Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/295484905?client_source=feed&format=rss
Tony Gonzalez Richard Blanco The Following Anna Burns Welker Martin Luther King, Jr. Mlk Quotes Elder Scrolls Online
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Friday, March 29, 2013
Stressful life events may increase stillbirth risk, study finds
Mar. 27, 2013 ? Pregnant women who experienced financial, emotional, or other personal stress in the year before their delivery had an increased chance of having a stillbirth, say researchers who conducted a National Institutes of Health network study.
Stillbirth is the death of a fetus at 20 or more weeks of pregnancy. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2006, there was one stillbirth for every 167 births.
The researchers asked more than 2,000 women a series of questions, including whether they had lost a job or had a loved one in the hospital in the year before they gave birth.
Whether or not the pregnancy ended in stillbirth, most women reported having experienced at least one stressful life event in the previous year. The researchers found that 83 percent of women who had a stillbirth and 75 percent of women who had a live birth reported a stressful life event. Almost 1 in 5 women with stillbirths and 1 in 10 women with livebirths in this study reported recently experiencing 5 or more stressful life events. This study measured the occurrence of a list of significant life events, and did not include the woman's assessment of how stressful the event was to her.
Women reporting a greater number of stressful events were more likely to have a stillbirth. Two stressful events increased a woman's odds of stillbirth by about 40 percent, the researchers' analysis showed. A woman experiencing five or more stressful events was nearly 2.5 times more likely to have a stillbirth than a woman who had experienced none. Women who reported three or four significant life event factors (financial, emotional, traumatic or partner-related) remained at increased risk for stillbirth after accounting for other stillbirth risk factors, such as sociodemographic characteristics and prior pregnancy history.
Non-Hispanic black women were more likely to report experiencing stressful events than were non-Hispanic white women and Hispanic women. Black women also reported a greater number of stressful events than did their white and Hispanic counterparts. This finding may partly explain why black women have higher rates of stillbirth than non-Hispanic white or Hispanic women, the researchers said.
"We documented how significant stressors are highly prevalent in pregnant women's lives," said study co-author Marian Willinger, Ph.D., acting chief of the Pregnancy and Perinatology Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of two NIH entities funding the research. "This reinforces the need for health care providers to ask expectant mothers about what is going on in their lives, monitor stressful life events and to offer support as part of prenatal care."
The NIH Office of Research in Women's Health also funded the study.
"Because 1 in 5 pregnant women has three or more stressful events in the year leading up to delivery, the potential public health impact of effective interventions could be substantial and help increase the delivery of healthy babies," added lead author Dr. Carol Hogue, Terry Professor of Maternal and Child Health at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, Atlanta.
Dr. Willinger collaborated with colleagues at the NICHD and Emory University; Drexel University School of Medicine, Philadelphia; University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston; Children's Healthcare of Atlanta; Brown University School of Medicine, Providence, R.I.; University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; University of Utah School of Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City; and RTI International, Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Their findings appear in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
The research was conducted by the NICHD-funded Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network (SCRN). The researchers contacted all women delivering a stillbirth as well as a representative portion of women delivering a live birth in defined counties in Georgia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Texas and Utah. The women were enrolled in the study between 2006 and 2008 in 59 community and research hospitals.
Within 24 hours of either a live birth or a stillbirth delivery, the women in the study were asked about events grouped into four categories: emotional, financial, partner-related and traumatic. They answered yes or no to 13 scenarios, including the following:
- I moved to a new address.
- My husband or partner lost his job.
- I was in a physical fight.
- Someone very close to me died.
Some of the stressful events were more strongly associated with stillbirth than were others. For example, the risk of stillbirth was highest:
- for women who had been in a fight (which doubled the chances for stillbirth)
- if she had heard her partner say he didn't want her to be pregnant
- if she or her partner had gone to jail in the year before the delivery
"At prenatal visits, screening is common for concerns such as intimate partner violence and depression, but the questions in our study were much more detailed," said co-author Uma Reddy, M.D., M.P.H., also of NICHD. "This is a first step toward cataloguing the effects of stress on the likelihood of stillbirth and, more generally, toward documenting how pregnancy influences a woman's mental health and how pregnancy is influenced by a woman's mental health."
