying these players/workers/students/athletes don’t take classes. But this argument by the school makes little sense to me:

David Sirota: Let Them Eat NCAA Brackets

In historians’ quest to find the perfect anecdote to summarize this era of unprecedented economic inequality, they confront an embarrassment of riches (pun intended).

There are the stories of billionaires like Tom Perkins, Stephen Schwarzman and Ken Langone insisting that criticism of inequality is akin to Nazism. There are more subtle antics at the local level-for instance, there is news this week that in New York (aka one of the most unequal states in America) Republican legislators are aiming to create a special sales-tax exemption for those buying private jets. And there is, of course, the tale of the billionaire vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charles Munger, telling everyone to “thank god” for massive bank bailouts, and then telling the poor to “suck it in and cope” with their own problems.

Each of these makes a good modern-day analogue to the legend of Marie Antoinette’s attitude toward the proles during the 18th century. Yet, none of these examples rise to truly iconic “let them eat cake” status in the way the recent episode involving Warren Buffett does.

I’m referring, of course, to Buffett’s headline-grabbing deal with Quicken Loans to give away $1 billion to anyone who can perfectly predict the outcome of every game in the NCAA basketball tournament.

Eugene Robinson: Tilting at Windbags

I had no idea so many Republicans were nostalgic for the Cold War. President Obama should dust off the zinger he used in a campaign debate against Mitt Romney: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”

Poor Mitt. It seems he never got over Obama’s putdown of his view that Russia is the “number-one geopolitical foe” of the United States. Since Russia’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from neighboring Ukraine, Romney has been crowing “told you so.”

Other hawkish GOP luminaries, either out of ideology or opportunism, are loudly echoing Romney’s criticism. Speaking of hawks, Sen. John McCain of Arizona accused the president of conducting a “feckless” foreign policy. And speaking of opportunists, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said the United States has “receded from leadership” in the world and speculated that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “openly laughing” at Obama.

Joe Conason: Bill Clinton Urges Democrats to Embrace Health Care Reform

Defending the Affordable Care Act in his memorable nominating speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton did as he often advises his party’s elected officials: Don’t run away from the argument; confront it directly instead. During his own political career, the former president has done both.

“When the president asked me to speak for him in North Carolina, I said that I would do it-but that I could only do it and be effective if he let me explain and defend the health care deal,” Clinton recalled this week, speaking not only about the 2012 election but the midterm campaign now underway.

“I thought that Democrats had a tendency to shy away from things they had done that were unpopular, (and) talk about positions they had that were popular. And that my own experience had convinced me-going back to ’94 and even more when I was governor-that that was always a terrible mistake. That you had to turn in toward all controversies and embrace them-even if you said you were wrong or a mistake was made. You couldn’t not deal with it.”

March Madness 2014: Women’s Regional Semi-Finals Day 1

What about Sepang do we not understand?

Today’s Games

Time Network Seed School Record Seed School Record Region
noon ESPN 2 Baylor (31 – 4) 3 Kentucky (26 – 8) East
2:00 ESPN 1 Notre Dame (34 – 0) 5 Oklahoma State (25 – 8) East
4:30 ESPN 1 UConn (36 – 0) 12 BYU (28 – 6) East
6:30 ESPN 3 Texas A&M (27 – 8) 7 DePaul (30 – 6) MidWest

On This Day In History March 29

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 29 is the 88th day of the year (89th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 277 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1951, the Rosenbergs are convicted of espionage.

In one of the most sensational trials in American history, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. The husband and wife were later sentenced to death and were executed in 1953.

The conviction of the Rosenbergs was the climax of a fast-paced series of events that were set in motion with the arrest of British physicist Klaus Fuchs in Great Britain in February 1950. British authorities, with assistance from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, gathered evidence that Fuchs, who worked on developing the atomic bomb both in England and the United States during World War II, had passed top-secret information to the Soviet Union. Fuchs almost immediately confessed his role and began a series of accusations.

Fuchs confessed that American Harry Gold had served as a courier for the Soviet agents to whom Fuchs passed along his information. American authorities captured Gold, who thereupon pointed the finger at David Greenglass, a young man who worked at the laboratory where the atomic bomb had been developed. Gold claimed Greenglass was even more heavily involved in spying than Fuchs. Upon his arrest, Greenglass readily confessed and then accused his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, of being the spies who controlled the entire operation. Both Ethel and Julius had strong leftist leanings and had been heavily involved in labor and political issues in the United States during the late-1930s and 1940s. Julius was arrested in July and Ethel in August 1950.

By present-day standards, the trial was remarkably fast. It began on March 6, and the jury had convicted both of conspiracy to commit espionage by March 29. The Rosenbergs were not helped by a defense that many at the time, and since, have labeled incompetent. More harmful, however, was the testimony of Greenglass and Gold. Greenglass declared that Julius Rosenberg had set up a meeting during which Greenglass passed the plans for the atomic bomb to Gold. Gold supported Greenglass’s accusation and admitted that he then passed the plans along to a Soviet agent. This testimony sealed Julius’s fate, and although there was little evidence directly tying Ethel to the crime, prosecutors claimed that she was the brain behind the whole scheme. The jury found both guilty. A few days later, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. They were executed on June 19, 1953 in Sing Sing Prison in New York. Both maintained their innocence to the end.

Since the execution, decoded Soviet cables, codenamed VENONA, have supported courtroom testimony that Julius acted as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, but doubts remain about the level of Ethel’s involvement. The decision to execute the Rosenbergs was, and still is, controversial. The New York Times, in an editorial on the 50th anniversary of the execution (June 19, 2003) wrote, “The Rosenbergs case still haunts American history, reminding us of the injustice that can be done when a nation gets caught up in hysteria.” This hysteria had both an immediate and a lasting effect; many innocent scientists, including some who were virulently anti-communist, were investigated simply for having the last name “Rosenberg.” The other atomic spies who were caught by the FBI offered confessions and were not executed. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who supplied documents to Julius from Los Alamos, served 10 years of his 15 year sentence. Harry Gold, who identified Greenglass, served 15 years in Federal prison as the courier for Greenglass and the British scientist, Klaus Fuchs. Morton Sobell, who was tried with the Rosenbergs, served 17 years and 9 months. In 2008, Sobell admitted he was a spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was “in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.”

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