NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Telescope Stalled by Glitch

NASA's prolific planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has been placed in a precautionary "safe mode" after engineers noticed a problem with the instrument's orientation mechanism.

The Kepler telescope went into safe mode on Jan. 17 for a planned 10 days, during which time the telescope's reaction wheels ? spinning devices used by the observatory to maintain its position in space ?will be rested. The move comes after researchers detected an unexpected increase in the amount of torque needed to rotate one of the wheels, mission officials said.

"Resting the wheels provides an opportunity to redistribute internal lubricant, potentially returning the friction to normal levels," Kepler officials wrote in a Jan. 17 mission update.

Kepler will not make any new science observations for its search for alien planets while in safe mode, team members said.

"Once the 10-day rest period ends, the team will recover the spacecraft from this resting safe mode and return to science operations," Kepler officials wrote. "That is expected to take approximately three days. An update will be posted after the wheel rest operation is complete."?[Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

When the Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009, it had four functional reaction wheels ? three for immediate use, plus one spare. The wheels help the telescope keep its precise aim at more than 150,000 target stars, which it monitors for the presence of orbiting?exoplanets.?

One of the wheels failed last July. Since the spacecraft needs three functioning reaction wheels to work properly, another failure could potentially end the $600 million Kepler mission.

Kepler detects alien planets?by flagging the telltale brightness dips caused when they cross the face of their parent stars from the instrument's perspective. Kepler generally needs to witness three such "transits" to identify a planetary candidate.

The telescope has already spotted more than 2,700 potential planets, including a number in their host stars' habitable zones ? that range of distances that could support liquid water on a world's surface. To date, just 105 of these candidates have been confirmed, but mission scientists think at least 90 percent should end up being the real deal.

If the three remaining reaction wheels keep spinning normally and Kepler doesn't suffer any other major issues, it could keep scanning its patch of sky for several more years to come. Last year, NASA announced that it had extended the mission through at least 2016.

Kepler's main mission is to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone. The longer it runs, the more such worlds it will find.

Because of the three-transit requirement, most of the planets Kepler has found so far zip around their stars relatively quickly, in close-in orbits.

With more time, the instrument will be able to discover more exoplanets in relatively distant orbits, allowing Kepler to survey the habitable zones of warmer stars. (It could take a hypothetical alien version of Kepler up to three years, after all, to see Earth transit the sun three times.)

Witnessing more transits will also increase the signal-to-noise ratio, enabling more relatively small planets to be detected, researchers have said.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall?or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook?and?Google+.?

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nasas-planet-hunting-kepler-telescope-stalled-glitch-183103523.html

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Miss Piggy's Version Of Global Warming: What About Me?

Here's a new, sly, (and frankly selfish) way to think about global warming: instead of worrying about the whole planet and all its oceans, how about asking a more personal question ...

What about me? What about where I live? Or where my grandma lives? Or the North Pole? Or Siberia? What if I could take my curser, plop it onto any place on Earth and find out what's happened to temperatures right there.

Click! And a graph instantly registers how much temperatures have changed in that very region since the early 1950's. You can click anywhere you please, on deserts, oceans, island chains, mountains, on places you love or dream of, and discover if things have been warming up or cooling down, and by how much. Some places, I noticed have gotten colder. But not many. It's easy to do. Go ahead, give it a whirl.

This graphic appears on New Scientist's website. It was built by Chris Amico and Peter Aldhouse, with help from Robert Schmunk from data produced by a team at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose offices, as it happens, are located not far from the Greek diner you see featured on Seinfeld in New York City.

The team attached some detailed source material to their graphic that some of you will want to read. I'd put this stuff in fine print, but we at NPR don't have a "fine print option" for our blogs, so if you don't want to know this, squint or go walk the dog. (Or listen to Radiolab. I'm told it's a fine podcast.) For the rest of you:

How The Data Was Assembled And Adjusted:

The graphs and maps all show changes relative to average temperatures for the three decades from 1951 to 1980, the earliest period for which there was sufficiently good coverage for comparison. This gives a consistent view of climate change across the globe. To put these numbers in context, the NASA team estimates that the global average temperature for the 1951-1980 baseline period was about 14 ?C.

The analysis uses land-based temperature measurements from some 6000 monitoring stations in the Global Historical Climatology Network, plus records from Antarctic stations recorded by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. Temperatures at the ocean surface come from a measurements made by ships from 1880 to 1981, plus satellite measurements from 1982 onwards.

Surface temperature measurements are not evenly distributed across the globe. So the NASA team interpolates from the available data to calculate average temperatures for cells in a global grid, with each cell measuring 2 degrees latitude by 2 degrees longitude. The analysis extrapolates up to 1200 kilometres from any one station, which allows for more complete coverage in theArctic? where monitoring stations are sparsely distributed, but where the warming trend is especially strong.

