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Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
10 American Industries Still Hanging On - Yahoo! Finance
Donn Fresard, Matthew Mallon, and Justin Rohrlich, On Wednesday August 24, 2011, 1:20 pm EDTFor most of the last century, the United States dominated global manufacturing -- no country could compete with America's output.
In recent years, however, the news about domestic manufacturing has been discouraging, if not devastating. Industry surveys have shown a decline in most sectors as the US continues to lose its factories to cheaper labor markets overseas, and especially to China.In 2010, the last remaining American flatware factory shut its doors. So did the nation's last sardine cannery. Recent years have seen the shuttering of America's last coat hanger factory, last button down shirt factory, and the entire sheetrock-producing town of Empire, Nevada -- which fell victim to the desiccated US housing market.
Surprisingly, however, there remains a handful of heroic holdouts. Bloodied, battered, but not yet down for the count, there are still pockets of US manufacturing scrappy enough to keep the lights on in the face of overseas competition. Here's a look at 10 survivors worth celebrating.
BOWLING BALLS: Modern bowling took off in the 1950s, kicked into a boom by the invention of the fully automatic pin-setter. By the mid-60s, there were around 12,000 bowling alleys across the U.S., mostly in working-class urban centers. But that was the industry's peak. Dogged by that blue-collar image, and dependent for much of their income on dwindling league play (see Robert D. Putnam's classic treatise Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community for the wider ramifications of this), bowling collapsed in the 1970s and '80s. By the late '90s there were less than 7,000 "bowling centers," (as the biz likes to call them now) in the country, and the decline has continued despite attempts to move the sport upmarket. Current estimates put the number of centers at less than 5,800.
Still, though league play continues to disappear and centers dwindle, there's some good news. The industry has managed to refocus itself as a family-recreation and special-event past-time, and seen the median incomes of bowlers increase. And while big players like Brunswick Corp. have moved most of their bowling equipment manufacturing overseas, plucky Ebonite International, located in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is keeping it local. Along with its own Ebonite brand of balls and equipment, the company sells under several different names, including Hammer and, since a successful 2007 expansion, the Columbia 300, Track and Dynothane brands.
SPARKLERS: Few products say summer in America like the sparkler. But without Diamond Sparkler of Youngstown, Ohio, it would be a cold winter for domestic sparkler production. Diamond has been in Youngstown since 1985, when Phantom Fireworks operator B.J. Alan bought Chicago's Acme sparkler manufacturer and brought its operations to Ohio. At that point, cheaper Chinese sparklers had snuffed out all but three US producers. By 1999, Diamond would be the lone holdout that hadn't shifted to imports. Not because it found a way to profits, however. Besides a brief tariff-related windfall, Diamond Sparkler never been a moneymaker for its parent firm, whose owner said he bought the division because he couldn't "envision something as American as sparklers, with its association with the (Fourth) of July, not being made in this country."
Youngstown, a onetime steel center whose population has dropped to barely 40 percent of its peak as that industry melted away, can claim only 20 year-round jobs at Diamond's factory. (Another 40 are hired for the peak season.) But city leaders are grateful, saying those jobs provide a much-needed light in a corner of America where business has mostly gone dark. "Phantom Fireworks is a small big business to us," Thomas Humphries, local Chamber of Commerce chief, told American Way magazine. "They always seem to find a way to hold on to a great core of people."
COMPACT DISCS: The physical is dead, long live the download. That's what entertainment observers have been saying since the turn of the century and they're not wrong. Last year CD sales fell by 20% from 2009, marking the fourth year in a row of increasingly brutal decline. But despite this, Sony DADC this spring announced a $72 million expansion of its existing Terre Haute, Indiana, manufacturing plant, in which it makes compact discs, Blu-ray equipment, video games and other electronics, while employing some 1,312 people (the planned expansion will add another 100 jobs). Why? Well, partly, it's just consolidation. With the closing of its Pittman, New Jersey compact disc plant, Sony DADC is merely shifting operations east (and shedding 200 jobs – the Pittman plant employed 300 people). And partly, it's a question of demographics. You, future-embracing consumer that you are, may be eager to embrace the world of on-demand downloads or dodgy torrents, but Aunt Gertrude in Duluth is going to be hanging on to those newfangled CDs until the day she dies. And there are a heck of a lot of Aunt Gertrudes out there, with a good decade or so left in them.
PIANOS: A Steinway grand, consisting of over 12,000 parts, is handmade, constructed by 450 individuals over the course of a year. Small wonder then, that in the decades between 1870 and 1930 the most expensive item an American owned other than his house was generally his piano. Since the 1930s and the advent of electronic home entertainment, of course, the piano, once the must-have of any genteel parlor, has gone with the wind. The great US piano manufacturers – Chickering and Sons, Davis & Co., J.C. Fischer, Mason & Hamlin, and Baldwin, to name only a few-- are all ghosts, swept away by changes in taste and more affordable Asian-made brands.
Only a few, tiny boutique piano-makers such as Mason & Hamlin, based in Massachusetts, and grand old Steinway, based in Queens, New York, and purveyor of high-end state of the art models that retail between $50,000 to $120,000 as well as budget, overseas-built Boston and Essex brands, are left. They cater to the very rich looking for status symbols, and an ever-dwindling market of performers -- over 98% of all concert pianists play Steinways -- and musical institutions.
SOCKS: To get an idea of what's happened to the American sock industry, take a look at Fort Payne, Alabama. Until a few years ago, the town of about 14,000 billed itself as the "Sock Capital of the World." They weren't spinning a yarn, either: As late as 2007, according to the Hosiery Association, if an American put on a pair of socks, the odds were about 1 in 8 they'd be rolling a product of Fort Payne/DeKalb County onto their hooves. Most of the area's workforce was employed in its sock mills, which then numbered 125 to 150. Today only 20 remain, providing roughly 600 jobs, down from 8,000 just a decade ago.
The "Sock Capital" sign that greeted visitors off Interstate 59? Gone. There's a new sign, on the front door of the oldest hosiery mill in town, that hints at the industry's unraveling: "We are not hiring at this time. Thank you for coming."
What started pulling out the thread was -- you guessed it -- globalization. An influx of cheaper hosiery, imported from the likes of China, Pakistan, and Honduras, started around the turn of the 2000s. It flipped the American sock industry on its head faster than argyle came back and again went out of style. Domestically made socks went from three-quarters of US sales to one-quarter between 1999 and 2006.
Thanks to a quirk of national politics, Fort Payne caught a break in 2005, when then-President Bush needed to swing a single vote in Congress to get his Central American Free Trade Agreement out of deadlock. The city's congressman, Robert Aderholt, was a holdout against the deal, and he took the opportunity to hold the bill hostage with a single demand: Restore the tariffs, which had been lifted in 1984, against socks seamed in Honduras. The White House complied, and the duty returned at the end of 2007. The move had little effect in the long run, and sock factories are still fleeing Fort Payne for Honduras.
