All Global News on One Page

Here are seven steps to developing a digital marketing blueprint. Many people skip the first four, but these first few steps are the crucial difference between success and failure. I have also uploaded slide presentations to help you along.
Assess Your Situation — This first step is perhaps the most

A few days ago, Alec Baldwin offered some advice to Charlie Sheen (perhaps you’ve heard of him?). “Take a nap. Get a shower. Call

In my last post about the Startup Visa, I was very critical of the Kerry-Lugar legislation. That’s because it required immigrant entrepreneurs to raise at least $250,000 in financing for their startups, of which $100,000 had to come from American VCs or Super Angels. Few startups raise this kind of seed money — even in Silicon Valley. I couldn’t foresee this bill generating more than a few dozen

KALTAG — The reigning king of the Iditarod Tral Sled Dog Race has conceded this year’s competition. Long live the king.
Lance Mackey from Fairbanks, who ran off an unprecedented string of four straight victories, said here late Saturday that he has no hope of catching race leaders John Baker from Kotzebue and Ramey Smyth from Wasilla.
“I’m out of it for a victory,” Mackey said, “and I know that. It’s a reality. I will be back with a vengenance.”
Mackey was the ninth musher into this, the last of the Yukon River checkpoint before the race turns overland on the portage to Unalakleet on the Bering

Were the three men wrapping themselves in leather straps and mumbling in a foreign language on this weekend’s Alaska Airlines Flight 241 a security threat or were they Orthodox Jews preparing to pray in their tefillin — amulets bound to the arm and head as part of traditional Jewish weekday prayer rituals? It was the latter, though the fact that the crew went into a high alert and locked down the flight deck for the duration of the flight, suggests that this is a story about security as well.
It’s not surprising that neither the crew, nor apparently anybody else, knew what was going on when the men began to put the small boxes attached with leather straps, on both their arms and foreheads. Although the ritual is rooted in the words of Deuteronomy 6:8, “Bind them as a sign upon your arm, and as a symbol on your forehead,” and was popular so early on that we have tefillin from the time of Jesus, it is unlikely that more than ten percent of Jews currently engage in this practice with any regularity.
That being the case, it’s just not something with which lots of people are going to be familiar. That, and the fact that one does look pretty odd while wearing

If you’ve been following the news lately or if you’ve ever stood in line at Mammoth’s Chair 8 during the Christmas Holiday, you know that Iranian lunacy knows no bounds.
Having cleansed their entire country of political dissidents and homosexuals, the Iranians went looking for a new foe. They didn’t have to look very far. In a letter to the International Olympics Committee, Iran’s Secretary General Bahram Afsharzadeh warned of a possible boycott of the games because the new, and admittedly ugly logo, allegedly spells out the word

On Friday, as the world was rightly absorbed with the epic tragedy in Japan, I was reporting on a local tragedy for Patch.com. A young man, Matthew C. Blum, 32, of Forked River, New Jersey, had collapsed and died after leaving a recreational hockey game because he didn’t feel well.
Blum was married just four months ago and his wife learned two weeks ago that she is expecting their first

Picture courtesy of the Estate of Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was so impressed with dancer, Sofia Boutella — star of the late icon’s new music video for “Hollywood Tonight” — he was ready to offer her the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to dance alongside him on his This Is It concert series at the O2 Arena in London. Unfortunately, she was still under contract for Madonna’s Confessions Tour at the time and couldn’t get out of it. Seeing how disappointed Boutella was, Jackson turned to a couple of his collaborators and said: “I used to date Madonna. I should call her.”
While Boutella ultimately missed out on This Is It, she pays admirable homage to the King of Pop in his most recent posthumous video, which paints the story of a young, ambitious girl trying to make it in Hollywood without being swallowed by its trappings and

Over the past 12 months, we’ve had caved-in coal mines, underwater oil spills and now compromised nuclear facilities. What does it take for us to accept that renewable energy is the way to go, both from a safety and ultimately a cost effectiveness viewpoint? We are quick to forget the societal consequences surrounding our dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear until disaster strikes.
Coal miners working in dangerous conditions. Photo courtesy of Giorgio Monteforti via Creative Commons.
The Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, operated by Massey Energy, killed 29 miners in the worst disaster in four

