Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/300298069?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, April 20, 2013
Boy Scouts' plan: let in gay youth, keep out gay adults
By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Boy Scouts of America on Friday proposed lifting a ban on gay scouts but maintaining a prohibition on gay adults from leading troops, a compromise that attempts to end a fight that has split the century-old American institution into bitter factions.
Reaction from scouting supporters ranged from outrage to limited approval. The biggest organization in scouts, the Mormon Church, said it was studying the proposal, leaving uncertain the outcome of a May vote by scout leaders that will set policy. Gay rights groups said continuing to bar gay adults was unacceptable, but they welcomed the change for youths.
"The general feeling is that this is a bad move," which could precipitate a major crisis, A.J. Smith, president of the Association of Baptists for Scouting, wrote in a website post, attempting to summarize Baptists' views. "This is about a concerted effort to bring down a cultural icon. We must brace ourselves for the long haul on this one."
The scouts' decision is a focal point of a heated gay rights debate in the United States, where polls show public opinion is fast moving toward greater acceptance and a core of social conservatives stridently oppose such change.
In the coming months, the Supreme Court will rule on whether to strike down parts of a federal law that defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman. In 2011, the military repealed a ban on openly gay soldiers.
The Boy Scouts proposal would create a situation where a gay youth could become a scout and then be forced to resign when he becomes an adult.
Scout leaders in 2000 won a Supreme Court battle over the right to exclude gays. There are more than 2.6 million youth scouts and 1 million adults, with faith-based groups sponsoring 70 percent of scout units.
If the resolution is approved, "no youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone," Deron Smith, the organization's spokesman, told Reuters.
But the policy is not changed for adults, the group said, and an internal document obtained by Reuters says that when youth members become adults, they "must meet the requirements of our adult standards" to remain in the group.
LONG STUDY BEFORE COMPROMISE
Smith said a parents in three of four U.S. regions opposed the current membership policy.
A report on the matter found religious groups linked to the Scouts were concerned with homosexual adult leaders, not with youth, and concluded "a change in the membership policy specific to youth only would be consistent with the religious beliefs of the BSA's major chartered organizations."
AT&T Chief Executive and Chairman Randall Stephenson, a Boy Scouts board member who had called for allowing gays scouts and a key corporate advocate on the issue, endorsed the new policy on youths but did not comment on banning gay adults.
"I fully support the BSA Executive Council's resolution to ensure all youth have the opportunity to participate in scouting and benefit from the life-long leadership skills scouting helps develop," he said in a statement.
Gay rights groups were quick to say the decision was not far-reaching enough.
"By refusing to consider an end to its ban on gay and lesbian parents, the Boy Scouts have missed an opportunity to exercise leadership and usher the organization back to relevancy," said Rich Ferraro, a spokesperson for GLAAD, which promotes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon church, which has more than 430,000 youths in scouts, "will take the time needed to fully review the language and study the implications of this new proposal," spokesman Michael Purdy said.
The Mormon church has consistently opposed gay marriage, and was a primary promoter of California's 2008 ban, known as Proposition 8. But recently it has emphasized respecting gay church members and declared that homosexuality is not a choice, reflecting changing attitudes among members.
"This was an exceptionally difficult decision as a business," said Patrick Boyle, whose 1994 book "Scout's Honor" examined sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America.
"They were stuck in a very bad spot with their constituents divided - constituents being the parents, and also the churches and the businesses that support the scouts."
The road to a decision has been long. In July 2012, the group's board voted to uphold the gay ban. Six months later, group leaders said they were mulling over whether to remove the national restriction, leaving local branches to decide whether to admit gays and lesbians. A final vote, expected in February, was delayed following a request from a coalition of 33 faith-based councils that represent about one-fifth of all youth members in the Boy Scouts.
Boyle notes that this reversal "shows how the gay rights movement has caught fire in the past dozen years."
Chuck Small, a BSA adult leader and the parent of 10- and 12-year-old scouts in South Carolina, welcomed the proposal.
