All Global News on One Page

Amy Chua’s memoir about Chinese parenting styles, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has American parents in a tizzy. I teach History at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, a K-12 school in which we neither grade nor punish our students. Instead, we let the students’ individual interests serve as their guides. I’m therefore among the first to ask: are we all too soft on our kids?
But I also spent three years teaching in

Due to recent unfortunate circumstances, I’ve been forced to evaluate my definition for the term ‘relationship.’ I have been in a serious but long distance relationship for quite a while, and recently, both parties (including myself) have confessed to cheating. Although hurt, we both realized we still loved each other and wanted to remain together, but obviously under different circumstances. And since the whole “strictly monogamous” rule wasn’t working, it would have to be something different. But was an open relationship the right answer?
It would seem that being in a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” sort of relationship is almost condoning the act of

With the way some political opponents latched onto the story Friday, you would have thought Scott Gessler had just orchestrated Bernie Maddoff’s escape from federal prison. Just two weeks after being sworn in as Colorado’s Secretary of State, he has come under fire after he voluntarily, publicly and ethically disclosed his plan to take on a second job, one that would include part-time contract legal work with his old firm.
The reason for his announcement: he’s got bills to pay. I

John Wells has a dream job. For 15 seasons as a writer and producer, he masterminded the hit television drama ER and also been a guiding force behind The West Wing, Third Watch, China Beach and the current cable programs Southland and Shameless. He’s won a long string of awards and currently serves as the president of the Writers Guild of America, West.
At first it might seem ironic that his latest project, the new film The Company Men, deals with the traumas associated with unemployment. Nonetheless, he can make viewers empathize with three high powered shipping firm executives (Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper) who all lose their jobs the same way he could make the president of the United States seem human in The West Wing.
For a film that deals with misfortune, Wells has had a surprising amount of

Oscar Wilde’s ability to skewer societal hypocrisies is masterful — and his 1895 farce The Importance of Being Earnest is a pitch-perfect send-up of Victorian pseudo-morality and the embodiment of fin de sicle British dandyism.
Renown for his wit, Wilde’s three-act comedy at the American Airlines Theater revolves around mistaken identities, upper-class snobbery and dubious pedigrees. Two London gentlemen — Jack Worthing (David Furr) and Algy Moncrieff (Santino Fontana) — are in hot pursuit of two women, Gwendolen (Sara Topham) and Cecily (Charlotte Parry), who long to marry a man called Earnest.
There are several obstacles to their respective unions. Worthing is deemed unworthy by Gwendolen’s mother, the daunting Lady Bracknell, played to the hilt by Brian Bedford, who also directs. She can inspire fear by arching an eyebrow or the inflection of a single word, such as “handbag.” An orphan reared by a kindly guardian, Worthing cannot produce lineage, at which Lady Bracknell

Needed to Play:
4 taxpayers of any sex: 1 rich white banker-type wearing dark suit with loosened tie. 2 ordinary folks wearing jeans; 1 in a blue or flannel work shirt, the other in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. 1 poor bedraggled person wearing clothes that look like they were retrieved from the bottom of a rodeo dumpster behind the animal performer stalls. 1 living room — with a TV tuned to the State of the Union Address.1 shot glass per

This week, Former Speaker of the House and twice divorced Newt Gingrich celebrated the Republican House vote on health care, stating that far from being symbolic, it was a first step in repealing the legislation, a move that leaves me wondering, who will champion the rights of people like me, who belong to one of the one of the most poorly organized, underrepresented, and downright depressed but growing population in America: the unhappily married. We stand to stand to lose more than almost any other group: not only money and our health, but our ability to separate from our spouses.
As a constituency, like many Americans, we’ve seen our benefits decrease while premiums and deductibles rise, in addition, we know now that our health is at risk by staying married. The latest research shows that both men and women in unhappy marriages have higher cortisol levels in the morning, leading to increased stress levels, high blood pressure, raising the risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, depression as well as other serious and unattractive illnesses. So, ironically, we’re staying married to keep our benefit plans, but getting sicker, which adds to our costs and chances of becoming uninsurable should we ever be able to afford to go it

I have to preface this by saying I’ve never been a fan of Keith Olbermann. But then I’ve never been a fan of any particular commentator. I’ve always considered ‘fandom’ something reserved for sports teams or maybe an individual player. There’s something non-threatening about sports in

