truesee's Blog

The List: Top New Year's resolutions

Watching less television and exercising are two popular New Year's resolutions.

The Washington Times

7:46 p.m

Friday, December 31, 2010

The new year is a time to reflect; to make new commitments and resolutions. This week, The List looks at some of the popular resolutions people make at the beginning of each year.

• Stop smoking -- It's hard to give up the popular weed first introduced to Europeans by Native Americans. U.S. smoking rates have stalled in the last five years, according to federal health officials. The rate was 20.6 percent of U.S. adults in 2009 compared with 20.9 percent in 2005. Each year in the U.S., tobacco use causes about 443,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. For help, check out the National Cancer Institute's website smokefree.gov.

• Drink less -- Alcohol is certainly part of our culture and helps many celebrate holidays, notes the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "But drinking too much -- on a single occasion or over time -- can have serious consequences for our health," the website states. Too much alcoholic can affect the liver and also damage the brain.

• Get more exercise -- Get off the couch and get those muscles working; your body is beautiful. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), adults should do a minimum of 2 hours and 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week by doing activities like brisk walking, ballroom dancing or gardening. If you choose, you can do 75 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, such as jogging, aerobic dancing or tennis, etc.

• Go on a diet -- Currently, more than 64 million Americans are obese. Obesity is ranked as the second-leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., exceeded only by smoking according to the Food and Drug Administration._ To lose weight you need to take in fewer calories than you use. Start eating healthy foods and do regular physical activity.

• Find a soul mate -- The number of single adults in the United States has reached 110 million, according to the "It's Just Lunch" website, a national dating service. Eharmony.com, another dating service, says it has 20 million registered online users and accounts for 542 marriages a year. 

• Spend more time with family and friends -- Americans are happiest on days when they spend six or seven hours socializing, according to the Gallup-Healthways Happiness-Stress Index._ Individuals who reported being alone all day (zero hours of social time) performed the poorest on the Index.

• Get more organized -- There are two types of clutter: mental and physical. Take control of your life and start cleaning up your surroundings. It starts with your thinking. Set clear goals, and then start cleaning up, room by room. 

• Find a job -- With the unemployment rate nearing 10 percent, many Americans will be looking for a job in 2011. It's important to take a closer look at industry data to find out where jobs are, such as sites like CareerBuilder.com. It's always a good idea to freshen up your skills.

• Travel more -- American is a big country, but there's also a world out there, too. Plan a trip overseas, or take a cruise. 

• Help others/charity work, etc. -- Mahatma Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” Want to have a meaningful, positive impact on your community? Become a volunteer. Volunteers often feel a sense of achievement, generated from a desire and enthusiasm to help. Volunteering also helps on your resume. A study by Timebank, a British volunteer organization, _ showed that employers will recruit a candidate with volunteering experience over one without.
• Relocate -- Sometimes a move is good, but it's wise to find a job at a new location first. 

• Manage stress better -- Preventing and managing stress can help lower your risk of serious health problems, _such as high blood pressure and depression. 

• Get out of debt -- Cut up all your credit cards until you are down to just one. Start keeping a record of your spending and make a budget. Figure out how much you owe, to whom and on what terms, and start paying it off.

• Text less -- Texting and cell phone use is becoming an addiction for many young people. According to a study done by Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland of 4,257 secondary school students, almost one in five teens sent more than 120 texts a day. 

• Watch less TV -- According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than four hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or two months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Pick up a book.

Compiled by John Haydon

Susan Blumenthal, M.D.

Public Health Editor at HuffPost and Former U.S. Assistant Surgeon

December 31, 2010 08:36 AM 

Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Highs: The gruff Allen, a retired admiral and former commandant of the Coast Guard who helped manage the response to Hurricane Katrina, was a rare reassuring presence in the troubled federal efforts to control the Gulf oil spill. It was Allen who ran the near-daily press conferences, and who was the final authority for any decisions made by BP as it struggled to repair the ongoing leak. No one came out of the spill clean, but Allen made out better than most.

Lows: Even though the chain of command put Allen at the top, there were still times when it seemed that BP-the guilty party-was running the shop. Too often the federal response was slow to dispense information, leaving a vacuum. And at the end of the day, it still took months for Allen's team to finally close the leak-staining his boss President Obama with a daily reminder of failure.

—Bryan Walsh

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2036767_2037029,00.html #ixzz19mtaijWb

DECEMBER 31, 2010, 4:42 A.M. ET

Days of Auld Lang What?

The origin of the New Year's anthem—and what it means to us.

PEGGY NOONAN

You know exactly when you'll hear it, and you probably won't hear it again for a year.  The big clock will hit 11:59:50, the countdown will begin—10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4—and the sounds will rise: the party horns, fireworks and shouts of "Happy New Year!"

And then they'll play that song: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?  Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and days of auld lang syne?"

It is a poem in Scots dialect, set to a Scots folk tune, and an unscientific survey says that a lot of us don't think much about the words, or even know them. The great film director Mike Nichols came to America from Germany as a child, when his family fled Hitler.  He had to learn a lot of English quickly and never got around to "Auld Lang Syne": "I was too busy with words like 'emergency exit' on the school bus," he told me. "As a result, I find myself weeping at gibberish on New Year's Eve.  I enjoy that."