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NIH/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- C. J. R. Hogue, C. B. Parker, M. Willinger, J. R. Temple, C. M. Bann, R. M. Silver, D. J. Dudley, M. A. Koch, D. R. Coustan, B. J. Stoll, U. M. Reddy, M. W. Varner, G. R. Saade, D. Conway, R. L. Goldenberg. A Population-based Case-Control Study of Stillbirth: The Relationship of Significant Life Events to the Racial Disparity for African Americans. American Journal of Epidemiology, 2013; DOI: 10.1093/aje/kws381
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/jQJhbOzdTPQ/130327133702.htm
best superbowl commercials 2012 best super bowl ads chrysler super bowl commercial madonna half time show fiat 500 abarth madonna halftime m i a
Why Puma, Natura and Greif track environmental externalities ...
[Editor's note: This is the fourth installment of WRI's five-part blog series, "Aligning Profit and Environmental Sustainability." Each post, which will run on Thursdays over the course of five weeks, will explore solutions to help businesses overcome barriers to better integrate environmental sustainability into their operations.]
David Roberts at the online news organization Grist commented last week on Twitter that "people talk about 'externalities' like they are just bad vibes or something. But that money is real money. Those costs are real costs."
How real is that money? Pavan Sukhdev, author of "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity" and "Corporation 2020," claims that these "externalities" -- or costs to society from carbon emissions, water use, pollutants and other byproducts of business activities -- are more than $2 trillion.
Putting a financial value on these environmental costs can help businesses make better-informed decisions about how they manage their environmental risk. Not all companies recognize this -- and even fewer actually know how to value these externalities correctly. But a few corporations are starting to show us the way.
Learning from Puma's environmental profit and loss statement
Puma is one company that thinks this is an important issue. While all companies have to develop profit and loss statements, Puma is the first to develop an environmental profit and loss statement. The company valued the environmental impact of its operations and supply chain in 2010 at about $190 million, factoring in impacts like water use, greenhouse gas emissions, land use conversion, air pollution and waste.
The company is now using this statement as a way to drive environmental initiatives, which it views as key to its long-term commercial survival. Puma's environmental profit and loss statement?is helping employees, shareholders and suppliers understand the magnitude of the company's environmental impacts, prioritize which ones to tackle first and incorporate this information into decision-making.
Next page: Natura and Greif use externalities to push sustainability
Source: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/03/28/puma-natura-greif-environmental-externalities
brett ratner stevie nicks anchorman capybara duggars peter facinelli bobby rush
Part of Berlin Wall removed in pre-dawn operation
BERLIN (AP) ? For nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the hated symbol of the division of Europe, a gray, concrete mass that snaked through neighborhoods, separating families and friends. On Wednesday, it took hundreds of police to guarantee the safe removal of 15 feet (less than 5 meters) of what's left of the wall.
Construction crews, protected by about 250 police, hauled down part of the three-quarter of a mile (1.3-kilometer) strip of the wall before dawn to provide access to a planned luxury apartment complex overlooking the Spree River.
Even though most of the strip remains intact, the move angered many Berliners, who believe that developers are sacrificing history for profit.
The site, known as the East Side Gallery, has become a major tourist attraction, painted by 120 artists with colorful scenes along the gray concrete tiles.
It is the longest remaining portion of the 96-mile (155-kilometer) wall that surrounded Western-occupied West Berlin from 1961 until the peaceful revolution against the communist East German government in 1989. At least 136 people were killed trying to escape over the wall.
The flap over the future of the East Side Gallery flared last month with the announcement that developers wanted to tear away part of the wall. The announcement triggered a series of protests, including one attended by American celebrity David Hasselhoff.
Hasselhoff is remembered here fondly for his song "Looking for Freedom" that became the unofficial anthem of the 1989 revolution.
"It's like tearing down an Indian burial ground," Hasselhoff said during the March 17 protest. "It's a no-brainer."
After the protests, demolition work was suspended while local politicians and the investors looked for alternative access to the apartment site, located in the heart of the German capital.
When no other access route could be found, the main investor, Maik Uwe Hinkel, decided to resume the project. Work began at 5 a.m. Wednesday when few people were out on the streets.
In an emailed statement, Hinkel said the removal of parts of the wall was a temporary move to enable trucks to access the building site. He said that after four weeks of fruitless deliberations with city officials and owners of adjacent property, he was no longer willing to wait.
As word of the demolition spread, small crowds of Berliners turned out to watch although no one sought to block the effort.
"I can't believe they came here in the dark in such a sneaky manner," said Kani Alavi, the head of the East Side Gallery's artists' group. "All they see is their money. They have no understanding for the historic relevance and art of this place."
