28-04-2011 om 04:47 geschreven door lilihuang  

 nike sb shoesThe 18.5-mile (30 km) radius around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is known officially as the "zone of alienation." Abandoned cars, tractors, buildings and homes litter the landscape and are slowly being devoured by trees and shrubs. A classroom bulletin board not far from the central Lenin Street in the town where the plant workers used to live reads, "No return. Farewell, Prypyat, April 28, 1986." This eerie landscape about 50 miles (80 km) from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, provides a snapshot in time — of the frenzied evacuation following the meltdown 25 years ago today of reactor core No. 4, a meltdown that produced a radioactive plume across the northern hemisphere in the worst nuclear accident in history. It also presents a stark vision of the possible future thousands of miles away in Fukushima prefecture, Japan, where emergency workers are in the seventh week of a battle to cool several partially melted reactor cores. (See pictures of the Chernobyl zone, 25 years after the nuclear disaster.) Even now, the effort to contain the Chernobyl accident is far from over: workers in white suits and respirator masks show up for work every day, constructing a new concrete shield to replace a massive sarcophagus built in 1986. hermes birkin handbags The sarcophagus, which contains the molten core, is starting to crumble and could collapse, which could release another radioactive cloud into the air. Chernobyl offers many lessons about what Princeton University physics professor Robert Socolow calls the "afterheat" of a nuclear disaster — but it's the generational lesson that's the most important one. Because the isotopes released during a nuclear accident remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, cleanup is the work not just of first responders, but also of their descendants — and their descendants' descendants. cheap coach handbags outletIt's messy, it's expensive, and it's the kind of job that forever denies the workers themselves the satisfaction of standing back and admiring the results of their efforts. Asked when the reactor site would again become inhabitable, Ihor Gramotkin, director of the Chernobyl power plant, replies "at least 20,000 years." (See pictures of the worst nuclear disasters.) That timescale makes things more than simply frustrating. Over the course of millennia, after all, how can safety measures be maintained? Already, the financing of cleanup and maintenance operations is proving difficult. On April 19, the Ukrainian government hosted an international donor conference in Kiev to raise money for the $1.1 billion concrete shelter. Coach Scarves The government fell some $300 million short of that goal and is holding out for further pledges. But even the gigantic concrete shield — which is 360 ft. (110 meters) high and weighs 29,000 tons — has a woefully brief life when measured in radiological time: it will need to be replaced in a century unless the extremely radioactive and molten core inside can be safely removed and stored somewhere else, itself an expensive and difficult operation. "Neither Ukraine nor the world community has the right to turn its back [on Chernobyl]," Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said at the end of the conference. "The accident left a deep wound that we will have to cope with for many years." Everything to do with radiation moves at an insidiously slow pace. coach handbags outlet Exposure to radioactive particles increases the risk of cancer, but the level of the danger depends on the dose and the age and health of the affected population. When radiation does kill, it can still take years. Around Chernobyl, no accurate dose estimates on the most heavily affected population were made until after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and, as a result, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine all use different techniques for measuring exposure.

27-04-2011 om 04:29 geschreven door lilihuang  

26-04-2011 om 04:44 geschreven door lilihuang  

 nike dunk shoesIt was an injustice that led a 26-year-old Tunisian street trader called Mohammed Bouazizi to douse himself in petrol and strike a match. The resulting conflagration killed Bouazizi, crackled through Tunisia, chasing out its despised President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and sparked uprisings across the region that are still burning fiercely. On December 17, Bouazizi, a fruit and vegetable seller, was quietly doing business on the street in his home town of Sidi Bouzid when a female municipal inspector confiscated his cart and his wares and, adding grave insult to financial injury, slapped him. Bouazizi wasn't killed instantly by the fire he set but clung on until Jan. cheap hermes birkin4. Ten days later Ben Ali fled the country. The rest is history in the making—except for Bouazizi's story, which appears to be history in the remaking. The municipal inspector Fedia Hamdi has broken her silence to contest this version of events. A British journalist Elizabeth Day tracked down Hamdi, 46, after a tribunal cleared her of the assault last Tuesday. The sole accuser claiming to have seen the slap had a grudge against Hamdi; four witnesses disputed his evidence. Hamdi herself claims when she asked Bouazizi to leave—he was hawking his wares without licence—he became angry and grabbed her hand, hurting her finger. cheap coach handbags"I would never have hit him. It was impossible because I am a woman, first of all, and I live in a traditionally Arab community which bans a woman from hitting a man. And, secondly, I was frightened," Hamdi told Day. Hamdi spent 111 days in detention awaiting the tribunal and says now she has been "a scapegoat." Coach Kristin HandbagsBouazizi's suffering triggered the Arab Spring, but it seems he may not have been the only victim that day last December.