The NASA team also corrects the data to remove local heating caused by dense human settlements ? a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. Temperature stations in urban areas are identified by referring to satellite images of the light they give off at night, and their records are adjusted to reflect the average trend of nearby rural stations.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/19/169718818/miss-piggys-version-of-global-warming-what-about-me?ft=1&f=1007

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The Debt Ceiling Poll Question That Will Make Republicans Extremely Depressed

Republicans have argued and convinced themselves that they're fighting a popular fight on the debt ceiling.

That's because, despite the fact that pundits/economists/everyone says a failure to raise the debt ceiling would be disastrous, Americans say they DON'T want it raised. 60% (!) say they don't want it raised.

But here's the catch.

Although Americans don't want the debt ceiling raised, and although Republicans are the ones against a clean raise, look what poll respondents say when asked who should get the blame if the debt ceiling isn't hiked, and payments for crucial services are halted.

This is from a new NBC/WSJ poll. 45% of respondents would blame the GOP. Just 33% would blame Obama and Congressional Democrats.

This seems contradictory, of course, but it's really not that weird.

People don't get what the debt ceiling is. It sounds like a good thing... a tool to keep the government fiscally prudent, which it's not.

But people do seem to grasp that the GOP is on a dangerous kamikaze mission. So even though the GOP is ostensibly on the same side as people on the debt limit, they can't win by going all the way.

If we wake up one day, and we've hit the "x-date" it will be the GOP taking most of the blame.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheMoneyGame/~3/owVYHWAqawk/debt-ceiling-poll-americans-will-blame-gop-in-debt-ceiling-standoff-2013-1

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Mali, Algeria, and the Shadow of Colonialism

On one level, Mokhtar "Marlboro Man" Belmokhtar is just another lone Islamist warlord, pursuing his own private jihad in the Sahara Desert. But a deeper look at the Algerian terrorist?s biography tells a larger story of how, for many decades, various kinds of Western intervention in the region have helped to create and shape the Belmokhtars of the jihadist world. ?

Belmokhtar?s personal story is also a warning sign that France?s neocolonialist military intervention in Mali?although perhaps launched for the right reasons, to stop a violent jihadist takeover?may well create another backlash even worse than the Western hostage situation that it has apparently already provoked.

In the West and in Washington, many pundits approved of the French intervention (although the Obama administration steered clear of supporting it). Rand scholars Stephanie Pezard?and?Michael Shurkin even approvingly cited France?s colonial history in Mali in lauding the attack, suggesting that Paris? again find "proxies" it can control. "This is, in effect, how France conquered and secured northern Mali in the first place a century ago,"?they write today on CNN?s Global Public Square. "The aim now has changed ? strengthening Mali rather than perpetuating colonial rule ? but the key point remains finding the right partners.? On the extreme right, commentators such as Charles Krauthammer and John Bolton again made the same sort of case they argued before the 2003 Iraq invasion: Jihadists were responding to "American weakness," as displayed by President Obama?s lack of response to the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi. What is required now, they say,?is another show of military strength in the region.

And thus the cycle is perpetuated: Westerners march in, and the locals are radicalized. Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics, told?National Journal?on Thursday, "Regardless of the intentions of the French leadership today, their military intervention in Mali will be seen through France's colonial legacy in West and North Africa, a bloody legacy. France is not responsible for producing the jihadis roaming the wadis and deserts, and mountains of North and West Africa, but its military intervention may fuel anti-hegemonic and anti-colonial grievances that power the jihadist caravan. There is a real danger that Western boots on the ground in Muslim societies would produce counterproductive results, as the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq clearly show.

"One would have expected the French to have learned the lessons of the Soviet and American experiences!" Gerges says.

Apparently not. True, it is difficult for anyone to figure out what is happening in the chaotic aftermath of the two-year-old "Arab Spring." But with each passing month, the outcome looks less Western-friendly and more Islamist.? Yet the Islamism enfranchised by these democratic movements across the region is taking different, complex?forms. Some outcomes are ?legitimate,? as in the elections of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party?in Tunisia. Others are illegitimate and far more dangerous (new violent groups that have sprung up in Mali, Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere).

All this must be grappled with, and distinctions must be made. Yet to date U.S. and Western policy is mostly failing to do that--in Mali, Syria, even Egypt.

Belmokhtar, who reportedly funds his jihad with a vast cigarette trade, apparently led the hostage raid on the BP gas facility, an attack that, according to some reports, was provoked by the French air and ground assaults in Mali next door. If so, this is just another round in a very old fight, and let's say so. The paternalistic approach of French President Francois Hollande is part of a tit-for-tat that has been going on since the 19th?century, when France declared Northwest Africa its imperial domain, culminating 100 years later in a notoriously brutal French ?counterinsurgency? operation in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 (captured in an iconic 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers), which ended in Algerian independence.