IRONING BOARDS: The fact that there's only one ironing board manufacturing plant left in the Unites States has nothing to do with changing tastes in laundry after-care, or the viral spread of track-suits and t-shirts, and everything to do with retail consolidation and globalization.
Located in Seymour Indiana, HPI Seymour, owned by Chicago-based Home Products International, has been around since 1942, when it started as a tool-and-engineering shop. In the 1950s it switched to ironing-board only mode, successfully marketing a range of high-end ironing boards around the world.
But today the plant, which employs 200 people (down from 400 in 2000) and pumps out 720 boards an hour, is fighting the same stiff winds that have wiped out so much of U.S. manufacturing, despite a market that sees some 7 million ironing boards sold every year. Big chains like Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT) are still customers and anti-dumping tariffs as high as 157% against its rapacious Chinese competitors have kept the lines rolling at the plant so far. But with the chains increasingly sourcing cheaper and cheaper products from Asia, and with the tariffs coming under pressure from observers who wonder if artificially high ironing board costs for 7 million consumers are worth 200 jobs in Indiana, HPI Seymour's 69-year-old history is probably nearing its end.
PENCILS: Without tariffs against Chinese imports, you might as well erase pencil manufacturing from the ledger of American industry. And even since the US government took anti-dumping action against Chinese exporters in 1993, China's dominance of the industry here has barely slowed: American companies in 2008 produced only 14% of pencils sold stateside, whittled down by half from just four years prior.
While the duties (running as high as 53%) provide some relief, the remaining nub of an American pencil industry just can't compete on price, especially when it comes to the familiar yellow No. 2. Major US producers, like General Pencil of Jersey City and Newell Rubbermaid's Sanford, have closed plants that employed hundreds in the past few years as they shift production to Mexico and elsewhere while largely retreating into specialty graphite utensils, like colored and drawing pencils. "The yellow pencil basically became a Chinese commodity," Jim Weissenborn, whose family has owned General Pencil for 150 years, explained to Bloomberg news in June. "We've had to become a very boutique type of business in order to survive."
SNEAKERS: New Balance is the only major player in athletic footwear that still operates American factories, and it's hanging on by a shoestring as free-trade negotiations with Vietnam loom. The privately held Boston company has 1,000 US workers in its five New England plants, whose $10-and-up hourly wages are a quaint holdover in an industry that imports 99 percent of its product. "The company already could make more money by going overseas, and they know it," 35-year-old floor leader Scott Boulette told the Washington Post. "So we hustle."
But all the elbow grease in Norridgewock, Maine, won't keep New Balance competitive if an expected agreement with Vietnam eliminates the tariff on imported shoes, typically around 20%. The region's legislators are trying to carve out an exemption to keep New Balance's factories open. The firm's competitors like Nike and Reebok, though, seeing an opportunity for higher profits on imports and, displaying little sympathy for the scrappy northeastern holdouts, have banded together to fight the duty – or "shoe tax," as they call it. "For products that are no longer produced here and haven't been produced here for decades, there's no sense for consumers to be paying it." said Nate Herman, of the industry's lobbying group.
The US footwear industry now employs about 12,000 people, less than half what it did a decade ago, and a mere shadow of the quarter-million jobs it provided in the 1950s. That makes a third-generation Norridgewock shoemaker like Michelle Witham, 40, a rarity in the US. "When I started, people would say, 'Oh, you don't want to work there. They're not going to be around for long. They ain't got a chance,' " Witham told the Post. "But I've been here 20-something years now."
If New Balance lacks allies within the footwear industry, at least it has fans among domestic manufacturing cheerleaders. Scott Paul, head of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, says his closet holds 10 pairs of New Balance sneakers.
ELECTRICAL RELAYS: The last U.S.-based manufacturer of electrical relays and controls, Struthers-Dunn was founded in Philadelphia in 1923, and moved to South Carolina in the mid-1980s. It specializes in building customized relays -- basically electrically operated switches for controlling high-powered devices in industry and military operations -- for factory automation, elevators, cranes, traffic controls and power generation and distribution. Its 219 series of industrial relays, developed in 1958, is still used today as a crucial element of modern nuclear energy plants. During World War Two, Struthers-Dunn became the first supplier of electrical relays to the U.S. military.
After being purchased and reorganized by a series of parent companies in recent years, the company, now specializing in custom-built industrial controls, is once again a privately-held firm. Where's the rest of the industry? Overseas, naturally, and mainly concentrated in India and other Asian locations.
CHOPSTICKS: Sometimes globalization brings an ironic twist that actually helps American manufacturers. In the case of chopsticks, it was a double-dose of irony that made Americus, Georgia, a center of wooden utensil production for China. The huge, fast-growing powerhouse, which seems to export the bulk of Americans' everyday consumer products, produces most of the world's chopsticks, about 63 billion pairs annually. It's a simple product that serves a huge market -- a third of the world's population uses the sticks to pluck morsels from their dishes. When China's several hundred manufacturers started running short of wood, though -- remember, that country is building furiously, and it's not heavily forested to begin with -- an opportunity arose for a US company to turn the international-trade tables. Enter Jae Lee, the Korean-born American who in November 2010 founded Georgia Chopsticks to take advantage of China's shortfall and rural Georgia's abundance of wood.
Before long, Americus (fitting name, isn't it?) was processing a few million pairs of chopsticks daily, slapping Made in the USA labels on them, and exporting China's favorite utensil to Chinese. Lee is ramping up production as fast as he can order machinery, and intends to churn out 10 million a day by year's end. At full capacity, the company plans to have around 150 hires. Not bad for a town with a 12% unemployment rate, in a country supposedly burdened by sky-high labor costs.
The irony isn't lost on the workers. "Everywhere you see in America 'Made in China,'" new hire Susan White told Voice of America, "and you wonder if, in China, they ever see 'Made in America.'" They do now.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Rose McGowan’s Childhood Escape from Cult | Movie Talk - Yahoo! Movies
Rose McGowan is best known for her butt-kicking roles in "Scream," "Grindhouse," and, most recently, "Conan the Barbarian." But in the recent issue of People magazine, the outspoken actress went into detail about a real-life battle far scarier than any movie.Photo: Jon kopaloff/Filmmagic.com
McGowan, 38, spoke with People about how she spent her childhood in the Children of God cult. The sect is a "polygamous cult that blended free-love attitudes with Christian proselytizing." At age nine she escaped the cult with her father after he became fearful that Rose might be sexually abused.
While in the cult, McGowan tells People she was often either angry or terrified. "You weren't allowed to have imperfections," she explained. "I had a little wart on my thumb, and I remember walking down this hallway -- a door opened and some adult grabbed me and just cut it off with a razor blade and stuck me back out in the hallway with it still bleeding."
McGowan also describes watching how the men in the cult treated the women. "At a very early age I decided I did not want to be like those women. They were basically there to serve the men sexually -- you were allowed to have more than one wife." The cult's women would sometimes travel to area bars to try to recruit, an act known as "flirty fishing."
