NBA legend Reggie Miller and wealthy silver spoon Alex von Furstenberg are still fighting over a girl.
Miller has been granted a restraining order amid “fears for his safety” after yet another run-in with the son of legendary designer Diane von Furstenberg and Fiat heir Prince Egon von Furstenberg, The NY Post has learned.
The former Indiana [...]
Urban movies continue to grow in popularity. This can be seen in the exploding direct to video market where urban movies reign supreme. The rising quality of independent urban movies has made them much more attractive to DVD consumers. Some talented film directors behind this urban movement are Charles Dutton, Damon Dash, Sid Kali, Hype [...]
1. Not looking out for bikers. 2. Antagonizing bikers. 3. Annoying bikers. 4. Stopping suddenly in the middle of the road because you saw something interesting. 5. Changing lanes without thinking to look in your blind spot. 6. Throwing something out the window that hits a biker. 7. Turning at the last second. 8. Attempting [...]
1. Annoying the police officer. 2. Antagonizing the other driver. 3. Having tried to drive and eat a chili hot dog at the same time. 4. Reaching for something that fell on the floor. 5. Using your cell phone to call your best friend. 6. Trying to pick up on the paramedic. 7. Sniveling. 8. [...]
A Mexican-American nurse named Helena is believed to be the surrogate mother of Michael Jackson’s youngest child.
(He’s too adorable! Look at those cheeks.)
Prince Michael Jackson II, nicknamed Blanket, was born on February 21, 2002 at the Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa, near San Diego in Southern California.
The child was conceived through IVF and the [...]
Greetings Technorati members and BC Nation. Each and every year, the otherwise laid back, Southern California beach vibe of beautiful San Diego, California is assaulted by an invasion of geeks, freaks, aliens, and costumed characters from throughout the known universe for the annual pop culture nerd-a-thon known as Comic-Con. Being the culture vultures that we [...]
Solar power is becoming less of a luxury
JUST below your correspondent’s hillside home in southern California, a house is being rebuilt with all the latest thinking in materials technology and construction codes. Much has changed in the eight years since your correspondent did the same. Most strikingly, the house below has a gleaming white roof of fireproof chippings embedded in a mastic undercoating. With summer temperatures in the nineties (32ºC and up), these new reflective coatings are said to reduce air-conditioning bills by 20% or more. Not content with that, the owner has added a five-kilowatt bank of solar panels.
Eighteen months ago, your correspondent ran the numbers to see what it would cost to use photovoltaic solar panels to replace the 8,300 kilowatt-hours of electricity he buys annually from the grid. Economically, solar turned out to be a dud. The 6.4 kilowatts of capacity needed would have cost $48,000 for the panels alone—and half as much again by the time the mounting frames, switching modules, power controller, fault protector, DC-to-AC inverter, service panel and installation charges had been included. …
Stressed parents may play a role in childhood asthma, researchers believe.
They found the children of tense parents who lived in polluted areas were far more likely to have asthma than friends in the same neighbourhood.
The University of California team believe parental anxieties combine with other known risk factors to increase a child’s asthma risk.
They told Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences there might be an underlying biological explanation.
Experts have already shown that women who are stressed in pregnancy may raise the risk of their child developing asthma or other allergies.
"These results suggest that children from stressful households are more susceptible to the effects of traffic-related pollution and in utero tobacco smoke on the development of asthma"
The study authors
And stress is known to trigger asthma attacks.
In the latest study the researchers followed 2,497 healthy primary school children living in Southern California and recorded how many of these developed asthma over a three-year period – 120 in total.
They also gathered information on other known asthma risk factors like exposure to traffic-related air pollution and maternal smoking, as well as parental education, income and stress levels.
Stressful households
As expected, children exposed to more air pollution had a higher risk of asthma, but this risk was further increased if their parents were stressed and described their lives as "unpredictable", "uncontrollable" or "overwhelming".
Maternal smoking and parental stress posed a similar compounded risk.