But French paternalism never completely went away. Belmokhtar was radicalized like so many others by the policies of U.S.-supported dictators in the Arab world, and by the teachings of the Palestinian radical Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, and he checked his box with Qaida training in Afghanistan. But his anti-Western passions are clearly turbocharged by France?s long and ugly history in his country. ?When he returned to Algeria in 1993, the country was already in the throes of conflict after the French-backed Algerian military annulled elections that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win,"?according to a BBC profile. "Belmokhtar joined the conflict, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and became a key figure in the militant Armed Islamist Group (GIA) and later the breakaway Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).? And what is the French military doing in Mali today? Defending yet another military tyranny (the democratically elected government of President Amadou Toumani Toure was overthrown in 2012, leading to the civil strife).

It's what the West has been doing for the past century. Today, one still occasionally hears that anti-Westernism--both the moderate Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qaida-style extremism--rises out of some inevitable ?clash of civilizations.? In truth, despite al-Qaida's rants about?grievances going back to the Crusades,?the enmity between the West and the Arab world is a relatively modern phenomenon that is intimately tied to this Western colonial history. It began with British and French imperial designs, typified by the infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, by which the British and French agreed to divvy up the Arabic-speaking countries after World War I. Things got progressively worse after the creation, by the Europeans, of corrupt, kleptocratic tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan; the endemic poverty and underdevelopment that resulted for most of the 20th century; the U.N.-imposed creation of Israel in 1948; and finally, in recent decades, American support for this status quo and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, which only regenerated the cycle of enmity toward the West.

To his critics, President Obama has looked consistently weak and indecisive in response to the ?Arab Spring,? culminating in his "lead from behind" approach to NATO?s intervention in Libya and the humiliation and anguish left behind by the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi.

But, frankly, Obama has good reason to hesitate. The last thing the U.S. wants to do now is look like it is meddling, yet again, in a region that has already had far too much of it from the West. Still, even if what is emerging in the region is less than coherent, the president needs to develop a more coherent policy response?than he has so far.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mali-algeria-shadow-colonialism-154726935--politics.html

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Nissan knocks $6,400 off Leaf sticker price, sells S model for $28,800

That lower-cost Nissan Leaf we heard about? It just got a sticker price. Savvy car buyers will be able to kick off their haggling at $28,800, the Leaf S' MSRP. Don't expect the price war to last long though -- dealers will waste no time leveraging relevant tax credits, which in California, can dip the car's price as low as $18,800. The price reduction hits the entire line, too -- pricing the Leaf SV and SL at $31,820 and $34,840, respectfully. Nissan attributes the savings to local construction, dodging foreign currency fluctuations by building the vehicles in its existing Tennessee facilities. The move puts the Leaf a little closer to competing with its gas-guzzling cousins, and goes a long way to placate EV buyers put off by the car's 2012 price hike. Still too pricy? Don't worry -- Nissan promises that you can still lease it, too. Read on for the official press release.

Continue reading Nissan knocks $6,400 off Leaf sticker price, sells S model for $28,800

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/15/2013-nissan-leaf-price/

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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50477864/ns/local_news-peoria_il/

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Growing Concern Over Broken Adoptions - CityLimits.org

Tanya's account of being adopted out of the foster care system at 7 only to be put back in the system six years later comes at the end of a numbing tale of losses. Over a span of four hours one evening stretching into night, Tanya, 23, tells a story of so many lessons learned?that family isn't really family and that bonds are meant to be broken?that the actual story of the failed adoption comes almost as an afterthought.

Tanya doesn't remember when she was separated from her biological parents. For her first few years of conscious memory, Tanya thought her foster family was her "real" family. At age 5, that reality was shattered when her foster mother began saying that Tanya's real mom looked like Aunt Jemima, the woman on the pancake box. At 5 1/2, Tanya lost her foster father?the one adult she loved?when his wife took Tanya and her sister from New York to Puerto Rico to leave behind the troubled relationship. "It didn't hurt me. I was able to let go of him because I knew he loved me and I loved him," recalls Tanya.

When Tanya was 6, her foster mother decided she could no longer manage the strong-willed girl, and closed the first chapter in Tanya's life for good. (She wanted to keep Tanya's sister, with whom she had a close bond, but the agency insisted that the sisters stay together.) "Then it came that day when our [foster] mother took us to the agency," Tanya recalls. "She was crying, and she kept telling my sister that she's coming back. I was so angry at my sister for crying. I wanted to say, ?She's not coming back. Just get over it.' It was like hearing a baby cry and cry and cry."

By the time Tanya met Sylvia, the woman who took her into her home at age 6 and adopted her at age 7, Tanya knew she was the "difficult one." She also knew she wasn't going to accept a new mother just because someone wanted to be her mom.

Still, Tanya believes Sylvia intended to provide her a loving home. Early on, when Sylvia saw how Tanya took out her rage by attacking her sister, she sent her to therapy. When they diagnosed Tanya with hyperactivity, Sylvia tried to find ways to help her, taking her to karate and ballet and to the park to hit a ball. In first grade, Tanya went to a friend's house after school one day without telling Sylvia. When Sylvia finally found her, Tanya recalls, she had tears in her eyes. "I just never had someone cry for me before," Tanya says. Tanya's sister continued to live in Sylvia' house for the rest of her childhood, and found enough stability there to finish college and start a career.