The irony of Berliners trying to preserve part of what was once a hated symbol of repression reflects a growing public belief that the German capital needs to preserve symbols of its past ? both the good and the bad ? for future generations.
Much of Adolf Hitler's capital was destroyed by Allied bombing and the 1945 Soviet ground assault that ended World War II in Europe.
With the end of the Cold War, however, Germans have worked to preserve other sites, including those that do not flatter the country.
A museum to Nazi atrocities has been built over the site of Gestapo headquarters. Tourists can wander through dungeon-like prisons operated by the Soviets and the East German secret police ? as well as underground complexes built in the west of the city to protect civilians against nuclear attack.
It's all designed to allow new generations to understand the painful history behind a country that is now Europe's economic powerhouse.
"The Berlin Wall is the most significant symbol of the division of Berlin," said Maria Nooke, the deputy director of the Berlin Wall Foundation. "On the one hand it illustrates the repression in East Germany, on the other hand it symbolizes how Germans peacefully overcame that repression."
It took years for Berliners ? both easterners and westerners ? to develop such feelings for the wall.
"After a while, there was a growing need to deal with that part of history and to preserve it for future generations," Nooke said.
In an effort to give visitors and Berliners a taste of life in a divided city, a 70-meter (-yard) stretch of the wall on Bernauer Strasse was restored to its original state, including an East German watchtower from which guards would shoot at people trying to scale the structure.
The East Side Gallery was recently restored at a cost of more than 2 million euros ($3 million) to the city. It is now covered in colorful murals painted by about 120 artists.
Scenes include the famous image of a boxy East German Trabant car that appears to burst through the wall; and a fraternal communist kiss between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German boss Erich Honecker.
"I heard it on the radio, so I quickly took my son to nursery school and then came here," said Jana Voigt, a kindergarten teacher who grew up in East Berlin. "I feel so betrayed that they tore down that piece of the wall while I was asleep. They knew that so many Berliners don't want the wall to be touched."
She said part of the wall needs to be protected for future generations "in order to understand what happened here."
Karl-Heinz Richter was a 17-year-old teenager when he tried to escape from East Berlin three years after the wall was erected. His escape failed and he was jailed.
"What you see happening now is capitalism in its purest form: it's all about money and power, history doesn't matter anymore. That's disgusting." he said. "For me the wall is a holy site. I'm outraged that they would even dare to touch it."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/part-berlin-wall-removed-pre-dawn-operation-185011250.html
spring lululemon jon hamm southern university biggest loser TJ Lane lindsey vonn
Gay marriage: Supreme Court critiques DOMA
Same-sex marriages are legal in 9 states and the District of Columbia, but the federal government does not recognize those unions. Based on their statements on Wednesday, it appears the majority of the country's Supreme Court justices are questioning the law which bars such unions from federal recognition.?
Plaintiff Edith Windsor of New York waves to supporters in front of the Supreme Court in Washington Wednesday after the court heard arguments on her Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) case.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
EnlargeConcluding two days of intense debate, the Supreme Court signaled Wednesday it could give a boost to same-sex marriage by striking down the federal law that denies legally married gay spouses a wide range of benefits offered to other couples.
Skip to next paragraph' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
As the court wrapped up its remarkable arguments over gay marriage in America, a majority of the justices indicated they will invalidate part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act ? if they can get past procedural problems similar to those that appeared to mark Tuesday's case over California's ban on same-sex marriage.
Since the federal law was enacted in 1996, nine states and the District of Columbia have made it legal for gays and lesbians to marry. Same-sex unions also were legal in California for nearly five months in 2008 before the Proposition 8 ban.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the decisive vote in close cases, joined the four more-liberal justices in raising questions Wednesday about a provision that defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman for purposes of federal law.
It affects more than 1,100 statutes in which marital status is relevant, dealing with tax breaks for married couples, Social Security survivor benefits and, for federal employees, health insurance and leave to care for spouses.
Kennedy said the Defense of Marriage Act appears to intrude on the power of states that have chosen to recognize same-sex marriages. When so many federal statutes are affected, "which in our society means that the federal government is intertwined with the citizens' day-to-day life, you are at real risk of running in conflict with what has always been thought to be the essence of the state police power, which is to regulate marriage, divorce, custody," Kennedy said.
Other justices said the law creates what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called two classes of marriage, full and "skim-milk marriage."
