We Salute the First Baby Senator

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

RELATED: Claire McCaskill and How to Attack the Opponent You’re Rooting For

Here’s our suggestion to improve the (already pretty hilarious) swearing-in process for U.S. Senators: Each new member of Congress must bring a cute baby.

RELATED: Rand Paul Doesn’t Want You to Go to Jail for Smoking Pot

RELATED: Larry David’s Two-Minute Guide to Etiquette

Apparently the BBC has decided to market a line of lunch boxes specifically made for hungry polar bears. They are still working out the kinks: 

RELATED: Homer Simpson, Fox News Pundit; Books After Dark

RELATED: Bo Obama Stays On Message; Sarah Palin Can See HBO in Her House

The Golden Globes will be bittersweet this year. Don’t get us wrong — we’re really excited to watch Amy Poehler and Tina Fey entertain us. But we’ll also be also really sad when this thing is over because it means the end of these promos:

And finally, it’s Friday. And it’s time to dance. Enjoy your weekend. 

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: We Salute the First Baby Senator
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/we-salute-the-first-baby-senator/
Link To Post : We Salute the First Baby Senator
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Packers show off depth in 24-10 win over Vikes

GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — This rematch was a mismatch.

And the rest of the NFC might want to take note.

Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers showed how dangerous they can be when they're at full strength Saturday night, overwhelming the Minnesota Vikings 24-10 in an NFC wild-card game that was never really close.

"Playoff victories are always ones that are very special," Packers coach Mike McCarthy said. "Tonight's win definitely starts and ends with our defense."

John Kuhn scored two touchdowns, DuJuan Harris added another and Rodgers connected with an NFL playoff-record 10 receivers as he threw for 274 yards in his first playoff victory at home. Defensively, the Packers (12-5) finally managed to contain Adrian Peterson and were all over Vikings backup Joe Webb, pressed into service because of Christian Ponder's elbow injury.

Peterson was held to 99 yards — an improvement after gaining 199 and 210 in the first two games. Webb, who hadn't thrown a pass all season, was sacked three times and off target all night. His only highlight was a 50-yard scoring pass to Michael Jenkins late in the fourth quarter, but it was far too late for the Vikings (10-7).

With a little over a minute left, Packers fans began taunting the Vikings (10-7) with chants of "Nah-nah-nah-nah ... goodbye." The win snapped a two-game losing streak at Lambeau Field in the playoffs, and sends the Packers to San Francisco next Saturday for an NFC divisional game with the 49ers. The teams met in the season opener, with San Francisco winning 30-22.

"The main thing was to come out and help this team get a big win," said Charles Woodson, playing in his first game since breaking his right collarbone Oct. 21. "This is the first playoff game for us this year and we want to continue to ride."

This was the third game in six weeks between Green Bay and the Vikings, and second in six days. The Packers' loss in Minnesota last weekend cost them the No. 2 seed in the NFC, along with a bye this weekend, and left them looking — dare we say it? — vulnerable going into the playoffs. But with Charles Woodson back from the broken collarbone that's sidelined him since Oct. 21 and Rodgers having all four of his top receivers for, essentially, the first time since Sept. 30, Green Bay looked like a team that could make the kind of deep run it did two years ago when it won the Super Bowl.

Rodgers used so many different options other NFL quarterbacks must have been drooling. He went with Harris on Green Bay's first scoring drive, mixed it up between James Jones, Tom Crabtree and Greg Jennings on the second, and had 22- and 23-yard completions to Jordy Nelson before Kuhn scored on a 3-yard run that put the Packers up 17-3 just before the half. It was more Harris and Kuhn on the final scoring drive.

Harris, who didn't play in the first game against Minnesota this season because he'd only been elevated from the practice squad a day earlier, led the team in receiving (five catches for 61 yards) and rushing (47 yards on 17 carries). Jennings and Jones had four catches each and Nelson had three before hobbling off late in the fourth quarter.

"We have some stuff to work on," Rodgers insisted. "We've got to help our defense out more, close a team out like that. Tough test next week back in San Francisco. We'll be excited about that."

Hey, at least the Packers are still playing. That's more than the Vikings can say.