But Tanya also felt controlled and misunderstood in Sylvia's home. At the time she was adopted, she says, she didn't even know what adoption was. "It seemed like I had no control of anything that was happening," Tanya says. Later, when Tanya told the therapist that she wanted to kill herself, Tanya says Sylvia told her: "?Don't tell them that kind of stuff. They'll think you're crazy and you're not crazy.'" Tanya says Sylvia was afraid she might be institutionalized. But Tanya just felt like nobody was willing to hear all the pain she was in, and that her past remained sealed up tight inside her.

Tanya says she felt angry all the time, so angry that at times she wanted to pull her own hair out. She acted out, too, destroying the things Sylvia gave her, "especially the jewelry, because I knew it was expensive." By the time she was 8, Tanya says, Sylvia had started to hit her on a regular basis, a charge Sylvia denies and that no court has verified.

By the time Tanya was 13, the conflicts between her and Sylvia had escalated. After one terrible blowup, Sylvia took Tanya to court and had her put back into the system as a juvenile delinquent. Tanya's permanent home had come to a permanent end, though ten years later, the pain clearly endures for both of them.

A national push toward adoption

Tanya was adopted in 1996, one year before Congress passed the national Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA).

At the time, children were spending years in the foster care system moving from home to home. Under ASFA, the idea was that children would return to their families of origin in a timely fashion. But if they didn't?if they remained in foster care 15 out of 22 months?foster care agencies were required to begin the process of terminating parental rights and looking for adoptive homes.

The law extended subsidies for adoptive children, required states to document efforts to move children toward adoption, and provided funding to states for promoting adoption. Today, states receive bonuses of between $4,000 and $12,000 for each adoption finalized. No similar bonuses are paid for permanency of any other kind.

There were good reasons for wanting to shorten the time children stayed in foster care. When parents are struggling with domestic violence, mental illness or addiction, it can sometimes take them years to stabilize. Before ASFA, until parents were deemed fit guardians, the plan for their children was usually foster care. But too many children never went home, and research showed that the outcomes for these children were particularly bleak. While everybody knew that foster care was a terribly messy affair, adoption seemed to offer the dream of simplicity: one child, one home, where healing could begin.

What nobody knew for certain in the first years after ASFA's passage?what some critics suggest nobody wanted to know?was how well those adoptions worked out. Would the dream of adoption prove to be a viable reality? A full answer wasn't possible, because the government didn't track adoption outcomes long-term. Congress had made adoption a lynchpin of its vision for child welfare reform without taking steps to determine whether the move worked.

*The names of the adoptive mother and daughter in this piece have been changed.

This is the first chapter in our series about broken adoptions?cases in which a child adopted out of the foster-care system returns to that system or otherwise leaves the family that adopted them. To read chapter 2, please click here.

Source: http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4716/growing-concern-over-broken-adoptions

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'Junk DNA' made visible before the final cut

Jan. 7, 2013 ? Research findings from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine are shining a light on an important regulatory role performed by the so-called dark matter, or "junk DNA," within each of our genes.

The new study reveals snippets of information contained in dark matter that can alter the way a gene is assembled.

"These small sequences of genetic information tell the gene how to splice, either by enhancing the splicing process or inhibiting it. The research opens the door for studying the dark matter of genes. And it helps us further understand how mutations or polymorphisms affect the functions of any gene," said study senior author, Zefeng Wang, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology in the UNC School of Medicine and a member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The study is described in a report published in the January 2013 issue of the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The findings may be viewed in terms of the film industry's editorial process where snippets of celluloid are spliced, while others end up unused on the proverbial cutting room floor.

Taken from a DNA point of view, not every piece of it in each human gene encodes for a functional protein; only about 10 percent does, in coding regions called "exons." The other 90 percent of the stuff that fills the intervening regions are longer stretches of dark matter known as "introns."

But something mysterious happens to introns during the final processing of messenger RNA (mRNA), the genetic blueprint that's sent from the cell's nucleus to its protein factory. Only particular exons may be included within the final mRNA produced from that gene, whereas the introns are cut out and destroyed.

It's therefore easier to understand why more scientific attention has been given to exons. "When people are looking at the genetics of a disease, most of the time they're looking for the change in the coding sequence," Wang said. "But 90 percent of the sequence is hidden in the gene's introns. So when you study gene variants or polymorphisms that cause human disease, you can only explain the part that's in the exon. Yet the majority remains unexplainable because they're in the introns."

Following completion of the genome sequencing projects, subsequent DNA and RNA sequencing revealed the existence of more than one splice variant, or isoform, for 90 percent of human genes. During messenger RNA processing, most human genes are directed to be cut and pasted into different functional isoforms.

