Swimming, ‘baby gym’ mats and walking part of routine journeys encouraged in first exercise guidance for under-fives Children under the age of five should exercise for at least three hours a day, new government guidelines will suggest. Babies should be taken swimming and play on “baby gym” mats while toddlers should walk for at least 15 minutes of routine journeys such as to nursery, chief medical officers will say. The exercise guidance, to be issued this week, targets under-fives for the first time. “For children that are not yet walking, there is considerable evidence that letting children crawl, play or roll around on the floor is essential during early years,” said England’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies. “Play that allows under-fives to move about is critical and three hours a day is essential,” she told the Sunday Times. “I think there are parents who are not aware how important it is for their children to be physically active for a minimum of three hours. Other parents are very busy and may not see how important it is to get that prioritisation and balance right.” According to NHS figures, nearly a quarter of children aged four and five are overweight or obese. Experts predict that by 2050 this could apply to 63% of children. Professor Fiona Bull, chair of the scientific committee behind the guidelines and co-director of the British Heart Foundation National Centre for Physical Activity at Loughborough University, said parents should “turn the TV off”. The advice follows warnings this month that England faces a liver disease “timebomb” because so many children are overweight. Professor Martin Lombard, national clinical director for liver at the Department of Health, said a culture of overeating was putting the lives of more than 500,000 young people at risk. Children Obesity guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …George Will to Donna Brazile: Obama and Dems Have Kicked the Deficit Can So Much It’s ‘Can Abuse’
July 10, 2011 No Comment
Democrat strategist and ABC contributor Donna Brazile on Sunday predictably blamed the current debt ceiling impasse on Republicans and their refusal to raise taxes. This led George Will to state what would be obvious to all media members if they weren't so in the tank for Barack Obama, namely that he and his Party have been kicking the deficit can down the road so long they're guilty of “can abuse” (video follows with transcript and commentary): CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Everybody knows that entitlements have to be in play as well, and if it hadn’t been for the hardball negotiations that the Republicans were doing, the President may not have come to even talking about entitlements. DONNA BRAZILE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST, ABC AND CNN CONTRIBUTOR: He put it on the table, the Republicans came into the room, got their appetizers and said, “You know what? Main course, we’ll just walk away.” Maybe tonight the President will serve dessert. It’s after six o’clock, George, I should be cooking. GEORGE WILL: Before we have a moratorium I hope on the can metaphor, let’s look at who’s been kicking the can down the road. Democrats started kicking the can down the road when they stopped writing budgets. The President kicked the can down the road by appointing a deficit commission. Then he kicked it again down the road by ignoring the deficit commission. Then he submitted a budget in February that no one on either side of the House would support that promised to increase the deficit. That’s a lot of kicking. That’s can abuse. Indeed it is, and if Congressional Republicans along with a GOP President had behaved this way for over two years, the media would be up in arms about it. Congressional Democrats have not proposed a budget since Obama's fiscal 2010 one was passed in April 2009. That's 27 straight months worth of can kicking right up to this debt ceiling showdown. It's been many decades since there's been an entire political party that has so abdicated its budget responsibility, a fact that seems lost on so-called journalists who are supposed to be exposing such hypocrisy rather than assisting its cover-up as well as its willing distortion of the truth so the blame can be diverted to the largely innocent. This would be laughable if the nation wasn't facing another financial crisis that will make the last one look like a simple bounced check. Sadly, this Marx Brothers movie we're watching is real, and the only ones laughing are the press as they pat themselves on the back for once again being able to convince so many people that one plus one doesn't equal two.
