CJC–The United States and Britain ranked at the bottom of a U.N. survey of child welfare in 21 wealthy countries that assessed subjects from infant mortality to whether children ate dinner with their parents or were bullied at school. The Netherlands, followed by Sweden, Denmark and Finland, finished at the top, while the United States was 20th and Britain 21st, according to the report released Wednesday in Berlin by UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency.

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She refused offers of a plea bargain and now faces an astounding 40 years in prison.
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Photograph by Anita Brown

It is possible but not likely that Muqtada would go to Iran. He and his family have endlessly made fun of the al-Hakim clerical leaders for fleeing to Iran to escape persecution by Saddam Hussein, when the al-Sadrs insisted on staying in Iraq
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Babies breast-fed for between six and 13 months were 53% more likely to move up a social class than those bottle-fed, and those fed for more than a year had a 54% increased chance.

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Exxon Mobil Chairman Rex Tillerson told a world energy conference today that “there is no question that the world’s climate is getting warmer,” and said that technological advances and a global strategy will be needed to combat the rise in carbon emissions

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Tuesday, a mid-level Administrative Law Judge at the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the agency which administers the Controlled Substances Act (a/k/a “the War on (some users) of (some) Drugs”, as it’s been called) provided a rare victory to a public interest group seeking to study marijuana as medicine.

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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Depends on the picture.

And the words.
We are often asked whether our kind of journalism matters. People are curious about why we give so much time to novelists, playwrights, artists, historians, philosophers, composers, scholars, teachers—all of whom we consider public thinkers. The answer is simple: They are worth listening to.
–Bill Moyers “Discovering What Democracy Means”

Go to original by Bill Moyers on TomPaine.com (crossposted from Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost )

Some of America’s most desirable felons are lining up to send you love letters, poems and even proposals of marriage.

The idea for www.hotprisonpals.com came from New York pop artist Sam Wagner, who began writing to a friend in jail several years ago. The prisoner then asked Wagner to write to his cellmate who had stopped receiving letters from his family.

Tommy DeWayne Cox, #182460
Draper Correctional Facility
Fountain 4000, Atmore AL 36015

Requests for letters from lonely prisoners kept coming, until Wagner was sending a monthly letter to more than 100 inmates. With no access to the Internet, letters are often the only contact U.S. prisoners have with the outside world.

Go to original by Rosalind Russell, Reuters.

For those times when too many hours spent reading gadget sites in the afternoon heat have left your foam walls thick with the musky smell of nerd.

Go to original at engadget.com

The US government has a new website, http://www.ready.gov. It’s another attempt at scare mongering in the style of the old “duck and cover” advice after WWII.The fun thing is that these pictures are so ambiguous they could mean anything! Here are a few interpretations.

After exposure to radiation it is important to consider that you may have mutated to gigantic dimensions: watch your head.

Go to original.

One “bad apple” in a team of workers really can “spoil the entire barrel,” new business research shows.

Whether it’s an office bully, team slacker or a chronic pessimist, a single employee can seriously damage an entire company, according to William Felps and Terence Mitchell of the University of Washington Business School. Read more »

Depression is not simply a disease to be eliminated, but a way of eliciting support from family and friends.

In the fall of 2005, psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson Jr. was treating an 18-year-old college freshman whom he describes as “intensely depressed, feeling suicidal and doing self-cutting.”

A few years before, Thomson says, he would have interpreted her depression as anger turned inward. But instead he decided that her symptoms might be a way of signaling her unhappiness to people close to her. Read more »