If the court does strike down part of?DOMA, it would represent a victory for gay rights advocates. But it would be something short of the endorsement of gay marriage nationwide that some envisioned when the justices agreed in December to hear the federal case and the challenge to California's ban on same-sex marriage.
Still, the tenor of the arguments over two days reflected how quickly attitudes have changed since large majorities in Congress passed the federal?DOMA?in 1996 and President Bill Clinton signed it into law. In 2011, President Barack Obama abandoned the legal defense of the law in the face of several lawsuits, and last year Obama endorsed gay marriage. Clinton, too, has voiced regret for signing the law and now supports allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
In 1996, the House of Representatives' report on the legislation explained that one of its purposes was "to express moral disapproval of homosexuality." Justice Elena Kagan read those words in the courtroom Wednesday, evoking a reaction from the audience that sounded like a cross between a gasp and nervous laughter.
Kagan's quotation gave lawyer Paul Clement, representing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives that has taken up defense of the law in place of the administration, some uncomfortable moments at the lectern.
"Does the House report say that? Of course, the House report says that. And if that's enough to invalidate the statute, then you should invalidate the statute," Clement said. But he said the more relevant question is whether Congress had "any rational basis for the statute." He supplied one: the federal government's interest in treating same-sex couples the same no matter where they live.
Clement said the government does not want military families "to resist transfer from West Point to Fort Sill because they're going to lose their benefits." The U.S. Military Academy at West Point is in New York, where same-sex marriage is legal, and Fort Sill is in Oklahoma, where gay marriages are not legal.
Opposing Clement was the Obama administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, Donald Verrilli, who said the provision of?DOMA?at issue, Section 3, impermissibly discriminates against gay people.
"I think it's time for the court to recognize that this discrimination, excluding lawfully married gay and lesbian couples from federal benefits, cannot be reconciled with our fundamental commitment to equal treatment under law," Verrilli said.
Both Verrilli and Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer for Edith Windsor, the 83-year-old New York woman who sued over?DOMA, told the court that views about gay people and marriage have shifted dramatically since 1996 when the law was approved.
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/FyuO48ux08k/Gay-marriage-Supreme-Court-critiques-DOMA
honor killings mary tyler moore x games pro bowl 2012 rick santorum daughter gainesville 2012 royal rumble
Sanctions noose makes it harder for Japan's Koreans to help their own
By Ju-min Park
TOKYO (Reuters) - When the now elderly man left Japan on a Soviet ship in 1960 for North Korea, he thought he was headed to the promised land. In reality, he survived 47 years there thanks only to $1 million in support from his half-brother in Japan.
The man's Korean-born parents decided to migrate to North Korea when he was a teenager, lured by the promise of free education and healthcare in a country that at the time was richer than South Korea in the wake of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Much of the Korean community in Japan is descended from people who were shipped across as forced labor during Tokyo's 35-year colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, which ended with Japan's defeat in World War Two.
In a twist of fate, the man fled back to Japan in 2008 and is now supporting his wife and children in the North. Like other Koreans sending money to the North from either Japan or South Korea, he may find transactions coming under greater scrutiny after new U.N. sanctions were imposed on Pyongyang for its third nuclear test in February.
Speaking to Reuters during an interview in Tokyo, the 66-year-old man declined to be identified for fear of reprisals against his family. He also declined to say exactly why he fled North Korea. He escaped to China in 2007, and arrived in Japan the following year.
He remembered calling his half-brother some years ago when he was in North Korea, thanking him for the money.
"I told my brother that I was sorry (for taking the money), but he said we were grown from the same mother's belly ... I really cried, I was so thankful for his words," said the man. His half-brother had died by the time he arrived in Tokyo.
Even before the February 12 nuclear test, Japan's Finance Ministry appeared to be paying more attention to transfers to North Korea, as the man found out when he tried to send 200,000 yen ($2,100) to Pyongyang through the postal system after North Korea's latest long-range rocket launch in December.
Two days after he made the application, the ministry sent him a letter asking why he wanted to send the money.
"There was a blank space at the bottom to provide reasons for remittances in detail. So I wrote: 'This is not for Kim Jong-un's political fund but to help my poor starving family to live'."
The man said the ministry did not get in touch again, so he assumed the money was sent. Japan's post offices are able to carry out banking functions, such as sending money abroad.
WILL JAPAN TIGHTEN UP ON REMITTANCES?