In a process called alternative splicing, a single gene could code for multiple proteins with different biological functions. In this way, alternative splicing allows the human genome to direct the synthesis of many more proteins than would be expected from its 20,000 protein-coding genes.

"And those different versions sometimes function differently or in opposite ways," Wang said. "This is a tightly regulated process, and a great number of human diseases are caused by the 'misregulation' of splicing in which the gene was not cut and pasted correctly."

Wang's research colleagues identified "intronic splicing regulatory elements." These essentially recruit protein factors that can either enhance or inhibit the splicing process.

Their discovery was accomplished by inserting an intron into a green fluorescent protein (GFP) "reporter" gene. These introns of the reporter gene carried random DNA sequences. When the reporter is screened and shows green it means that portion of the intron is spliced.

"The default is dark," so any splicing enhancer or silencer can turn it green," Wang explains. "In this unbiased way we can recover hundreds of sequences of inhibited or enhanced splicing."

The study collaborators put together a library of cells that contain the GFP reporter with the random sequence inserted. Thus, when researchers looking at the intron try to determine what a particular snippet of genetic information does and its effect on gene function, they can refer to the splicing regulatory library of enhancers or silencers.

"So it turns out that the sequencing element in both exons and introns can regulate the splicing process, Wang says. "We call it the splicing code, which is the information that tells the cell to splice one way or the other. And now we can look at these variant DNA sequences in the intron to see if they really affect splicing, or change the coding pattern of the exon and, as a result, protein function."

Collaborators in this study with Zefeng Wang are Yang Wang in the department of pharmacology and member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center; Meng Ma, Anhui University, Hefei, China; and Xinshu Xiao, University of California, Los Angeles.

Support for the research comes from the American Heart Association and the National Cancer Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of North Carolina Health Care.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Yang Wang, Xinshu Xiao, Jianming Zhang, Rajarshi Choudhury, Alex Robertson, Kai Li, Meng Ma, Christopher B Burge, Zefeng Wang. A complex network of factors with overlapping affinities represses splicing through intronic elements. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, 2012; 20 (1): 36 DOI: 10.1038/nsmb.2459

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/Ej5ff9ZkjPM/130107100057.htm

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BURNING COAL THEATRE COMPANY'S LOBBY LECTURES ...

Paul Reid, author of the just released conclusion to ?The Last Lion? trilogy begun by William Manchester, will speak at Burning Coal Theatre Company on Thursday, January 31st at 6 pm.? Tickets are $10 or free with anyone holding a ticket to that night?s performance of Burning Coal Theatre Company?s Good by CP Taylor.? The lecture will last about 50 minutes and will be held at Burning Coal?s Murphey School auditorium, 224 Polk Street, Raleigh, NC.? Tickets are available for the lecture at the door.? More information may be obtained by calling 919-834-4001 or visiting us online at www.burningcoal.org.

ABOUT PAUL REID.? After stints in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a worker in a cat-food factory, blue-grass guitarist, cab driver, bartender, and counselor at a home for emotionally disturbed children, Paul Reid and his brother bought a small steam-valve manufacturing business in Newtonville, Mass. In the early 1990s, after selling his share of the company, Reid began writing political commentary for local Massachusetts newspapers, which led to a regular op-ed column at the Boston Globe. As a free-lance writer he covered the Yugoslav civil war, narco-terrorism in Colombia, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland.? He graduated from Harvard University Extension School in 1990 with a bachelor of Liberal Arts cum laude.? In 1996 Reid joined The Palm Beach Post, a Cox newspaper, as a features writer.

Reid was named 1998 Cox Newspapers writer of the year and won the 1998 Paul Hansell award, given by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, for reporting and writing. In 2003 he was embedded with United States Marines at the start of the Iraq War.? In 2004 he left the Post to complete THE LAST LION: Defender of the Realm.

Paul lives in western North Carolina.

ABOUT WILLIAM MANCHESTER.? A popular novelist, historian, and biographer who, according to the New York Times, ?used his novelist?s eye to fashion meticulously researched portraits of power,? William Manchester (1922?2004) was also the adjunct professor of history and writer-in-residence at Wesleyan University. ?Power is the one thing that has fascinated me ever since I was a kid in Springfield, Mass.,? he told People magazine. ?What exactly is power? Where are its roots? How do some people get it and others miss it entirely? How do they hold it or lose it??

Manchester?s attention to detail was what made his works so successful. Many of his eighteen books of fiction and nonfiction were bestsellers, including The Arms of Krupp (about the German family that fed the Nazi War Machine), American Caesar (his biography of Gen. Douglas MacArthur), The Death of a President (on the assassination of John F. Kennedy), Goodbye Darkness (his memoir of his World War II experiences as a Marine in the Pacific), A World Lit Only by Fire (an exploration of the sordidness and the splendor of the Middle Ages), and the first two volumes of his Winston Churchill trilogy, The Last Lion. The final volume was published by Little, Brown on November 6, 2012 and written by Manchester and Paul Reid.