Professor Rob McConnell and his team speculate that stress increases the inflammatory effects of pollutants in tobacco smoke and traffic fumes on the airways.
Writing in PNAS they said: "These results suggest that children from stressful households are more susceptible to the effects of traffic-related pollution and in utero tobacco smoke on the development of asthma."
Elaine Vickers of Asthma UK said: "This study adds to existing evidence suggesting that a child’s environment can impact on their risk of developing asthma.
"For example, smoking during pregnancy, traffic pollution and stress in the home may all have harmful effects.
"We know that smoking during pregnancy significantly increases a baby’s risk of having breathing difficulties and that children whose parents smoke are 1.5 times more likely to develop asthma, so Asthma UK strongly advises parents to avoid smoking around children and young people, especially in the home.
"One in 11 children in the UK has asthma so studies like this are vital, as they provide an insight into the factors influencing asthma development and therefore how it might be prevented." </p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Children of stressed out parents are at an increased risk of developing asthma associated with environmental triggers such as high levels of traffic-related pollution and tobacco smoke, says a new study.
The study, led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), appears this week in the Online Early [...]
SAN DIEGO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cast a lifeline Monday to a colony of federally protected harbor seals that spend their days lounging around a popular San Diego cove and have become the subject a lengthy legal tussle over their fa…
By Peter Bowes
BBC News, Yosemite National Park
Scientists in California have set up a unique experiment to track the life histories of some of the world’s oldest and tallest trees.
The project is designed to follow up research, in the Yosemite National Park, which suggests that giant trees are perishing as a result of climate change.
An analysis of data collected over 60 years has led scientists from the University of Washington and the Yosemite Field Station of the US Geological Survey, to conclude that the density of large diameter trees fell by 24% between the 1930s and 1990s.
"We want to identify the reasons for tree mortality and if those are changing," says Dr James Lutz, a research associate at the university’s College of Forest Resources.
Little research has been done on a long-term basis to monitor the lives of large trees. Unlike studies with smaller plants and almost all animals, no individual scientist is able to track a forest giant for its entire lifespan – from germination to death. They live for hundreds of years and play a vital role in the ecosystem long after they have died.
Fire-resistant
Yosemite National Park is a vast area of wilderness covering 3,027 sq km (1,169 square miles), 321km (200 miles) from San Francisco. The park is best known for its breathtaking waterfalls, black bears and ancient giant sequoias, which are part of the redwood family of trees.
Large trees play a crucial role in the forest ecosystem. They provide a habitat for birds and insects while they are alive and also when they are dead. Crucially, they are resistant to fire and are seen as pivotal to a forest’s ability to recover from a major blaze.
The impact of a vibrant forest is also felt much wider afield.
"Forests provide a lot of ecosystem services for us, whether we live in the city or whether we live in the forest," explains Dr Lutz.
"Certainly here in California most of the water comes from the snowpack, it comes from the mountainous forests such as the one that we’re in. And were that forest to be converted to a different vegetation type, perhaps there would be less snow – perhaps it would affect the water quality."
Dr Lutz and his team have set up the Yosemite Forest Dynamics Plot to monitor the forest over a period of decades, and possibly centuries. It is a 25-hectare plot of dense woodland, comprising mainly Sugar Pine and White Fir trees. The area has not burned for at least 70 years.
The plan is to measure and map almost all of the trees, which are estimated to number about 30,000. The cut-off point is woody stems that are less than 1cm in diamater at chest height.
"We plan to come back every year to do a mortality assessment to evaluate all of the trees that have died and hopefully the reason they die," says Dr Lutz.
"What we want to do is identify as soon as possible subtle changes in the composition or the structure of the forest."
Next generation
Traditionally, the funding of long-term experiments that involve monitoring nature has been difficult to secure. The Yosemite project received about $15,000 (£9,000) from the Smithsonian Institution, although the grant funded only the supplies needed to set up the project.
A typical funding cycle might run two or three years and the sponsoring agency would expect the experiment to be concluded then," explains Dr Lutz.
But this project is open-ended and has been made possible only through the co-operation and enthusiasm of unpaid researchers and land surveyors.