"It's a hard and divisive issue, but what it comes down to is that we learn more from people who are different from us than people who are like us," Small said.
"I think it's a healthy thing, and I hope my boys are up to the challenge to accept people for what they do, rather than what they believe or how they're made up."
(Additional reporting by Chris Francescani and Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Vicki Allen, Andrew Hay, Eric Walsh and Stacey Joyce)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-boy-scouts-set-end-ban-gay-members-150711650.html
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'Soft Targets' Remain Vulnerable to Terrorist Attacks
Once the drama is Boston is over, attention will inevitably turn to how to prevent another terrorist attack on an event with limited security.
These so-called ?soft targets? ? places like malls, sporting events, and movie theaters ? have always been vulnerable to terrorist attacks especially given how much harder it is to attack aircraft since 9/11. But until Monday?s deadly bombings, it wasn?t a fear for many people.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, security was boosted for airports, government offices, and other high-profile, "hard" targets as well as nuclear and chemical plants. And while local authorities were given technologies and resources to respond to an attack--more paramedics and mobile command centers--their ability to prevent attacks on soft targets in the first place remains limited--whether it's a crowded mall during the holiday shopping season or an outdoor summer concert.
?You have to combine the ability to allow people to go in and out and do what they want to do on a normal basis, and separating those who are intent on doing bad things,? said Bob Liscouski, who served as the assistant secretary for infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2005.
The idea of placing a metal detector in every mall in the U.S., Liscouski said, is not realistic. So, what?s stopping a terrorist from going to a department store or a sporting event and causing mass casualties??
In all reality, the only real limits for terrorists to attack these locations comes down to their desire to carry out the attack and their accessibility to the types of materials they need for the attack?whether it?s for a bomb of some sort or another high-impact weapon. It?s a low-cost task with a high impact.
One encouraging note, say experts, is that the kinds of things that help prevent attacks on hard targets will help at least a bit with soft ones--border security, surveillance cameras, confidential informants, and so on. Those safeguards probably wouldn't have helped prevent the Boston Marathon bombings but they could conceivably forestall other attacks on targets, hard or soft.
The idea is to prevent those who could do harm long before they load up a pressure cooker with an improvised explosive device. Experts also point to the importance of making sure that mental health services are available and to encourage mental health professionals to come forward if they think their patients are a danger to themselves and others. No system of attack prevention is flawless, of course. But a quilt of different solutions can help. Unfortunately while there are expensive but relatively simple solutions for preventing hijackers from ramming a plane into a building--more security guards, hardened cockpit doors, air marshals--the idea of distinguishing a troubled adolescent from a troubled adolescent killer can't be solved by hiring a few more TSA agents.
?The government can never guarantee 100 percent security,? said Rick Nelson, a senior affiliate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ?And even if they could, we wouldn?t want to pay the cost both in terms of dollars and in the erosion of civil liberties.?
Where local authorities can make the most difference happens right after an attack takes places, using surveillance technology, social media monitoring, or even license plate readers to catch suspects.
?Not everything is a technology solution, but there is a lot of great technology can be applied that can give you a better sense of situational awareness,? Liscouski said. ?You may not be able to prevent the incident, but you can certainly enhance the response rate to limit the amount of damage.?
But for many locations, the resources aren?t there. A security officer at a mall being paid $10 per hour cannot properly respond to a terrorist attack. The burden of the cost of boosting security for these soft targets falls on the owners of the locations, whether it's a stadium or a movie theatre. For example, the real estate group that owns a mall would have to invest heavily in security. And until there?s a mall bombing at a mall, the likelihood this investment would take place across the country is remote.
At its root, one way to detect and stop an attack, Nelson explains, is simple and for those in Washington well-known: If you see something, say something. Homeland security officials consistently say that everyday Americans should continue to stay vigilant and aware of their surroundings.
?Every individual, every American has a role in this, a responsibility,? Nelson said. ?If you are aware of suspicious packages or know first aid, those type of skills are critically important to building a developing a resilient society that can overcome these kinds of events more quickly.?