Manchester was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1922, and he joined the Marines in 1942. For wounds received on Okinawa, he was given the Purple Heart. After the war, he graduated first in his class from the University of Massachusetts, and received a master?s degree from the University of Missouri. Manchester?s thesis was on H. L. Mencken, and it became the basis of his first biography, Disturber of the Peace, published while he was a local reporter and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.

Manchester received the Prix Dag Hammarskj?ld du m?rite litt?raire, James L. McConaughy Jr. Memorial Award for distinguished writing, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, and the National Humanities Medal for his distinguished career.

ABOUT BURNING COAL?S LOBBY LECTURE SERIES.? With each of its mainstage productions, Burning Coal presents a speaker or other presenter on a topic related to the production currently running at Burning Coal.? Sometimes the topic is the play itself, sometimes it relates to the author, sometimes it deals with an issue about which the play is concerned.? Past Lobby Lectures have includes Gerald Freedman, original director of Hair (at our 2009 production of Hair), a gospel choir (at our 2010 production of Crowns) and the author of several books on Poker (at our 2010 production of The Seafarer).

For further information about the Lobby Lecture series or about Burning Coal Theatre Company, please contact managing director Simmie Kastner at 919.834.4001 or visit us online at www.burningcoal.org.

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Wounded ex-Rep. Giffords meets with Conn. families

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) ? Nearly two years after being critically wounded in a mass shooting, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on Friday met with families of victims in last month's shooting that left 26 people dead inside a Connecticut elementary school.

Giffords was accompanied by her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, at the private meeting in Newtown that was also attended by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

"As always, I was deeply impressed by the strength and courage and resolve of the families and the extraordinary caring and generosity of Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly in visiting with them," Blumenthal said.

Giffords, a Democrat, met earlier in the day with officials including Connecticut's lieutenant governor and Newtown's first selectman.

Giffords was left partially blind, with a paralyzed right arm and brain injury, when a gunman opened fire at a constituent meet-and-greet outside a Tucson grocery store on Jan. 8, 2011. Arizona's chief federal judge and five others were killed and 13 people, including Giffords, were injured.

The gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, pleaded guilty to 19 federal charges and was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences, plus 140 years.

Kelly has become a vocal advocate for gun control in recent months, most notably at Loughner's sentencing in November. He lashed out at politicians for avoiding a "meaningful debate" about gun laws and called out Arizona Republicans, including the governor, for taking a pro-gun stance in the months after the shooting.

"As a nation we have repeatedly passed up the opportunity to address the issue. After Columbine, after Virginia Tech, after Tucson and after Aurora, we have done nothing," he told the court.

He has issued strongly worded statements many times since the massacre in Connecticut, including a harsh response to the National Rifle Association's reaction to the shooting. He often begins statements with "Gabby and I" as he makes pointed comments about the direction of the gun debate in America.

Kelly said on the day of the Newtown shooting that it should lead to better gun control.

"This time our response must consist of more than regret, sorrow, and condolence," Kelly said on his Facebook page, calling for "a meaningful discussion about our gun laws and how they can be reformed and better enforced to prevent gun violence and death in America."

Blumenthal said he is eager to find allies as he pursues tougher gun control laws.

"I'm hopeful that everyone who cares about this issue or has a stake in it will be active in supporting our effort in gun violence prevention legislatively," he said.

Giffords' visit came one day after Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced the creation of an advisory commission that will review and recommend changes to state laws and policies on issues including gun control in the wake of the Dec. 14 rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The gunman, Adam Lanza, shot and killed his mother, then drove to the school and slaughtered 20 first-graders and six educators before committing suicide as police arrived.

Giffords has appeared in public a few times since the shooting. She came face-to-face with Loughner when he was sentenced and attended ceremonies for the anniversary of the shooting.

She received tributes and ovations when she returned to the House in January 2012 to say goodbye as she resigned her seat and she delivered the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democratic National Convention in September.

On Wednesday, two days before she visited the Newtown families, she and Kelly met for an hour with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a longtime and vociferous gun control advocate. Bloomberg's office tweeted a photo of the meeting but wouldn't elaborate Friday on the discussion.

President Barack Obama invoked the Tucson and Newtown elementary school shootings when he spoke at Newtown shortly after the attack. He said four shootings, including those two plus the attacks at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., marked his first term in office.

A recent Pew Research Center report says gun policy accounted for almost 30 percent of discussions examined on blogs and Twitter in the three days after the school massacre. It compares the response to the Newtown rampage with the Arizona shooting, saying that in the three days after that, just 3 percent of social media conversation was about gun laws.

___

Associated Press writer Susan Haigh contributed to this report from Hartford, Conn.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wounded-ex-rep-giffords-meets-conn-families-231306569.html

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Child support claim rankles sperm donor to lesbian couple

KANSAS CITY, Kansas (Reuters) - A Kansas man who donated sperm to a lesbian couple so they could have a child said on Wednesday he is shocked the state is now trying to make him pay child support.