Ponder's right elbow was hurt last weekend when Morgan Burnett slammed into him on a blitz, and there just wasn't enough time to recover with the short, six-day turnaround. He tested the arm before the game, but the Vikings decided to go with Webb, whose only playing time this year was a couple of handoffs at the end of a blowout of Tennessee in early October.

"Close," Ponder said of the decision not to play. "We went out pregame and threw a little bit, and just made the decision that it would probably be better off playing Joe with how limited I'd be."

It was the first time Buffalo's Frank Reich in 1993 a quarterback had started a playoff game after not starting during the regular season and, in the first series at least, he seemed to have caught the Packers off guard.

That or they were too busy trying to bottle up Peterson, who bulldozed them for 409 yards in their first two games, to pay attention. With what seemed like every Packers defender focused on Peterson, Webb converted a third-and-3 with a 17-yard pickup. His 5-yard run four plays later put the Vikings at the Green Bay 13. But Webb's first pass of the night went into the ground, and the Vikings were forced to settle for Blair Walsh's 33-yard field goal that gave them a 3-0 lead.

But the Packers quickly settled down and Webb and the Vikings never stood a chance. Especially with Peterson not allowed to roam free as he's done against the Packers in the past.

"The energy level was at an all-time high," Woodson said. "This week, like last week, we buzzed around. But this week we made the tackles, we didn't allow (Peterson) to get through the line of scrimmage and get yards after first contact. We just kept putting heat on them. That was the difference."

Like they did last week, the Packers got off to a rocky start offensively, going three and out after Harris dropped what looked like a gimme pass. But unlike last week, they didn't let it continue, scoring on four of their next five drives.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

Read More..

Preoccupations: Teaching Meditation Techniques to Organizations

IN 1972, I was a 30-year-old American traveling in India, with the smell of incense in my hair and mantras repeating in my ears. Back then, if you had told me that I would someday be training employees of corporate America to apply contemplative practices to help them become more successful, I would have said you’d been standing too long in India’s hot noonday sun.

Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times

Mirabai Bush is a co-founder and senior fellow at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which offers meditation techniques to organizations.

Yet not long ago, I was standing in front of employees at Google in Mountain View, Calif. They were dutifully following my instructions to feel the sensations of their breath as it passed in and out of their nostrils, and learning how to send e-mail mindfully, by taking three deep breaths before hitting “send.”

I am a co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a nonprofit organization that is now 16 years old, and we have undertaken a daunting task: to convince people in their workplaces that the simple meditation techniques developed 2,500 years ago by the Buddha might help increase productivity, reduce absenteeism and inspire greater creativity. We have introduced contemplative exercises that can reduce stress and heart rate and increase attention and awareness of self and others. We teach what we call “mindful listening,” so that a speaker is fully heard.

For our first project, we chose a large corporation in the Midwest whose C.E.O. knew one of our board members. We created a three-day, mostly silent retreat off site.

I encountered workers who were exhausted, overworked and stressed. They were curious whether these practices could help, but also skeptical. Before the retreat, several people said, in effect: “Stress got me where I am. I don’t want to lose my edge.”

I thought to myself: This won’t be easy; maybe they won’t even attend.

But they all showed up. First, I asked them to lie on the floor for a deep-relaxation exercise. They didn’t balk; instead, they followed my instructions to let go and relax their bodies. We also introduced mindfulness meditation, which we believe builds attention and insight and helps people become more kind and loving. We taught the practice of bringing our minds to our breath, noticing our breath, and returning to our breath each time the mind wanders off — a task that’s tougher than it sounds.

“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” said the C.E.O., who had a brilliant mind and thousands of employees. But the participants learned how to bring their minds to a place that was calm and clear, a great place to begin thinking and making decisions. When it was over, all felt that it was helpful.

SINCE that first foray into the corporate world, we have worked with many other organizations. For a small group, we have had a big reach, working with high-profile organizations like Yale Law School, Hearst Publications and the Army. We’ve offered programs as diverse as one-hour introductions, four-day intensive retreats, and courses with six weekly sessions.

At first, resistance was everywhere, but so were the possibilities. A litigation lawyer thought that if he became more compassionate toward the opposition in his cases, he couldn’t be a zealous advocate for clients. But he found that being calm, clear and compassionate gave him better insights and better timing.

An environmental leader thought that if others knew he practiced meditation, they wouldn’t take him seriously — and would write him off as a tree-hugger without scientific rigor. Instead, he found that he became more resilient, and less overwhelmed by climate-change predictions, and that he collaborated better with colleagues.

