of the woman who’s now president of Harvard: WashPo
I liked this part:
Yes, there were already women presidents at Ivy League universities. But there was no way Faust could have anticipated that Rudenstine’s successor, Larry Summers, would go down in flames, his leadership style condemned as arrogant and non-consultative by a significant portion of the faculty.
And there was certainly no way to predict the irony that Summers would fan those flames with ill-advised remarks on the possibility that high-level science and engineering might be — just as Faust’s mother had tried to warn her, all those years ago — a man’s world.
Last February, on the day her selection was announced, Faust made a point of drawing a distinction for a Boston Globe reporter. “I am the president of Harvard,” she said, “not the woman president of Harvard.”
“What I meant by that was: I don’t have an asterisk,” she says now. Nothing about being a woman makes her less powerful or legitimate than her male predecessors.
Just thought it was an interesting contrast with someone who’s running on the fact that she would be the ‘woman president’ of the US. YMMV.
enjoys a little banking industry schadenfreude: Reuters
The woes in the U.S. financial sector are “poetic justice” for bankers who designed and sold complex investments that have since gone sour, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said on Wednesday.
The head of the Berkshire Hathaway Inc group of companies also played down worries about a credit crunch by saying that recent interest rate cuts mean low-cost funds are readily available.
But he warned that the U.S. dollar will continue to slide unless the country can rein in its yawning trade deficit — the “biggest factor” behind the decline. Still, he said, the U.S. economy will “do very well over time.”
Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest people, appeared to see irony in the fact that many of the banks who marketed complex investments which have now crashed are bearing much of the fallout.
“It’s sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end,” he said.
that this would be expected in an election year? Reuters
U.S. drivers could enjoy a drop of up to 50 cents per gallon in gasoline prices by this spring as high fuel prices and the threat of a recession force them to conserve, experts said on Wednesday.
U.S. gasoline supplies hit a near-14-year high of 227.5 million barrels last week, helped by falling demand for the fuel, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday.
“Gasoline stocks are continuing to increase and it implies that people are probably cutting down on gasoline consumption — a result of the weakening economy,” said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading in Chicago.
I’m betting on less than $2.20/gallon by late October.
A pioneering technique that uses the body’s nerves to bypass spinal injuries could help thousands of people to regain feeling, and possibly even the use of paralysed limbs, scientists say. Using similar principles to heart bypass surgery, where veins from a patient’s leg are used to get around an artery blockage, scientists in the US have shown that nerves can be used to circumvent spinal damage and reconnect the brain to the body.
The procedure, successfully used in experiments with rats, raises the prospect of the first human trials within five years, offering hope to the 40,000-plus people in the UK with spinal cord injuries.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his Mehdi Army militia to maintain its six-month ceasefire, Sadr’s spokesman said on Thursday, while his militiamen clashed with Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.
Salah al-Ubaidi said the ceasefire, which expires later this month, should continue to be observed until militia members are told it is over or has been renewed.
[…]
Sadr has been gauging the mood among senior figures about the ceasefire, Ubaidi told Reuters earlier this week.
Recent statements from within Sadr’s camp have indicated growing unease about the truce, with members claiming they are being targeted by Iraqi security forces.
U.S. commanders have said they are confident Sadr, the son of a revered Shi’ite cleric killed under Saddam Hussein, would extend the freeze, although U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to target “rogue” Mehdi Army units.
His Holiness Maharishi Mehesh Yogi, the illustrious sage of the Vedic tradition of India, who over 50 years ago introduced his Transcendental Medidation program to sprititually regenerate mankind and create world peace, passed away peacefully at his international headquarters in Vlodrop, The Netherlands.
“Maharishi’s work is complete. He has done what he set out to do in 1957 — to lay the foundation for a peaceful world. Now Maharishi is being welcomed with open arms into Heaven,” said first ruler Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam.
