Headline Sep30,2012 / ''That Classic Fairy Tale Called Marriage!''

''THAT CLASSIC FAIRY TALE CALLED
MARRIAGE!''

It is a an-age old story! These are the best of times. These are the worst of times. It is an age of wisdom. It is an age of darkness. Yes, it's the new millennium version of that classic fairy tale called marriage. Except. these days, a wedding is no longer the happily ever after.

So, it is no surprise that marriage has become as ''unfashionable'' as white socks with sandals?? In 2007, the latest date for which data has become readily available, more than 230,000 couples tied the knot in England and Wales.
As many as that you ask?
But that's the lowest number of unions since 1895. Please, believe that! And at a time when the population was a third smaller than it is today. The men who do tread nervously up the aisle are leaving it much longer to do so. An average groom delays marriage until the age of 32, up three years of the past decade.

Who could blame him? UK judges have been extremely generous to a woman when handing down divorce settlements. What red-blooded man didn't shudder when the Court of Appeal awarded the estranged wife of former Arsenal and England International Ray Parlour a portion of his future earnings? The former Mrs Parlour walked away with a pound 250,000 lump sum, two mortgage free properties and pound 444,000 a year, although the presiding judge asked that the arrangement be reviewed at a later date.
As for the unfortunate Mr Parlour? With his playing days now over, so much for those for future earnings.

Even judges admit that UK divorce settlements have moved way out of step with the rest of Europe, putting London in a great spotlight as a Divorce Capital of the World, at least for estranged wives. The President of the High Courts Family Division, then Sir Mark Potter, had said that sky-rocketing settlements have ''hugely'' raised the aspirations of claimants. His comments came after Beverly Charman received a pound 48 million payment from her ex-husband, insurance high flyer John Charman, who originally offered a paltry pound 20million.

The other ladies watching this unfold were delighted to opine that if their husband offered them one tenth of that they would be just too delighted to walk away, send their ex husband a Christmas card every year and welcome him to come meet the children. As Mr Charman was so quick to point out too: that his ex wife who was in her mid-fifties, could live extremely well off the interest on pound 20 million, without ever needing to touch the sum itself.

There is no question that such settlements have discouraged Men from tying the knot according to Vaneesa Lloyd Platt, a proprietor of Family Law Firm Lloyd Platt & Company.
''There's a direct correlation between Draconian divorce settlements and plummeting marriage rates. Men are standing on window ledges, jumping off at the mere thought of marriage!!'' Ha Ha Ha!

Many thanks to !WOW! for this delightful post and interlude. And this post continues just don't miss it!.

Good Night and God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Students launch protest over school lunches

CLEVELAND --  The video parody on YouTube called "We Are Hungry" set to Fun's song "We Are Young" received more than half a million hits this week.

While the video may be comical, the message isn't. The Kansas kids who put it together say the new federal student lunch guidelines don't give them enough to eat.

The new nutrition guidelines are set at 650 calories for elementary school students, 700 for middle school and 850 for high school.

But some students, especially athletes, say it isn't enough.

The government defended the stricter guidelines saying one in three children in America is overweight or obese and at risk for diabetes.

The USDA proposed updated, science-based nutrition standards for local schools to develop their own menus to ensure children have the energy they need.

But when 17-year-old Joey Nemecek, of Michigan, started taking pictures of his "healthy" lunch and posting them on Facebook, other students at his school started boycotting lunch.

"The mashed potatoes are like water. They've tried changing that, but like you put it on your spoon and it'll just roll off like water," he said.

His school district is promising to come up with more appetizing options that still fit federal guidelines.

-  WKYC.com

Nuclear waste set to power spacecraft

Britain’s nuclear waste could be used to power spacecraft as part of government attempts to offset the huge cost of the atomic clean-up by finding commercial uses for the world’s largest stock of civil plutonium.

A £1m pilot programme by the European Space Agency has shown that nuclear batteries for use on deep space missions could be made from an isotope found in decaying plutonium at the Sellafield waste storage site in Cumbria.

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Britain’s National Nuclear Laboratory has harvested americium-241 from the plutonium, produced from reprocessing fuel.