Magazine editors thought that they would miss deadlines; in fact, they learned to focus on priorities and work better in teams to meet the deadlines in new ways. Data-driven Google engineers questioned the value of developing capacities that can’t be quantified, but many of them learned better ways to communicate. One engineer told me his wife had noticed a change in the way he listened to her. She asked him: “What happened to you?”

As we continue exploring the benefits of mindfulness for work, scientists are researching the effects of the practices on the brain. Neuroscientists have confirmed much of what we were experiencing: that meditation improves attention, reduces stress hormones, increases appreciation and compassion for others and helps us recover faster from negative information.

Personally, this work has made me feel more connected to the world. Watching the responses of so many people — from an economics professor to Army soldiers — I’ve come to believe that it’s a basic human need to be calm and clear, to be aware of ourselves and others, to be kind and collaborative, to be fully present in each moment.

It turns out that people work better when they are happy and feel aligned with their work. I know I do.

Read More..

F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Checking the temperature of lettuce at an Arizona farm. Safety measures would start at farms.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..

Crackdowns Make Fleeing North Korea Harder

Woohae Cho for the International Herald Tribune

The Rev. Kim Seung-eun at his church in Cheonan, a center for activists who help smuggle refugees from North Korea.

CHEONAN, South Korea — The Rev. Kim Seung-eun said he could measure the increasing difficulty of smuggling people out of North Korea by the higher cost of bribing North Korean soldiers on the Chinese border to look the other way.

“They demand not only more cash, but also all kinds of things for themselves and their superiors,” said Mr. Kim, a South Korean human rights activist who helps North Koreans flee their totalitarian homeland and resettle in the South. “They’ve developed a taste for South Korean goods, too.”

Under North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, human rights activists and South Korean officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to smuggle refugees out of the country, contributing to a sharp drop in the number of North Koreans reaching South Korea in the past year.

The number of refugees has never been particularly large, since most North Koreans are so impoverished they find it all but impossible to raise the money to attempt an escape. But the tightening of controls at the Chinese border led to a fall of about 44 percent from the previous year in the number of refugees reaching South Korea in 2012. The total was 1,509, according to South Korean government data.

Despite the relatively small number, the flow of North Koreans defecting to South Korea to escape poverty and oppression has long been a major embarrassment for the North. Lately, the Chinese also appear to have tightened their control at the river border to help protect their client government. “The crackdowns in China and North Korea came in tandem,” said Mr. Kim, who manages a network of activists and smugglers from his Caleb Mission church in Cheonan, a city about 60 miles south of Seoul. “It’s become more difficult for my people to operate in North Korea and China.”

A devastating famine in the 1990s caused many North Koreans to flee, and the number of refugees peaked at 2,917 in 2009. Today, about 24,000 people who escaped from North Korea live in South Korea.

In the last years of his rule, Kim Jong-il, the previous dictator and the current ruler’s father, added more checkpoints on the roads to the Chinese border, according to South Korean activists and researchers. North Korea built more barriers along the border and rotated patrols more frequently to discourage corruption.

Under Kim Jong-un, who took over a year ago after his father’s death, border controls have tightened further, officials and activists say. The government began to jam the Chinese cellphone signals that activists relied on to coordinate their smuggling operations with collaborators in the North. North Korea also deployed equipment to trace cellphone signals.

“That significantly narrowed the window for cross-border cellphone conversations,” said Kim Hee-tae, a leader of the International Network of North Korea Human Rights Activists. His group raises money from churches; until last year it typically arranged for 180 to 190 North Korean refugees annually to escape to the South. But this past year, he said, his organization managed to bring in only about 100 people.

“Even after the bribes are paid, there is no guarantee of success,” said Do Hee-youn, head of the Citizens’ Coalition for the Human Rights of North Korean Refugees, based in Seoul. “We have recently seen cases where border guards were not punished for having taken bribes when they turned over the refugees.” Adding to the difficulty, some of the missionaries and brokers involved in the smuggling were rounded up by the Chinese police.

“It just became impossible to use public transportation in China because these days you cannot buy a train or bus ticket without a proper ID, which the North Koreans don’t have,” said the Rev. Chun Ki-won, another veteran human rights activist, who runs the Durihana Mission, a Christian group based in Seoul.