McGowan's father realized he had to leave when he was asked to draw cartoon literature that advocated child-adult sexual relationships. Soon after, Rose, her father, and some siblings left the cult in the middle of the night. They hid in a stone house, and avoided the cult members who came looking for them. "I remember a man trying to break in with a hammer," McGowan said. The Children of God sect has since been renamed The Family International and has "renounced its advocacy of sexual sharing" and adult-minor sexual relationships.
Eventually, McGowan settled with her father in Washington, where they worked on their relationship. "We became really close when he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis at age 60," she said. Her father died in 2008. Today, she is close with her siblings, who she describes as "the most together, offbeat, funny, regular-ish people." Her mom is also happily married.
But McGowan has no illusions that things could have ended very differently. "As strong as I like to think I've always been, I'm sure I could have been broken. I know I got out by the skin of my teeth."
For the full article, pick up the September 5, 2011 issue of People magazine.
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Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Nick Swisher is planning a honeymoon to … Afghanistan? - Big League Stew - MLB Blog - Yahoo! Sports
We all know the old honeymoon standbys: There's the islands of Hawaii. The destinations in the Caribbean. Italy, France and Spain, too.
But Afghanistan? I'm guessing the only honeymooning any Americans do there comes as a result of a deployment following the marriage of two members of the U.S. military. It's not on anyone's short list — or long list, for that matter.
Well, except for New York Yankees outfielder Nick Swisher(notes) and his actress wife, JoAnna Garcia. After being married last December, the couple now say they plan to visit the troops in Afghanistan this winter as they finally take a honeymoon that was postponed because of their busy schedules.
Speaking to us at the Yankees Unite for Tornado Relief event at Southern Hospitality Hell's Kitchen, Swisher said, "Three military officers came to the Yankee locker room and asked if any of us would like to visit the troops. My hand went straight up, I said, 'I'm in.' I knew JoAnna would want to go. It will be our first trip since we got married.
"I come from a military family ... and no matter what your views are, these men and women are out there risking everything for us. I realize how fortunate I have been, so I like to give back at every opportunity I can." [...]
Excited Garcia also told us, "We are both really looking forward to visiting the troops. Yes, it isn't a traditional honeymoon, but it is something we both feel strongly about."
Garcia admitted that the couple will probably stop in Europe on their way back, but here's a message for the inevitable cynics out there: Who cares? There aren't many people who'd spend any part of their special time in Afghanistan so the Swisher-Garcias taking a good chunk of their precious downtime to support and visit with our military members ranks as a big win in my book.
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Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Beating Stress with Martial Arts | Maine Kyokushin Karate
by Robert Jones
Are you a busy executive or mom trying to do everything? Are you getting so stressed out that it seems like you’re not accomplishing anything?
If so, you can use martial arts to combat that stress! Many of the skills and techniques used in martial arts training are the same skills and techniques you can use to rid your body of stress.
So, you might be wondering how a skill that is commonly depicted as a fighting tool can actually reduce stress… Some of these common images of martial arts aren’t completely accurate.
The cartoons, video games and movies showing martial arts as a fighting tool are only showing you one small facet of the art. The skills necessary for training martial arts can teach you how to balance your mind and body and give you the confidence you need to face the stressful events in your life.
HOW DO YOU DO IT?
One of the techniques used to create this balance is using breathing and meditation techniques to help you connect and control your mind and body. There are different types of meditation: sitting, standing, kneeling and moving. Find the position that works best for you. Here’s how to start.
1. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.
2. Breathe deeply. To make sure you’re breathing deeply enough, put your hand on your stomach. If your stomach isn’t pushing out as you breath in, you’re not breathing deeply enough. Try to pull the air all the way to your navel before you let it out.
3. When you breathe out, keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth. This keeps helps minimize your saliva and swallowing.
In the Chinese way of thinking, breathing like this is completing a path: The mouth is a gate and the tongue on the roof of the mouth allows your vital energy called “Qi” or “Chi” (both pronounced “chee”) to circulate throughout your body. Chi is what helps your mind and body connect.
After you’ve gotten the physical aspects of breathing down, you can start counting your breaths – this is a form of meditation that many experts teach during stress management courses. Start short and work your way up.
1. Begin with a count of 4 as you breathe in and a count of 6 as you breathe out.
2. As you go along, extend the in and out until you can get a count of 6 as you breathe in and up to 24-30 as you breathe out. Just remember that you want a short, deep breath in and a slow, long breath out.
WHY DOES IT WORK?
This mind and body connection through breathing works because stress is a mental state that manifests itself as a physical symptom in your body. This physical symptom then acts as a trigger to tell you to do something about it. As you become more aware of your body, you’ll be able to notice the “trigger” before it becomes something unbearable such as a severe neck problem or a migraine headache.
Once you notice your trigger, you can stop and do something about it such as practicing a breathing technique. For example, I used to get stress-induced migraines that would leave me out of commission for a whole day. Now, I’ve come to realize that it actually starts in my lower back as a small thing. If I let it go, it works its way up to my head. Now, when I noticed this trigger in my back, I stop and do my breathing. It allows the issue to surface so I can deal with it and I don’t have to deal with a migraine.
We all have those moments from time to time when we experience stress (some more frequently than others). The overall benefits of training martial arts for the mind and body (including self-awareness, self confidence, focus, concentration and physical conditioning) all lead to reducing that stress. You owe it to yourself to start relieving the stress in your life with the skills taught through martial arts.
The best place to find these skills is at a fine martial arts school. Why not give it a try? You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
via mkkarate.com
Monday, August 22, 2011
Elite group of 9/11 first responders still battling illness, 'WTC Cough' - Yahoo! News
Harold Schapelhouman, fire chief at Menlo Park Fire Protection District, is breathing heavily.The posted speed limit is 15 mph, but when you're fighting respiratory infection by way of mountain biking, rules go out the window. Your lungs need it. You have to push it.
Schapelhouman has been pushing it for years.
As the former captain and task force leader for California Urban Search and Rescue, Schapelhouman has responded to disasters all over the country. He's seen what both man and Mother Nature can do, from the Oklahoma City bombing to Hurricane Katrina.
He knew what he would see when his team headed to New York to assist in the cleanup and recovery efforts after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
"It's like working in a graveyard. But somebody has to do it. Somebody has to go in there and pick up the pieces. … We're an elite team, and we were honored to go," he says.
What he did not anticipate is the long-term impact of his time on "the pile," at the World Trade Center.
Schapelhouman and his team members are only some of the thousands of first responders who have shown signs of debilitating illnesses from breathing the dust at the site.Harold Schapelhouman
Seventy percent of his team got sick from their time spent at Ground Zero. Some of their symptoms include bloody noses, skin rashes, pneumonia, upper respiratory infections, and what is known as the WTC Cough.
Schapelhouman often wakes up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. "It reminded me of going out on a call for an 80-year-old emphysema patient who'd smoked all his life. This can't be happening to me. I'm too young for this to happen. I'm in the best years of my life. I'm in my 40s; I'm at the top of my game."
