Michigan Senate OKs bill for schools to have anti-bullying policies; effectiveness questioned
LANSING, Mich. (AP) ? Legislation that would require Michigan's public schools to adopt anti-bullying policies has been approved in the Republican-led Senate, but some Democrats say the measure wouldn't do anything to protect students.
The bill was approved Wednesday by a 26-11 vote along party lines. It advances to the Republican-led House.
Some Democrats want a more detailed measure that specifically outlines reasons students can't be bullied such as race, weight and sexual orientation. Democrats said a clause in the Senate-approved bill would provide students with a license to bully based on religious beliefs.
Republicans said the bill would protect all students.
Michigan is one of the few states without a law requiring anti-bullying policies. Efforts to adopt one have languished for years.
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Appeals court hears arguments over state funding for 111-foot cross landmark in S. Illinois
CHICAGO (AP) ? A 111-foot cross in southern Illinois is a religious symbol, but that doesn't mean the state legislature was wrong to fund part of it, a federal appeals court said.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals heard the appeal of Rob Sherman Wednesday involving a $20,000 state grant used to refurbish the Bald Knob Cross for Peace in Alto Pass.
Sherman argues that using taxpayer money for the cross is unconstitutional.
But judges say they don't see clear evidence that the state tried to violate the Constitution's ban on the establishment of a state religion. Judge Richard Posner says courts "can't do everything."
They did not rule on the case Wednesday. A lower court had dismissed Sherman's lawsuit over the grant.
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Nurses' lawsuit says NJ hospital forced them to help in abortions despite religious objections
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) ? A group of nurses claims in a lawsuit a major New Jersey hospital has forced them to assist in performing abortions despite their religious objections.
The lawsuit was filed this week in federal court in Newark against the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
The lawsuit claims the hospital changed its policy in September to require its employees to assist in abortions or be subject to termination, a requirement that the plaintiffs argue violates state and federal laws.
The nurses are seeking an injunction to force the hospital to change its policy and an order prohibiting it from retaliating against them.
The hospital says in a statement none of its nurses is required to participate in procedures he or she objects to on religious or moral grounds.
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Dalai Lama to appear in Chicago
CHICAGO (AP) ? For the second time in a year the Dalai Lama will make an appearance in Chicago.
The Tibetan spiritual leader will give a public talk on nonviolence at Loyola University on April 26. The Dalai Lama previously spoke in Chicago last July, when he appeared with a rabbi, pastor and Muslim scholar.
There are about 4,000 tickets available for the April appearance. More than 450 will be reserved for Illinois high school students. Students also can enter an essay contest. Winners will present their essays to the Dalai Lama and have the chance to ask him questions.
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Wichita mosque damaged by fire had received anti-Islam letters, target of vandals
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) ? Investigators are trying to determine if anti-Islam letters sent to a mosque in west Wichita are connected to a fire that caused at serious damage to the building.
The leader of the Islamic Association of Mid Kansas, Abdelkarim Jibril, said the mosque received about eight letters starting four to six months ago, although the letters stopped about a month ago. The letters criticized Islam, called the Prophet Muhammad a pig and contained drawings that mocked the prophet.
The leaders of the mosque had planned to turn the letters over to authorities but had not done so before a fire struck the mosque Monday morning, Jibril said.
"We don't know if any of the letters have any relationship to the fire at this point. It's something we're looking into though," said Wichita fire Lt. Troy Thissen.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined the fire investigation Monday.
The blaze, which was reported at 12:45 a.m. Monday, spread quickly. It caused at least $130,000 damage but might have totaled the mosque because of extensive damage to the attic and roof supports, Wichita fire Capt. Stuart Bevis said. The cause of the fire has not been determined.
"We're going to be taking a lot of steps" to review evidence because the fire involves a religious meeting place, Bevis said.
Jibril, who has been president of the association for most of its 32-year history, said it appeared the letters were written by the same person because they contained the same types of pictures and same handwriting.