But for all the tighter controls imposed by the North Koreans and Chinese, there are still ways of slipping through the cracks.

Landing a border assignment is seen by many North Korean soldiers as a chance to make a fortune by collecting bribes from smugglers. The police in North Korea sometimes protect families with relatives in the South so they can take a cut from cash remittances from the South.

North Koreans have also developed an appetite for outside news and entertainment. “If early defectors fled North Korea for sheer ‘survival,’ an increasing number of North Koreans reaching South Korea flee for ‘a better life’ than they had in the North,” Kim Soo-am, an expert on North Korean refugees at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, recently wrote.

A group of 15 North Koreans that the Caleb Mission team in Cheonan had smuggled out in early December included a striking example of one such defector: a 29-year-old woman who yearned to become a television celebrity. “She had watched so many South Korean soap operas that she developed an illusion about life in South Korea,” Mr. Kim said, pointing out a particularly well-dressed woman in a photograph of the 15 North Koreans. “When we smuggled her out of North Korea, she was already wearing nothing but South Korean-made clothes.”

Read More..

The Death of E-Readers Is All Your Fault

So there’s a reading gadget and a reading gadget with Angry Birds Star Wars. Which do you pick? Well, you, cultured person that you are, would select the dedicated e-reader, of course, just like you would rather watch Frontline instead of Honey Boo Boo, or pick up Vanity Fair instead of Us Weekly on the checkout line. Or at least that’s what the ideal version of yourself would do. But as Amazon and Barnes & Noble are quickly discovering this year, the highbrow ideal all too often gives way to the mass-market realities. Sales of the Kindle and especially the Nook fell this holiday season, despite lower prices than more fully functioning tablets, which are distinctly on the rise. And market researchers estimate that these divergent paths will continue — The Wall Street Journal reports that e-readers sales will be cut in half, from 14.9 million per year to just 7.8 million, by 2015. But the death of the e-reader has less to do with the iPad than what’s inside of it: from tablets to TV shows and everything in between, the most high-minded of ideas for cultural consumption always seem to devolve toward mindless entertainment.

RELATED: Gordon Brown Predicts the Future; Cormac McCarthy Doesn’t Tweet

Take Bravo, the once completely enlightened — and completely failing — network that, like Arts & Entertainment and The Learning Channel before they became A&E and TLC, once devoted itself to being a slightly less boring knockoff of PBS. In 1985, five years after its founding, The New York Times‘s Steve Schneider described Bravo’s success, measured then by its 350,000 subscribers, as follows: 

What has kept things afloat for the past five years has been an evolving mix of cultural programming. Nowadays, a spokesman said, approximately 70 percent of the premium service’s schedule is devoted to films, nearly all of which are either from abroad, from the fringes of American production or from times past. The remainder of the schedule is given over to the performing arts -jazz concerts, ballet, opera, modern dance and the like. From Woody Allen films to documentaries about Latin America to performances by the Pina Bausch dance troupe, the offerings range from the challenging to the downright esoteric.

All that changed when NBC bought Bravo in 2002 and gave it a makeover almost completely motivated by ratings. It started with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which in its first year delivered 3.3 million viewers per episode. Then came the much acclaimed era of Top Chef and Project Runway, which are still considered highbrow in their own way, but only in the context of their fellow reality shows like The Real Housewives. And let’s face it: Bravo is pretty much all Housewives all the time. Well, that and a show about Silicon Valley that features no computer programming at all.

RELATED: Barnes & Noble CEO Is Done with Books; 43 Famous Writers Walk into a Cafe

And remember The Learning Channel? It was founded by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, along with NASA. Really! Then in came Discovery as the new boss, and with it American Chopper and, eventually, TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras, which birthed Honey Boo Boo — not to mention major ratings. Arts & Entertainment has long been a corporate entity, but it gave way from highbrow post-Nickelodeon fare and devolved into, you know, Dog the Bounty Hunter and whatever Gene Simmons is up to these days.

RELATED: The New Kindles We’ll Probably See at Today’s Amazon Event

It’s all a little reminiscent of the days when Us magazine was actually a glossy movie magazine that Hollywood stars loved to pose for. The New York Times started it! Then came a partnership with Disney, and J.Lo, and on and on to the supermarket tabloid you now know as Us Weekly, one of the most successful print publications on Earth.