The ESA believes this could replace plutonium-238, only available from Russia and the US, and provide an independent source of energy for planned deep space missions to Jupiter and other distant planets.

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GM trials slash dengue mosquito numbers

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes transmit dengue
 fever, which kills 22,000 children every year

[CURITIBA, BRAZIL] Genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes released into the environment, during a trial in the Cayman Islands, reduced the population of dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes by 80 per cent, according to a study.

The findings, published this month (10 September) in Nature Biotechnology, were followed by another successful trial of GM mosquitoes in Juazeiro region, Brazil, where a controlled release of GM A. aegypti reduced the mosquito population in the region by 90 per cent, according to a press release by the Brazilian science ministry issued last week (20 September).

The GM mosquitoes for the Cayman Islands trial were developed by the UK-based biotech company Oxitec. Around 3.3 million sterile male mosquitoes, which do not bite people and so do not spread dengue, were released in a site in Grand Cayman, over a period of 23 weeks in 2010.

-  scidev.net

Violence erupts at Madrid anti-austerity ral

Tens of thousands of Spaniards and Portuguese rallied in the streets of their countries’ capitals Saturday to protest enduring deep economic pain from austerity measure, and the demonstration in Madrid turned violent after Spaniards enraged over a long-lasting recession and sky-high unemployment clashed with riot police for the third time in less than a week near Parliament.

The latest violence came after thousands of Spaniards who had marched close to the Parliament building in downtown Madrid protested peacefully for hours. Police with batons later moved in just before midnight to clear out those who remained late because no permission had been obtained from authorities to hold the demonstration.

On Friday, the government presented a 2013 draft budget that will cut overall spending by €40 billion ($51.7 billion), freezing the salaries of public workers, cutting spending for unemployment benefits and even reducing spending for Spain’s royal family next year by 4 percent.


Pablo Rodriguez, a 24-year-old student doing a master’s in agricultural development in Denmark, said the austerity measures and bad economy mean most of his friends in Spain are unemployed or doing work they didn’t train for.

He plans to work abroad after graduating and doubts he will put his education to use in Spain until he is at least 35 or 40, if ever.

“I would love to work here, but there is nothing for me here,” Rodriguez said. “By the time the economy improves it will be too late. I will be settled somewhere else with a family. One of the disasters in Spain is they spent so much to educate me and so many others and they will lose us.”

Madrid authorities put the number of protesters at 4,500 - though demonstrators said the crowd was larger. In neighboring Portugal, tens of thousands took to the streets of Lisbon Saturday afternoon to peacefully protest against even deeper austerity cutbacks than Spain has imposed.

Retired banker Antonio Trinidade said the budget cuts Portugal is locked into in return for the nation’s €78 billion ($101 billion) bailout are making the country’s economy the worst he has seen in his lifetime. His pension has been cut, and he said countless young Portuguese are increasingly heading abroad because they can’t make a living at home.

- France24.com

Polluting paper mill on Lake Baikal could close

(Russia) A Pulp and Paper Mill located on the UNESCO-protected Lake Baikal could soon be closed, said Vice-Premier Arkady Dvorkovich. It’s the latest official promise to end its 46 year pollution of the world’s largest fresh water lake.

"Though many such plants are working, most likely, the mill will have to be closed," Dvorkovich said.

The Baikal pulp and paper mill is currently in the hands of receivers, as it has debts of 1.9bln roubles. But financial situation won’t be the only or first issue to be considered before a final decision is made.

The issue of closing down the mill located next to one of the most ecologically precious sites has been subject to heated debate for a long time. On the one hand, the mill’s been dumping waste into the lake since it started operating in 1966. On the other, about 15,000 people living in the town Baikalsk are somehow connected with the mill.

Not long after the plant ended the use of poisonous chlorine in 2008, it was shut down as the economic crisis had made it uneconomic. Two years later the mill restarted and the ban on using chlorine was lifted. In October 2010 Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister at that time, ordered the pollution should be stopped by using a closed water system.