Schapelhouman is not only an advocate but also one of thousands of workers and residents from the Ground Zero area enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Registry. The registry was created to monitor the health effects of people involved in the recovery, or those who lived near the towers. It is the largest registry to track the health effects of a disaster in American history.
Late last year, Congress passed the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which provides financial aid to sick workers. Joe Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, says that although it took time to get the bill passed, it was the right thing to do. "The people that worked here on the pile, the construction workers, the volunteers, the trades, the first responders, they did it selflessly. They did it without thinking anything other than 'We need to come here, we have the skills to help out, we want to help out.'"
Schapelhouman says this attitude is echoed by almost all of the personnel that helped with the recovery.
[ Photos: Mural artists remember 9/11 ]
"It's a very conflicting thing. You wish it didn't happen, but if it's going to happen, I know most firefighters or even police officers would say, 'I want to be there.' Because that's what we do. That's our job.'"Schapelhouman has taken up a strenuous exercise regimen to combat his respiratory illness. It's not a choice. He knows if he doesn't exercise hard, he won't live the life he would have lived had he not gone to Ground Zero.
Once again, he's pushing it. Not just for himself, but for his family.
Schapelhouman wants a normal life. He wants to see his 11-year-old daughter grow up and get married. He wants to live long enough to play with his grandchildren.
He also doesn't want to forget Ground Zero, although part of him has to.
"You can't help but come back from one of these events and feel as if, when the sun's out, the day is a little bit brighter. When you're with the family and your friends, it's sweeter and it gets better...It's realizing how fragile life is."
Video produced by Brad Williams and Ricky Montalvo. Shot and edited by Brad Williams. Post-Production Audio by James Kelly. Graphics by Howard Kim for Yahoo! Studios.
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via news.yahoo.com
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Chely Wright Marries Partner Lauren Blitzer In Connecticut - Our Country
In some ways, it was as traditional a wedding as could be. It was held on a Saturday afternoon at a family member's home, it was presided over by clergy, and the bride wore white.
Oh wait--make that the brides wore white!
Yep, Chely Wright--who is credited as the first country star to publicly come out as a lesbian--and her partner, civil rights activist Lauren Blitzer, tied the knot Saturday in Connecticut with more than 200 friends and family members in attendance, according to .
Despite the familiar elements of the wedding plans, Wright and Blitzer's union was filled with plenty of personal touches. Blitzer's aunt's house was decided on for the location. Wright is Christian and Blitzer Jewish, so they chose an interfaith ceremony presided over by both a reverend and a rabbi. Music was spun by a DJ ("Bands at weddings make me nervous," Wright told People). The wedding feast was barbecue. And, although they both opted for white gowns, neither bride wore a veil--"We like our hair too much!"
Wright, 40, came out in May of 2010 and met Blitzer, 30, a few weeks after. In April 2011 the couple announced their engagement. Connecticut is one of several states that legally recognizes same-sex marriages. The couple are currently living in New York, which recently decided to recognize same-sex marriages, but had not made this ruling at the time of the couple's engagement.
Although Wright claims she has not received much support from the Nashville community after coming out, she told People famous friends such as Faith Hill and former boyfriend Brad Paisley have reached out with encouragement and kindness. The week preceding the wedding, Wright fielded a stream of congratulatory comments on her
A toast to the newest beautiful country bride...and her beautiful bride! Congratulations!
Friday, August 19, 2011
Kat Von D & Jesse James Back On - Yahoo! TV
Kat Von D and Jesse James are back together - and engaged, again.
Just hours after news broke that her show, "LA Ink," had been canceled by TLC (she Tweeted she left the show first), Jesse confirmed the two are back on.
PLAY IT NOW: Oops! Kat Von D Gets Jesse James’ Face Tattooed On Her Body… Prior To Breakup!
"para siempre," he wrote on Twitter, which translates to "for always," in English.
He also linked to a photo of the couple in an intimate embrace. Kat too Tweeted a link to a different photo showing the two in a hug in another location.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: The Colorful Kat Von D
Jesse also confirmed they were back on -- and again engaged -- to People.com.
"Sometimes you are only given one chance in life," he told the mag's website. "It was up to me to open my eyes and see it. That girl is my chance. I will never stop fighting and striving to hold on to her. Showing her how special she is, and how much I love her."
In related news, Kat explained that she left "LA Ink" because she claimed TLC had edited footage of "LA Ink" to focus on her split with Jesse, which the two originally confirmed last month, prior to Thursdays' revelation they were back on.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: They Dated? Surprising Former Couples!
"In an effort to capitalize on my recent breakup, the network has decided to focus their energy on re-editing events that didn't happen while filming," she told People. "I have no regrets and am very proud of the original footage. In my opinion, any attempt to compromise the honesty of that would be an insult to my fans and viewers
Copyright 2011 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
via tv.yahoo.com
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
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Monday, August 15, 2011
Obama criticizes GOP presidential field - Yahoo! News
CANNON FALLS, Minn. (AP) — President Barack Obama launched a rare direct attack Monday on the GOP presidential field, criticizing Republican hopefuls for their blanket opposition to any compromise involving new taxes."Think about that. I mean, that's just not common sense," Obama said at a town hall-style meeting in Cannon Falls, Minn., as he kicked off a three-day bus tour through Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.
"You need to take a balanced approach," he said.
Obama made the comment after describing a moment in last week's GOP presidential debate when all eight of the candidates said they would refuse to support a deal with tax increases, even if tax revenues were outweighed 10-to-1 by spending cuts.
Obama didn't mention any of the candidates by name, and started the remark by saying, "I know it's not election season yet."
But his comment underscored that election season is well under way. And the bus tour itself, although an official White House event rather than a campaign swing, took on a campaign feel coming on the heels of Republican Michele Bachmann's weekend victory in the Iowa Straw Poll and through states Obama won in 2008 but where he now needs to shore up his standing and counter GOP attacks.
It also comes after the president spent much of the summer holed up in the nation's capital enmeshed in bitterly partisan negotiations on the debt crisis that cratered his approval ratings and those of Congress amid a faltering economy and high unemployment.
In response to a question, Obama also took the chance to counter the anti-government stance embraced by the tea party and largely by the Republican presidential field.
He noted that although government doesn't do everything well, the government's also responsible for sending a man to the moon and for the military defending the country, among other things.
"When you go to the National Parks and those folks in the hats, that's government," Obama said.
"As frustrated as you are about politics don't buy into this notion that somehow government is what's holding us back," he said.
He made clear he believes Congress is responsible for that, at least in part, accusing lawmakers of putting politics ahead of the country and calling on voters to tell them to cut it out.
"You've got to send a message to Washington that it's time for the games to stop, it's time to put country first," Obama said.
"If you can do the right thing, then folks in Washington have to do the right thing," the president said. "And if we do that, there is not a problem that we face that we cannot solve."