RELATED: Ebook Juggernaut John Locke Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You

So, in the slowly dwindling technological world of the e-reader and its advanced brethren, Amazon‘s Kindle is like old-school TLC and the B&N Nook is maybe a little younger and cooler, like Bravo, but still failing; the iPad, however, has Here Comes Honey Boo Boo written all over it. Not that there’s anything wrong with what Amazon and Barnes & Noble were trying to do — a small audience might enjoy a device that has novels and long biographies and maybe some newspapers and little more. But the majority of people these days want to spend their downtime with HBO Go and Netflix apps, with games and email and other ways to relax their entire brains… not just the fancy parts of it. With tablet prices falling to more affordable levels — Amazon sells a Kindle Fire for $ 159 and a Kindle Paperwhite for $ 119 — of course today’s readers are going to choose the thing that helps them go beyond boring old reading. It might not have that easy-on-the eyes screen, but the majority of time spent on tablets isn’t spent reading books but answering emails, reading the news (a shorter reading experience than an entire book), and playing games, according to Pew. Plus, the iPad has its own Kindle app, for those times when you do, after all, feel like indulging in something a bit more highbrow. Because people do, still read a lot of books. They just like doing everything else a lot more. If the death of the e-reader is nigh, maybe the age of the straight-and-narrow, undistracted smartypants isn’t far from ending, either.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: The Death of E-Readers Is All Your Fault
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/the-death-of-e-readers-is-all-your-fault/
Link To Post : The Death of E-Readers Is All Your Fault
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Manziel, Texas A&M beat Oklahoma 41-13 in Cotton

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel ran for two touchdowns, threw for two more and had a Cotton Bowl-record 516 total yards as 10th-ranked Texas A&M wrapped up its first SEC season with a 41-13 win over No. 12 Oklahoma on Friday night.

The Aggies (11-2) never trailed after Manziel tiptoed the sideline for a 23-yard TD run on their opening drive of the game.

Texas A&M took control of the game by scoring touchdowns on its first three drives in the third quarter, going ahead 34-13 when Manziel threw a 33-yard TD pass to Ryan Swope on a fourth-and-4 play.

Oklahoma (10-3), which like the Aggies entered the game with a five-game winning streak, went three-and-out on its first three drives after halftime.

Manziel set an FBS bowl record with his 229 yards rushing on 17 carries, and completed 22 of 34 passes for 287 yards.

Read More..

F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Checking the temperature of lettuce at an Arizona farm. Safety measures would start at farms.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..

Scant Proof Is Found to Back Up Claims by Energy Drinks

Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade.

Their rising popularity represents a generational shift in what people drink, and reflects a successful campaign to convince consumers, particularly teenagers, that the drinks provide a mental and physical edge.

The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels. But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.

“If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,” said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.

Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more. For example, producers claim that “Red Bull gives you wings,” that Rockstar Energy is “scientifically formulated” and Monster Energy is a “killer energy brew.” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, has asked the government to investigate the industry’s marketing claims.

Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.

As with earlier elixirs, a dearth of evidence underlies such claims. Only a few human studies of energy drinks or the ingredients in them have been performed and they point to a similar conclusion, researchers say — that the beverages are mainly about caffeine.

Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates.

“These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message.”

A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.

In the experiments, scientists injected large doses of the substance into laboratory rats. Afterward, the rats swam better. “I have no idea what it does in energy drinks,” Dr. Goodman said.

Energy drink manufacturers say it is their proprietary formulas, rather than specific ingredients, that provide users with physical and mental benefits. But that has not prevented them from implying otherwise.

Consider the case of taurine, an additive used in most energy products.

On its Web site, the producer of Red Bull, for example, states that “more than 2,500 reports have been published about taurine and its physiological effects,” including acting as a “detoxifying agent.” In addition, that company, Red Bull of Austria, points to a 2009 safety study by a European regulatory group that gave it a clean bill of health.

But Red Bull’s Web site does not mention reports by that same group, the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that claims about the benefits in energy drinks lacked scientific support. Based on those findings, the European Commission has refused to approve claims that taurine helps maintain mental function and heart health and reduces muscle fatigue.