The screen and television writer Aaron Sorkin, who this year, with "The Social Network," gives Paddy Chayefsky a run for his money, says that every year he means to learn the words. "Then someone tells me that's not a good enough New Year's resolution and I really need to quit smoking."

"Auld Lang Syne"—the phrase can be translated as "long, long ago," or "old long since," but I like "old times past"—is a song that asks a question, a tender little question that has to do with the nature of being alive, of being a person on a journey in the world. It not only asks, it gives an answer.

 

Randy Jones

It was written, or written down, by Robert Burns, lyric poet and Bard of Scotland. In 1788 he sent a copy of the poem to the Scots Musical Museum, with the words: "The following song, an old song, of the olden times, has never been in print." Burns was interested in the culture of Scotland, and collected old folk tales and poems. He said he got this one "from an old man"—no one knows who—and wrote it down. Being a writer, Burns revised and compressed. He found the phrase auld lang syne "exceedingly expressive" and thought whoever first wrote the poem "heaven inspired." The song spread throughout Scotland, where it was sung to mark the end of the old year, and soon to the English-speaking world, where it's sung to mark the new.

The question it asks is clear: Should those we knew and loved be forgotten and never thought of? Should old times past be forgotten? No, says the song, they shouldn't be. We'll remember those times and those people, we'll toast them now and always, we'll keep them close. "We'll take a cup of kindness yet."

"The phrase old acquaintance is important," says my friend John Whitehead, fabled figure of the old Goldman Sachs, the Reagan State Department, and D-Day. "It's not only your close friends and people you love, it's people you knew even casually, and you think of them and it brings tears to my eyes." For him, acquaintance includes, "your heroes, my heroes—the Winston Churchills of life, the ones you admire. They're old acquaintances too."

But "the interesting, more serious message in the song is that the past is important, we mustn't forget it, the old has something for us."

So does the present, as the last stanza makes clear. The song is not only about those who were in your life, but those who are in your life. "And there's a hand, my trusty friend, and give a hand of thine, We'll take a right good-will draught for auld lang syne."

To Tom Coburn, a U.S. senator from Oklahoma, the song is about friendship: "I think it's a description of the things we lose in our hurry to do things. We forget to be a friend. We have to take the time to make friends and be friends, to sit and tell stories and listen to those of others."

Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana said he always experienced the song as celebratory and joyful until something happened in 2004. Mr. Daniels was running for office, and it became a new bonding experience for him and his father, who followed the campaign closely: "He loved my stories from the road." The elder Daniels died unexpectedly in August, "50 days short of my election as governor." At a New Year's party, the governor-elect heard the song in a new way. Ever since, "I hear its wistfulness."

Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes," enjoying one of the great careers in the history of broadcast news, thinks of childhood when she thinks of "Auld Lang Syne": "I see New Year's Eve parties going way back, all the way back to when we were little kids and you had to kiss someone at midnight and you had to sing that song." She interviewed Mark Zuckerberg recently. "Maybe in the age of Facebook you don't lose old friends," she says. "Maybe it's obsolete." Maybe "they'll have to change the song."

For the journalist and author Marie Brenner, the song didn't come alive until she moved from her native Texas to New York City, in the 1970s. That first New Year's in town, "Auld Lang Syne was a revelation to me. . . . I thought, this is beautiful and maybe written by a Broadway composer, by Rodgers and Hammerstein." She saw people singing it "on the street, and at a party in a bar downtown." There was "this gorgeous moment when everyone seemed to know the words, and people looked teary and, yes, drunk." They played the song back in San Antonio, "but it took me coming to New York to really hear it."

The song is a staple in movies, but when I asked people to think of the greatest "Auld Lang Syne scene," every one of them had the same answer. Not "When Harry Met Sally," not "Out of Africa," not, for film buffs, Charlie Chaplin's "The Gold Rush." The great "Auld Lang Syne" scene in cinematic history is from "It's a Wonderful Life," which Mr. Sorkin puckishly describes as "Frank Capra's classic tale of an angel who takes up the cause of a progressive in order to defeat a heartless conservative. It's possible I'm misinterpreting the movie, but the song still works."

The scene comes at the end of the film. Friends surround George Bailey, recently rescued by an angel. Someone bumps against the Christmas tree and a bell ornament makes a sound. George's daughter says, "Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings," and George looks up and winks. "Thanks, Clarence," he says, as the music swells. God bless the baby boomers who discovered that film on TV after their elders dismissed it as Capra-corn.

Tonight I'll be at Suzie and Joe's, with whom I worked at CBS News in auld lang syne. I'll think of some who won't be entering the new year with us—big, sweet-hearted dynamo Richard Holbrooke, and Ted Sorensen, counselor to presidents, whose pen was a terrible swift sword. I'll take a cup of kindness yet for them, for all the old acquaintances in this piece, and for the readers, for 10 years now, of this column. We mark an anniversary. Thank you for being in my life. Happy New Year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/10-best-books-of-2010.html?scp=1-spot&sq=10%20best%20books%20&st=Search

Amy Lee

HuffPost Reporting

'Give It Back For Jobs' Helps Affluent Return Tax Cuts

For affluent Americans outraged by the fiscal and social consequences of tax cuts handed to them by President George W. Bush and recently extended for two more years, a trio of similarly dismayed academics has furnished a way for them to put their money where their mouth is.