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Church buys former northeast Ohio dinner theater
AKRON, Ohio (AP) ? A defunct dinner theater that entertained northeast Ohio audiences for more than 30 years will soon be full again, this time with churchgoers.
The former Carousel Dinner Theatre in Akron has been sold to a suburban church that tried unsuccessfully to acquire the property at auction nearly a year ago. An electrical contractor that submitted the winning bid ultimately decided it didn't want to undertake the extensive renovations necessary to transform the building for its purposes.
The pastor of Community Baptist Temple of Lakemore said he believed God had a hand in the turnabout.
"I still felt that was our building and that we were supposed to be there," the Rev. Mark O'Donnell said. "I didn't know how it was going to happen, but we were very confident that with the Lord nothing was impossible."
The theater first began operating in 1973 in what had once been a supermarket in Ravenna, and it moved in 1988 into the Akron site, a former nightclub.
The 31,000-square-foot building will allow the church to seat twice as many people as it does at its current location.
The independent Baptist church is buying the Carousel property for $770,000. O'Donnell said his growing congregation is hopeful that it can move in within a year, once the church sells its current property.
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Shaking it like her mama gave her is something Padma Lakshmi’s 20-month-old daughter Krishna (pictured in 2010) loves to do. And her singer and song of choice is expectant mom Beyonce’s hit “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” “She is obsessed with Beyonce,” Lakshmi tells iVillage. “Like, she’ll say, ‘Beyonce? Beyonce?’ And she does the “Uh oh, Uh oh.’”
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Ashley Hebert has no plans to marry J.P. Rosenbaum at the moment.
But that doesn't mean there's trouble for the pair. They're just busy.
"We're so busy that even if I wanted to plan [a wedding] right now, I don't think I could," the former Bachelorette star told People in a recent interview.
Ashley Hebert, who is in her final weeks of dental school and currently applying to pediatric residencies in NYC, says, "My brain is just not there right now."
Like Ali Fedotowsky and Roberto Martinez, there is no wedding date at the moment, but unlike their predecessors, Ash and J.P. are sure there will be.
The couple isn't waiting too long, and will "start talking about [weddings] after the New Year," assured J.P., who bested Ben Flajnik last season.
For now, they're just enjoying what downtime they have and getting used to living together in New York after a whirlwind Bachelorette courtship.
"My closet space is a lot less now and the place is twice as big," joked J.P. "But it's her idiosyncrasies that I love and there's no pet peeve of hers that gets to me."
As for downtime? "We just both have really busy, crazy lives, so staying in, making dinner and watching a movie is my personal favorite," said Ash.
Ashley and J.P.: Will it last?
Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/11/ashley-hebert-and-jp-rosenbaum-no-wedding-date-set/
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WASHINGTON ? The host of the world's longest-running TV quiz show in which teams of high school students in the Washington area compete against each other says he's retiring.
Mac McGarry, host of the Saturday morning show "It's Academic", is stepping down after 50 years. McGarry will be replaced by WTOP-FM news anchor Hillary Howard, who has been hosting on a temporary basis throughout the season.
"It's Academic" tests brainy high school students' knowledge on an array of subjects. Among the competitors the show has attracted are Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; New York Sen. Charles Schumer; Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Chabon; and political commentator George Stephanopoulos.
"It's Academic" has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest-running quiz show on television. The show airs on WRC-TV in Washington.
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/O00AOrfYcTc/the-thames-hub-truly-looks-like-the-future
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ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2011) ? After discovering an emerging crack that cuts across the floating ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, NASA's Operation IceBridge has flown a follow-up mission and made the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of a major iceberg calving in progress.
NASA's Operation Ice Bridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown, is in the midst of its third field campaign from Punta Arenas, Chile. The six-year mission will yield an unprecedented three-dimensional view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice.