Taurine, an amino acidlike substance that got its name because it was first found in the bile of bulls, does play a role in bodily functions, and recent research suggests it might help prevent heart attacks in women with high cholesterol. However, most people get more than adequate amounts from foods like meat, experts said. And researchers added that those with heart problems who may need supplements would find far better sources than energy drinks.

Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.

Read More..

In Chile, Abortion Hot Line Is in Legal Gray Area

Roberto Candia for The New York Times

Volunteers for the Safe Abortion Hot Line in Chile routinely wear masks when showing support in public for the organization in a country where abortion is illegal under any circumstances.

SANTIAGO, Chile — Every time the phone rings, Angela Erpel feels her nerves swell. Sometimes it is a scared teenager on the other end, or a desperate mother of three. There are the angry ones, too, with callers playing the sounds of crying babies or sending text messages with pictures of aborted fetuses.

Then Ms. Erpel, 38, a sociologist who volunteers at Chile’s Safe Abortion Hot Line, gathers herself and settles into a familiar dialogue on the use of misoprostol, a drug that will induce a medical abortion.

“We don’t give them a moral guide or advice; we only provide information,” she said.

Since the hot line began in 2009, volunteers spread across this long, thin country have taken turns answering tense calls from women seeking information about abortion every evening from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. There have been more than 12,000 calls so far, and they continue rolling in at a steady clip.

In a country where abortion is entirely illegal, even in cases of rape or when a woman’s life is in danger, the hot line is a risky endeavor. Operating in a legal gray area, volunteers face a daunting prison sentence if a conversation veers too far from a lawyer-approved script. The hot line already has had three lawsuits brought against it, though all were eventually dropped.

According to the law, having an abortion carries a penalty of 5 to 10 years in prison, depending on the circumstances, while doctors and others who perform an abortion or assist with one could face up to 15 years, prosecutors say. In practice, however, fewer than 500 cases have been prosecuted over the last several years.

“I think there is a certain sensitivity to the social conditions behind these abortions, such as poverty or rape or teenage pregnancy,” explained Paula Vial, a lawyer and former public defender in Santiago.

Beyond the legal consequences, the 30 hot line volunteers are keenly aware of the social ramifications of taking an active role in such a polarizing issue. They wear masks when promoting the hot line at public gatherings, and are often vague about the details of their volunteer work in their daily lives. Many fear losing their jobs or driving a wedge into personal and family relationships. Indeed, Ms. Erpel was the only volunteer willing to go on the record about her work with the hot line, and even she is usually circumspect about it.

“It’s complicated,” she explained. “I’m open about being in an organization, but not necessarily that I work directly with abortion.”

Abortion was not always a clandestine affair in Chile. The current law that strictly bans it was one of the final acts of the dictatorship. In 1989, shortly before relinquishing power, Gen. Augusto Pinochet ended a tradition of legal abortion dating to 1931, in which a pregnancy that threatened a woman’s life, or a fetus that was not viable outside the womb, could be terminated. Chile’s law now is one of the strictest in the world.

By contrast, Uruguay legalized abortions in the first trimester for any reason last October, joining Guyana and Cuba as Latin American countries with broadly legalized procedures. Abortion is also legal in Mexico City. But Chile has remained a socially conservative country, after 20 years of economic growth and the election in 2006 of a woman as president.

“The hierarchy of the Catholic Church has had a very strong influence in public policy,” said Claudia Dides, a spokeswoman for the Movement for the Legal Interruption of Pregnancy.

In a pivotal case in 2008, Karen Espíndola, then 22, learned in her 12th week of pregnancy that her fetus had holoprosencephaly. Fetuses with the condition have a single-lobed brain, and most die before they are born. It is a common reason for terminating a pregnancy.

Ms. Espíndola sought an abortion, appealing to the president and setting off a national conversation over abortion. In February 2009, Ms. Espíndola gave birth to Osvaldo, who died in 2011.

“In reality he was never conscious he was alive,” she lamented. “He fought to breathe; he was fed through a tube. We all suffered a lot. Nobody here is a winner.”

Chile has witnessed a swell of liberal social movements in recent years, with gay men and lesbians pressing for the country’s first hate-crime legislation, environmentalists stalling dam-building projects in Patagonia, and students pushing for an overhaul of the education system.

Advocates contend that abortion rights sentiment bubbles near the surface as well, but the government has pushed back.

Read More..