Their new website, giveitbackforjobs.org, invites high-income Americans to calculate the value of their tax cut under the extension and then pledge to donate that money directly to charities that the site says encourage "fairness, economic growth, and a vibrant middle class." The site doesn't accept contributions directly, but links users to the charities.

The site has been engineered to offer Americans who view the tax cuts as misguided a means to personally direct dollars toward countering the effects, while also registering a protest for broad policies that have exacerbated economic inequality.

"It's like civil disobedience," said Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, and one of the three academics behind the initiative. "You're not committing a crime, but the government says, 'This is what you should give,' and you're saying, 'No, I should give more.'"

President Obama took office last year on a pledge to end the tax cuts lavished by his predecessor on the wealthiest American households. But he agreed to continue the cuts via a controversial compromise with Republicans in Congress in which he gained an extension of emergency unemployment benefits, while also securing the renewal of lowered taxes for middle-class households.

The deal landed as a bitter disappointment to liberal economists, who have assailed it for perpetuating the conditions that have led millions of ordinary Americans to take on impossible debts in recent years to finance housing, health care and education while their wages have stagnated. The tax cuts accelerated a long-term flow of increased shares of national wealth to the most affluent households, leaving smaller and smaller slices for everyone else

Give It Back For Jobs aims to narrow the gap by effectively mimicking the tax policy that would have been in place had the Bush tax cuts been allowed to expire. Had the tax cuts gone off the books, more dollars would have flowed into federal coffers, making more money available to pursue job-creating public works projects and aid to now ailing states and local communities. The new website seeks to compensate for those lost tax revenues by inviting wealthy Americans to voluntarily contribute equivalent funds to social service groups that are focused on aiding people contending with the weak economy.

"It's private collective action that builds upon itself and, in effect, amounts to a kind of shadow tax policy," said Robert Hockett, a professor at Cornell Law School, and another force behind the site. "It's a partial representation of what a proper tax policy would be."

The website grows out of a similar effort that Markovits and Hockett unleashed five years ago in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, called givebackthetaxcut.org, which raised around $250,000 in relief aid.

They viewed that disaster, and the dearth of help for people affected, as more than an accident: They saw it as the outgrowth of policies that have favored the wealthy while leaving middle class and poor Americans to fend for themselves.

"When Katrina struck, we were both sort of astonished," said Hockett. "It was a humanly facilitated disaster. It seemed it was no coincidence that the failure coincided with unbelievably gigantic tax cuts."

That site employed a tax calculator, much like the one on giveitbackforjobs.org, and it, too, invited people to donate money what they would have been giving the government absent the Bush tax cuts.

Ironically, that calculator was designed by none other than Peter Orszag, who headed Obama's Office of Management and Budget, and recently took a senior executive position at the Wall Street goliath Citibank. He played no role in developing the new site.

"He's busy with other things now," Hockett said wryly.

For the new site, Hockett and Markovits joined forces with Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist who has written frequently about economic inequality and the strains of the middle class.

"The 2001 tax cuts were a really terrible policy," Hacker said. "They were really skewed towards the rich in the 20 years in which the rich got much richer. To sustain that policy in the face of majority popular support for ending tax cuts for the rich is a pretty egregious example of what I call 'winner-take-all' politics."

The tax cuts will give about $300,000 to taxpayers in the top one-tenth of one percent of the bracket, or those making $2 million in annual income and above. The median tax cut is about $1,000.

Far from a conduit for money to flow to social service groups, Give It Back For Jobs is pitched by its creators as a way to enable political action, while giving contributors the means of proving their convictions and sharing in a collective undertaking.

"People are privately incredibly generous," said Markovits. "There are a quite a few people who would like society as a whole to be juster, to let their private commitments be translated into a langauge that says, 'We are in this together.'"

The professors chose to give the money to charities in part as a rebuke of what they portray as an inadequate federal response to the long-running national economic crisis.

"We're trying to immediately and directly support programs the government ought to be doing," said Markovits.

They have opted to target organizations focused on expanding access to health care and housing, and those that train unemployed workers for new careers.

"We wanted the categories to have an obvious connection with economic downturn," said Hockett.

Some view the site as more symbolic than substantive--a kind of feel-good effort that does not alter the real economic policies that have assailed the middle class and working poor. In this view, such policies can be changed only by the White House and Congress, and that will only happen through advocacy and effective political organization.

"If you want to get anywhere with this agenda, you wont get anywhere by being nice," said said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "It's like going to a gunfight with an olive branch."

But the professors behind Give It Back For Jobs dismiss such criticisms, while asserting that they have realistic aims.

"We don't think this is suddenly going to raise all the money it would have raised if tax cuts on the wealthy had been allowed to expire," said Markovits.

Rather, he suggested, the new website may alter the national debate, raising awareness of the consequences of extending the tax cuts, and setting up conditions for a different policy trajectory in the years ahead.

"If people took a cold shower for a moment, and got a little bit more reflective, surely they would realize that one of the things that the funding of a government is for is to assist those who are suffering through no fault of their own," said Hockett.