When President Obama took office, he vowed to repair the damage done to America’s moral standing on the global stage. You may have hoped that human rights would become an organizing principle of our foreign policy. That the U.S. would finally try to engage pariah states like Iran and North Korea, or that Obama’s presidency would elevate the voices of grassroots movements in economic and environmental policy

Now that Senator Lieberman has announced he will not seek another term for the Senate, many pundits took Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s witticism to heart: “If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.”
I’m not going there. I’ve got something good to say about the former Democrat, now Independent from Connecticut.
For many, gay and straight, asking Joe Lieberman to be the Senate lead in repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” seemed an odd choice. And frankly, some Servicemembers Legal Defense Network supporters initially were skeptical of the choice. They didn’t entirely trust

Norway’s Opera claims 140 million worldwide users, most of whom are on smart phones using Opera Mini.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

It is 9 pm on a very cold Philadelphia night as I sit down to write this. I’ve just returned from a closed casket viewing of my 19-year-old union brother Mark Keely who was blown up in a gas main explosion three nights ago. Three other union members of his work crew were burned from head to toe.
Brother Mark was 19 and had been on the job just five months.
Death and horrible injury is a daily possibility for members of the Utility Workers Union of America. Our members are the first of the first responders cutting off the electricity and gas so firefighters and police officers can so their jobs.
No one knows how many lives Brother Keely and his crew saved with their ultimate sacrifice.
Hundreds and hundreds of union members were at

We pulled wrought iron fences out of the ground and used them to build blazing barricades on the highway when we heard four were dead in Ohio.
We ran the streets of Chicago to express our rage against the war. We gathered in protest at the Civic Center when we heard Judge Julius J. Hoffman had muzzled and shackled Bobby Seale. We defiantly refused to disperse until the tear gas canisters exploded and the noxious cloud sent us scampering away.
We were deep into Nixon’s reign of darkness — the downward spiral of the war, the unauthorized sideshow in Laos and Cambodia, preventive detention in DC, Watergate — but we wanted to give the process one last

When we’re young, we build castles in the sand. And when we grow up, some of us build empires.
One fella intimately familiar with the empire-building process, a relatively unknown name to the masses, unlike such nationally known empire builders as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, is 67-year-old Dick Heckmann. Not only has he done it before, but he’s busily engaged in pursuing an encore.
“I want to be an $800 million gorilla again,” says Heckmann, a one-time Fuller brush man who’s convinced he’s off to a solid start in achieving that goal.
The Old Testament says dream no small dreams, and that surely applies to our would-be gorilla, not only an achiever who dreams big, but one who doggedly follows up with the necessary action to make sure his dreams will come true.
That was the case in 1990 when Heckmann, together with the aid of a secretary, founded United States Filter Corp., a New York Stock Exchange-listed company that treated waste water and water that went into manufactured products. Though the subsequent acquisition of 260 water firms and internal growth, he built a booming business with annualized revenues of $5 billion over the next nine years that was sold in 1999 to Vivendi for $8.2 billion.
In the process, the sales of

So Keith Olbermann’s gone.
For now.
And the side of the room that is reveling in his departure will, of course, display their colors as do all vain beasts who strut and preen and demonstrate their bloated, overcompensating masculinity to their submissive minions.
And then, having flexed and posed thus, proceed to bob and weave through the onslaught of righteous criticism, disingenuously denying the truth about their actions, deploying their meme-machines to spout nonsense and calumny about their accusers.
And because the other side of the room — along with wit, intelligence, reverence for history and mortality — possesses a crippling introspection which is often an impediment to action, they do little to impede them, hoping for the eventual tripping-up of the bullies, the inevitable gaffe which reveals their corroded inner workings.
And, as always, it becomes abundantly clear that their drivel is merely the raving of a cornered and terrified animal on the verge of extinction, railing against all who would snuff out its lethal messages of racism, sexism, classism, corporatism. They accuse, they lie, they do everything they have been bred to do to

It’s been twenty years since we went to war in Iraq for the first time. The years have been kind to Desert Storm, which is now remembered as an unalloyed triumph. But was it? The way Desert Storm was shaped, fought and finished revealed tremendous indecision in Washington, half measures on the battlefield, and an inconclusive war termination that sowed the poison seeds of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 in large part to extricate himself from the debts of the Iran-Iraq War, which had raged from 1980 to 1988. The Americans, Japanese and Europeans had loaned Saddam about $35 billion, the Saudis $31 billion, Kuwait $14 billion and the