San Antonio Del Mar, Mexico
This is the second of two blog posts from a volunteer home build with Homes of Hope
During the build, some of us gravitated to one another to complete tasks because we liked certain skills. I found painting very relaxing and I think most of us found that rolling the paint on the outside walls to be especially satisfying. This went fast and because we were outside, we could enjoy the beauty of the sky, the Pacific Ocean and the sun. Some of us forgot to put sunblock on and had bad

On Sunday morning I got an email from a friend who works for a municipal utility — I was expecting documentation on now to design incentives for utilities to help their customers save money instead of wasting electrons and carbon. So I was shocked when I opened it and discovered an early alert that the nuclear problems in Japan were much worse than being reported at that time, and that my friend was certain the reactor had already melted down.
He had started his career at the Brown’s Ferry TVA nuclear power plant — and he told me that the Fukushima reactors were twins of Brown’s Ferry and that, based on his knowledge of the plants, the initial description of the problems was not plausible. Only a meltdown, perhaps partial, perhaps complete, could explain the damage being reported. And the reported injection of seawater, he said, required a breach in the containment vessel, and meant serious long-term releases of

As both Republicans and Democrats in Congress appear willing to cut funding for key energy innovation programs, a bipartisan group of senators have spoken out in support of maintaining funding for an innovative energy technology agency that invests in game-changing research.
Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), have all rallied around the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), hoping to shield it from major budget cuts in the following months.
Speaking at ARPA-E’s recent Washington, D.C., summit, Senator Alexander, one of most respected Republican Senators on energy issues, discussed the importance of maintaining investments in energy research:
Alexander advocates ending energy subsidies for mature energy technologies — including both oil and some older renewable energy technologies — in order to free up funding for expanded investments in energy research and advanced technologies — a concept broadly consistent with the advanced energy strategy that the Breakthrough Institute and our colleagues at Brookings and AEI called for in Post-Partisan Power.
Republican Lisa Murkowksi, ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, also spoke approvingly of ARPA-E in a speech at the

Right now, millions are glued to the television sets and scanning the Internet for stories about Japan’s tragedy and relief efforts. As the images of destruction mirror across the screens, many are rushing to see what they can do to help.
Horrible events like this tend to bring out the best and worst in humanity. We are reminded of how fragile life is and how we are all bound

Parents of a terminally ill Canadian boy have transfered him to a US Catholic hospital after an Ontario court ruled doctors could remove a breathing tube keeping him alive.
Joseph Maraachli, aged one, is in a vegetative state with a severe neurological condition and will not recover, Canadian doctors say.
An Ontario hospital refused his parents' request for a tracheotomy they say will prolong his life by six months and allow him to die at home.
A Catholic hospital in the US city of St Louis will review his case, a family lawyer said.
Joseph had been at London Health Sciences Centre since October, where doctors say he will die as soon as he is removed from a

Americans are getting used to the withdrawal or severe restriction of drugs “previously thought safe.” From last year’s Avandia warnings to the withdrawal of Vioxx, Bextra, Baycol, Meridia, Trovan and Fen Phen, “Pill Buyer Beware” seems to be a shrewd stance, especially when a drug is new.
Still, the parade of heart, liver and muscle complications seen with withdrawn drugs has lacked the side effect that sends shivers down the spines of consumers, regulators and drug-makers: birth defects.
But this month FDA issued a warning that pregnant women who take the antiepileptic drug Topamax are 20 times as likely to have their babies develop cleft lip and cleft palate as they would otherwise be, says Reuters. Children are three times as likely to develop the facial anomalies as infants exposed to other seizure drugs, adds the Associated Press.
Johnson & Johnson’s Topamax is FDA-approved to treat seizures and migraine headache. But like the off-label marketed seizure drugs Neurontin and Lyrica (for which Pfizer paid massive fines), J & J agreed to a $6.1 million fine for illegally marketing Topamax for psychiatric conditions, less than a year ago.
And the marketing worked. Thanks to J & J’s subsidiary Ortho-McNeil’s “Doctor-for-a-Day” scheme in which it paid outside physicians to call on health care providers along with sales reps and speak at meetings and dinners, according to the AP, Topamax made J & J a cool $2 billion a year by