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/galleries/the_most_memorable_celeb_tweets_of_2010/the_most_memorable_celeb_tweets_of_2010.html

The 2010 campaign provided enough memorable moments to fill out a list all by itself. Christine O’Donnell, Joe Manchin shooting the cap and trade bill, Aqua Buddha: It was that kind of year.

But that was mostly noise. We’ve compiled a list of moments below that represents the framework through which 2010 can begin to come into focus for what it was as a narrative. We’ll leave what it means, or will mean, for later on down the road. 2011 will go a long way toward deciding that.

Below are the “Big Impact” moments from 2010, along with two other categories: the “Best of the Rest,” and then some moments sent in to us by political types. We hope you enjoy.

And Happy New Year!

Big Impact Moments

1. Scott Brown’s shocker: When the Massachusetts Republican ripped Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat out from underneath the Democratic Party, we thought it was the end of President Obama’s health care bill. We were wrong about that, but so was the White House when they insisted that their policies had nothing to do with the voter backlash.

2. Passage of Obama’s health care bill: Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid surprised the nation when they pressed forward with the health overhaul, but were able to push the bill through despite huge procedural obstacles (remember “deem and pass”?) and the presence of a few thousand protesters outside the Capitol building, behind probably one of the most intense vote whips by congressional leaders in the institution’s history. When Pennsylvania Democrat Bart Stupak brought his bloc of pro-life Dems over to the yea column following the president’s executive order, the game was over. But the battle over the bill will rage on for years.

3. The BP Oil spill: Summer has been a bad time of year for this president. In 2009 it was the Tea Party town halls. In 2010, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was a slow burn of daily pain for the White House. Obama wanted to pivot from the health care bill to jobs, to gain some momentum going into the fall elections. Instead, his administration found itself on the defensive for three months.

4. Obama anti-business meme hits mainstream: In June, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg gave a speech faulting Obama’s policies for keeping the business community from expanding and creating jobs. Days later, GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s comments critical of the president’s economic policies leaked out. Fareed Zakara wrote a column saying that CEO’s he talked to though Obama was “anti-business.” It was a body blow to the president’s standing with the country, and to Democrats’ chances for the fall.

5. Midterm election results: 63 House seats. 6 Senate seats. The GOP’s gains in the House were the biggest swing for either party in 62 years. Obama admitted it was a “shellacking,” but indicated he still believed his core agenda was the right one.

Obama’s lame duck compromises with the GOP could be added to the list above. But they are more accurately viewed as 2011 developments, even if they occurred in the 2010 calendar. If Obama is successfully resurrecting his political fortunes in the year ahead, the lame duck session will likely be seen in retrospect as the moment when he began his comeback. If 2011 is a draw or a defeat for him, the lame duck will be a footnote.

The Rest of the Best

Michael Steele’s expenses: Of course the expenses were many, and those have been well documented, and even apologized for by Steele himself. But nothing broke through the clutter like the news that among the RNC’s receipts for February was $1,946 to hang out at a strip club in West Hollywood featuring “topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex,” as The Daily Caller’s Jonathan Strong first reported. Was Steele there himself? Well, no. Did that matter to ? Not really.

Rolling Stone’s article on Gen. McChrystal: If you read the Michael Hastings piece before the story broke into the mainstream, you could probably feel the heat coming off the computer screen. The temperature was also rising inside the White House, as Obama and his advisers absorbed the comments of the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and his aides ridiculing the president, the vice president, and his top advisers. In the end, the decision for Obama wasn’t all that hard, because most liberals and conservatives agreed that Gen. Stanley McChrystal needed to go. But the flap pushed the war in Afghanistan to the fore of the nation’s mind at an unhelpful time for Obama.

Obama’s flip flop on the Ground Zero mosque: He was for it before he had no position on it. Either way, Obama’s comments in August on the matter threw wood on a simmering fire, giving the story new life. It was the second summer in a row Obama had waded into an emotionally charged issue – in 2009 it was his “acted stupidly” comment about cops in Cambridge who arrested a black professor. In each case Obama prolonged and intensified a controversial story with his remarks and took on water politically when he didn’t have to.

Harry Reid gives detailed colonoscopy description: The October debate between the Senate Majority Leader from Nevada and his Republican challenger, Sharron Angle, was among the more entertaining political moments of the year because of its sheer absurdity. Angle did her part, casting the race between her and Reid as “a choice between the free market and Americanism.” But Reid took the cake with his rambling, incoherent answer to a question about insurance companies. Here is the entirety of his comment, which represents this reporter’s favorite 30 second political moment of the year:

“Insurance companies don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts. They do things out of a profit motive and they have almost destroyed our economy. We need them to be forced to do mammograms. That’s why you see … the baseball players wearing pink shoes and the football players wearing pink helmets. It’s because people dread breast cancer. And you don’t get breast cancer. You correct breast cancer. You detect it if you do mammograms. Colonoscopies. If you do colonoscopies, colon cancer does not come because you snip off the things they find when they go up and, no more. And we need to have insurance companies do this.”

Epic.

