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POPSVEE Day in Alameda, California, we practiced duck-and-cover as well as earthquake drills. Nothing quaint or or historic about it then. Here’s Reagan speechwriter Anthony R. Dolan at the Wall Street Journal on the power of “Four Little Words” … you remember them: “Tear down that wall” … and the earth-shaking ideas they represented as well as the action that backed them. The popular myth is that the wall kind of toppled over by itself, with a little push from people power. That of course ignores not only the prior 44 years of Cold War … interspersed with several hot ones that cost us tens of thousands of American lives … it also ignores the massive military buildup of the 1980s, the encouragement of liberation movements behind the Iron Curtain, the tough engagement with old-school Soviet leaders and, not least, the cordial engagement with a Soviet leader who realized it was time to throw in the towel. An atmosphere was finally created in which people felt like they could
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POPSConsumer Reports finds BPA in most canned foods More: …our findings are notable because they indicate the extent of potential exposure: Consumers eating just one serving of the canned vegetable soup we tested would get about double what the FDA now considers typical average dietary daily exposure… A 165-pound adult eating one serving of canned green beans from our sample, which averaged 123.5 ppb, could ingest about 0.2 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, about 80 times higher than our experts' recommended daily upper limit. And children eating multiple servings per day of canned foods with BPA levels comparable to the ones we found in some tested products could get a dose of BPA approaching levels that have caused adverse effects in several animal studies… Drinking three servings per day of canned apple juice with BPA levels comparable to the levels found in our samples could result in a dose of BPA that is more than our experts' daily upper limit.
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POPSHope, Change, Peace, Universal Health Care…Oh…and Alien Invasion ABC "V" TV SERIES PILOT PROMO TRAILER http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQoSCEMzJYE Kenneth Johnson, who wrote and directed the 1983 miniseries (it spawned a sequel and then a regular network series over the next two years), took his inspiration from a 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel called It Can’t Happen Here that depicted an imaginary fascist takeover of the United States. The aliens in the original V were patterned after Nazis, and, just in case anyone missed the point, an elderly Jewish character who was a Holocaust survivor periodically hammered on the similarities. But ABC’s series takes aim not at a German dictator from the misty past but a sitting " and popular " U.S. president.
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POPSThe BBC's amazing U-turn on climate change The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too. But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down. These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.
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POPSRacist Undertones Of The 'Socialist' Epithet
More From The Article: Take another black leader, another society fraught by racial division. In 1956, Nelson Mandela and 155 other antiapartheid activists were arrested by the South African government under the infamous Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, a law that was used gratuitously to incarcerate anyone who was critical of the government. The treason trial that followed resulted in a 1961 acquittal for all those involved, the government unable to prove any "socialist" intentions. But the political equation of black activists as "communists" would continue up through the 1980s. The Reagan administration egregiously soft-pedaled the issue of apartheid on the basis of the South African government's purported anticommunist stance. Indeed, the South African government itself viewed its policies not as racist, but as anticommunist. Only popular pressure through a global antiapartheid movement persuaded the US to isolate South Africa. It takes the cry of "socialism!" liter
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: Are women getting sadder? Not necessarily
More: So why all the sudden fuss…? Mostly because it's become a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham…a cookie-cutter classic of the positive-thinking self-help genre…all bookended with an ad for the many related products you can buy, including a "video introduction" from Buckingham, a "participant's guide" containing "exercises" to get you to happiness, and a handsome set of "Eight Strong Life Plans" to pick from… It's an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered "micromastia" -- the "disease" of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from "Female Sexual Dysfunction," or FSD. Now, it's unhappiness, and the range of potential "cures" is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.
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POPS Something In The Water
Camp kids have cancer, disorders Jerry Ensminger, a 24-year Marine Corps veteran, said his daughter, Jane, born in 1976 at Camp Lejeune, was diagnosed with leukemia at age 6 and died at age 9. Jeff Byron, a former Marine air traffic controller, moved with his family into base housing in 1982, three months after his first daughter Andrea was born and two years before his daughter Rachel was born. Rachel is developmentally disabled, has spina bifida and was born with a cleft palate, he said. Andrea has a rare bone marrow syndrome known as aplastic anemia, according to Byron's testimony. Dr. Michael Gros, a Navy obstetrician at Camp Lejeune in the early 1980s, was diagnosed with lymphoma after living in Camp Lejeune housing, he said. Gros said he has had to give up his medical practice and his treatment has cost more than $4.5 million. Thomas Sinks, deputy director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, . . .
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POPSThe Science Behind Global Warming Is Settled. Sadly, It's Also Been Incinerated The Dog Ate Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels @NRO Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared. Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense. In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce . .
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POPSCan Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present day, their power " another variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model " sagged significantly. Amid the thousands of rows on the spreadsheet, there’s one called Forecast. It consists of a single number that represents the most likely consensus of all the players. It begins at 160 " bomb-making territory " but by next year settles at 118, where it doesn’t move much. “That’s the outcome,” Bueno de Mesquita said confidently, tapping the screen. What does 118 mean? It means that Iran won’t make a nuclear bomb. By early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this computer model is right, all the dire portents we’ve seen in recent months . . .