"I did not want to pass up the opportunity to get involved in this," says John Knox, a land surveyor from Southern California, who volunteered his services for the project.
"It’s the paradox that we live with. We love the land, we love nature but we build roads that lead to developments.we lay out the destruction of the environment," he explains.
"This is a nice opportunity to lay out something for conservation and nature studies."he long-term nature of the research means that the management of the project will change hands over the decades.
"No one researcher can see the ultimate results of the work," explains Dr Lutz.
"I plan on monitoring this plot for the next 25 or 30 years after which I will turn the plot over to someone in the next generation of forest ecology. The value in these long term projects is only realized after 50 or even 100 years."
Finding answers to why giant trees are dying early will be a slow process. But preserving the forest for centuries to come may be impossible without long-term projects like this.
"It’s a sense of fulfilment," says James Freund, a researcher on the project.
"You know that there’s a bigger picture and that you’re starting something, you’re becoming a really positive part of history. It’s rewarding and fulfilling knowing that people far into the future are going to come back to what we have started here." </p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Actress Kate Hudson and Yankees star Alex Rodriguez spent a romantic weekend in Southern California, according to reports.
The pair, who have been romantically linked since May, is said to have spent the weekend at the Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Beach, along with Hudson’’s 5-year-old son Ryder, reports People magazine.
Sources said that there they stayed [...]
Buddhism is perhaps even more diverse than Christianity. In fact, the differences among schools can be so vast that some scholars consider them different religions.
By Hilary Andersson
BBC Panorama, Washington
In making Licence to Torture, Panorama did not set out to ask whether the US practices adopted in the aftermath of 9/11 were right, wrong, justified or fruitful. We aimed to find out if they broke US and international law.
One might think that in the world’s most powerful democracy this would be the central public debate. But not in America. The debate that dominates here today is whether torture worked.
At a public forum at a southern California college, we tracked down one of the legal architects of the Bush interrogation programme, a man named John Yoo.
He pointed out that the legal advice that he and other senior lawyers in the Bush administration wrote were not policy recommendations.
Still, Mr Yoo defended the harsh interrogation techniques.
"Was it worth it" Yoo asked the crowd rhetorically. "Well, we haven’t had an attack in seven years."
The audience burst into applause.
There is a significant number of Americans who are sickened by the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics, but many are unsure if they want to see prosecutions.
Legal memos
It came as little surprise that our project, looking into the question of guilt, was not popular with some CIA and White House insiders. Nevertheless we were granted extraordinary access to a large number of key individuals who helped piece together the story, mostly off camera.
As we ploughed through legal memos, court cases, government reports and books and talked to lawyer after lawyer, it emerged that a central legal question was this: Did America’s leaders intend to torture
"There was a real sense that there was going to be a major new attack that was going to come and that we needed to somehow prevent it"
John Bellinger
Former legal adviser, US National Security Council
Did the White House approve torture "by accident", because their lawyers decided that waterboarding and confining someone in a box was not actually torture
Or was there a policy and an intent to torture behind it all
In investigations of this nature, the answer lies in the detail. In this case, chronology was the key.
America’s leaders say they only authorised the controversial techniques because their lawyers advised that they did not constitute torture. It therefore became critical for us to find out if the torture started before the key legal memos were issued.
We spoke to several people who we believed knew this very precise piece of information. But so often in our inquires, the answer came back: "I cannot recall."
Then we met John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who had led the capture of key al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He had flown back to the US shortly after the capture and monitored Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation from CIA headquarters in Virginia.
Kiriakou was categorical that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded in the early summer of 2002. This became a crucial piece for the Panorama team in the puzzle that we were slowly piecing together, because the key legal memos that approved the method were not issued until August 2002.
The CIA has told the BBC that waterboarding did not happen before that August 2002 memo but would not reveal when it did occur.
It is not clear that any oral legal advice that told White House leaders that the harsh techniques were not torture before August would amount to much of a legal defence in court.