In 1996 Lake Baikal was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is the world's deepest and oldest lake. It’s estimated to be over 25 million years old. It is also world's most voluminous freshwater lake containing roughly 20% of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water. Its water is regarded as the cleanest. Two thirds of plants and animals living at the lake can be found nowhere else in the world.

Samsung Ativ Smart PC

Where many of the Windows 8 tablets at this year’s IFA have gone the high-end route, Samsung’s Ativ Smart PC is first glimpse of a more mainstream option. With a “next-generation” Atom, aka Intel Clover Trail, taking pride of place alongside a modest all-round specification, this 11.6in convertible should hit retail at well under the £1,000 mark.
Unlike its Sony, Dell and Toshiba-branded Windows 8 competitors, Samsung’s opted for the Asus Transformer school of convertible tablet design: the 750g slate slots into a 748g keyboard dock, which makes for a claimed travelling weight of 1.48kg. It’s good to see that a stylus has made the grade, too, with the S Pen stashing away neatly in the tablet’s bottom corner.
The expanse of glossy white looks striking, but up close it’s obviously a budget model. The keyboard is plasticky, and while the layout is nice and spacious, the overall feel is decidedly average. And while the tablet itself feels a little more solid initially, it’s not perfect: give it a squeeze, and the plastic rear flexes inwards.
The 11.6in display’s low 1,366 x 768 resolution is the other clue as to the Smart PC’s built-to-a-budget beginnings. Still, image quality was pretty good, even under the hall’s spotlights, thanks to Samsung’s decision to use its own IPS-quality PLS panel technology and an LED backlight rated up to 400cd/m2.
Look around the tablet’s 9.9mm-thick edges, and there’s a modicum of connectivity scattered about. A single USB 2 port is present on the tablet itself, with another two spread across the keyboard dock’s opposite edges. Back on the tablet itself, there are micro-HDMI and microSD slots, as well as a SIM slot for the 3G and 4G versions. Ethernet is provided via a USB dongle, with dual-band 802.11n and Bluetooth 4 to soften the blow, and the more security minded will welcome the presence of a TPM 2 chip.
Inside, the dual-core Intel Atom Z2760 CPU partners with 2GB of low-voltage LPDDR memory and 128GB of eMMC solid-state storage. In our brief time with the Smart PC, the new Atom platform seemed perfectly capable of running Windows 8 smoothly. Granted, it lacks the fluidity of the Core i5 and i7 slates we’ve seen, and we saw a slight hint of stutter once we set multiple Office apps opening at once, but it’s not bad at all.

Nikon releases app for using my Picturetown from an Android device

TOKYO —Nikon Corp has released an app for using my Picturetown, Nikon’s image sharing and storage service, from an Android device. This app can be downloaded free of charge from Google Play administered by Google Inc. the new app provides expanded support for image sharing, organization, and storage from the new COOLPIX S800c and the latest Android devices.
The app allows for viewing of images in albums temporarily saved beforehand when Internet access from the Android device is not possible. By simply selecting and temporarily saving my Picturetown albums beforehand, images in those albums can be viewed in situations when a signal cannot be acquired. This function also enables quick display of images without waiting for them to download. Therefore, it makes for stress-free viewing of images with the new COOLPIX S800c when the Internet cannot be accessed over a Wi-Fi connection.
Support for Android intents enables access to my Picturetown from other Android apps. For example, an image selected from an Android gallery app for image viewing can be uploaded to my Picturetown with launching of the my Picturetown app. Collaboration between apps provides a smooth and seamless user experience.

Gates: New Windows 8 system is 'very exciting'

NEW YORK —Microsoft founder Bill Gates says the new Windows 8 operating system scheduled for release next month is a very exciting new product and a very big deal for the world’s largest software maker. Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press that he is already using Windows 8 and I’m very pleased with it. Windows 8 is Microsoft’s biggest overhaul of Windows in more than a decade and the company’s attempt to stay relevant and exciting in a world where mobile gadgets have started to overshadow personal computers.
 
Microsoft will release Windows 8 on Oct 26 along with a new version of Internet Explorer. Windows 8 will replace Windows 7 on practically all personal computers sold to consumers. It features major changes in the way consumers interact with their machines, and versions of it will also run on tablet computers and smartphones.
 