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POPS8 Troops Killed In Afghanistan; Remote Outposts Attacked Nuristan, bordering Pakistan, was where a militant raid on another outpost in July 2008 claimed the lives of nine American soldiers and led to allegations of negligence by their senior commanders. Army Gen. David Petraeus last week ordered a new investigation into that fighting, in which some 200 militants armed with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars pushed their way into the base, which is no longer operating. The region was key for Arab militants who battled alongside Afghan warriors during the 1980s U.S.-backed war against invading Russians because it is a rare place in South Asia where the Wahhabi sect of Islam is practiced – the same sect followed by Osama bin Laden and most Saudis.
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POPSIt's a Curve Convention! Successful Plus Size Models Glamour magazine is leading the way in examining the fashion industry's fascination with stick-thin models
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POPSMutating vaccine causes polio outbreak in Nigeria The agency discussed the first 16 cases it knew of at meetings early this year and posted information on its Web site in April, "but only in places where lab people would look," he said. Outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio are unusual but not unheard of. Individual cases have been known for years. For example, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia was partly paralyzed in 1973, apparently after changing the diapers of his son, who had received an oral vaccine. The first spreading outbreak of a vaccine-derived strain, in which 22 children were paralyzed, was detected in 2001 in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Experts now believe that another took place in Egypt in the late 1980s but went unnoticed amid the much larger numbers of wild-type infections. There have been others in the Philippines, Madagascar, China and Indonesia.
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POPSFlorida Care-Giver System Plagued With Felons 12 registered sex offenders and 200 people with histories of harming children. Exemptions are supposed to be granted only with proof of rehabilitation. But about 1,800 of the people approved " or one in five " went on to be arrested again, some within days of the state's determination that they could be trusted to care for vulnerable residents. "It's totally unacceptable. Obviously, this has become a huge loophole that needs to be closed," said Nan Rich, D-Weston, vice chairwoman of the Florida Senate's Children, Families and Elder Affairs committee. A sex abuse scandal at a Miami day care in the mid 1980s prompted the first of several state laws requiring background checks for caregivers and allowing for exemptions. Florida now has a patchwork system with glaring inconsistencies. Employees at day cares and facilities for the disabled undergo a nationwide criminal check. But caregivers for the elderly are checked only for offenses in Florida, with some exceptions.
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POPSLife of TV chef Floyd celebrated Floyd, who was born near Reading in Berkshire, presented a number of popular cookery programmes from the 1980s, characteristically enjoyed with a glass of wine in his hand. Recordings were often made on location, which was groundbreaking for the time.
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POPSStem Cell Research: Medics Now Under Police Investigation did not deny or admit to the charges of abuse against him during the hour long interview in his private IVF clinic in the suburbs of Nairobi. “I have worked with a lot of women about 64 of them since 1986. One has to do what they have to do in order to make it and help find a cure for many diseases affecting our society and the world,” said Dr Gichuhi. The investigations boss said that as many as 100 women, their whereabouts could not be known to date. At least 36 women have gone missing in the last three weeks alone. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Manitoba in Canada are also under investigations. However, some researchers have long fled the country after realizing that charges may be brought against them.
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POPSMemories "One fascinating feature of remembering is how a cue from the external world can cause us to suddenly remember something from years ago. For example, returning to where you once lived or went to school may bring back memories of events experienced long ago. Sights, sounds, and smells can all trigger recall of long dormant events. These experiences point to the critical nature of retrieval in remembering." *Like my Momma baking cookies*
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POPSmore from: Imperial Ambitions
it previously states-in the background is a long-standing US hatred of the European social system-which provides decent wages-working conditions and benefits-the US doesn't want that model to exist because it is a dangerous one-with the US economy deteriorating and with the prospect of more layoffs on the horizon, how is the Bush administration going to maintain what some are calling a garrison state-engaged in permanent war and the occupation of numerous countries-how are they going to pull it off- they onlly need to pul it off for another 6 years-by that time they hope to have institutionalized a series of highly reactionary programs within the US-they wil have left the economy in a serious state with huge deficits-by then it will be somebody else's problem-meanwhile they will have undermined social programs and diminished democracy which of course they hate- seems to me to be what has happened to us here in the United States in a bit of a nutshell- look at us now........he called i
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POPSA Precious Gift for Lovers of Literature
The Paris Review Interview Archive "Since 1953, when the first issue of the magazine appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the Paris Review interview. More than fifty years—and more than three hundred interviews—later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine. In November 2006, the first volume of a four-book set of The Paris Review Interviews was celebrated by reviewers across the English-speaking world. In tandem with this publishing project, we offer here online a complete index of every interview ever published, searchable by author and by date—as well as a substantial sampling of the archive’s finest interviews, posted in their entirety. Taken together, these conversations with novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, biographers, journalists, and critics constitute what Salman Rushdie calls “the finest available inqui
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POPSSoviets Built a Doomsday Machine. It’s Still Working. more at source: By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, says Zhelenyakov says, was “to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.”
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POPSNeocon Judge's History of Cover-ups In the 1980s, Silberman played behind-the-scenes roles in helping Ronald Reagan gain the White House; he helped formulate hard-line intelligence policies; he encouraged right-wing media attacks on liberals; and he protected the flanks of Reagan’s operatives who were caught breaking the law.
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