The dueling rallies on the National Mall by Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart: Forget the numbers estimates. That’s besides the point. The point is, a lot of people came out to Washington in late August for Beck and then again in late October for Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The striking thing was that both rallies had clear political points of view – though the perspectives of the two rallies were opposed in most ways – and both attracted hundreds of thousands of Americans who largely for political reasons. But both Beck and Stewart went out of their way to avoid a political message, and both, in fact, said much the same thing, albeit in very different ways. The message from both was essentially, “Be a better person, and be nicer to other people.” In the end, both rallies ended up being the same thing: an attempt by a PR-savvy media personality to build on his already large following and position himself and his message for greater influence.

The Deficit Commission’s final weeks: First you had the two co-chairs leak their draft proposal. Then others released theirs. That made the panel’s final vote on its work product anti-climactic. Or so we thought. It turned out that 11 of the commission’s 18 members voted for a proposal that everybody vehemently disliked for different reasons. It was a show of bipartisan accommodation that was surprising even for a process that had no binding authority or impact on actual legislation. Republican Tom Coburn and Democrat Dick Durbin both swallowed their objections and voted in favor, giving the nation a sliver of hope that its elected leaders may actually have the ability to get serious about the government’s looming fiscal crisis. But don’t get your hopes up just yet.

Bill Clinton takes over the White House briefing room: It was late on a Friday afternoon – near evening time really – when former President Clinton suddenly appeared at Robert Gibbs podium in the West Wing, with the current president at his elbow. This reporter was walking across the Capitol to watch Sen. Bernie Sanders conduct an actual filibuster when he got a phone call from a frenzied source about Clinton’s inexplicable presence in front of the White House press corps. Further confounding observers, Obama left after a brief statement, leaving Clinton alone to defend the president’s tax deal compromise with the GOP. Clinton barely blinked as Obama sidled out, and then held court for nearly 30 minutes, in one of the oddest political moments of the year.

Politico favs

Ed Crane, president of the Cato Institute: “My favorite political moment of 2010 was when Charlie ‘The Chameleon’ Crist described himself as a ‘true-blue Reagan conservative.’”

Greg Jenkins, Brunswick Group communications, former Bush White House aide: “The best political moment was when a candidate was compelled to deny her own witch hood.”

Toby Gati, former White House adviser to President Clinton on Russia, Ukraine and the Eurasian States: “My favorite moment was actually a moment of silence: [Tom] DeLay is sentenced for illegally raising money for Republican candidates in Texas races in the election that saw several long-time Democrats defeated and ensured that redistricting would favor these same Republicans – but since then not a word (from Republicans or Democrats) about the legitimacy of those elections. If illegal money helps a candidate win, why isn’t the election fraudulent? Can you think of a better way than the possibility of invalidating an election to ensure that candidates are extremely careful about where their money comes from? As things stand now, if you are willing to risk getting caught and going to jail (6 or 7 years later), you can do ANYTHING illegal for campaign fundraising. What a system.”

Taylor Griffin, principal, Hamilton Place Strategies: “For favorite political moment, the irony of the Obama Administration defending the Bush tax cuts. Also, I’ll give them some credit for political courage in resisting calls for a foreclosure moratorium during the robosigning debate.”

Rob Collins, political director, American Action Network: “Favorite moment: Marco Rubio winning Election night.”

Fran Coombs, managing editor, Rasmussen Reports: “Sarah Palin shooting and carving up a caribou on her TV show.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/31/the-best-and-oddest-political-moments-of-2010/#ixzz19gsyv45X

Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On

MIGUEL HELFT

December 30, 2010

SAN DIEGO — Some people go to court hoping to win millions of dollars. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have already won tens of millions. But six years into a legal feud with Facebook, they want to give it back — for a chance to get more.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Tyler Winklevoss, left, and his twin, Cameron. They want to undo a $65 million deal and pursue a case against Facebook.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has said the Winklevoss brothers’ idea was specifically for a dating site, not a social network.

Richard Heathcote/Getty Images

Cameron Winklevoss, left, and Tyler Winklevoss, Olympic rowers, in action last spring in London.

The Winklevosses — identical twins and Harvard graduates — say that they, along with another Harvard student, Divya Narendra, had the original idea for Facebook, and that Mark Zuckerberg stole it. They sued Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg in 2004, and settled four years later for $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook shares.

They have been trying to undo that settlement since, saying they were misled on the value of the deal. But it has not been an easy decision.

As recently as Thursday, the brothers considered dropping their effort to unwind the agreement, and went as far as drafting a statement to that effect, according to people close to the case. They decided, though, to keep fighting.

Their argument is that Facebook deceived them about the value of the shares, leaving them with far less than they had agreed. Whatever their value at the time of the deal, Facebook’s shares have soared since, putting the current worth of the settlement, by some estimates, at more than $140 million.

Next month, the twins and Mr. Narendra plan to ask a federal appeals court in San Francisco to undo the deal so they can pursue their original case against Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg, and win a richer payday. They could, though, lose it all.

Still, they say it’s not about the money, it’s about the principle — and vindication.

“The principle is that they didn’t fight fair,” said Tyler Winklevoss during an interview at a pub here recently. “The principle is that Mark stole the idea.”

His brother, Cameron, chimed in, “What we agreed to is not what we got.”

Facebook denies it did anything improper and says the Winklevosses simply suffer from a case of “settlers remorse.”

To make matters more complicated, the twins are also at war with the lawyers who helped them win the settlement. The brothers fired them, accused them of malpractice and refused to pay them. A judge recently found for the lawyers, and ordered the twins to pay the 20 percent contingency fee, or $13 million. For now, the money and shares remain in an escrow account.

