Conventional wisdom says that the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill faces a long uphill slog in the Senate against steep odds. But small changes are building beneath the surface of the news cycle, emerging as seven reasons for cautious optimism.
Key Republican support is already in place, beginning with Sen. Lindsey Graham, who took to the New Y ork Times editorial page offering full-throated support for passing clean energy legislation this year.
All five surviving members of Monty Python celebrated their 40th anniversary at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York with the premiere of a new six part documentary ‘Monty Python: The Truth.’ The mini-series is set to air on the IFC channel beginning October 18.
Watch two video reports from Reuters, and AP. (Watch out for ads in the videos…)
The recession finally ended in August in one out of every five metro areas in the United States, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains, according to the latest Adversity Index from Moody’s Economy.
This is the first month this year when any metro area has moved from recession into the “recovery” category, indicating that the economy grew from six months earlier.
Check the list for your area…
Oxford BioMedica, a leading gene therapy company, announced yesterday new data from the ongoing Phase I/II trial of ProSavin, its gene therapy for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. All patients treated at the second dose level have completed their six-month assessments and have shown further improvement in motor function — up to 53% improvement in patients’ motor function, with an average uptick of 34%..
French conductor Jean-Claude Casadesus is used to playing for classical music fans all over the world. But once a year, he and musicians from the National Orchestra of Lille play to a different kind of audience — inmates in an overcrowded and rundown prison.
Production went up again at the nation’s factories in September, the Federal Reserve just reported. The 0.7% increase from August was the third straight month that production increased and, Reuters writes, means that output grew at a 5.2% in the third quarter — the largest quarterly rise since first-quarter 2005.
Here is an amazing video montage from YouTube that honors the luckiest people in the world. Some of these lucky people avoided cars that should have plowed into them. Others avoided falls that should have taken their lives. Some just had lucky shots in sports.
Watch the inspiring video below:
The Terminator wants to terminate paparazzi. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a new law Sunday that will fine paparazzi for taking photos that invade a celebrity’s right to privacy.
The new amendment raises the penalties when a person commits a trespass “in order to physically invade the privacy” of a celebrity in order to film or record them. It also targets media outlets who purchase the illegal photos.
But it raises first amendment questions.
Meatless Monday is a campaign that aims to get Americans to cut out burgers and dogs one day each week as a way of trimming the hefty greenhouse gas emissions produced by the livestock industry — 18% of the world’s total carbon output, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
In a big leap forward for the movement, the Baltimore Public School District announced recently it would adopt a Meatless Monday menu for its 80,000 students, saying they wanted to “ensure the kids eat and learn about healthy, environmentally-friendly choices”.
The school system’s actions yesterday earned it the 2009 Award for Visionary Leadership in Local Food Procurement and Food Education from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said it will donate a total of $120 million in a bid to boost agricultural production, marketing and farming expertise in the developing world.
“Melinda and I believe that helping the poorest small-holder farmers grow more crops and get them to market is the world’s single most powerful lever for reducing hunger and poverty,” Gates, the billionaire founder of software giant Microsoft, said in remarks prepared for delivery on Thursday to the World Food Prize annual meeting, and obtained by Reuters.
He couldn’t get over the fact that so much soap was wasted every day in hotels across wealthy America, so now Derreck Kayongo’s basement in the United States is lined with huge boxes filled with bars of soap that will help fight the spread of child diseases in Africa.
Kayongo has collected five tons of lightly used bars through his Global Soap Project, which melts them down, sterilizes them and reshapes them before sending them to refugees back in his homeland of Uganda. (Continue reading AP story at NPR)
All the local Atlanta hotels are contributing and thrilled with the project.
Watch the interview from Global Atlanta… “I called my dad (who is a soap-maker) and said, ‘Dad, you wouldn’t believe it. They throw away the bars of soap after just one use!”
RELATED STORY: Cruise Line Program ‘Ship to Shelter’ Donates Items Once Discarded
20 university teams from around the world have designed and built their ultimate solar dream homes on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
Watch these cool videos showcasing some of the top designs, along with very impressive students:
Team Germany, which won the Solar Decathlon in 2007, is back this year with a solar-panel-covered home that generates enough energy for two houses.
Team Puerto Rico is trying to address the public taboo that solar power is unrealistic. (photo, right: Solar decathlon home, Team Puerto Rico)
Team Alberta from Canada has followed a goal to make a hi-tech house that uses native Canadian materials to give it a cozy, livable feeling.
America.gov produced the videos…
An expert skier fresh out of medical school fell submerged into an icy river and became stuck for 80 minutes, with no pulse or respiration. Her accident led to a revelation about treating accidental hypothermia. Doctors did CPR continuously on a helicopter trip to the hospital and her blood was slowly warmed.