Continue reading …Fox News Watch Panel Frets Over Suspension of ‘Brilliant Reporter’ Mark Halperin at MSNBC
July 10, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media It seems that the majority of the panel on Fox’s so-called media watchdog show, Fox News Watch were terribly upset that MSNBC suspended Mark Halperin after calling President Obama a dick on live television on Morning Joe. Personally I think if they were going to get rid of Halperin, it should have been for a lot of other reasons than what happened on Morning Joe that day. What’s humorous about this exchange is that the panel of course equates what Halperin said on the air to a lot of the things Keith Olbermann said about George W. Bush which they thought he should have been suspended for. Hyperbolic or not, at least Olbermann didn’t come on the air night after night and lie to his audience the way Fox does on the air every day. The panel also painted the suspension being due to MSNBC’s supposed “liberal bias” where they don’t want anyone saying something bad about a Democratic president on the air, ignoring of course that Morning Joe could just as easily fit quite nicely into Fox’s daily programming with the kind of right wing hackery we get from Joe Scarborough and his regular panel members and guests every morning. And Jim Pinkerton called Halperin a “brilliant reporter.” I guess in Fox-World, Halperin would be considered that. Alan Colmes tried to point out the things that right wing radio hosts say on the air day after day about President Obama that go unpunished, ignoring of course some of the things said on his own network by the likes of the now canceled Glenn Beck and Eric Bolling as a couple of the worst examples.
Continue reading …Los Angeles braced for ‘car-mageddon’ as roadworks close the interstate 405
July 10, 2011 No Comment
Closing the San Diego freeway for a weekend for bridge rebuilding could bring an already congested LA to a standstill Other cities have traffic jams. Los Angeles is gearing itself up for “car-mageddon”. The City of Angels, already infamous for bumper-to-bumper extravaganzas that have inspired whole movies, is taking the unprecedented step of ordering the total closure of what is perhaps the most emblematic stretch of congested roadway in North America for one nightmarish weekend. For 53 hours, from 7pm on the evening of Friday 15 July to the early hours of Monday 18 July, the San Diego freeway – referred to by local people, usually with a shudder, as 405, its interstate number – will be off limits between the San Fernando valley and the main LA basin. The reason could not be more workaday: the local transport authority needs to demolish and rebuild a bridge over the freeway and cannot do it with cars haring in either direction directly below. But the fear – mostly, if not entirely, justified – is that the closure will have a ripple effect bringing the entire city to a standstill. “This will be something for the record books,” city councilman Bill Rosendahl promised a group of concerned citizens this week. And that was the rosy spin on things. Deputy LA police chief Kirk Albanese expressed his best case scenario this way: “On Monday morning we will all be alive and well.” The stretch in question arches over the hills of Brentwood and Bel Air, past the Getty Center with its dreamy views of the Pacific and the twinkling urban lights. This is where OJ Simpson took the LAPD on a protracted chase after a warrant went out for his arrest in 1994, and what Bret Easton Ellis had in mind when he wrote of his fear of merging on freeways at the beginning of his brat-pack novel Less Than Zero. The closure will begin at the single busiest freeway interchange in the US, where the 405 meets the Ventura freeway, and will end at the third or fourth busiest, where the 405 meets the Santa Monica freeway. The city, to its credit, has launched a vast publicity campaign to alert as many people as humanly possible, posting signs all the way to the Oregon border more than 600 miles away. It is also hosting community meetings to address the understandable concerns of local people whose hillside homes are not reachable by any means other than the freeway or a single straggly road running alongside it over the Sepulveda pass. It is not much of an alternative for the 300,000 or so vehicles that would thunder along the 405 on any normal weekend. At the meeting where Rosendahl spoke, proceedings started late because – why else? – the traffic was horrible, and he and other featured speakers were reduced to praying for wings. “We all know what we’re experiencing here every day,” he lamented. His argument in favour of the closure was not unlike the old Vietnam war rationale of destroying a village in order to save it. The traffic had to be pure hell for one weekend, Rosendahl said, to make everything better in the long run. The community was not buying it. Bits of the 405 have been plagued by roadworks for at least five years, with only modest results. Questioner after questioner at the meeting wanted to know how they were going to go grocery shopping, or keep snaking traffic off their particular streets. Steve Tomingas, a resident of the exclusive Mountain Gate community – which boasts a golf course, security gates and fabulous views of the hills – urged the city elders to issue special passes, Oscar night style, so only the elect could pass through the congested area. The police and transport officials said, politely, that the idea was not workable. • This article was amended on 8 July 2011. In the original the Ventura freeway was described as the Hollywood freeway. This has been corrected. United States Road transport Los Angeles North and Central America United States Andrew Gumbel guardian.co.uk