Eager to get out of Washington, Obama struck a casual tone, ditching his suit and tie for a sports coat and khakis for the open-air event.
via news.yahoo.com
How To Keep Her Home - In-Law Faux-Pas: 6 Things to NEVER Say to Your Daughter-In-Law on Shine
How To Keep Her Home
My own mother-in-law who is the laid back type and wisely doesn't offer her own two cents unless asked for it, says that one thing a MIL should never do is tell a daughter-in-law how to keep her home. So that means no comments on her housecleaning, the way she places her furniture, or her visible dishes in the sink. None of it. Luckily my MIL lives by this rule so she never places pressure on me to have a immaculate house when she visits. If anything, she tells me to sit down and stop cleaning!
Photo by: Thinkstock
via shine.yahoo.com
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Kyokushin Karate Teaches Spirit of 'Perseverance' | Maine Kyokushin Karate
By Anna-Stina Johansson
Note: this was sent to us from a student in Sweden. She started training in Kyokushin in September 2010. It’s a great story and here’s a link the website she writes for: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110731130018iasj.nb/topstory.html
Sometimes I have been wondering if I was out of my mind when I contacted the local karate club last year. You see I have social phobia and training karate when you have that are more than difficult. I have no idea where I got the courage from to contact them so I guess that I was more than crazy that summer day! But maybe I was tired of being scared.
Lucky me they had an email address and not just a phone number to call, because for someone like me it’s easier to write than talk. The reason I sent that email is because I wanted to learn self-defense since someone I’m acquainted with got stalked and raped. This terrible incident made me scared of men and darkness, in fact I dreaded to go out at night. Luckily I got a friendly answer from the head instructor who encouraged me to come and try it out.
One Monday evening in the beginning of September I went to the dojo for the first time to get some more information and watch the others train. I was pretty nervous when I opened the door. The head instructor welcomed me with a smile and I’m glad that he didn’t tell me then that the karate style he teaches, Kyokushin, is the strongest karate in the world, because that would probably had made me even more scared.
However, he did tell me that there weren’t enough people to start a new group but that I was welcome to train with them anyway, he added that it would be tough for me to train with those who already had practiced for several years. And was he right about that! Particularly since the majority of the group is around 20 years old.
I wonder if these young people have any idea how hard it is for a woman in her mid-thirties to start training something as hard as Kyokushin with them, especially since I have recently recovered from an eating disorder, meaning that I have been very skinny and it had been hard to get all the muscles back. I would soon come to experience the rigor of the training. I definitely got to feel where I had my spine when we did sit ups! Ouch!
“When can I start?” I asked curiously.
“Immediately.”
“NO!” I said affrightedly.
“Aha, you want to be mentally prepared” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
You bet, I thought to myself. I didn’t think I had enough strength to do it. The thought that I have bite off more than I could chew crossed my mind. However, it did look fun and I wanted to learn how to physically protect myself, so why not give it a try.
After mentally preparing, I returned the following Thursday. This was my first karate lesson, a moment I will never forget! Kyokushin is a martial art from Japan, therefore are all the names they use for different techniques in Japanese. While I love languages, I must confess Japanese is one tricky language! I didn’t understand much.
The instructor tried his best to show me how to do different movements with my arms and legs. The only thing I came close was to look like a big question mark, it was all very difficult. This may sound silly but it can be very complicated to move your arms and legs in different directions at the same time! All the new information that I tried to absorb just spun round and round in my head. It was too much! The dojo was a stressful place for me.
While we were only around ten people that time in the class, which may not seem like a whole lot of people for some, but for me that’s a crowd! In the end of the lesson there were some physical exercises. The instructor told us to lie down on our backs in order for him to walk on our tummies. I simply wanted to disappear underground when I realized that I had to lie close to an unknown man and after that the instructor had walked on our tummies he too lied down next to me! Did I mention that I’m scared of men? Well, they didn’t know this so I endured. But that was not the end! Now it was one of the other students turn to walk on our bodies and this was repeated until all of us had walked on everyone. And oh how my body ached that night when I came home! Ouch! The next day I discovered bruises at my back.
At the beginning of the semester I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling how sore my body was because of the hard training. Sometimes I even cried, not so much because of the pain but because of the constant physical contact with the other students who were practically strangers to me. I wasn’t used to so much touching and sometimes it was just too much for me to handle. It was also very hard for me to understand what they tried to teach me, which made me feel bad despite that the head instructor had told me that it takes thousands times for the brain to recognize a movement.
The instructors often told me to let my feet slide against the floor when I did the moves. I heard what they said but I wondered if I was the only one who got sweaty feet there! It felt like my feet got sucked into the floor which made it hard to slide. My feet ached too because the skin abraded. I looked at the others’ feet and wondered how long you had to train to get as nice feet as they had. I have trained Kyokushin for two semesters now and still my feet trouble me.
For those of you who don’t know what it’s like to have social phobia; imagine that you often prefer to be invisible rather than visible, you do everything you can to avoid any potentially scary situations and you dread almost all types of physical contact. That’s why I surprised even myself for choosing to expose myself to Kyokushin. There have been many difficult situations for me in the dojo. However, what has encouraged me is something that you often hear when you start training Kyokushin: to never give up even when it’s hard. They have a saying – Osu No Seishin – which means “Spirit of Perseverance”. This has become my motto. These three little words, Osu No Seishin, I often repeat to myself. Karate is very challenging to me, I have sometimes wanted to give up, but each time my new motto has helped me to persevere.
Once I was the only woman in the dojo but I was brave to stay! At one point when we were practicing punches, the head instructor expected me to hit his hand. I didn’t think I had it in me to hit and kick people but I did it anyway, as best as I could.
“I could barely feel it” he smiled. “Remember, this is the strongest karate in the world.”
They always tell me to hit harder. And I thought that I was so brave that dared to touch him since someone like me often think better to flee than to fight poorly. The karate people are so demanding!Anyway, I’m glad that I have the will power never to give up. I am proud to say that I have managed to get my second orange belt! You see, it’s literally blood, sweat and tears behind this accomplishment. However, this would never had been possible if it wasn’t for my two instructors who have shown such patience in teaching me all the complicated techniques you need to know in order to earn a belt. They have been very kind and understanding towards me.
My instructor told me once that I didn’t have to be afraid of the Kyokushin people. Over time I have come to realize that he was right about that. I have never in my entire life met such nice people before! I enjoy the friendly atmosphere in the dojo and the way people show each other respect. The Kyokushin people are great! Still I look at karate with delight mingled with terror and I doubt that I will stop entirely being nervous about going there. Despite all my problems I have grown to love this humble sport. It’s so much fun! Indeed Kyokushin is my latest passion.
via mkkarate.com
One-child policy a surprising boon for China girls - Yahoo! News
BEIJING (AP) — Tsinghua University freshman Mia Wang has confidence to spare.
Asked what her home city of Benxi in China's far northeastern tip is famous for, she flashes a cool smile and says: "Producing excellence. Like me."
A Communist Youth League member at one of China's top science universities, she boasts enviable skills in calligraphy, piano, flute and pingpong.