Pine Island Glacier last calved a significant iceberg in 2001, and some scientists have speculated recently that it was primed to calve again. But until an Oct. 14 IceBridge flight of NASA's DC-8, no one had seen any evidence of the ice shelf beginning to break apart. Since then, a more detailed look back at satellite imagery seems to show the first signs of the crack in early October.
While Pine Island has scientists' attention because it is both big and unstable -- scientists call it the largest source of uncertainty in global sea level rise projections -- the calving underway now is part of a natural process for a glacier that terminates in open water. Gravity pulls the ice in the glacier westward along Antarctica's Hudson Mountains toward the Amundsen Sea. A floating tongue of ice reaches out 30 miles into the Amundsen beyond the grounding line, the below-sea-level point where the ice shelf locks onto the continental bedrock. As ice pushes toward the sea from the interior, inevitably the ice shelf will crack and send a large iceberg free.
"We are actually now witnessing how it happens and it's very exciting for us," said IceBridge project scientist Michael Studinger, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "It's part of a natural process but it's pretty exciting to be here and actually observe it while it happens. To my knowledge, no one has flown a lidar instrument over an actively developing rift such as this."
A primary goal of Operation IceBridge is to put the same instruments over the exact same flight lines and satellite tracks, year after year, to gather meaningful and accurate data of how ice sheets and glaciers are changing over time. But discovering a developing rift in one of the most significant science targets in the world of glaciology offered a brief change in agenda for the Oct. 26 flight, if only for a 30-minute diversion from the day's prescribed flight lines.
The IceBridge team observed the rift running across the ice shelf for about 18 miles. The lidar instrument on the DC-8, the Airborne Topographic Mapper, measured the rift's shoulders about 820 feet apart (250 meters) at its widest, although the rift stretched about 260 feet wide along most of the crack. The deepest points from the ice shelf surface ranged 165 to 195 feet (50 to 60 meters). When the iceberg breaks free it will cover about 340 square miles (880 square kilometers) of surface area. Radar measurements suggested the ice shelf in the region of the rift is about 1,640 feet (500 meters) feet thick, with only about 160 feet of that floating above water and the rest submerged. It is likely that once the iceberg floats away, the leading edge of the ice shelf will have receded farther than at any time since its location was first recorded in the 1940s.
Veteran DC-8 pilot Bill Brockett first flew the day's designed mission, crisscrossing the flow of the glacier near the grounding line to gather data on its elevation, topography and thickness. When it came time to investigate the crack, Brockett flew across it before turning to fly along the rift by sight. The ATM makes its precision topography maps with a laser than scans 360 degrees 20 times per second, while firing 3,000 laser pulses per second. When flying at an altitude of 3,000 feet, as during this flight, it measures a swath of the surface about 1,500 feet wide. As the crack measured at more than 800 feet wide in places, it was important for Brockett to hold tight over the crevasse.
"The pilots did a really nice job of keeping the aircraft and our ATM scan swath pretty much centered over the rift as you flew from one end to the other," said Jim Yungel, who leads the ATM team out of NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. "It was a real challenge to be told?we're going to attempt to fly along it and let's see if your lidar systems can map that crack and can map the bottom of the crack.
"And it was a lot of fun on a personal level to see if something that you built over the years can actually do a job like that. So, yeah, I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed seeing the results being produced."
While the ATM provided the most detailed measurements of the topography of the rift, other instruments onboard the DC-8 also captured unique aspects. The Digital Mapping System, a nadir-view camera, gathered high-definition close-ups of the craggy split. On the flight perpendicular to the crack, the McCORDS radar also measured its depth and the thickness of the ice shelf in that region.
Catching the rift in action required a bit of luck, but is also testimony to the science benefit of consistent, repeated trips and the flexibility of a manned mission in the field.
"A lot of times when you're in science, you don't get a chance to catch the big stories as they happen because you're not there at the right place at the right time," said John Sonntag, Instrument Team Lead for Operation IceBridge, based at Goddard Space Flight Center. "But this time we were."