William Marotta, 46, donated sperm to Jennifer Schreiner and Angela Bauer under a written agreement that he would not be considered the father of the child nor liable for child support. A daughter, now 3, was born to Schreiner.

But in October, the state of Kansas filed a petition seeking to have Marotta declared the father of the child and financially responsible for her after the couple encountered money difficulties.

Marotta will ask the court in a hearing January 8 to dismiss the claim, which centers on a state law that the sperm must be donated through a licensed physician in order for the father to be free of any later financial obligations. Marotta gave a container of semen to the couple, who found him on Craigslist, instead of donating through a doctor or clinic.

The case is seen as having repercussions for other sperm donors. Sperm banks routinely provide sperm to people who want to conceive a child on the understanding that the donors are not responsible for the children.

Kansas is seeking child support from Marotta, including about $6,000 in medical expenses related to the child's birth, according to its petition.

"This was totally unexpected," Marotta said in a phone interview. "The very first thing that went through my mind was that no good deed goes unpunished."

The case has attracted national attention. Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said Wednesday "it is unfortunate and unfair" that Kansas is seeking money from a sperm donor.

"It certainly might have a negative effect on other men's willingness to help couples who need a donor, which would be harmful to everyone," Minter said.

"I also think it undermines everyone's respect for the law when you see it operate so arbitrarily."

Kansas officials are required under the law to determine the father of a child when someone seeks state benefits, said Angela de Rocha, spokeswoman for the Department for Children and Families. The couple was compelled to provide that information, which led to investigation of the sperm donation.

Marotta should be declared the father and subject to financial claims because he donated the sperm directly to the women and not through a physician, as required by Kansas law, the state's petition states.

Marotta said he's had virtually no contact with the child, but that he and Schreiner have remained cordial. He said she was pressured by the state to provide his name as the sperm donor.

"To me, ethics need to override rules," he said.

Lawyers for Marotta argue that he had no parental rights because of his agreement with the couple and cannot be held financially responsible.

They cite a 2007 case in which the Kansas Supreme Court ruled against a sperm donor seeking parental rights because he did not have any such agreement with the mother, lawyers for Marotta said.

"So now, we are flipping the argument around," Marotta attorney Ben Swinnen said Wednesday.

If the father had no legal parental rights in the 2007 case, Marotta should be declared to have no parental obligations in the current case, Swinnen said.

Marotta, a race car mechanic, responded to an ad on Craigslist from someone offering to pay $50 for sperm donations, but he made the donation for free. Marotta said he and his wife have no children of their own but have fostered a daughter. Marotta said he was simply trying to help a couple wanting a child.

(Editing by James B. Kelleher and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/child-support-claim-rankles-sperm-donor-lesbian-couple-014725388.html

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?The Paperback Quest For Joy? ? A Self-Help Roundup | Mockingbird

Why do self-help books keep selling? Lots of reasons we could say on here, but their commercial success is entirely predicated on the fact that no single one of them tends to help the problem. Different forms of Law survive mainly because of our predilection for control and self-justification, but its inner irony is that our continued ?love affair? with it depends directly on the fact that it does us no good.

There?s no better sociological parable of the Law that the still-growing American self-help industry, a frequently snide subject for Mockingbird but one that, it helps to remember, is inveterately there in all of us, which is why it provokes such nervously self-conscious derision. The?City Journal?recently did a piece on??America?s Unique Love Affair with Self-Help?, pointing out national attitudes underlying the self-help obsession and some its social consequences. All the same, if you think reading a simple article can end your love affair with self-help?but it does go to show some good, presumably secular wisdom on the demand for happiness in practice:

There is much to mock about titles like the?Chicken Soup for the Soul?series, which has so many constituent books for teens, preteens, dog lovers, and so forth that it occupies its own shelf in Barnes & Noble. There are serious criticisms, too: that self-help distracts Americans from a fraying social safety net and disintegrating communities, or that an obsession with self-actualization breeds people unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good. But at its best, self-help captures something uniquely American: the belief that anyone can pursue happiness?

Then there?s the question of whether self-help works at all. ?To be frank, most self-help books are disappointing,? says [sociologist Christine] Whelan. ?They often blame the victim with the implied message that the advice in the book works, and if it doesn?t work for you, you didn?t try hard enough. They often seek to solve problems that can?t really be solved by reading a book on your own. They use composite stories to create idealized examples of how the advice works, which only leads real people to wonder why they keep failing.?

Micki McGee, a professor of sociology at Fordham University and author of?Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life, notes that, since the 1970s, the growth in self-help has paralleled the destabilization of the labor market and of families. ?In place of a social safety net, Americans have been offered row upon row of self-help books,? she says. A declining number of people have a lifelong profession or a lifelong marriage, and so ?it is no longer sufficient to be married or employed; rather, it is imperative that one remains marriageable and employable.???Taking issue with the ?empowerment? school, she points out that ?the idea that you?re completely in charge of your own destiny has as its inverse that if anything happens to you, you are to blame.? And if things go well? Self-help is steeped in ?that painful, self-congratulatory aspect that American success has. It?s not enough to be successful, you get to take full individual credit for it,? as if no one had helped you along the way. ?Our indebtedness to each other is erased in this literature,? McGee says?.