Mountain rescue, photo by Ketil Singstad; Thanks to Pam Guthrie for submitting the link!
Sir James Dyson, the inventor who revolutionized the bagless vacuum cleaner, revealed his latest invention: a fan with no blades.
The Dyson fan works very differently to conventional fans. With no blades or grill, it’s completely safe, effortless to clean. It uses Air Multiplier™ technology to draw in air and amplify it 15 times, producing an uninterrupted stream of smooth air that doesn’t cause unpleasant buffeting.
Watch the United Press video below (Ad at the top):
Visit a new exhibition in Kabul and see a selection of some 2,000 Afghan artifacts which were illegally smuggled out of the country during three decades of conflict and civil war, treasures altogether weighing 3.5 tons.
No less remarkable than the craftsmanship on display at the National Museum of Afghanistan, is the story of the antiquities’ return after customs officials stopped smugglers trying to take the looted goods through British airports three years ago.
Half belong to the pre-Islamic period before the seventh century. “Each piece is priceless.”
About 70 percent of the museum’s 100,000-piece collection was looted by mujahideen fighters in the 1990s. Exhibits were also damaged by rocket fire or the Taliban, on a rampage to destroy “un-Islamic” artifacts.
(Continue reading AFP story from Drexel University)
National Museum of Afghanistan, head of a Buddha
Around the world millions of children are not getting a proper education because their families are too poor to afford to send them to school. In India, one schoolboy is trying to change that.
A BBC reporter travels to meet Babar Ali, whose remarkable education project is transforming the lives of hundreds of poor children.
800 students travel in the late afternoon to Babar’s home and study beneath lean-to structures.
Click to read or watch the BBC report. (Watch also the two other videos about Babar that follow the main story.) Photo from BBC video
For 35 years, hundreds of villagers living in northern Guinea-Bissau have been too scared to cultivate the land around their villages for fear of exploding landmines.
Their town of Suar in the Cacheu region, near the northern border with Senegal, was contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance laid by the Portuguese in the 1974 liberation war.
“The area was not safe,” Daniel Camara, 28, said as he cycled along a path once surrounded by mines. “But now we can move around. We are no longer living in fear – they’ve taken our bad luck away.” (Cashew fruits in Guinea-Bissau ©Manoocher Deghati/IRIN)
Can we get more people to throw their trash in the bin by making it fun? Can fun encourage more people to sort recyclables? Will more people exercise if it’s fun… Volkswagen says yes, through a set of experiments in a new project called The Fun Theory.
Documenting the effects, their whimsical YouTube videos show that changing people’s behavior is easy — when it’s fun.
The first experiment showed that subway riders’ use of a staircase dramatically rose 66% over normal when the stairs played a tune.
The second experiment showed that people would actually pick up trash surrounding a public bin just so they could dump it, when a fanciful sound effect played every time the litter entered the can. Almost double the amount of trash was collected compared with the bin up the street.
Stay tuned for Volkswagen’s next stunt. They are creating an arcade game that will make it more fun for you to sort recyclables… Watch all the videos below, or at TheFunTheory.com. Take part in a competition to find fun ways to change other behavior. Entries are being accepted for a contest that ends November 15.
Can we get more people to throw their trash in the bin by making it fun? Can fun encourage more people to sort recyclables? Will more people exercise if it’s fun… Volkswagen says yes, through a set of experiments in a new project called The Fun Theory.
Documenting the effects, their whimsical YouTube videos show that changing people’s behavior is easy — when it’s fun.
The first experiment showed that subway riders’ use of a staircase dramatically rose 66% over normal when the stairs played a tune.
The second experiment showed that people would actually pick up trash surrounding a public bin just so they could dump it, when a fanciful sound effect played every time the litter entered the can. Almost double the amount of trash was collected compared with the bin up the street.
Stay tuned for Volkswagen’s next stunt. They are creating an arcade game that will make it more fun for you to sort recyclables… Watch all the videos below, or at TheFunTheory.com. Take part in a competition to find fun ways to change other behavior. Entries are being accepted for a contest that ends November 15.
Turkey and Armenia may finally be on the verge of reconciliation, after nearly a century of hostile relations between the two nations. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Zurich to give a final needed push toward the signing of agreements to establish normalized diplomatic relations between the Turkish and Armenian governments and to reopen the sealed border between them.
The United States has been engaged in the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process and will “remain ready to work with both governments in support of the process”, which will likely be difficult, requiring ratification from each of the parliaments.
The football diplomacy also resumed as the Armenian president said today that he will attend a football match in Turkey later this week accepting an invitation by his Turkish counterpart to watch the two nations’ teams in the second leg of their World Cup qualifier. Last year the Turkish president watched the first leg of the qualifier in Armenia.
(Armenian and Turkish presidents at May 5 meeting- CC license)