Yet their battle with Mr. Zuckerberg is what has had them riled up. When they talked about him, and told their version of the founding of Facebook, they helped finish each other’s sentences, easily reciting every last detail of a tale they have evidently told time and again.

“It shouldn’t be that Mark Zuckerberg gets away with behaving that way,” Cameron Winklevoss said.

The company declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg available for an interview, and Andrew Noyes, a spokesman, said Facebook would have no comment “beyond was is already in our appellate briefs.” In the past, Mr. Zuckerberg has denied he stole the Facebook idea from the Winklevosses, saying they planned a dating site, not a social network.

The twins, who are 29, recently told portions of their story in a “60 Minutes” interview for CBS. They grew up in affluence in Greenwich, Conn., were varsity rowers at Harvard and competed in the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. They now live here in San Diego, where they are training for the 2012 London Olympics.

They are as physically striking and imposing as they appeared in the film, “The Social Network, where they were portrayed by one actor, Armie Hammer. They are 6-foot-5 , and their frames are lean and muscular, shaped by years of rowing.

For the interview, they wore hoodies and jeans, and only the variation in the hoodies — one zippered with a Ron Jon Surf Shop emblem, one a pullover with a Quicksilver logo — helped to tell them apart.

As they talked about the Facebook case, no detail was too small to omit, from where they first met Mr. Zuckerberg (the Kirkland House dining room) to the layout of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room, to the content of the e-mails he had sent them after they asked him to do computer programming for a Web site called Harvard Connection. They recited arcane facts about the valuation of private companies and even quoted from the Securities Act of 1934, which they say Facebook violated when it drew up the settlement.

In addition to a bigger payday, the twins say they want a court to reconsider their original claims about Facebook’s founding, pointing to instant messages on the subject sent by Mr. Zuckerberg to various friends. The messages have come to light since the brothers signed the deal. But they say Facebook executives and board members have known about the messages since 2006, and played dirty by concealing them when they negotiated the settlement.

“If you take all those documents, it is a dramatically different picture,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

Facebook declined to comment on the messages. In prior interviews, Mr. Zuckerberg said he had regretted sending some of them.

While the Winklevosses could end up losing their settlement, the risks for Facebook are high as well. If the court unwinds the agreement, the company will have to decide whether to offer them a richer settlement or face a trial. Recent trades on a private exchange suggest that Facebook, which is not a public company, now is worth around $50 billion, and the company may not want the negative publicity associated with a trial, especially if it decides to move forward with a stock offering.

The roots of the original dispute date to 2003, when Mr. Zuckerberg, then a Harvard sophomore, said he would help the Winklevosses and Mr. Narendra program Harvard Connection, later renamed ConnectU. But Mr. Zuckerberg delayed work on Harvard Connection, and when pressed for answers, stalled, according to the Winklevosses. In February 2004 he released TheFacebook, which eventually became Facebook.

After ConnectU and its founders sued, Facebook countersued in 2005.

The settlement, which gave Facebook ownership of ConnectU, was supposed to resolve all claims.

The details of the new dispute, which erupted almost immediately, are less known, in part because the parties reached the settlement after a confidential mediation. But according to court documents, the parties agreed to settle for a sum of $65 million. The Winklevosses then asked whether they could receive part of it in Facebook shares and agreed to a price of $35.90 for each share, based on an investment Microsoft made nearly five months earlier that pegged Facebook’s total value at $15 billion. Under that valuation, they received 1.25 million shares, putting the stock portion of the agreement at $45 million.

Yet days before the settlement, Facebook’s board signed off on an expert’s valuation that put a price of $8.88 on its shares. Facebook did not disclose that valuation, which would have given the shares a worth of $11 million. The ConnectU founders contend that Facebook’s omission was deceptive and amounted to securities fraud.

They refuse to say how much they would ask for in a new negotiation, but they said that based on the lower valuation, they should have received roughly four times the number of shares. At today’s price, that would give the settlement a value of more than $500 million.

In its brief, the company says it was under no obligation to disclose the $8.88 valuation, which was available in public filings. Facebook describes it as one of many that it received and as “immaterial” to the calculations of ConnectU founders and their battery of lawyers and advisers.

“There was no chance that that one valuation would have affected the decision of these sophisticated investors and their entourage of advisers,” Facebook wrote in its brief.

In marketplaces that match buyers and sellers of the shares of privately held companies, Facebook’s shares have soared to more than $100 in recent trades, after adjusting for stock splits.

So far, Facebook’s arguments have won the day in multiple court rulings.

The brothers are hoping for better luck next month, before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Unless they decide to give up.

Last year, the Winklevoss brothers completed coursework for a masters in business administration at Oxford. Cameron helped to start Guestofaguest.com, a Web site that offers information about “people, places and parties” in New York, Los Angeles and the Hamptons.

“We are moving forward and trying to be productive individuals,” Cameron said.

When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” They added that Mr. Zuckerberg deserved some credit for “not screwing up” and expanding Facebook into a community of 500 million users. But they believe the fame and fortune is undeserved.

Tyler Winklevoss said: “Mark is where he is because we approached him to include him in our idea.”