This final insight has a deep relation to Christianity ? the indebtedness of judgment and the gratitude once that judgment is paid have little to no meaning in the ?painful, self-congratulatory? way of looking at things.

This viewpoint is of course evenly distributed among partisan lines, part of the intrinsic human condition. ?Yes We Can!? and ?We Built It? look remarkably similar from a Law/Grace standpoint, and perhaps that?s because this obsession with progress, both personal and communal, is articulated with unusual directness in the roots of America itself:

The fact that we choose our gurus according to who seems most compelling is also very American. We have no state religion, and few of us do things just because our great-grandparents did. We don?t listen to a village elder who tells us what the good life looks like. Instead, we construct it ourselves, from what we see of the world around us?and what we find at the bookstore.

That reflects the philosophy of our Founding, says Indiana University folklorist Sandra K. Dolby, whose treatise?Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them?takes an anthropological look at these mixtures of case studies and morals?.

And so, living out the Founders? expectations, we undertake our happiness projects, trusting that with hard work?and perhaps a few positive thought vibrations?we can succeed. ?Americans think they can find a way to fix anything,? says Dolby, ?including themselves.?

Source: http://www.mbird.com/2013/01/the-paperback-quest-for-joy-a-self-help-roundup/

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'Peter and the Starcatcher' to live off-Broadway

In this theater image released by The O & M Co., from left, Matt D'Amico, Rick Holmes, Isaiah Johnson, Adam Chanler-Berat, and Christian Borle are shown in a scene from "Peter and the Starcatcher," performing at the brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York. Producers of the play "Peter and the Starcatcher" said Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2013, that the production will have a new life after it vacates the Brooks Atkinson Theatre later this month. It will be produced this spring at New World Stages, an off-Broadway complex of theaters that has housed other former Broadway shows like ?Avenue Q,? ?Million Dollar Quartet? and ?Rent." (AP Photo/The O & M Co.)

In this theater image released by The O & M Co., from left, Matt D'Amico, Rick Holmes, Isaiah Johnson, Adam Chanler-Berat, and Christian Borle are shown in a scene from "Peter and the Starcatcher," performing at the brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York. Producers of the play "Peter and the Starcatcher" said Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2013, that the production will have a new life after it vacates the Brooks Atkinson Theatre later this month. It will be produced this spring at New World Stages, an off-Broadway complex of theaters that has housed other former Broadway shows like ?Avenue Q,? ?Million Dollar Quartet? and ?Rent." (AP Photo/The O & M Co.)

NEW YORK (AP) ? Broadway's boy who wouldn't grow up is not going away quite yet.

Producers of the play "Peter and the Starcatcher" said Wednesday that the production will have a new life after it vacates the Brooks Atkinson Theatre later this month.

It will be produced this spring at New World Stages, an off-Broadway complex of theaters that has housed other former Broadway shows like "Avenue Q," ''Million Dollar Quartet" and "Rent"

The inventive "Peter and the Starcatcher," adapted by "Jersey Boys" co-writer Rick Elice from Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson's best-selling 2004 children's adventure book, tells the story of how an English orphan became Peter Pan.

The Tony Award-winning design team of "Peter and the Starcatcher" will design the New World Stages production. Casting will be announced later.

___

Online: http://www.peterandthestarcatcher.com

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-01-02-Theater-Peter%20and%20the%20Starcatcher/id-2e54cb6a87a8438594eb7e3d0137db9c

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Today in History

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/today-history-050206767.html

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Google Glass features 'still in flux', no plans to display advertising on device

It's been a few months since we heard anything new about Google Glass -- fortunately, IEEE Spectrum has managed get a few questions answered by the project's lead, Babak Parviz. While noting that Google Now could be "very compelling" on the new hardware, he stopped short of saying that it would make an outing on the headset. There will, however, be a cloud-based API, which Parviz hopes will help to maintain a consistent user experience -- it's already been used to build both the email and calendar functions on Glass. Perhaps more importantly, when asked whether Google Glass would display advertising to its users, the project lead said that there were no plans for ads on the device. Google's keeping it vague with a precise feature list, but hardware-wise, Parviz says that the team is aiming for the headwear to last a full day on a single charge, with work still underway on head gestures -- still likely to be the least subtle input option alongside the (now patented) trackpad and voice commands. He added that the product is still on track to ship to those early 'explorers' early this year -- we're already polishing our glass block in anticipation.

Filed under: Wearables, Google

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Via: PhoneArena

Source: IEEE Spectrum

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/02/google-glass-features-still-in-flux-no-plans-to-display-adv/

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