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Europe’s main security and human rights watchdog said on Thursday it had cancelled plans to monitor Russia’s presidential election next month, citing unacceptable restrictions imposed by Moscow.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) election body ODIHR said it would not send a monitoring mission for the March 2 election, which President Vladimir Putin’s protege Dmitry Medvedev is expected to win easily.
“We made every effort in good faith to deploy our mission,” said ODIHR director Christian Strohal in a statement. “… the Russian Federation has created limitations that are not conducive to undertaking election observation”.
In a separate announcement, the OSCE’s parliamentary assembly also scrapped plans to watch the Russian election. This leaves a group from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) as the only Western body still planning to watch next month’s vote.
KABUL, Afghanistan – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday she has seen progress in Afghanistan during the past few years, despite a determined Taliban insurgency that has disrupted security and prompted concerns that the NATO-led military campaign is failing.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attends a news conference with Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband in Lancaster House, central London. Rice and Miliband arrived in Kabul today for an unannounced visit to Afghanistan. Reuters/John Stillwell
Rice chalked up the deteriorating security in the country to “committed enemies” of Afghanistan and the United States and she told reporters that President Bush, after the 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorists, had warned people that “this would be a long war.”
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Somewhere amid the cactus-studded hills on this sprawling Navy base, separate from the cells where hundreds of men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban have been locked up for years, is a place even more closely guarded — a jailhouse so protected that its very location is top secret.
Guantanamo commanders said Camp 7 is for key alleged al-Qaida members, who must be kept apart from other prisoners to prevent them from retaliating against long-term detainees who have talked to interrogators. They also want the location kept secret for fear of terrorist attack.
obama and clinton score big $ following super tuesday:
NEW ORLEANS – Democrat Barack Obama raised $7.2 million in less than 48 hours post Super Tuesday and rival Hillary Rodham Clinton collected $4 million, giving him a financial edge that’s caused consternation within a Clinton campaign clamoring for attention-getting debates.
The remarkable outpouring of contributions recorded since Tuesday’s contests in 22 states comes on the heels of an eye-popping $32 million raised by Obama in January and the record-shattering $100 million each Obama and Clinton raised in 2007 in their neck-and-neck race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Clinton is really low on cash and desperate. Really, as the article notes, she’s clamoring for debates so she’ll gain free publicity. But we’re catching on by the mere fact she had to loan her campaign $5 million after raising $104 million in 2007 and $13 million in 2008.
Under normal circumstances, presidential candidates host town-hall meetings so they can answer voters’ questions and present their ideas. They don’t usually invite their rival to share a stage.
But these, my friends, are not normal circumstances.
In an unusual move, Hillary is inviting Barack Obama to appear with her side by side at a town hall meeting in Maine this weekend, when both are scheduled to be campaigning in the state.
Spin from the Clinton campaign’s perspective: Aren’t we gracious? What other campaign would consider sharing our time and our stage with our intra-party opponent?
Spin from the Obama campaign’s perspective: Given the Clinton campaign’s financial troubles, they’ve apparently decided that gaining publicity through a media stunt is easier than buying ad time.
nobody knows, but something strange is going on at the “head table”:
A Medical Mystery Unfolds in Minnesota
AUSTIN, Minn. — If you have to come down with a strange disease, this town of 23,000 on the wide-open prairie in southeastern Minnesota is a pretty good place to be. The Mayo Clinic, famous for diagnosing exotic ailments, owns the local medical center and shares some staff with it. Mayo itself is just 40 miles east in Rochester. And when it comes to investigating mysterious outbreaks, Minnesota has one of the strongest health departments and best-equipped laboratories in the country.
And the disease that confronted doctors at the Austin Medical Center here last fall was strange indeed. Three patients had the same highly unusual set of symptoms: fatigue, pain, weakness, numbness and tingling in the legs and feet.
The patients had something else in common, too: all worked at Quality Pork Processors, a local meatpacking plant.
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.