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US academic calls for armed guards to protect heritage sites from theft and damage in midst of conflict or disaster Museum guards and others tasked with protecting the world’s cultural treasures should be routinely armed to defend heritage sites from the depredations of conflict, according to a leading expert. Professor Lawrence Rothfield, faculty director of the University of Chicago’s cultural policy centre, told the Guardian that ministries, foundations and local authorities “should not assume that the brutal policing job required to prevent looters and professional art thieves from carrying away items is just one for the national police or for other forces not under their direct control”. He was speaking in advance of the annual conference of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA), held over the weekend in the central Italian town of Amelia. Rothfield said he would also like to see museum attendants, site wardens and others given thorough training in crowd control. And not just in the developing world. “Even in the US and other very stable countries, disasters can occur that open the door to looting,” he said, citing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as an example of how quickly normality can disintegrate. His controversial proposal follows a string of heritage disasters arising from the turmoil in the Middle East. In 2003, looters ransacked the Iraqi national museum . In January, as protests against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak gathered momentum, thieves broke into the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo . Most recently, there have been reports that the Libyan conflict has put some cultural treasures at risk. Another conference, held under the auspices of Unesco and the Italian government at Caserta near Naples this month, heard from representatives of the anti-Gaddafi rebels of a robbery at the Bank of Benghazi in May. One of those present reported that the treasures stolen included Greco-Roman gold and silver artefacts and coins. Rothfield’s views hardened while conducting a study of the Cairo museum raid. Much remains unclear about the incident, including whether “the whole thing was a well-controlled gambit to persuade the international community that the country was descending into chaos and that the revolt needed to be crushed”, he said. But two key points had emerged. One was that the museum authorities were unable to count on the police when they needed them most. The second was that no amount of education on the value and importance of cultural heritage would prevent a disaster. Egyptians have long been schooled to treasure the evidence of their past. But, said Rothfield, “even if you have 90% of the people on your side, it doesn’t take many others to do the damage”. That, of course, does not mean education is dispensable. One of Rothfield’s fellow speakers at ARCA’s conference was Laurie Rush, an archaeologist attached to the US army’s 10th Mountain Division. Her mission is to help soldiers identify cultural property in their forward deployments and keep damage to a minimum. Five years ago, her unit produced a pack of cards, each with a different message about heritage protection. The nine of spades, for example, has a picture of a Chinook helicopter and the message: “Rotor rush can damage archaeological sites. Locate your landing zones a safe distance away from known sites.” Rush said she had secured changes to army regulations, and these had saved a Mesopotamian settlement, several thousand years old, near forward operating base Hammer, east of Baghdad. “A young soldier contacted us having seen military contractors scooping up dirt to make an earthen wall. He realised it was archaeological material and, because of our project, there were military regulations that empowered the base commander to give orders for the protection of the site.” Many other sites in Iraq have been less fortunate. The invasion was the prelude to a calamity for Iraq’s cultural heritage. Rothfield said it was estimated that looters had dug up three times the area excavated before the invasion. “The Baghdad museum lost around 15,000 items, half of which were recovered. But the country has lost several hundred thousand items, and they will probably never come back,” he said. Museums Libya Egypt Iraq Italy Europe John Hooper guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …At least one person dead and 61 missing after double-decked river cruiser sinks in Russia’s Volga river A pleasure boat carrying more than 170 people sank in Russia’s Volga river on Sunday, killing at least one person and leaving dozens missing, emergency officials said. One body has been recovered and 61 people are unaccounted for after the boat, a double-decked river cruiser called the Bulgaria, sank in the Tatarstan region, said a spokeswoman for the emergency situations ministry. “We don’t know yet why it sank. There were 140 passengers and 33 staff. One was found dead, a passing boat saved some people. Sixty-one are unaccounted for.” A rescue team aided by a helicopter was searching for missing people, she said. The boat was heading to the regional capital, Kazan, about 500 miles east of Moscow, and sank about two miles from shore in 20 metres of water, the ministry’s regional branch said. The RIA news agency, citing a regional official, said 78 people had been rescued and 94 people were missing. Russia Europe guardian.co.uk
