While most women giving birth are doing it within the context of marriage, researchers said a record 41 percent of births were to unmarried women in 2008. That's up from 28 percent in 1990, according to the study, "The New Demography of American Motherhood." The trend crossed major racial and ethnic groups.
For fans of Morpurgo, it is also good news that the screen adaptation is being written by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, both past masters at bringing a tear to the eye.Richard Curtis! I hate all his post-Blackadder work.
The equivalent of $1 is enough to buy four glasses of illegally brewed chang’aa—and oblivion. Some drink the local special, jet-five, so called because the fermentation of maize and sorghum is sped up with pilfered jet fuel. It can damage the brain. Elsewhere in Nairobi, chang’aa is spiked with embalming fluid from mortuaries. The name, meaning literally “kill me quick”, is well chosen.And Uganda may have this distinction:
The UN’s World Health Organisation reckons that half of all alcohol drunk in Africa is illegal. Neighbouring Uganda may consume more alcohol per person than any country in the world. Much of this is waragi, a banana gin. Some 100 Ugandans died from toxic waragi in April alone.
So I guess some mornings he still can't find his car keys, but at least he can recite line 8,576 of a poem while he's looking for them.Although not formally tested, JB's everyday memory is apparently normal for his age, with his exceptional memory for Milton's poem apparently arising from his relentless practice and dedication.
This is a common pattern in mental practice or 'brain training' style scenarios where we get better at the tasks we repeat but that improvement doesn't seem to carry over very effectively into other areas of mental life.
Professor Richmond and her team studied 188 Australians who had made it to 100, and found that maintaining social networks, keeping physically and mentally active, and being open to change were common traits.
Sounds a little dubious to me, but what do I know?“About 20 to 30 per cent of the likelihood of living to 100 is because of your genes. But that leaves 70 to 80 per cent up to environmental factors,” Professor Richmond said.
“The major finding of this study is the impact of personality.”
The chemicals used in methamphetamine production are highly toxic and can include not only pseudoephenadrine—the main ingredient in meth and active ingredient in decongestants—but also 32 other precursor chemicals. These include acetone, the active ingredient in nail polish remover, and phosphine, a widely used insecticide.There are specialist meth lab clean up businesses in America:
Home-cooking meth spreads toxins to every inch of the room where the meth was cooked and beyond. Nothing escapes contamination—the carpet, walls, furniture, drapes, air ducts, even the air itself becomes toxic. "Ingesting some of these chemicals, even a tiny drop, can cause immediate death," said Smith.
In dealing with toxic chemicals, most meth lab clean-up crews follow general guidelines. In the room where the meth was made, they scrub all surfaces, repaint the walls, replace the carpets and air filters, and air out the property. However, there are no national standards for meth lab cleanups—regulations differ from state to state. And in some states, getting a license to decontaminate a house is as easy as taking a few hours of class and a written test. "There are some bad certification methods out there. You could be a pizza delivery guy, study for a month, pay $250 and be certified," said Joe Mazzuca, a methamphetamine contamination expert and CEO of Meth Lab Cleanup, a nationwide meth-lab-specific cleanup company based in Boise, Idaho.Finally, guess the State which is the meth lab capital of the world:
And although meth houses are more concentrated in certain states—Missouri is the meth capitol of the world, with 1,471 labs discovered in 2008 alone—there are meth houses in all fifty states, and they can be found in posh towns.What a distinction. And why Missouri?
Overall, I have yet to see anyone rebut the simple calculations of Vaclav Smil, the resource and risk polymath at the University of Manitoba, who has shown how capturing and processing just a small percentage of today’s CO2 from coal combustion would require as much pipeline and other infrastructure as is now used globally to get oil — a costly commodity — out of the ground. Imagine the price required on carbon to make that doable beyond boutique scale.
Prosecutors have abandoned a legal attempt to make a young man pull his trousers up, it emerged today.Somewhere last week, I think it was in New Zealand, I did spot the lowest worn pants by a stupid teenager ever. I mean, the top of the back of his jeans sat at the base of his backside, so that his entire buttocks would be exposed if it weren't for his underpants. It looked very strange.Ellis Drummond, 18, was facing an asbo preventing him from "wearing trousers so low beneath the waistline that members of the public are able to see your underwear". He would have been banned from displaying his underpants anywhere in public in the borough of Bedford, and wearing a hood up in any public place in the area.
In 1900 the first attempt was made to ship Sockeye ova (eggs) to New Zealand from Canada which had been gathered from Weaver Creek , British Columbia in 1898. This shipment turned bad en route. A second shipment of 500,000 ova was supplied free of charge by the Canadian Fisheries Department, collected from the tributaries of Shuswap Lake in the Kamloops district of British Columbia. This time 160,000 survived and were hatched at the Hakataramea Hatchery near the Waitaki River .I remember when visiting the Salmon Ponds in Tasmania many years ago (it's a historic trout hatchery, actually), it told the story of how some early fish pioneer tried to introduce salmon to Tasmanian rivers by importing fertilised salmon eggs (not an easy feat when they had to be shipped from England), then releasing them in the rivers and hoping that they would head out to sea and back to the rivers to spawn. They did leave the rivers, but never returned.
The bulk were carefully liberated into streams feeding into beautiful Lake Ohau . However, instead of running to the sea, and returning to fresh water to spawn (as is the normal life cycle) the Sockeye developed into a non-migratory population.
This is the only self-sustaining population in the Southern Hemisphere and forms the basis for the fish farmed today by Mt Cook Salmon. Chinook salmon introduced around the same time established normal migratory patterns and can be caught in the major South Island east coast river systems today.
Our salmon live in fast flowing cold water and develop firmer flesh with less inter-muscular fat. This makes for a tastier firmer textured fish.Well, another reason to visit New Zealand again.
In a report issued on the eve of Children's Day, a national holiday, the Internal AffairsI wonder what the equivalent figure (for under 15 year olds) is in Australia.and Communications Ministry said kids comprised 13.3 percent of the population as of April 1.
"The differential mortality that we witnessed suggests that the relationship between certain populations of Pocillopora and the species of algae they associate with is quite stable," said Warner. "And this stability, ultimately, is an Achilles heel for Pocillopora. The inability of the corals to shuffle their symbionts or to establish symbioses with different species of algae means that we may see a significant loss of coral populations in the future, especially if extreme temperature disturbances, such as the cold anomaly we documented in 2008 or the hot anomaly that took place in 1997, become more frequent or severe."
Pope Benedict this spring put forward the Vatican model priest at the end of his letter to the Irish church. Jean Marie Vianney, a 19th century French priest who overcame a lack of education to serve his flock 16 hours a day or more and was known for his radical piety, is the model. Mr. Vianney’s talent for reading thought and tales of his levitation have also brought a cult of mysticism and secrecy around him; he is venerated by hardcore groups like the Society of St. Pius X, whose namesake pope beatified Vianney in 1904.Well, more levitating priests would give a certain supernatural zing to going to Mass that's been missing for a while!
"Vianney is thought to be a useful model for many new Catholic priests in rural or developing nations," says Andreas Batlogg, editor of the Jesuit-based Catholic intellectual journal Stimmen der Zeit in Munich, Germany.
Yet Benedict’s choice of Vianney caused loud and palpable groans in many parts of US and Europe. Modern-oriented Catholics and theologians see the choice as a political model of a priest closed off from society, overly idealized, hard for young Catholics to relate to, and one whose effect will be to increase a sense of distance between priests and ordinary people, and promote a view of priests more spiritually gifted than regular Catholics.
“We need an example, but this is a pastor of 230 people in a small French village in the 19th century,” says Mr. Batlogg.