Such gifted young women are increasingly common in China's cities and make up the most educated generation of women in Chinese history. Never have so many been in college or graduate school, and never has their ratio to male students been more balanced.
To thank for this, experts say, is three decades of steady Chinese economic growth, heavy government spending on education and a third, surprising, factor: the one-child policy.
In 1978, women made up only 24.2 percent of the student population at Chinese colleges and universities. By 2009, nearly half of China's full-time undergraduates were women and 47 percent of graduate students were female, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
In India, by comparison, women make up 37.6 percent of those enrolled at institutes of higher education, according to government statistics.
Since 1979, China's family planning rules have barred nearly all urban families from having a second child in a bid to stem population growth. With no male heir competing for resources, parents have spent more on their daughters' education and well-being, a groundbreaking shift after centuries of discrimination.
"They've basically gotten everything that used to only go to the boys," said Vanessa Fong, a Harvard University professor and expert on China's family planning policy.
Wang and many of her female classmates grew up with tutors and allowances, after-school classes and laptop computers. Though she is just one generation off the farm, she carries an iPad and a debit card, and shops for the latest fashions online.
Her purchases arrive at Tsinghua, where Wang's all-girls dorm used to be jokingly called a "Panda House," because women were so rarely seen on campus. They now make up a third of the student body, up from one-fifth a decade ago.
"In the past, girls were raised to be good wives and mothers," Fong said. "They were going to marry out anyway, so it wasn't a big deal if they didn't want to study."
Not so anymore. Fong says today's urban Chinese parents "perceive their daughters as the family's sole hope for the future," and try to help them to outperform their classmates, regardless of gender.
Some demographers argue that China's fertility rate would have fallen sharply even without the one-child policy because economic growth tends to reduce family size. In that scenario, Chinese girls may have gotten more access to education anyway, though the gains may have been more gradual.
Crediting the one-child policy with improving the lives of women is jarring, given its history and how it's harmed women in other ways. Facing pressure to stay under population quotas, overzealous family planning officials have resorted to forced sterilizations and late-term abortions, sometimes within weeks of delivery, although such practices are illegal.
The birth limits are also often criticized for encouraging sex-selective abortions in a son-favoring society. Chinese traditionally prefer boys because they carry on the family name and are considered better earners.
With the arrival of sonogram technology in the 1980's, some families no longer merely hoped for a boy, they were able to engineer a male heir by terminating pregnancies when the fetus was a girl.
"It is gendercide," said Therese Hesketh, a University College London professor who has studied China's skewed sex ratio. "I don't understand why China doesn't just really penalize people who've had sex-selective abortions and the people who do them. The law exists but nobody enforces it."
To combat the problem, China allows families in rural areas, where son preference is strongest, to have a second child if their first is a girl. The government has also launched education campaigns promoting girls and gives cash subsidies to rural families with daughters.
Still, 43 million girls have "disappeared" in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year.
Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF's representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls "but they have to be born first."
Wang's birth in the spring of 1992 triggered a family rift that persists to this day. She was a disappointment to her father's parents, who already had one granddaughter from their eldest son. They had hoped for a boy.
"Everyone around us had this attitude that boys were valuable, girls were less," Gao Mingxiang, Wang's paternal grandmother, said by way of explanation — but not apology.
Small and stooped, Gao perched on the edge of her farmhouse "kang," a heated brick platform that in northern Chinese homes serves as couch, bed and work area. She wore three sweaters, quilted pants and slippers.
Her granddaughter, tall and graceful and dressed in Ugg boots and a sparkly blue top, sat next to her listening, a sour expression on her face. She wasn't shy about showing her lingering bitterness or her eagerness to leave. She agreed to the visit to please her father but refused to stay overnight — despite a four-hour drive each way.
Fong, the Harvard researcher, says that many Chinese households are like this these days: a microcosm of third world and first world cultures clashing. The gulf between Wang and her grandmother seems particularly vast.
The 77-year-old Gao grew up in Yixian, a poor corn- and wheat-growing county in southern Liaoning province. At 20, she moved less than a mile (about a kilometer) to her new husband's house. She had three children and never dared to dream what life was like outside the village. She remembers rain fell in the living room and a cherished pig was sold, because there wasn't enough money for repairs or feed.
She relied on her daughter to help around the house so her two sons could study.
"Our kids understood," said Gao, her gray hair pinned back with a bobby pin, her skin chapped by weather, work and age. "All families around here were like that."
But Wang's mother, Zheng Hong, did not understand. She grew up 300 kilometers (185 miles) away in the steel-factory town of Benxi with two elder sisters and went to vocational college for manufacturing. She lowers her voice to a whisper as she recalls the sting of her in-law's rejection when her daughter was born.
"I sort of limited my contact with them after that," Zheng said. "I remember feeling very angry and wronged by them. I decided then that I was going to raise my daughter to be even more outstanding than the boys."
They named her Qihua, a pairing of the characters for chess and art — a constant reminder of her parents' hope that she be both clever and artistic.
From the age of six, Wang was pushed hard, beginning with pingpong lessons. Competitions were coed, and she beat boys and girls alike, she said. She also learned classical piano and Chinese flute, practiced swimming and ice skating and had tutors for Chinese, English and math. During summer vacations, she competed in English speech contests and started using the name Mia.
In high school, Wang had cram sessions for China's college entrance exam that lasted until 10 p.m. Her mother delivered dinners to her at school. She routinely woke up at 6 a.m. to study before class.
She had status and expectations her mother and grandmother never knew, a double-edged sword of pampering and pressure.
If she'd had a sibling or even the possibility of a sibling one day, the stakes might not have been so high, her studies not so intense.
Beijing-based population expert Yang Juhua has studied enrollment figures and family size and determined that single children in China tend to be the best educated, while those with elder brothers get shortchanged. She was able to make comparisons because China has many loopholes to the one-child rule, including a few cities that have experimented with a two-child policy for decades.
"Definitely single children are better off, particularly girls," said Yang, who works at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Renmin University. "If the girl has a brother then she will be disadvantaged. ... If a family has financial constraints, it's more likely that the educational input will go to the sons."
While her research shows clearly that it's better, education-wise, for girls to be single children, she favors allowing everyone two kids.
"I do think the (one-child) policy has improved female well-being to a great extent, but most people want two children so their children can have somebody to play with while they're growing up," said Yang, who herself has a college-age daughter.
Ideally, she said, China should relax the policy while also investing more in education so that fewer families will be forced to choose which child to favor when it comes to schooling.
While strides have been made in reaching gender parity in education, other inequalities remain. Women remain woefully underrepresented in government, have higher suicide rates than males, often face domestic violence and workplace discrimination and by law must retire at a younger age than men.
It remains to be seen whether the new generation of degree-wielding women can alter the balance outside the classroom.
Some, like Wang, are already changing perceptions about what women can achieve. When she dropped by her grandmother's house this spring, the local village chief came by to see her. She was a local celebrity: the first village descendent in memory to make it into Tsinghua University.