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• Phaedra Almajid now says claims of bribes were fabricated • Insists that she has not been pressured or paid for retraction The “whistleblower” who alleged Qatar paid huge bribes to three African Fifa executive committee members during the gulf nation’s campaign to host the 2022 World Cup has retracted the story, saying she “fabricated” it all. The allegations, that Qatar’s bid paid $1.5m (£935,000) to the three Africans, Issa Hayatou, Jacques Anouma and Amos Adamu, to secure their votes, were not published in any newspaper, but the House of Commons select committee for culture, media and sport did publish them, based on a letter from the Sunday Times . That meant the allegations of serious corruption, revealed by “a whistleblower who had worked with the Qatar bid”, were reported here and around the world with the protection of parliamentary privilege. The whistleblower, publicly identifying herself as Phaedra Almajid, was head of international media relations at Qatar’s 2022 bid between May 2009 and March 2010. She now says she entirely fabricated that story of bribes paid by the Qatar bid, and other corruption allegations, because she wanted to “hurt” the bid after they decided to move her from her job. She said she was “furious” at the bid’s suggestion that she was not handling the international media competently, and, “acting irrationally”, decided to make up the corruption stories “to show them I could control the international media”. She now says she came to feel “sorry” and “guilty” for having severely damaged the bid’s reputation, and that she never expected her stories to reach as far as the UK parliament and an intention by Fifa to investigate them. The Guardian spoke to Almajid from Qatar itself, where we conducted an exclusive newspaper interview with the bid’s chief executive, Hassan al-Thawadi, which will appear online on Monday. He said that Almajid had been in contact with the bid wanting to retract her story, and facilitated our conversation with her. Both she and the bid insist they did not put pressure on her to issue her retraction, nor paid her or helped her in any way. “The decision to make this admission is entirely my own,” she said in a statement made on a website specifically created for her retraction. “I have not been subject to any form of pressure or been offered any financial inducement.” http://www.qatarwhistleblower.com/ http://www.sportsfeatures.com/soccernews/story/48970/world-exclusive-by-keir-radnedge-it-was-all-lies-says-qatar-2022-whistleblower Fifa World Cup 2022 David Conn guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …• Phaedra Almajid now says claims of bribes were fabricated • Insists that she has not been pressured or paid for retraction The “whistleblower” who alleged Qatar paid huge bribes to three African Fifa executive committee members during the gulf nation’s campaign to host the 2022 World Cup has retracted the story, saying she “fabricated” it all. The allegations, that Qatar’s bid paid $1.5m (£935,000) to the three Africans, Issa Hayatou, Jacques Anouma and Amos Adamu, to secure their votes, were not published in any newspaper, but the House of Commons select committee for culture, media and sport did publish them, based on a letter from the Sunday Times . That meant the allegations of serious corruption, revealed by “a whistleblower who had worked with the Qatar bid”, were reported here and around the world with the protection of parliamentary privilege. The whistleblower, publicly identifying herself as Phaedra Almajid, was head of international media relations at Qatar’s 2022 bid between May 2009 and March 2010. She now says she entirely fabricated that story of bribes paid by the Qatar bid, and other corruption allegations, because she wanted to “hurt” the bid after they decided to move her from her job. She said she was “furious” at the bid’s suggestion that she was not handling the international media competently, and, “acting irrationally”, decided to make up the corruption stories “to show them I could control the international media”. She now says she came to feel “sorry” and “guilty” for having severely damaged the bid’s reputation, and that she never expected her stories to reach as far as the UK parliament and an intention by Fifa to investigate them. The Guardian spoke to Almajid from Qatar itself, where we conducted an exclusive newspaper interview with the bid’s chief executive, Hassan al-Thawadi, which will appear online on Monday. He said that Almajid had been in contact with the bid wanting to retract her story, and facilitated our conversation with her. Both she and the bid insist they did not put pressure on her to issue her retraction, nor paid her or helped her in any way. “The decision to make this admission is entirely my own,” she said in a statement made on a website specifically created for her retraction. “I have not been subject to any form of pressure or been offered any financial inducement.” http://www.qatarwhistleblower.com/ http://www.sportsfeatures.com/soccernews/story/48970/world-exclusive-by-keir-radnedge-it-was-all-lies-says-qatar-2022-whistleblower Fifa World Cup 2022 David Conn guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …No Dice On Grand Bargain. Boehner Counts The Votes For Tax Increases And Comes Up Short. Stay Tuned!