The news surrounding the Boston bombings will fade, and Liscouski warns this is the time when an attack is most likely.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/soft-targets-remain-vulnerable-terrorist-attacks-165158217--politics.html
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Friday, April 19, 2013
Community gardens may produce more than vegetables
Apr. 18, 2013 ? People who participate in community gardening have a significantly lower body mass index -- as well as lower odds of being overweight or obese -- than do their non-gardening neighbors. Researchers at the University of Utah reported these and other findings in the American Journal of Public Health published online today.
"It has been shown previously that community gardens can provide a variety of social and nutritional benefits to neighborhoods," says Cathleen Zick, lead author of the study and professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah. "But until now, we did not have data to show a measurable health benefit for those who use the gardens."
To gauge a health benefit, researchers used body mass index, or BMI, a calculation based on a person's height and weight and which is widely used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems. In general, a normal BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9; a smaller number is better than a larger one.
Results showed that women community gardeners had an average BMI 1.84 lower than their neighbors, which translates to an 11 pound weight difference for a woman 5 feet 5 inches tall. For men, the BMI was lower by 2.36 for gardeners -- a difference of 16 pounds for a man 5 feet 10 inches tall -- compared to the neighborhood cohort. Gardeners were also less likely to be overweight or obese; 46 percent less for women gardeners, and 62 percent less for men gardeners.
Researchers also looked at the BMIs of individuals related to the gardeners, namely siblings and spouses.
When compared to same sex siblings, a similar advantage to unrelated neighbors was found. Women in the community gardening group had a BMI 1.88 lower than their sisters; for men, the difference was 1.33 lower for the gardeners compared to their brothers. Both differences were statistically significant.
For spouses of married gardeners, there was no difference in BMI or odds of being overweight or obese. That finding was not surprising, as researchers had expected that spouses would benefit from eating food produced in the garden, and perhaps from helping out with the gardening activities.
"These data are intriguing, although they were drawn from participants in a single community gardening organization in Salt Lake City and may not apply broadly until more research is done," Zick notes. "However, as the percentage of Americans living in urban areas continues to grow, this initial study validates the idea that community gardens are a valuable neighborhood asset that can promote healthier living. That could be of interest to urban planners, public health officials and others focused on designing new neighborhoods and revitalizing old ones."
How the study was conducted
The study used unique administrative data to examine -- for the first time -- the relationship between community gardening and a health outcome. Researchers compared community gardeners' BMIs, and odds of being overweight or obese, with three control groups.
One group included unrelated people from the same geographic neighborhood. This group would share similar physical environments, like walkability and proximity to food shops and stores, as well as economic status.
The second group was same sex siblings, who would be expected to share genetic predispositions for weight and family influences on diet and exercise.
The third group was married spouses of the gardeners, because they would likely share lifestyle and food choices, including food grown in the community garden.
Gardeners were drawn from a pool of individuals active with Wasatch Community Gardens (WCG), a 20-year old non-profit organization located in Salt Lake City. WCG provides a network of urban gardens located throughout the local area, as well as classes, programs and events focused on gardening and eating locally. After gaining assurance from the gardeners that they had no concerns regarding WCG's involvement with the study, WCG staff provided names and addresses of 423 adults who had gardened on one of the community plots for at least one year between 1995 and 2010.
Data for neighbors, siblings and spouses were drawn from administrative records, using the Utah Population Database, a multi-faceted data resource used by health researchers. It includes a large set of Utah family histories, and links to publicly-available historical birth, marriage, and driver's license records.
A total of 375 gardeners were linked to BMI information in the database; once linked, driver's license records were used to build a sample of neighbors -- individuals matched for age, gender and residential location, and Utah marriage, divorce and birth records to identify siblings and spouses. In the end, data on 198 gardeners and 67 spouses were included in the analyses, and height and weight information came from driver's license records after they began community gardening.
"We know obesity is costly," Zick concludes. "This study begins to shed light on the costs and benefits of the choices families make about eating and physical activity. Future research with controlled, randomized field studies across a range of communities are needed to further advance our understanding of the role gardening can play in healthy lives."