Although Microsoft has grown into much more than a maker of computer operating systems providing computer services to corporations and Xbox gaming machines to game enthusiasts Windows still accounts for a significant chunk of the company’s annual revenue.
 
In 2011, Microsoft’s “Windows & Windows Live” division generated 27%, or $19 billion, of the company’s $69.9 billion in annual revenue.

Kokuyo, Murata, Intel develop wireless charging desk

TOKYO —Kokuyo Furniture Co, Murata and Intel have teamed up to create a wireless charging desk prototype that allows users to charge compatible devices that are placed onto it.
The desk, designed for office use, has a wireless device charging system, developed by Murata Machinery, built in. It also has embedded charge indicator lights that on the desk surface. Some 25W of wireless power can be transmitted to any device compatible with Murata’s Wireless Power Transmission Modules, Murata said on its website.
Murata has for some time been developing wireless charging systems that use capacititive coupling, electromagnetic induction, magnetic resonance and radio waves.
The three companies said that the prototype is designed to offer a glimpse at a potentially more mobile, cable-free workspace of the future. The technology will be demonstrated at CEATEC 2012, which is scheduled to take place Oct 2-6 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba.

100-year-old man sets 100km cycling record

A 100-year-old Frenchman has set a record for the fastest centenarian to cycle 100km.

Robert Marchand completed the distance in 4 hours, 17 minutes and 27 seconds.

According to the AFP, the amateur cyclist claims to have clocked up tens of thousands of kilometres in his lifetime.

Speaking after his success, Marchland admitted: "I did a little better than I hoped.

"However, the going was tough in the last few kilometres."

Marchland purchased his first bicycle in 1978 at the age of 66.

His bid for the centenarian record has been officially certified by the French national cycling federation. 

U.S. consumer sentiment jumps to 4-month high

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. consumer confidence in September rose to the highest level in four months, indicating an optimistic outlook of the U.S. economy, according to the Thomson Reuters/ University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment revealed on Friday.

The index of U.S. consumer confidence climbed to 78.3 in September from 74.3 in the prior month, the best reading since May, when the index stood at 79.3.

The index gauging consumer expectations for six months from now, which more closely projects the direction of consumer spending, increased to 73.5 from 65.1 in August. The index of current conditions, reflecting Americans' perceptions of their financial situation and whether they consider it a good time to buy big- ticket items like cars, fell to 85.7 from 88.7 last month.

"The September improvement in confidence was due to more favorable prospects for the economy and for jobs during the year ahead," said Richard Curtin, chief economist in charge of the survey.

Rising property values, higher stock prices and a stabilization in the cost of gasoline may all contribute to drive sentiment up. Growing confidence could stimulate consumer spending. It is widely believed that the U.S. economic recovery will heavily rely on the rebound of consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the overall economic activity.

India launches its heaviest satellite

NEW DELHI, Sept. 29 (Xinhua) -- India Saturday successfully launched its heaviest satellite -- GSAT-10, weighing 3,400 kg -- from French Guiana, the state-owned space agency said.

"The launch vehicle lifted off at 2.48 a.m. (Indian Standard Time) after a smooth countdown lasting 11 hours and 30 minute," the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said in a release.

The communication satellite carried 30 transponders and a component of navigation system Gagan into space. ISRO used the European Space Agency's Ariane-5 rocket to launch the satellite which will be ready for use by November.

"The satellite is in good health," the statement said.

UN chief pranked by fake phone call from Canadian radio comedy team

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was pranked by a phone call from a fake Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the UN General Assembly annual debate, his spokesman confirmed on Friday.

Martini Nesirky, the UN spokesman, told reporters the Masked Avengers, a Quebec radio comedy team, reached Ban between sideline meetings on Wednesday but said the secretary-general quickly realized it was a prank, adding the pranksters should improve their fake French accents.

The Masked Avengers, Montreal's Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel, fooled former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during her failed campaign, thinking she was talking with former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, published reports said. Harper's spokesman tweeted about the prank, "well played."

The Avengers'past victims also included New York real estate magnate Donald Trump, The Canadian Press reported Thursday.