July 10, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media If you’ve heard bloggers use the term “Grand Bargain” and you don’t understand what it means, it refers to the theoretical packaging of a very big deal on third-rail issues that’s so unpleasant for both sides, it’s in effect a political wash. The idea is, it’s reform that doesn’t leave either side at a disadvantage. (Please note that Obama’s intentions to do so were known in February 2009 .) On our side, Social Security and Medicare cuts; on their side, tax increases. Anyway, it looks like the Grand Bargain is coming unraveled – but we can’t relax just yet since it’s been reported that the chained CPI for Social Security benefits is included in Joe Biden’s smaller plan, the one to which Republicans have already agreed. This isn’t a victory for eleventy-dimensional chess, because no matter what, we still have a Democratic president offering Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts and validating the right-wing view of the universe, and we’re still talking about spending cuts during a prolonged recession — as if they’ll help. We’ll see what the White House is asking Democrats to support as part of the final deal after today’s debt ceiling talks. Stay tuned. House Speaker John A. Boehner abandoned efforts Saturday night to reach a comprehensive debt-reduction deal worth more than $4 trillion in savings, telling President Obama that a midsize package was the only politically possible alternative to avoid a first-ever default on the nation’s mounting national debt. Boehner (R-Ohio) told Obama — who is hosting a key meeting Sunday evening on the debt issue — that their efforts to “go big,” as the speaker says, were stymied by the toughest issues: taxes and entitlements. Democrats continued to insist on tax reforms that would not pass muster in the conservative-dominated House, and Republicans wanted cuts to programs such as Medicare and Social Security that Obama and Senate Democrats would oppose. “Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes. I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase,” Boehner said in a statement released less than 24 hours before the Obama meeting is to take place.
Continue reading …No Dice On Grand Bargain. Boehner Counts The Votes For Tax Increases And Comes Up Short. Stay Tuned!
July 10, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media If you’ve heard bloggers use the term “Grand Bargain” and you don’t understand what it means, it refers to the theoretical packaging of a very big deal on third-rail issues that’s so unpleasant for both sides, it’s in effect a political wash. The idea is, it’s reform that doesn’t leave either side at a disadvantage. (Please note that Obama’s intentions to do so were known in February 2009 .) On our side, Social Security and Medicare cuts; on their side, tax increases. Anyway, it looks like the Grand Bargain is coming unraveled – but we can’t relax just yet since it’s been reported that the chained CPI for Social Security benefits is included in Joe Biden’s smaller plan, the one to which Republicans have already agreed. This isn’t a victory for eleventy-dimensional chess, because no matter what, we still have a Democratic president offering Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts and validating the right-wing view of the universe, and we’re still talking about spending cuts during a prolonged recession — as if they’ll help. We’ll see what the White House is asking Democrats to support as part of the final deal after today’s debt ceiling talks. Stay tuned. House Speaker John A. Boehner abandoned efforts Saturday night to reach a comprehensive debt-reduction deal worth more than $4 trillion in savings, telling President Obama that a midsize package was the only politically possible alternative to avoid a first-ever default on the nation’s mounting national debt. Boehner (R-Ohio) told Obama — who is hosting a key meeting Sunday evening on the debt issue — that their efforts to “go big,” as the speaker says, were stymied by the toughest issues: taxes and entitlements. Democrats continued to insist on tax reforms that would not pass muster in the conservative-dominated House, and Republicans wanted cuts to programs such as Medicare and Social Security that Obama and Senate Democrats would oppose. “Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes. I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase,” Boehner said in a statement released less than 24 hours before the Obama meeting is to take place.
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