For more than 50 years, waterboarding has been considered torture in America, and torture is illegal.
Secretive techniques
Abu Zubaydah was strapped to a board, with his face partially covered, while water was poured onto his nose and mouth.
According to his lawyer, the detainee had begun to drown until they stopped. This happened at least 82 more times.
It has emerged partly from newly-released government legal memos that the CIA borrowed some of its new interrogation techniques from a secretive US military programme called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape).
The SERE programme teaches American soldiers how to cope in captivity. Amongst other training techniques, it simulates torture used by the Chinese on American soldiers in Korea in the 1950s.
These methods were intended for training US soldiers, not for use in the interrogation of enemy suspects.
But a recent report by the Senate Armed Service Committee traces how Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense, in parallel with the CIA, also contacted the SERE programme, and modelled its interrogation plans on the same techniques.
The Pentagon says SERE techniques were never authorised.
Post 9/11 reality
All this has left many in America asking themselves how they got to this point in the first place
The reality is that on 11 September 2001 the CIA had virtually no interrogation capacity but, the BBC was told, the agency was rapidly authorised by President Bush to set up a detention and interrogation programme anyway.
A senior CIA insider said they trawled intelligence agencies worldwide in the hunt for new techniques. SERE was contacted as part of this.
Donald Rumsfeld, it was suggested, pushed for his own tough programme.
"Rumsfeld needed intelligence and he didn’t trust the CIA", said Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, former US secretary of state.
Critically, there was distressing intelligence in the aftermath of 9/11 that another attack was imminent.
"There was a real sense that there was going to be a major new attack that was going to come and that we needed to somehow prevent it," said John Bellinger who at the time was legal adviser to the National Security Council.
Insiders say the resulting atmosphere in the White House was that extraordinary measures were called for.
Shock waves
Within months the Bush administration announced that the Geneva Conventions, which ban cruel and degrading treatment, did not apply to suspected members of al-Qaeda.
This sent shock waves around the world.
William Taft, who was Colin Powell’s lawyer, drafted a memo arguing that detainees be treated humanely in accordance with article three of the Geneva Conventions, but he said his memo was blocked by the administration.
"I really do think at that time that the reason that they didn’t approve publishing my memo was that they intended to actually use coercive techniques," said Mr Taft.
The Bush administration said it was committed to humane treatment along the lines of Geneva, as long as it was consistent with "military necessity", a significant caveat.
"The decision was that the rules were gone" said Mr Taft.
Department of justice lawyers began to prepare legal memos that redefined torture in terms broad enough to allow harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.
With the legal ground dramatically altered, widespread use of controversial interrogation techniques and systematic abuses appeared across US military bases.
Later, concern mounted inside the administration. John Bellinger, who believes existing international law is poorly equipped to deal with al-Qaeda, nevertheless worried that applying none of the Geneva conventions left a large legal grey area.
"I said well if the Geneva conventions in their entirety don’t apply, that we need to conclude that something does apply because we are a nation of laws, we’re not just a nation of men and of policies".
Panorama has been told by other insiders that President Bush personally authorised the CIA’s interrogation programme soon after 9/11, and that he may have personally approved the specific programme by the early summer of 2002.
The net of responsibility could go much wider. The CIA says that over the years more than 50 members of Congress were briefed on elements of the CIA’s tactics. Objections were few. But exactly what Congress was told and when is hotly disputed, particularly with recent allegations that the CIA misled Congress during the Bush era.
The Obama administration has not ruled out criminally investigating the lawyers involved in all this. Even interrogators who may have acted beyond the controversial legal advice could face investigation. A major CIA watchdog report with more information, is due to be released this summer.
But with mounting evidence pointing to fundamental responsibility at a very high level, President Obama appears little inclined to pursue anyone who was senior.
Panorama: Licence to Torture, BBC One, Monday 13 July at 2030 (1930 GMT).</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
What is it about Rocio Martinez that makes kids on the edge of the abyss trust her? Well, for one thing, they know that Rosi, as they call her, can relate — she used to be one of them.