Dec 30, 2010

2010: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

2010's world gone wild: Quakes, floods, blizzards

This was the year the Earth struck back.

Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 - the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.

"It just seemed like it was back-to-back and it came in waves," said Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. It handled a record number of disasters in 2010.

"The term `100-year event' really lost its meaning this year."

And we have ourselves to blame most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say.

Even though many catastrophes have the ring of random chance, the hand of man made this a particularly deadly, costly, extreme and weird year for everything from wild weather to earthquakes.

Poor construction and development practices conspire to make earthquakes more deadly than they need be. More people live in poverty in vulnerable buildings in crowded cities. That means that when the ground shakes, the river breaches, or the tropical cyclone hits, more people die.

Disasters from the Earth, such as earthquakes and volcanoes "are pretty much constant," said Andreas Schraft, vice president of catastrophic perils for the Geneva-based insurance giant Swiss Re. "All the change that's made is man-made."

The January earthquake

that killed well more than 220,000 people in Haiti is a perfect example. Port-au-Prince has nearly three times as many people - many of them living in poverty - and more poorly built shanties than it did 25 years ago. So had the same quake hit in 1985 instead of 2010, total deaths would have probably been in the 80,000 range, said Richard Olson, director of disaster risk reduction at Florida International University.

In February, an eartquake that was more than 500 times stronger than the one that struck Haiti hit an area of Chile that was less populated, better constructed, and not as poor. Chile's bigger quake caused fewer than 1,000 deaths.

Climate scientists say Earth's climate also is changing thanks to man-made global warming, bringing extreme weather, such as heat waves and flooding.

In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past 15 years combined.

"It's a form of suicide, isn't it? We build houses that kill ourselves (in earthquakes). We build houses in flood zones that drown ourselves," said Roger Bilham, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado. "It's our fault for not anticipating these things. You know, this is the Earth doing its thing."

No one had to tell a mask-wearing Vera Savinova how bad it could get. She is a 52-year-old administrator in a dental clinic who in August took refuge from Moscow's record heat, smog and wildfires.

"I think it is the end of the world," she said. "Our planet warns us against what would happen if we don't care about nature."

The excessive amount of extreme weather that dominated 2010 is a classic sign of man-made global warming that climate scientists have long warned about. They calculate that the killer Russian heat wave - setting a national record of 111 degrees - would happen once every 100,000 years without global warming.

Preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever.

"These (weather) events would not have happened without global warming," said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

That's why the people who study disasters for a living say it would be wrong to chalk 2010 up to just another bad year.

"The Earth strikes back in cahoots with bad human decision-making," said a weary Debarati Guha Sapir, director for the World Health Organization's Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. "It's almost as if the policies, the government policies and development policies, are helping the Earth strike back instead of protecting from it. We've created conditions where the slightest thing the Earth does is really going to have a disproportionate impact."

Here's a quick tour of an anything but normal 2010:

HOW DEADLY:

While the Haitian earthquake, Russian heat wave, and Pakistani flooding were the biggest killers, deadly quakes also struck Chile, Turkey, China and Indonesia in one of the most active seismic years in decades. Through mid-December there have been 20 earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher, compared to the normal 16. This year is tied for the most big quakes since 1970, but it is not a record. Nor is it a significantly above average year for the number of strong earthquakes, U.S. earthquake officials say.

Flooding alone this year killed more than 6,300 people in 59 nations through September, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, 30 people died in the Nashville, Tenn., region in flooding. Inundated countries include China, Italy, India, Colombia and Chad. Super Typhoon Megi with winds of more than 200 mph devastated the Philippines and parts of China.

Through Nov. 30, nearly 260,000 people died in natural disasters in 2010, compared to 15,000 in 2009, according to Swiss Re. The World Health Organization, which hasn't updated its figures past Sept. 30, is just shy of 250,000. By comparison, deaths from terrorism from 1968 to 2009 were less than 115,000, according to reports by the U.S. State Department and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The last year in which natural disasters were this deadly was 1983 because of an Ethiopian drought and famine, according to WHO. Swiss Re calls it the deadliest since 1976.

The charity Oxfam says 21,000 of this year's disaster deaths are weather related.

HOW EXTREME:

After strong early year blizzards - nicknamed Snowmageddon - paralyzed the U.S. mid-Atlantic and record snowfalls hit Russia and China, the temperature turned to broil.

The year may go down as the hottest on record worldwide or at the very least in the top three, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The average global temperature through the end of October was 58.53 degrees, a shade over the previous record of 2005, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Los Angeles had its hottest day in recorded history on Sept. 27: 113 degrees. In May, 129 set a record for Pakistan and may have been the hottest temperature recorded in an inhabited location.

In the U.S. Southeast, the year began with freezes in Florida that had cold-blooded iguanas becoming comatose and falling off trees. Then it became the hottest summer on record for the region. As the year ended, unusually cold weather was back in force.

Northern Australia had the wettest May-October on record, while the southwestern part of that country had its driest spell on record. And parts of the Amazon River basin struck by drought hit their lowest water levels in recorded history.

HOW COSTLY:

Disasters caused $222 billion in economic losses in 2010 - more than Hong Kong's economy - according to Swiss Re. That's more than usual, but not a record, Schraft said. That's because this year's disasters often struck poor areas without heavy insurance, such as Haiti.