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A survey of the workers confirmed what the plant’s nurses had suspected: those who got sick were employed at or near the “head table,” where workers cut the meat off severed hog heads.
On Nov. 28, Dr. DeVries’s boss, Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the state epidemiologist, toured the plant. She and the owner, Kelly Wadding, paid special attention to the head table. Dr. Lynfield became transfixed by one procedure in particular, called “blowing brains.”
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. NYT
l wouldn’t look to the fda to do anything, given their record to date.
PARIS: Seven doctors and pharmacists went on trial for the deaths of more than 100 young people who died of a brain-destroying disease after being treated with tainted human growth hormones.
Hundreds of family members packed the courtroom where the defendants faced charges, including manslaughter and deception, following a more than 16-year investigation into the deaths of at least 110 young people from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, hormones collected from the pituitary glands of human corpses were used to treat thousands of French children whose growth was stunted because of a deficiency in the secretion of growth hormone.
The program ended in 1988 after contaminated growth hormones were linked to CJD — three years after the United States and Britain stopped the practice because patients had contracted the fatal brain disease.
of the woman who’s now president of Harvard: WashPo
I liked this part:
Just thought it was an interesting contrast with someone who’s running on the fact that she would be the ‘woman president’ of the US. YMMV.
enjoys a little banking industry schadenfreude: Reuters
LINK
that this would be expected in an election year? Reuters
I’m betting on less than $2.20/gallon by late October.
Let the good times roll! Tax rebates, lower gas prices, where’s my pony?
Scientists hail spinal injury breakthrough
Iraq’s Sadr tells militia to keep observing freeze
.
His Holiness Maharishi Mehesh Yogi, the illustrious sage of the Vedic tradition of India, who over 50 years ago introduced his Transcendental Medidation program to sprititually regenerate mankind and create world peace, passed away peacefully at his international headquarters in Vlodrop, The Netherlands.
“Maharishi’s work is complete. He has done what he set out to do in 1957 — to lay the foundation for a peaceful world. Now Maharishi is being welcomed with open arms into Heaven,” said first ruler Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Europe watchdog scraps plans to monitor Russia vote
.
KABUL, Afghanistan – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday she has seen progress in Afghanistan during the past few years, despite a determined Taliban insurgency that has disrupted security and prompted concerns that the NATO-led military campaign is failing.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attends a news conference with Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband in Lancaster House, central London. Rice and Miliband arrived in Kabul today for an unannounced visit to Afghanistan. Reuters/John Stillwell
Rice chalked up the deteriorating security in the country to “committed enemies” of Afghanistan and the United States and she told reporters that President Bush, after the 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorists, had warned people that “this would be a long war.”
NATO – Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Jeez, taking in a side trip after some shopping?
AP confirms secret camp inside Gitmo
obama and clinton score big $ following super tuesday:
this one’s headed towards the record books in more ways than one.
lTMF’sA
Clinton is really low on cash and desperate. Really, as the article notes, she’s clamoring for debates so she’ll gain free publicity. But we’re catching on by the mere fact she had to loan her campaign $5 million after raising $104 million in 2007 and $13 million in 2008.
Clinton extends all kinds of invitations to Obama The Carpetbagger Report
nobody knows, but something strange is going on at the “head table”:
l wouldn’t look to the fda to do anything, given their record to date.
lTMF’sA
.
PARIS: Seven doctors and pharmacists went on trial for the deaths of more than 100 young people who died of a brain-destroying disease after being treated with tainted human growth hormones.
Hundreds of family members packed the courtroom where the defendants faced charges, including manslaughter and deception, following a more than 16-year investigation into the deaths of at least 110 young people from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, hormones collected from the pituitary glands of human corpses were used to treat thousands of French children whose growth was stunted because of a deficiency in the secretion of growth hormone.
The program ended in 1988 after contaminated growth hormones were linked to CJD — three years after the United States and Britain stopped the practice because patients had contracted the fatal brain disease.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."