25-04-2011 om 04:53 geschreven door lilihuang  

 nike dunk shoesIt was the "Little White Donkey" incident that pushed many readers over the edge. That's the name of the piano tune that Amy Chua, Yale law professor and self-described "tiger mother," forced her 7-year-old daughter Lulu to practice for hours on end — "right through dinner into the night," with no breaks for water or even the bathroom, until at last Lulu learned to play the piece. For other readers, it was Chua calling her older daughter Sophia "garbage" after the girl behaved disrespectfully — the same thing Chua had been called as a child by her strict Chinese father. (See a TIME Q&A with Amy Chua.) And, oh, yes, for some readers it was the card that young Lulu made for her mother's birthday. hermes birkin handbags "I don't want this," Chua announced, adding that she expected to receive a drawing that Lulu had "put some thought and effort into." Throwing the card back at her daughter, she told her, "I deserve better than this. So I reject this." Even before Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua's proudly politically incorrect account of raising her children "the Chinese way," arrived in bookstores Jan. 11, her parenting methods were the incredulous, indignant talk of every playground, supermarket and coffee shop. A prepublication excerpt in the Wall Street Journal (titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior") started the ferocious buzz; the online version has been read more than 1 million times and attracted more than 7,000 comments so far. coach handbags outletWhen Chua appeared Jan. 11 on the Today show, the usually sunny host Meredith Vieira could hardly contain her contempt as she read aloud a sample of viewer comments: "She's a monster"; "The way she raised her kids is outrageous"; "Where is the love, the acceptance?" Chua, a petite 48-year-old who carries off a short-skirted wardrobe that could easily be worn by her daughters (now 15 and 18), gave as good as she got. "To be perfectly honest, I know that a lot of Asian parents are secretly shocked and horrified by many aspects of Western parenting," including "how much time Westerners allow their kids to waste — hours on Facebook and computer games — and in some ways, how poorly they prepare them for the future," she told Vieira with a toss of her long hair. "It's a tough world out there." (See Nancy Gibbs' take on the challenges of parenting.) Chua's reports from the trenches of authoritarian parenthood are indeed disconcerting, even shocking, in their candid admission of maternal ruthlessness. Her book is a Mommie Dearest for the age of the memoir, when we tell tales on ourselves instead of our relatives. Coach Heels&Sandals But there's something else behind the intense reaction to Tiger Mother, which has shot to the top of best-seller lists even as it's been denounced on the airwaves and the Internet. Though Chua was born and raised in the U.S., her invocation of what she describes as traditional "Chinese parenting" has hit hard at a national sore spot: our fears about losing ground to China and other rising powers and about adequately preparing our children to survive in the global economy. Her stories of never accepting a grade lower than an A, of insisting on hours of math and spelling drills and piano and violin practice each day (weekends and vacations included), of not allowing playdates or sleepovers or television or computer games or even school plays, for goodness' sake, have left many readers outraged but also defensive. The tiger mother's cubs are being raised to rule the world, the book clearly implies, while the offspring of "weak-willed," "indulgent" Westerners are growing up ill equipped to compete in a fierce global marketplace. One of those permissive American parents is Chua's husband, Jed Rubenfeld (also a professor at Yale Law School). He makes the occasional cameo appearance in Tiger Mother, cast as the tenderhearted foil to Chua's merciless taskmaster. When Rubenfeld protested Chua's harangues over "The Little White Donkey," for instance, Chua informed him that his older daughter Sophia could play the piece when she was Lulu's age. Sophia and Lulu are different people, Rubenfeld remonstrated reasonably.cheap coach handbags "Oh, no, not this," Chua shot back, adopting a mocking tone: "Everyone is special in their special own way. Even losers are special in their own special way."