The latest U.N. sanctions on the regime of North Korean leader Kim tighten financial restrictions, including the illicit transfer of bulk cash, and crack down on its attempts to ship and receive banned cargo. The aim of the March 7 measures is to curtail the North's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
Japan's Finance Ministry requires postal remittances above 3 million yen and cash transfers of more than 100,000 yen to be reported to the authorities. For all other countries, the amount is 10 times greater.
A day after the February nuclear test, the Nikkei newspaper said Japan would consider curbs on transfers to North Korea as well as lowering the amount that had to be reported.
A senior Finance Ministry official on Wednesday told Reuters no changes had been made to rules on remittances. It was unclear why the man had to give more details on his transfer, which was far less than 3 million yen.
More than 93,000 ethnic Koreans left Japan for North Korea between 1959 and 1984 under the slogan "Let's go back to the fatherland!", according to researchers in Japan.
That number plunged from the mid 1980s as stories of the grinding poverty in North Korea spread. Meanwhile, South Korea's industrialization was in full swing.
The man's half-brother, a construction worker, sent him a total of 87 million yen ($923,400) while he lived in North Korea, a number he said he added up one day.
Remittances from Japan were as much as an estimated $2 billion a year until the early 1990s, according to a report in 2007 by the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, which studies the North's economy.
North Koreans called the cash flow the "Mount Fuji Stream".
Ethnic Koreans in Japan can still send money, but it is a trickle by comparison.
"MOUNT FUJI STREAM" ALREADY DRYING UP
Japan's bubble economy burst in the early 1990s, hurting the disposable income of ethnic Koreans. At the same time, Tokyo cracked down on what it said were illegal businesses run by a pro-Pyongyang organization called the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon, which had long sent money to North Korea. It has denied such accusations.
The Chongryon, which still exists, played a key role in Japan's socially isolated Korean community in the 1960s and 1970s.
Japan then banned most financial transactions with North Korea in 2006 after Pyongyang's first nuclear test. It also closed a ferry service that delivered goods and money across the 1,000 km (600 mile) sea that separates the two countries.
For the last three years, the Finance Ministry recorded close to $20 million in remittances. Annual flows from North Korean defectors living in South Korea are estimated at $10 million a year, according to researchers in Seoul.
These days, asking travelers to take cash from Japan to North Korea or sending money by post is the usual way. Flights go via China because Japan does not have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang.
The problem now is the same as it was when the man was sent money - it is not clear if relatives get it all.
Lee Young-hwa, an economics professor at Kansai University in the Japanese city of Osaka, sends around 200,000 yen a year to family in the North.
He believes half goes to North Korean officials as a "loyal donation" to the regime. Lee said he also believed most remittances to relatives sent as cash were unreported.
"We have been sending money for about five decades, hoping that the Koreans sent to the North will some day stand on their own feet," said Lee.
"But there's still no sign that they can."
FOOD IS IMPORTANT TOO
North Koreans were especially desperate during a famine in the 1990s, which killed around a million people, according to independent estimates.
"In the 1990s, we had to send goods. Even if you had money, there was no rice so we sent sesame oil, sugar, rice and noodles and rice cakes," said Yang Yong-hi, an ethnic Korean filmmaker living in Japan and whose three brothers went to the North in the 1970s. One is dead but the other two still live there.
The money the 66-year old man received helped him pay for food and medicine for his parents and other siblings as well as a wedding and a house in North Korea for himself. He declined to say where.
During the 1970s and 1980s, instead of yen, he got so called "exchange vouchers".
"Cash went straight into the state's coffers and we could buy goods at a foreign currency store with these exchange vouchers instead," the man said, adding he began to get cash after the 1980s.
Vouchers are still used for North Koreans working at the Kaesong industrial zone, a factory near its border with South Korea. There, South Korean firms pay wages in U.S. dollars and Pyongyang gives the workers both vouchers and its won currency, according to a South Korean lawmaker who has visited the zone.
Leaving his family behind saddens the man, who said he gets by on 140,000 yen from the Japanese government each month.
"I think I am happy now although I am not rich. I love so much being free. I can talk, hear and see whatever I want," he said. ($1 = 94.2200 Japanese yen)
(Additional reporting by Antoni Slodkowski. Editing by David Chance and Dean Yates)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sanctions-noose-makes-harder-japans-koreans-help-own-225745718.html
rob dyrdek oberon donald driver donald driver robin thicke mariana trench transcendental meditation
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)