Ghulam Ali's three-bedroom, one-story house in northwestern Pakistan collapsed during the floods. To rebuild, he had to borrow 50,000 rupees ($583) from friends and family. It's what many Pakistanis earn in half a year.

HOW WEIRD:

A volcano in Iceland paralyzed air traffic for days in Europe, disrupting travel for more than 7 million people. Other volcanoes in the Congo, Guatemala, Ecuador, the Philippines and Indonesia sent people scurrying for safety. New York City had a rare tornado.

A nearly 2-pound hailstone that was 8 inches in diameter fell in South Dakota in July to set a U.S. record. The storm that produced it was one of seven declared disasters for that state this year.

There was not much snow to start the Winter Olympics in a relatively balmy Vancouver, British Columbia, while the U.S. East Coast was snowbound.

In a 24-hour period in October, Indonesia got the trifecta of terra terror: a deadly magnitude 7.7 earthquake, a tsunami that killed more than 500 people and a volcano that caused more than 390,000 people to flee. That's after flooding, landslides and more quakes killed hundreds earlier in the year.

Even the extremes were extreme. This year started with a good sized El Nino weather oscillation that causes all sorts of extremes worldwide. Then later in the year, the world got the mirror image weather system with a strong La Nina, which causes a different set of extremes. Having a year with both a strong El Nino and La Nina is unusual.

And in the United States, FEMA declared a record number of major disasters, 79 as of Dec. 14. The average year has 34.

A list of day-by-day disasters in 2010 compiled by the AP runs 64 printed pages long.

"The extremes are changed in an extreme fashion," said Greg Holland, director of the earth system laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

For example, even though it sounds counterintuitive, global warming likely played a bit of a role in "Snowmageddon" earlier this year, Holland said. That's because with a warmer climate, there's more moisture in the air, which makes storms including blizzards, more intense, he said.

White House science adviser John Holdren said we should get used to climate disasters or do something about global warming: "The science is clear that we can expect more and more of these kinds of damaging events unless and until society's emissions of heat-trapping gases and particles are sharply reduced."

And that's just the "natural disasters." It was also a year of man-made technological catastrophes. BP's busted oil well caused 172 million gallons to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Mining disasters - men trapped deep in the Earth - caused dozens of deaths in tragic collapses in West Virginia, China and New Zealand. The fortunate miners in Chile who survived 69 days underground provided the feel good story of the year.

In both technological and natural disasters, there's a common theme of "pushing the envelope," Olson said.

Colorado's Bilham said the world's population is moving into riskier megacities on fault zones and flood-prone areas. He figures that 400 million to 500 million people in the world live in large cities prone to major earthquakes.

A Haitian disaster will happen again, Bilham said: "It could be Algiers. it could be Tehran. It could be any one of a dozen cities."

---

Borenstein reported from Washington. Reed Bell reported from Charlotte, N.C.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101230/ap_on_re_us/us_sisters_pardon_kidney

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342100/Scientists-unveil-1-000-core-chip-make-desktop-machines-20-times-faster.html#

December 29, 2010

• Fox News

Tucker Carlson: Michael Vick 'should have been executed'

Tucker Carlson, filling in for Sean Hannity on Fox News last night, picked up the issue of President Barack Obama’s call to Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, during which the president thanked Lurie for giving Michael Vick a second chance.

The call had been a hot topic on Fox throughout what was a pretty slow news day, but Carlson’s take took things to a new level.

I’m Christian. I’ve made mistakes. I believe fervently in second chances. Michael Vick killed dogs in a heartless and cruel way. I think, firstly, he should have been executed for that. The idea the president of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs is beyond the pale.

UPDATE: Carlson is well known as an animal advocate. For the past couple years, he and Ana Marie Cox have served as spokespeople for the Washington Animal Rescue League, and in fact co-hosted a holiday party for the organization just this month.

“It’s the oldest animal rescue league in Washington,” Cox said. “It’s a no-kill shelter, which appeals to my bleeding heart liberalism, but it also accepts no government funding, which appeals to Tucker’s libertarianism.”

She and Carlson were approached by the league after the organization found her name in its database of supporters.

“They thought it would be cute to team me up with a conservative,” she said. “It turned out that Tucker had adopted one of his dogs from the league. It was a great fit.”

In a PSA they taped together for WRAL, they use their partisan differences to set up animal advocacy as one thing upon which both liberals and conservatives could agree. “Animals shouldn’t be mistreated,” Carlson says while holding a dog.

Carlson did not respond to requests for comment, and Cox said she couldn’t not speak to his latest statement.

“I would say that Tucker can have a very subtle intellect, but he also knows how to make an impression. I’m not sure which side of his brain was at the forefront when he said that.”

Nor is she sure that the president made the best choice by singling out Vick, of all people, for a second chance in the court of public opinion.

“I appreciate the president wants to endorse the idea that once people have been to prison and served their sentences, they deserve a second chance,” she said. “I think there are lots better examples out there to grant presidential grace to. What [Vick] did was really unconscionable and almost inexcusable.”

* This post has been updated to make it clear Cox was referring to Vick in the final sentence.

LINK TO VIDEO

http://bcove.me/3yo3ca53