"Women today, they can go out and do anything," her grandmother said. "They can do big things."
via news.yahoo.com
Friday, August 12, 2011
Entrepreneurship: Nothing to Lose and Everything to Gain | Power Your Future - Yahoo! Finance
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by Dan Schawbel, contributor
I recently caught up with Ryan Blair, who is a serial entrepreneur and author of the new book "Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain." Ryan established his first company, 24-7 Tech when he was only twenty-one years old. Since then, he has created and actively invested in multiple start-ups and has become a self-made multimillionaire. After he sold his company ViSalus Sciences to Blyth in early 2008, the global recession took the company to the brink of failure resulting in a complete write off of the stock and near bankruptcy. Ryan as CEO went "all in" betting his last million dollars on its potential and turned the company around from the edge of failure to more than $150,000,000 a year in revenue in only 16 months winning the coveted DSN Global Turn Around Award in 2010. In this interview, Ryan talks about how he re-branded himself after being in a gang, the issues with the education system, and more.
How did you shake your criminal record and re-brand yourself?
I remember when I was working my way up in the first company that employed me, I used to have nightmares that one day they'd find out about that I had been in a gang, call me into the office, and fire me. In the beginning I didn't talk much about what I'd been through. But eventually when I got to a point where I had established myself as a professional entrepreneur, I embraced my past, used it as part of my branding, and crossed over.
Ryan Blair
In this day and age people want authenticity. Now that the world is social, people know all about you. Assuming you decided to join humanity, that is. It turned out that as I started showing my true identity, so did the rest of the world. One of the reasons my company ViSalus is one of the fastest growing companies in the industry today is because we share our good, bad, and ugly. Like sharing a video of me playing a practical joke on one of my employees, for instance. As a result of embracing authenticity, I turned the company around from near bankruptcy to over $15 million a month today. Unlike our competitors, our distributors and customers know exactly who we are, and I'd say that corporate America has a lot of catching up to do.
What's your take on the educational system? Will a college degree help or hurt your chances at starting a successful business?
As a product of Los Angeles's public school system, in a state with the highest dropout rate in the nation (about 20 percent), I can tell you from personal experience that some of our brightest minds are being misidentified because of a one-size-fits-all learning environment. Because I had ADD and dyslexia I never got past the 9th grade.
I recall sitting with a career counselor in continuation high school, being told that I didn't have the intellect or aptitude to become a doctor or a lawyer. They suggested a trade school, construction, something where I'd be working with my hands.
The irony is that today I employ plenty of doctors and lawyers. Would you rather be a doctor or a lawyer, or a guy who writes a check to doctors and lawyers?
If President Obama phoned me today and told me he was appointing me Educational Czar, I'd turn education into a business, a capitalistic, revenue driven system, creating a competitive environment where each school is trying to attract customers, based on quality of customer experience.
As an entrepreneur, having a college degree or getting classroom training won't hurt your chances for starting a successful business, but it's ultimately not necessary. In Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers," he makes a point that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to master a skill set at a professional level. That means experience, over traditional education.
What three business lessons did you learn from juvenile detention?
I learned a lot about business and life from my time spent incarcerated. I like to call these pieces of wisdom my Philosophies from the Jail Cell to the Boardroom. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that in Juvenile Hall, new guys always get tested. When I went in the first time, I was just a skinny little white kid and I had to learn fast. People will be bumping into you on the basketball court, or asking you for things, testing to see if you're tough.
And everyone knew that if a guy let someone take their milk during lunchtime, they weren't as tough as they looked. Soon you'd be taking their milk everyday, and so would everyone else. It's the same for business, if you give people the impression that you can be taken, you will be.
Also, adaptation is the key to survival. In jail the guy who rises to power isn't always the strongest or the smartest. As prisoners come and go, he's the one that adapts to the changing environment, while influencing the right people. You can use this in business, staying abreast of market trends, changing your game plan as technology shifts, and adapting our strategy around your company's strongest competitive advantages. Darwin was absolutely right — survival is a matter of how you respond to change.
The last lesson I got from jail is that you have to learn how to read people. You don't know who to trust. It's the same for business because a lot of people come into my office with a front. I have to figure out quickly who is the real deal and who isn't. Based on that fact, I developed an HR system that I use when interviewing potential new hires that I call the Connect Four Technique. Yep, you guessed it. I make my future employees — and I have hundreds of them — play me in Connect Four.
Can everyone be an entrepreneur? Can it be learned or do you have to be born with a special gene?
No. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur. There are two types of people in the world, domesticated and undomesticated. Some people are so domesticated through their social programming and belief system, so employee minded, that they could never be entrepreneurs. And they shouldn't even bother trying. The irony is that this is coming from a guy who teaches millions of people how to become entrepreneurs. I'm literally selling a book about becoming an entrepreneur, telling you that not everyone should read it.
To be an entrepreneur, you have to have fighting instincts. Are instincts genetic? I don't think so, but you 'inherit' them from your upbringing. Now, if you're smart you can reprogram your beliefs. But there are still some people that would rather watch other people be entrepreneurs, like the people in the Forbes "richest celebrity list" than take the time to reprogram themselves, and live their lives like rock stars, too.
Is there a need for business plans these days?
When you've really got the entrepreneurial bug, the last thing you want to do is sit down and write a business plan. It's the equivalent of writing a book about playing the guitar before actually knowing how to play the guitar. You don't know what your new business is going to be like. And just like a guitar, a business will have to be tweaked and tuned multiple times, and you'll need long practice sessions and repetition, before you can get even one successful song out of it.
In my book "Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain," I actually included a chapter called "I Hate Business Plans" where I talk about this. Most business plans that get sent to me, I close within seconds of opening them up because they are full of fluff and hype. A business plan should be simple, something you could scribble on a scratch pad. No more than three pages of your business objectives, expected results, and the strategy to get there. But the best business plan is one built from a business that is already up and running and that matches the business's actual results.
The point is that you should be so obsessed with your business that you can't sleep at night because that's all you can think about. And that's your ultimate "business plan."
Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, LLC, a full-service personal branding agency, and author of "Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future."
More from Forbes.com:
20 Businesses You Can Start Tomorrow
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
The Trouble With Business Ethics - BusinessWeek
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Friday, August 5, 2011
Mexico town's police force quits after attack - Yahoo! News
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — An entire 20-man police force resigned in a northern Mexican town after a series of attacks that killed the police chief and five officers over the last three months, state officials said Thursday.
The officers' resignation Thursday left the 13,000 people of Ascension without local police services, Chihuahua state chief prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas said. State and federal police have moved in to take over police work, he said.
The mass resignation appeared to be connected to a Tuesday attack by gunmen that killed three of the town's officers, Salas said.
But it wasn't the first deadly attack on the police department this year.
In mid-May, police chief Manuel Martinez, who had been in office just seven months, was gunned down with two other officers on a nearby highway. The three had been kidnapped a day before police found their bodies riddled with bullets in the back seat of a sedan.
The town's police force was relatively new.