Unless you live in California, most Americans can’t imagine what it’s like to be in a minor earthquake, never mind a major one. As a kid in Japan, I lived through lots of little quakes. They were no big deal. If the quake seemed serious or went on too long, we’d simply go outside and

In 1992, when Kaya Henderson began her brief Teach for America classroom career, she could not have wanted to condemn poor children to a soulless regime of standardized test prep. As recently as last November, she said, “People understand that tests are a benchmark, not the goal. The goal is to educate children. And I think the swing of the pendulum from absolutely no accountability to what I might call data craziness is starting to hurt.”
I remain hopeful that the new chancellor of the

Like everyone, I’m shocked and horrified by the tragic events unfolding in Japan. I have a deeply ingrained fear of earthquakes having grown up on the San Andreas fault, but the triple whammy of an unimaginably massive earthquake, a devastating tsunami and a nuclear nightmare is beyond anything even I have ever imagined.
The news that 60,000 people participated in a peaceful anti-nuclear demonstration in Germany on Saturday was the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal weekend. It filled me with hope — an important reaffirmation that the spirit of peaceful protest, which was the keystone of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s is alive and

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on Friday is a disaster from which Japan may need years to recover. It is a disaster, however, from which the Japanese and by extension world nuclear industry may never recover. The meltdowns at up to six reactors that the Japanese are now struggling to contain are of a scale that easily rivals that of the last two major disasters, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. What is different is that the Japanese meltdowns are occurring a quarter century after Chernobyl in a country, unlike the former Soviet Union that has substantial transparency.
A generation after the last two disasters, there is an expectation that nuclear facilities are far

If it’s true that professional boxing now has 68 world title holders in 17 weight classes, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, then it’s not surprising that AT THE FIGHTS: American Writers on Boxing, a new anthology from The Library of America, reads like an elegy for the fight game.
More than five dozen world champs are too many to take seriously. “It’s harder to find great boxing writing these days simply because it’s harder to find great fighters and great fights,” John Schulian, who co-edited the anthology with George Kimball, says in a downloadable interview posted online by the publisher. Which helps to explain why so few of the selections in their 517-page anthology date from recent times.
This is hardly a demerit

Ireland arguably bears the brunt of the most stereotypes cast on any nation. At least it would seem that way in the United States. Say “Ireland” and Americans are inclined to think of the Land of Perpetual Fiddle Sessions as having Rustic Pubs with Dark Wood Bars on every single street and country byway, because the beleaguered, whiskey-fueled writers need a place to toil away and the fishermen need a place to feast on bangers and mash and flirt with red haired lassies. Oh, and lest we forget the scampering

Sustainability must be at the heart and conscience of all the city of Denver does — now and in the future. We can no longer afford the days of wanton consumption without regard for the future. Denver already has a strong culture of sustainability and the state of Colorado is a leader in sustainability technology. The next mayor of Denver must expand on the efforts of Mayor Hickenlooper and Governor Ritter to make Denver a model for sustainability throughout the country.
When I am mayor, the city will initiate a comprehensive review to identify ways to make Denver the national leader in

If ever there was a show that reeked of high school boys’ locker room or the improbable scenarios of moist nighttime dreaming, Showtime’s Californication is it. Loud, crass, bawdy, with some heart, occasional soul, but mostly lots and lots of other body parts (and I don’t mean arms and legs), it’s cable TV at its randiest. It is, after all, premiere cable, code for great stories with naked bodies and enough sex to bump the brink of porn. Which can be fun in the right

Many in the international community are pushing President Obama to authorize war against the regime of Libyan dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi. I think to undertake a third war in the Middle East would be downright foolish. We are now bogged down with 50,000 American soldiers apparently permanently stationed in Iraq and about 100,000 troops apparently stationed for an indefinite period of time in Afghanistan.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently warned that we should never again be dragged into “a big land war” in the Mideast or