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/0002PAHkWiU/130418162135.htm
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Thursday, April 18, 2013
Astronomers discover massive star factory in early universe
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Smaller begets bigger.
Such is often the case for galaxies, at least: the first galaxies were small, then eventually merged together to form the behemoths we see in the present universe.
Those smaller galaxies produced stars at a modest rate; only later?when the universe was a couple of billion years old?did the vast majority of larger galaxies begin to form and accumulate enough gas and dust to become prolific star factories. Indeed, astronomers have observed that these star factories?called starburst galaxies?became prevalent a couple of billion years after the Big Bang.
But now a team of astronomers, which includes several from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), has discovered a dust-filled, massive galaxy churning out stars when the cosmos was a mere 880 million years old?making it the earliest starburst galaxy ever observed.
The galaxy is about as massive as our Milky Way, but produces stars at a rate 2,000 times greater, which is a rate as high as any galaxy in the universe. Generating the mass equivalent of 2,900 suns per year, the galaxy is especially prodigious?prompting the team to call it a "maximum-starburst" galaxy.
"Massive, intense starburst galaxies are expected to only appear at later cosmic times," says Dominik Riechers, who led the research while a senior research fellow at Caltech. "Yet, we have discovered this colossal starburst just 880 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was at little more than 6 percent of its current age." Now an assistant professor at Cornell, Riechers is the first author of the paper describing the findings in the April 18 issue of the journal Nature.
While the discovery of this single galaxy isn't enough to overturn current theories of galaxy formation, finding more galaxies like this one could challenge those theories, the astronomers say. At the very least, theories will have to be modified to explain how this galaxy, dubbed HFLS3, formed, Riechers says.
"This galaxy is just one spectacular example, but it's telling us that extremely vigorous star formation was possible early in the universe," says Jamie Bock, professor of physics at Caltech and a coauthor of the paper.
The astronomers found HFLS3 chock full of molecules such as carbon monoxide, ammonia, hydroxide, and even water. Because most of the elements in the universe?other than hydrogen and helium?are fused in the nuclear furnaces of stars, such a rich and diverse chemical composition is indicative of active star formation. And indeed, Bock says, the chemical composition of HFLS3 is similar to those of other known starburst galaxies that existed later in cosmic history.
Last month, a Caltech-led team of astronomers?a few of whom are also authors on this newer work?discovered dozens of similar galaxies that were producing stars as early as 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. But none of them existed as early as HFLS3, which has been studied in much greater detail.
Those previous observations were made possible by gravitational lensing, in which large foreground galaxies act as cosmic magnifying glasses, bending the light of the starburst galaxies and making their detection easier. HFLS3, however, is only weakly lensed, if at all. The fact that it was detectable without the help of lensing means that it is intrinsically a bright galaxy in far-infrared light?nearly 30 trillion times as luminous as the sun and 2,000 times more luminous than the Milky Way.
Because the galaxy is enshrouded in dust, it's very faint in visible light. The galaxy's stars, however, heat up the dust, causing it to radiate in infrared wavelengths. The astronomers were able to find HFLS3 as they sifted through data taken by the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, which studies the infrared universe. The data was part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES), an effort co-coordinated by Bock to observe a large patch of the sky (roughly 1,300 times the size of the moon) with Herschel.
Amid the thousands of galaxies detected in the survey, HFLS3 appeared as just a faint dot?but a particularly red one. That caught the attention of Darren Dowell, a visiting associate at Caltech who was analyzing the HerMES data. The object's redness meant that its light was being substantially stretched toward longer (and redder) wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. The more distant an object, the more its light is stretched, and so a very red source would be very far away. The only other possibility would be that?because cooler objects emit light at longer wavelengths?the object might be unusually cold; the astronomers' analysis, however, ruled out that possibility. Because it takes the light billions of years to travel across space, seeing such a distant object is equivalent to looking deep into the past. "We were hoping to find a massive starburst galaxy at vast distances, but we did not expect that one would even exist that early in the universe," Riechers says.