If I am confused about what fish to eat and have spent my life studying nutrition and environmental science, then I imagine most people are confused. I am left with so many questions and had almost given up trying to figure it out. Until I met Tim O’Shea, the founder of Clean Fish, Inc, a company, aspiration and a movement that brings together artisanal fishermen and fish farmers and champions them in the marketplace under transparent, traceable brands.
Tim and I took a walk through the hills of San Francisco, past the homes of senators, down through the old army base, the Presidio, where sculptured trails wind through the woods, through the center of George Lucas’ Star Wars headquarters, and down to the Palace of Fine Arts, the home of 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition which displayed the world’s wonders of modern (as of 1915) technology, agriculture and food

I can’t tell you how many women come to me with the belief that menopause has caused their weight gain, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Wrong!
Some claim hormone therapy made them fat. Others are certain that the loss of estrogen caused their weight gain. One thing’s for sure, they say: Something is making us fat, and it is worsening with age.
Is menopause to blame?
Mid-life weight gain can partly be explained by an alteration in fat cell biology that seems to promote fat deposition in the abdominal

Once again I love it when a mystery is revealed, or at least partially explained.
I was reading a case study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine and it helped confirm a hypothesis I have had for a while about the importance of vitamins to your sleep.
Look at the busy B’s: Did you know that vitamin B can help regulate the use of tryptophan?
B3: has been shown to increase REM sleep, help with depression in some cases and a decrease in nighttime awakenings.
B6: is essential in the production of serotonin, the “calming” hormone that helps calm the body before falling asleep.
Folic Acid: Deficiency in folic acid deficient can be found in those with insomnia.
Important Minerals: Calcium and Magnesium, taken in a 2:1 ratio, can be helpful for sleep.
Calcium: is a natural relaxant which has a calming effect on the nervous system. 500 mg daily can be helpful (soda can actually strip away calcium).
Magnesium: is a mineral that appears to help assist chronic sleep problems as

At a press conference this week featuring none other than First Lady Michelle Obama, Walmart made pledges that should, in principle, put more nutritious food within easier reach, literally and figuratively.
Literally, because the nation’s largest grocer promised to reduce sugar and sodium in its own product line, and eliminate added trans fats over the next five years. They also plan to develop a logo to signify foods that meet their internal standard for better nutrition.
These promises sound good, and along with my public health colleagues, I commend Walmart for making them, and in anticipation of Walmart keeping them. But I must append some precautionary caveats.
Perhaps ironically, even as Walmart was promising both to provide more nutritious foods, and tell us which ones they are, the national non-profit, Prevention Institute, issued a report indicating that entities selling us food are not reliable judges of nutritional quality. The report, based on an examination of various front-of-pack claims indicating “more nutritious” children’s foods, found that nearly 85 percent of the products with specific shout-outs about their nutritional virtues were unhealthy by the evaluators’ objective standards.
I can validate this worry with a personal view from

Whatever the circumstances and fallout of Keith’s departure, NBC News still faces this weird contradiction of how to run a middle-of-the road news network and a partisan cable channel. At this juncture it is hard to tell if losing Olbermann was personally or editorially driven. It would seem to be the former, as MSNBC prime time remains without ideological balance (at least among the hosts).

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

I was pretty surprised while watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann to hear Olbermann, in a rather matter-of-fact way, tell his viewers that tonight would be his last show. It takes years to build up a TV news show “brand.” And Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show dated back to the darkest days of the one-party Republican state. It was Olbermann’s principled and sincere outrage at the warmongering and lies coming from the George W. Bush administration as it pushed the nation into war and recession that established his “brand.” But the fact that Olbermann was a “brand” in the first place points to the intrinsic limitations of corporate media.
The only winners in the Comcast/MSNBC decision to drop Countdown with Keith Olbermann are Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and all the other bloviators over at Fox

Some thoughts prompted by the divisive (i.e. dualistic, dichotomous, all-or-nothing) rhetoric and the Chinese visit…
The real threat to America (as I see it through my limited mind-lens) is not an economical one or a geopolitical one but a psychological one, not from outside but from within.
America is undergoing a major loss of identity. We used to think that we are 1st-this and 1st-that. And now we are learning that we

I had never been one to call myself a “spiritual” person. In fact, I didn’t even see spirituality as something attainable for someone like me. In my mind, that was a word used to describe shamans, gurus and priests — none of whom I identified with. I was of the fast-moving, career-driven, shoebox-dwelling, all-black-wearing city folk tribe — like most people in