Friday, November 13, 2009
Wikinews interviewed author Marc Headley about his new book Blown for Good, and asked him about life inside the international headquarters of Scientology known as “Gold Base“, located in Gilman Hot Springs near Hemet, California. Headley joined the organization at age seven when his mother became a member, and worked at Scientology’s international management headquarters for several years before leaving in 2005.
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Your eyes are one of the most important parts of your body. Without your eyes, many daily tasks in life would be significantly more difficult and troublesome. However, not everybody’s eyes work the way they should. Millions of people are born with conditions such as farsightedness, nearsightedness, and astigmatisms. These conditions can alter your eyesight in a way that you need corrections to fix them. Some of these corrections include glasses and contacts. Wearing and caring for contacts and glasses every single day can get extremely annoying and tedious after decades. Thankfully, there is a more permanent solution to these conditions. Laser surgery can quite literally reshape your vision.
What Is Laser Surgery?
As the name might suggest, laser surgery in West Point, NE involves the use of medical lasers. The most common type of surgery involves reshaping the cornea. The laser will physically cut a flap into your cornea. Once the flap is there, the surgeon will then fold back the flap and then remove some corneal tissue from underneath the cornea. The flap is then replaced. The reshaped cornea can now reflect light into your eyes properly, which can lessen or completely fix vision problems. There are other forms of laser surgery that are designed to help with different, more specific eye problems. You can consult your regular eye doctor to determine which type of laser surgery is most suitable for you and your eyes.
Why Get Surgery?
While glasses and contacts can correct some visual problems, wearing them every day can become rather annoying. Not only do you have to wear them but you often have to take special care to ensure that they are rarely if ever, damaged. These types of corrective devices can be extremely expensive, depending on your vision problems. That being said, vision also changes over time, meaning that you have to go back to the eye doctor to change the strength of those corrective devices repeatedly. This is a costly, time-consuming, and tedious process. With laser surgery, you will be able to do that less or maybe not even at all anymore. For more information on what laser surgery can do for you, click here to learn more.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Studs Terkel, an American historian, radio talk show host and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has died at the age of 96. His son, Dan Terkel, said he died peacefully in his Chicago, Illinois home.
“My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life. [His death was] peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted,” said his son in a statement to the press.
Terkel was born in New York City in 1912. He moved to Chicago when he was eight years old. He was mostly known for his oral histories, but he was also host of his own radio show, an author of several books, and an activist.
In 1985, Terkel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize after his writing about World War II in his book called The Good War. In 1970, he published a book about the Great Depression, entitled Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, which told the stories of people from all walks of life who were affected by the stock market crash in 1929.
In 2007 Terkel published his memoirs, titled Touch and Go, in which he described himself as a “martini and cigar man” who never retired.
“It was those loners — argumentative ones, deceptively quiet ones, the talkers and the walkers — who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors,” said Terkel in his memoirs.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Vernon Bellecourt, once the primary spokesperson for the American Indian Movement, died recently at age 75. Bellecourt, an Ojibwa who fought for Native rights, was perhaps best known for his opposition to Native names and mascots for sports teams.
First in the headlines in 1972, Bellecourt organized a cross-country caravan of the Movement, to Washington. Once there, members of the group occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices. His goal of international recognition for Aboriginal nations and their treaties found him meeting with figures like Libyan Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, and Palestine’s Yasir Arafat. In 1977 Leonard Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the murder of two FBI Agents during a 1975 shoot-out on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; Bellecourt led the campaign to free him.
Most recently, he visited Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, to discuss getting free or cheap heating oil for reservations.
His work as president of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media made a much wider known mark, though. Bellecourt emphasized that he believed such names perpetuated racial stereotypes, clouding the real identities and problems facing natives.
Teams with native-related names could almost guarantee on Bellecourt showing up at major games. He twice burned an effigy of Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indians baseball team mascot, and both times was arrested. When the Washington Redskins of the National Football League made the Super Bowl, Vernon was there to protest. The United States Commission on Civil Rights was critical of such names by 2001, calling them “insensitive in light of the long history of forced assimilation”. Some newspapers have stopped using the names of teams with Native origins.
None of his “big four” targets have shown any indication of changing: the Washington Redskins, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Cleveland Indians or the Atlanta Braves.
Post-season use of American Indian mascots were banned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2005, suggesting the names are “hostile or abusive”. Bellecourt was pleased with the NCAA sanctions, but suggested such actions were only going “half way”.
The Florida State Seminole and the Illinois Illini were among the 18 colleges affected by the ban. Florida president T.K. Wetherell threatened legal action in response. The Florida Seminole tribes have endorsed the University’s usage of the name, but some out-of-state tribes were “not supportive”, according to the NCAA vice president for diversity and inclusion.
Born WaBun-Inini, Bellecourt died from complications of pneumonia on October 13, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
In a media event on March 2, Apple Inc. unveiled its iPad 2 tablet computer, the successor to the company’s iPad. The announcement was made at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. CEO Steve Jobs appeared at the event and introduced the new product, with FaceTime video messaging (with front and rear cameras) as well as a new dual-core Apple A5 processor.