22-04-2011 om 05:05 geschreven door lilihuang  

21-04-2011 om 04:58 geschreven door lilihuang  

nike dunk shoesGreg Jeloudov was 35 and new to America when he decided to join the Army. Like most soldiers, he was driven by both patriotism for his adopted homeland and the pragmatic notion that the military could be a first step in a career that would enable him to provide for his new family. Instead, Jeloudov arrived at Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training in May 2009, in the middle of the economic crisis and rising xenophobia. The soldiers in his unit, responding to his Russian accent and New York City address, called him a “champagne socialist” and a “commie faggot. ” He was, he told NEWSWEEK, “in the middle of the viper’s pit.” nike sb shoesLess than two weeks after arriving on base, he was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States. When he reported the attack to unit commanders, he says they told him, “It must have been your fault. You must have provoked them.” What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, it’s an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hell—a soldier can’t just quit his job to get away from his abusers. But now, as the Pentagon has begun to acknowledge the rampant problem of sexual violence for both genders, men are coming forward in unprecedented numbers, telling their stories and hoping that speaking up will help them, and others, put their lives back together. birkin bag “We don’t like to think that our men can be victims,” says Kathleen Chard, chief of the posttraumatic-stress unit at the Cincinnati VA. “We don’t want to think that it could happen to us. If a man standing in front of me who is my size, my skill level, who has been raped—what does that mean about me? I can be raped, too.” In fact, it is the high victimization rate of female soldiers—women in the armed forces are now more likely to be assaulted by a fellow soldier than killed in combat—that has helped cast light on men assaulting other men. For most of military history, there was neither a system nor language in place to deal with incidents of soldier-on-soldier sexual assault. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Defense Department even acknowledged such incidents as an offense, and initially only female victims were recognized. Coach Ergo Handbags But last year more than 110 men made confidential reports of sexual assault by other men, nearly three times as many as in 2007. The real number of victims is surely much higher. Even among civilians, sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. In the military the silence is nearly complete. By the Pentagon’s own estimate, figures for assaults on women likely represent less than 20 percent of actual incidents. Another study released in March found that just one in 15 men in the Air Force would report being sexually assaulted, compared with one in five women.

20-04-2011 om 04:55 geschreven door lilihuang  

 discount gucci bagsLosing weight comes with a host of health benefits — including making your brain sharper. Yes, it turns out that in addition to being bad for your heart, carrying excess weight may impair cognitive functions such as memory and attention. Losing weight, therefore, may help improve these mental functions, according to new research led by John Gunstad, assistant professor of psychology at Kent State University, and reported in the journal Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases. A growing body of evidence suggests that obesity is linked to cognitive deficits, and it is a known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, dementia and stroke. So Gunstad and his team speculated that losing weight might improve mental function. For their study, they measured memory and attention in a group of 150 overweight participants, some of whom underwent gastric bypass surgery for weight loss and some who did not. coach outlet All of the volunteers completed mental-skills tests to assess their baseline abilities of recall and attention at the beginning of the study, and again 12 weeks later, after some of them had the operation and lost weight. To begin with, about 24% of the patients showed impaired learning and 23% showed signs of poor memory recall when tested. By the end of the study, those who had lost weight (on average they shed about 17% of their initial body weight) had boosted their scores into the average or above average range for cognitive functions. Scores for the volunteers who didn't undergo weight-loss surgery dropped even further. "We were cautiously optimistic going in that we would see a positive effect from the weight loss, but it was still great to see it," says Gunstad. Why would body weight have anything to do with brain function? It turns out that obesity works on a number of different metabolic pathways that can affect the way we process information. Gucci D Gold Bags"Obesity affects a number of physiological mechanisms that can have an adverse effect on the brain," says Gunstad. "Hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, all of which are consequences of being overweight, are all bad for the brain." Focusing on patients having weight-reduction surgery helped Gunstad to establish relatively quickly whether losing weight had any effect on mental function. Those who have the procedure, he says, tend to lose weight rapidly in a short period of time, faster than people who diet and exercise. Now that he's seen the positive impact that weight loss can have on memory and attention, he says he will next study those who opt to shed the pounds by eating healthier and getting more active. He anticipates that losing weight the old-fashioned way will have a similarly positive effect on the brain. "If we can improve the condition with surgery, then we can see if we can produce the same change with behavioral weight loss as well," he says. Gucci Indy BagsAnd prove that a healthy weight is good for both body and mind.

18-04-2011 om 05:01 geschreven door lilihuang