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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111102190354.htm
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NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Wall Street closed its best month in 20 years on a down note on Monday as the failure of trading firm MF Global Holdings Ltd and new worries about Europe's debt crisis hammered financial shares.
In a sign that Europe's woes were far from over, Italian and Spanish bond yields soared, prompting the European Central Bank to buy the debt, while shares of European banks came under heavy selling pressure.
MF Global Holdings Ltd (MF.N), the futures broker that made big bets on European sovereign debt, filed for U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, making it the biggest U.S. casualty of the euro-zone crisis. Trading in MF Global shares was halted.
Financial shares fell sharply. Morgan Stanley (MS.N), which has tended to do poorly when fears about Europe rise, dropped 8.6 percent to $17.64. Monday's losses marked a reversal of last week's euphoria over European leaders' deal to contain the debt crisis.
"We started the day with more questions about the European Union," said Mark Grant, Southwest Securities managing director, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
"Serious questions were raised, and then MF Global came along. MF is involved in all kinds of markets, and the fallout from them going bankrupt is unknown."
As the sell-off accelerated at the market's close, the CBOE volatility index (.VIX) jumped 22.1 percent, its biggest daily gain since mid-August.
UNCERTAINTY OVER GREECE
News late in the day that Greece called an unexpected referendum on a new EU aid package baffled investors and added to the uncertainty.
"It struck me as a very curious protocol and I will be interested in how the Asian markets react to that tonight," said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Contributing to the downward pressure, the U.S. dollar shot up to a three-month high against the yen as Japan's government
intervened to curb its currency's appreciation, which hurt the export-based economy.
The dollar's jump caused shares of energy and natural resources companies to fall sharply. The S&P energy index (.GSPE) fell 4.4 percent and was the worst-hit sector.
Despite the declines, the benchmark S&P 500 index was up nearly 11 percent for the month and posted its best monthly percentage gain since December 1991.
Most of that run came as European leaders moved to beef up the region's bailout fund and recapitalize its banks.
But despite October's gains, the S&P 500 index is flat for the year so far.
Still, many analysts believe that with a worst-case scenario in Europe seemingly off the table -- at least for now -- stocks could gain further as investors turn their attention to stronger-than-expected economic data in the United States and China.
The Dow Jones industrial average (.DJI) dropped 276.10 points, or 2.26 percent, to 11,955.01. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index (.SPX) fell 31.79 points, or 2.47 percent, to 1,253.30. The Nasdaq Composite Index (.IXIC) lost 52.74 points, or 1.93 percent, to 2,684.41.
Bruce Bittles, chief investment strategist at Robert W. Baird & Co in Nashville, said the market's strong advance over the past month was leading to some selling, but said the market would likely rise further, provided the S&P 500 held the top end of its recent trading range at around 1,250.
"The market had a huge run in October, so the market was overbought coming into today," he said.
BLAME IT ON THE DOLLAR
Bank stocks were among the worst performing, with the KBW bank index (.BKX) down 4.1 percent, although analysts said MF Global was unlikely to be big enough to spark a systemic failure in the banking sector.
JP Morgan Chase (JPM.N), which, according to an MF Global court filing, has about $1.2 billion worth of claims against the brokerage, fell 5.3 percent to $34.76.
The greenback's advance pressured commodity prices, with copper off 2 percent and Brent crude down 0.3 percent. Many commodities are priced in the greenback, making a spike in dollar prices more expensive for traders in other currencies and sapping demand.
The S&P materials sector (.GSPM) dropped 4.2 percent. Shares of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc (FCX.N) lost 5.9 percent to $40.26. Aluminum company Alcoa Inc (AA.N) dropped 7 percent to $10.76.
"After a solid month of gains, the (higher) dollar is giving traders a reason to shy from the risk trade and take some profits," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital in New York.
Volume was moderate, with about 7.7 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Amex and Nasdaq. Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE and the Nasdaq by about 4 to 1.
(Reporting by Edward Krudy; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Jan Paschal)
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