The iPad 2 is an all new design and has several improvements over the original iPad. The device runs on an dual-core Apple A5 CPU. According to Jobs, the CPU’s new dual-core capability enhances multitasking and doubles the processing speed. Apple additionally introduced a magnetic ‘Smart Cover’ accessory that snaps to the front screen of the device along with several new apps ported from the Mac OS X operating system and the iPhone. These include iMovie, GarageBand, and Photo Booth. The new iPad introduces front and rear cameras which enable FaceTime. The new tablet is 15% lighter and 33% thinner than the previous version – thinner than an iPhone 4 – and has beveled edges. It will be available in black and white. The device continues to be capable of ten hours of battery life on a single charge.
The announcement comes after months of rumors about a successor to the original iPad. Competitors have designed tablets to compete with the iPad such as Motorola’s Xoom powered by the Android operating system. One research analyst predicted that iPads would still make up at least 20 million of the more than 24 million tablet computers sold in the United States in 2011. Another analyst credited the Apple’s App store for iPad’s continued success. The device will become available in the United States on March 11, 2011, available in 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes. iPad 2’s 3G models can connect to the wireless networks of AT&T or Verizon Wireless and Wi-Fi. The iPad 2 will start at US$499. In tandem with the announcement, Apple reduced the price of its original iPad to US$399. Shares of Apple inc. rose $2.81, closing at US$352.12 the day of the announcement.
IT Consulting Services
by
chirstmartin
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Starting from small scale companies to high scale industry players, a well organised and coordinated IT service is needed to make the company function in the best possible manner. By availing of a competent agency which can offer you high class IT services covering manifold segments, you can very well enhance the efficiency of your business and also make it cost effective. Based on the type of industry or business requirement, you can make use of different types of IT consulting services. They help you to allocate the right funds and human capital to the right department, thereby utilizing the resources in the best possible manner. By availing of the IT consulting services offered by Woki IT, you can add a new dimension and platform to your business by making use of the most advanced softwares. Starting from creating a high profile IT infrastructure to securing valuable data through advanced data management and storage, you can get almost types of IT services for making business efficient, competitive, secure and full proof. Based as per the business model and department verticals, you can get IT Consulting services
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Article Source:
ArticleRich.com
Monday, April 23, 2007
A new drink called Robby Bubble has sparkled up some sparkled debate with distributors and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in Calgary, Alberta.
The drink, similar to sparkling wine, is a non-alcoholic sparkling drink which is currently for sale in Alberta liquor stores. The bottle has the words “Party, Party!” with cartoon characters. Their slogan is “Celebrate like the grown-ups” and is shaped as a champagne bottle. It is under the approval of the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission.
Tracy Franklin, president of MADD in Calgary, said: “It’s calling out to kids, but the whole thing is geared as a champagne bottle, as an alcohol product … Do we want to give them something, although it’s non-alcoholic, and have them partying like an adult?”
Other “adult products” marketed to children, such as candy cigarettes, have been banned in Canada. Studies have shown a link between the marketing of candy cigarettes to children and the promotion of smoking in later life. It had been shown that tobacco companies cooperated with candy manufacturers in the design of candy cigarettes.
The Tobacco Act legislation in Canada has eliminated the ability of companies to market tobacco-looking products to children. In Section 27, the Act states, “No person shall furnish or promote a tobacco product if any of its brand elements is displayed on a non-tobacco product, other than an accessory, or is used with a service, if the non-tobacco product or service is associated with young persons or could be construed on reasonable grounds to be appealing to young persons.”
President of the German company responsible for the distribution of Robby Bubble, Darryl Weinbren, defended his product saying it is non-alcoholic and parents are responsible for serving their children the drink.
“I can understand Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and certainly I respect their objectives and what they are after. There wasn’t any intention from our point of view to encourage kids to drink alcohol. It was just a matter of trying to find something that would meet a family celebration with something for their kids.”
A spokeswomen for the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission, Marilyn Carlyle-Helms, said liquor stores can distribute non-alcoholic drinks and if there were a health concern they would have disapproved them.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
It can be difficult to be John Reed.
Christopher Hitchens called him a “Bin Ladenist” and Cathy Young editorialized in The Boston Globe that he “blames the victims of terrorism” when he puts out a novel like Snowball’s Chance, a biting send-up of George Orwell‘s Animal Farm which he was inspired to write after the terrorist attacks on September 11. “The clear references to 9/11 in the apocalyptic ending can only bring Orwell’s name into disrepute in the U.S.,” wrote William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate. That process had already begun: it was revealed Orwell gave the British Foreign Office a list of people he suspected of being “crypto-Communists and fellow travelers,” labeling some of them as Jews and homosexuals. “I really wanted to explode that book,” Reed told The New York Times. “I wanted to completely undermine it.”
Is this man who wants to blow up the classic literary canon taught to children in schools a menace, or a messiah? David Shankbone went to interview him for Wikinews and found that, as often is the case, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Reed is electrified by the changes that surround him that channel through a lens of inspiration wrought by his children. “The kids have made me a better writer,” Reed said. In his new untitled work, which he calls a “new play by William Shakespeare,” he takes lines from The Bard‘s classics to form an original tragedy. He began it in 2003, but only with the birth of his children could he finish it. “I didn’t understand the characters who had children. I didn’t really understand them. And once I had had kids, I could approach them differently.”
Taking the old to make it new is a theme in his work and in his world view. Reed foresees new narrative forms being born, Biblical epics that will be played out across print and electronic mediums. He is pulled forward by revolutions of the past, a search for a spiritual sensibility, and a desire to locate himself in the process.
Below is David Shankbone’s conversation with novelist John Reed.