Angry residents had led authorities to replace the entire force last September after the mob killings of two teenagers who had allegedly kidnapped a girl from a seafood restaurant. People claimed police officers were aiding drug gangs.
Martinez, with his new police force, had said he wanted to end the kidnappings and extortions that have terrorized the town where people grow green chili and cotton.
The new police in Ascension had installed a telescopic camera in the town's plaza that rotated, giving officers at the station the ability to zoom on a site as far as the outskirts of town.
In addition, townspeople helped police dig a broad ditch around the town to prevent criminals from escaping on back roads.
Ascension is southwest of Ciudad Juarez, the border city across from El Paso, Texas, that is one of Mexico's most violent cities. The state of Chihuahua has had the most homicides blamed on organized crime and drug trafficking since the government's anti-drug offensive began in December 2006.
Elsewhere, the Defense Department announced that a 19-day offensive in northern states against the Zetas drug cartel had resulted in the shooting deaths of 30 alleged criminals and a soldier.
The army said that among those killed was Jorge Luis de la Pena, the Zetas boss for Nuevo Laredo, the city across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.
Troops also detained 196 people in different cities during operation "North Lynx."
The Zetas gang, known for its viciousness, has been fighting its former ally, the Gulf cartel, in Mexico's north since early 2010.
Near the northern industrial hub of Monterrey, police found the bodies of two men each hanging by an ankle from a pedestrian bridge. Officers said a witness reported that gunmen strung up the men alive and then shot them.
Such grisly displays at bridges have become common in and around Monterrey as well as in other Mexican cities torn by drug violence.
___
Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon in Mexico City contributed to this report.
via news.yahoo.com
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Oxford County Casino Gambling: Learn How To Gamble Responsibly | Oxford Maine Casino
Online Casino guide is a kind of entertainment which could be really fun. If you win, you will gain. But, that should not a major goal. You should always enjoy the game. You will have more fun if you visit the land-based casino with your friends or partner. Even you lose you could have a great time with them.
Even though it’s true that casino could be an entertaining one, it is also true that you will soon get addicted if you are not aware. Below are some tips and basics to consider while you gamble.
Casino should never consider as a way to earn money:
If you are in need of money, discover a way to get that. Casino is a business so it will be useful for you if you’re an owner. Gambling is purposely established to get profited from gamblers. So remember this.
If you find the images of great winners holding big checks with big amounts on it, never forget that lot of people lost their money hence that guy could gain. You’re more probably to be the unsuccessful person than the great achievers. Do not set your heart on acquiring that great check. It’s not going to happen.
Never gamble much than you could afford:
Your money you gamble is your gas money, grocery money or the money to pay off your telephone bill. You should always use your ‘extra’ money to gamble. Think of how you will feel if you go away without money before you spend any bucks to gamble. If you feel sorrow, then you should not spend them to bet.
Limit your money to gamble:
Set your using limit earlier. If you lost that money, then it is time to put an end to gambling. Never cross your using limit. If you can not manage this, take your bucks away from ATM earlier and forget the ATM card or any charge cards at house ahead before you move to gambling. Only use the money which you’ve decided to spend for casino.
Limit your spending time in the casino:
Set yourself the time limit before you visit the land-based casino. Do not allow the gambling interfere your lifespan. Be sure you get out soon enough for any engagements that you’ve, or to be at home soon enough to have enough sleep before you move to do work.
Stick with your loss limit:
Get out of casino if you lose your money that you had budgeted for casino gaming. When you cross the limit by trying to get back which you’ve lost, you may lose much more.
Don’t play if you are depressed:
Trophies Oxford Hills: For the Team Mom - How to Order Trophies for Your Child's Team | Trophies Oxford
Putting together the end of the year recognition gifts for a youth baseball team may seem like a daunting task, but it really can be simple and easy.
The first step is to decide on an appropriate memento for the season. At younger ages, usually age 10 and under, it is appropriate to recognize all the players with a participation trophy. The trophy should not be too large, because the child is still small, and if it is her first trophy, she will value you it greatly regardless of the size, color or any other detail. Kids know that it is what a trophy represents that is important, not the specific style of trophy that matters. But just so you don’t make a mistake, the trophy should glitter as much as possible. Sometimes parents pick out trophies that are more conservative in color, like wood, or another dull finish, but the trophy is not for the parents, and children usually prefer trophies that are very shiny.
Some hard-core competitors think a trophy should never be given just for participation, but we have found that kids under age 10 don’t see the value for winning as much as adults or teenagers, so a trophy still serves as a valuable motivator to continue with the sport of baseball.
As a child moves into adolescence, they no longer the participation award, and only appreciate receiving them when legitimately earned by a specific achievement, rather than for just playing.
Older kids will not value a participation award, but prefer an award that represents achievement. If you wish to recognize a team that does not have a winning record, it is best to do it with a gift of some sort like a backpack custom cap, or team t-shirt. It will help them remember the team, and the experiences they had during the season, but it won’t remind them that they were less than successful.
Once you have chosen an appropriate recognition gift, contact your local awards and recognition shop and see what they carry. Trophy shops often carry a wide variety of pre-designed styles that are time tested as successful representations of achievement.
After settling on an award or gift that is appropriate, we need to personalize it with the information that will help them remember the team and season years down the road. There three most important features are:
- League or location.
- Team Name and year
- The player’s name.
It is a little work to get the names spelled correctly on all the trophies, but just as actors like their names in lights, athletes like to see their name engraved on the trophy. Some stores may wish to charge you for the name, but it should be a reasonable fee of less than one Dollar per name. If you are a negotiator, you might be able to get the trophy company to engrave the player names for free. There was a time when engraving the names was time consuming, but most modern trophy shops use computers to do all the engraving, and the cost of individual names is not as much as it was twenty years ago. When providing the names it is best to use a printed copy rather than handwriting them. Handwritten names are easily misunderstood since many names do not have singular, standard spellings.
You should plan on ordering your awards and recognition gifts at least one week in advance of your team party. Because every trophy order requires custom engraving, and usually needs to be assembled before you receive it, you should allow time for production.
Most importantly, remember that a trophy has one single purpose, to represent some sort of achievement or as a memento for an activity. The color size and shape of the trophy is less important than its meaning, so you don’t have to worry about picking out the exact right product. Pick something that the trophy shop is showing and you are guaranteed that they will like the looks and appreciate what it really represents.
So, armed with this information, make a list of all your players, figure out your budget and go visit your local trophy shop. It should take no more than 15 minutes to make a decision on which trophy to buy and get the order place.
Brian has been recognizing excellence with trophies, medals, plaques and the like since 1987. When he started as an engraver it was all done by hand, he has seen it evolve from hand engraved, to computer engraved to laser engraved. The whole world of trophies and recognition has been revolutionized by technology in the last 20 years, but some principles stay the same.
Mainly, that recognition is an essential need of the human psyche, and that recognition products help people feel good about their achievements.
Brian is currently General Manager of one of the west coast’s largest Awards and Imprinted products supplier. His writings and company store can be found at:
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