To study HFLS3 further, the astronomers zoomed in with several other telescopes. Using the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA)?a series of telescope dishes that Caltech helps operate in the Inyo Mountains of California?as well as the Z-Spec instrument on the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the team was able to study the chemical composition of the galaxy in detail?in particular, the presence of water and carbon monoxide?and measure its distance. The researchers also used the 10-meter telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea to determine to what extent HFLS3 was gravitationally lensed.
This galaxy is the first such object in the HerMES survey to be analyzed in detail. This type of galaxy is rare, the astronomers say, but to determine just how rare, they will pursue more follow-up studies to see if they can find more of them lurking in the HerMES data. These results also hint at what may soon be discovered with larger infrared observatories, such as the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and the planned Cerro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope (CCAT), of which Caltech is a partner institution.
The title of the Nature paper is "A Dust-Obscured Massive Maximum-Starburst Galaxy at a Redshift of 6.34." In addition to Riechers, Bock, and Dowell, the other Caltech authors of the paper are visiting associates in physics Matt Bradford, Asantha Cooray, and Hien Nguyen; postdoctoral scholars Carrie Bridge, Attila Kovacs, Joaquin Vieira, Marco Viero, and Michael Zemcov; staff research scientist Eric Murphy; and Jonas Zmuidzinas, the Merle Kingsley Professor of Physics and the Chief Technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). There are a total of 64 authors. Bock, Dowell, and Nguyen helped build the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) instrument on Herschel.
Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at JPL in Pasadena, California. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech in Pasadena, supports the U.S. astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
The W. M. Keck Observatory operates the largest, most scientifically productive telescopes on Earth. The two 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectroscopy and a world-leading laser guide-star adaptive optics system. The observatory is operated by a private 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and is a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and NASA.
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California Institute of Technology: http://www.caltech.edu
Thanks to California Institute of Technology for this article.
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Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Black, Arab rail staff kept away from Peres visit to Paris: union
PARIS (Reuters) - A French union has accused its national railway of keeping black and Arab employees out of sight when Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Paris to avoid him coming into contact with Muslims, and an investigation has been launched.
The SNCF state railway concern and the Israeli Embassy denied the accusations.
The Sud Rail union said the workers, employed by Itiremia, a subsidiary of SNCF, were deliberately kept off a rota when the station master selected extra staff for Peres's arrival by train at the Gare du Nord station last month.
Other black and Arab workers were asked to stay away from the platform where Peres, who was on a European tour, would be disembarking, and workers were told the reason was "for their own security", the union said in a statement.
"The manager of the site went 'shopping' among his staff to exclude blacks and Arabs because no Muslims were wanted to welcome the Israeli head of state," the statement said.
The Itiremia works council has begun an internal investigation to check the allegations, determine whether discriminatory instructions were issued and who, if anyone, was behind them.
In a statement, the SNCF denied receiving any order from Peres' staff, the Israeli Embassy or the French interior ministry to discriminate among its workers.
It also denied issuing any discriminatory instructions to the Itiremia baggage handling company.
Israeli Embassy spokesman Yaron Ganburg denied allegations that a request for non-Muslim baggage handlers had come from any Israeli body, pointing out that Peres met with Muslim leaders during his trip. "This is a lie, pure and simple," Ganburg said.
Yacine Chaoui, a Sud Rail member in charge of the investigation, said questioning did not reveal evidence of written instructions but that an Itiremia station chief had received oral instructions to keep minority workers out.
"We are convinced there were instructions to discriminate, but we are still trying to determine where they came from," said Chaoui.
Israel is at odds with most Arab and Islamic countries partly because of its unresolved conflict with Palestinians who seek a state on land captured by the Jewish state in a 1967 war.
France's secular tradition forbids keeping official records of people's religious or ethnic background. But advocacy groups argue that discrimination based on "foreign-sounding" names goes largely unchecked.
(Reporting by Nicholas Vinocur and Lucien Libert, editing by Mark Heinrich)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/black-arab-rail-staff-kept-away-peres-visit-180523535--business.html
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