Al Gore's split from wife Tipper after 40 years of marriage was a shock to everyone who thought theirs was the ideal marriage. Now Star can exclusively reveal that the former Vice President was having an affair with Larry David's ex-wife — for the past two years!
Tierney concludes: “I’d love to see more girls pursuing careers in science (and more women reading science columns), but I wish we’d encourage their individual aspirations instead of obsessing about group disparities. I can’t see how we’re helping them with scare stories about the awful discrimination they’ll face. And I can’t imagine that many scientists, male or female, are looking forward to being yanked out of the lab to play Gender Bias Bingo.” The point, however, isn’t improving science. It’s all about providing jobs and authority for diversity specialists.
U.S. FINDS VAST MINERAL DEPOSITS IN AFGHANISTAN: Has Afghanistan hit the natural-resources jackpot? A Pentagon study says it may have found untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan worth $1 trillion—far more than has ever been found in any previously known reserves. More importantly, according to senior U.S. government officials, the reserves could fundamentally change the Afghan economy, as well as the Afghan war itself. The deposits—which are full of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and metals like lithium—are so enormous, in fact, that Afghanistan could become a mining capital of the world. "There is stunning potential here," Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, told The New York Times. "There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant." The newfound reserves will be critical in reshaping the country, which has a gross domestic product of only about $12 billion. Maybe the new discovery will make Americans care about the war in Afghanistan again.
“What is wrong with Proposition 8 is that they went for marriage. Marriage is going to put a lot of people off, the word marriage… I don’t want to be married. I’m very happy with a civil partnership. If gay people want to get married, or get together, they should have a civil partnership… You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships.” – Elton John
Contrary to popular belief, the ups and downs of romantic relationships have a greater effect on the mental health of young men than women, according to a new study by a Wake Forest University sociology professor.
SHOCKING:TALIBAN USING HIV BOMBS:
Taliban fighters are burying dirty needles with their bombs in a bid to infect British troops with HIV.
Hypodermic syringes are hidden below the surface pointing upwards to prick bomb squad experts as they hunt for devices. The heroin needles are feared to be contaminated with hepatitis and HIV. And if the bomb goes off, the needles become deadly flying shrapnel. Deadly needles become flying shrapnel.
The tactic, used in the Afghan badlands of Helmand, was exposed by Tory MP and ex-Army officer Patrick Mercer.
OBAMA WANTS AN 'ASS TO KICK': Start with Tony Hayward: President Obama tells Today's Matt Lauer in an interview set to air Tuesday morning that he wants to know "whose ass to kick" over the BP oil spill. Responding to criticism that he is relying too heavily on experts, Obama said, "I don't sit around talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick." He also rebuts his critics who say he was too slow to act: "I was down there a month ago, before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the Gulf." A new poll, meanwhile, shows that, one month out, more people disapprove of the federal government's handling of the oil spill than they did at the same time after Hurricane Katrina, 69 to 62 percent.
Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.
IRANIAN SHIPS SET FOR GAZA: Things in Gaza are quickly getting out of hand: The Iranian Red Crescent has announced plans to send two aid ships to Gaza this week after receiving the blessing of the country's foreign ministry. "One ship will carry donations made by the people and the other will carry relief workers," said the organization's director for international affairs. The matter could rise to the level of an international crisis if the Iranian Revolutionary Guards make good on their pledge, announced on Sunday, to protect any ship delivering aid to Gaza. "Iran's Revolutionary Guards naval forces are fully prepared to escort the peace and freedom convoys to Gaza with all their powers and capabilities," said Ali Shirazi, the Ayatollah Khamenei's representative within the Guards. Shirazi indicated that the Guards are still waiting for the go-ahead from Khamenei.
US employers added 430,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls in May, but 411,000 of those were temporary census workers.
In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama showed passion, lyricism, empathy and an exquisite understanding of character and psychological context — all the qualities that he has stubbornly resisted showing as president. It was a book that promised a president who could see into the hearts of other people. But there’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed.
The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing night and day, and worried that while everything looked the same on the surface, our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is in some places functionally and of course illegally open, that it too is gushing night and day with problems that states, cities and towns there cannot solve.
And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public's fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don't get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.
SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled c**t like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.
A New York City community board has voted for a plan to build a mosque and Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero. The vote, 29-1 in favor with 10 abstentions, came after hours of contentious public comment from angered conservative activists and families of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks. And last night a top Manhattan politician backed the plans, saying that while the wishes of 9/11 families must be respected, the board must also try to “balance diversity.”
The new world order as envisioned by Obama in January 2009 was, I think, supposed to look something like the following: A social-democratic America would come to emulate the successful welfare states in the European Union. These twin Western communitarian powers would together usher in a new world order in which no one nation was to be seen as preeminent. All the old nasty ideas of the 20th century — military alliances, sovereign borders, independent international finance, nuclear arms, religious and cultural chauvinism — would fall by the wayside, as the West was reinvented as part of the solution rather the problem it had been in its days of colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation. A new green transnationalism would assume the place of that bad old order, a transnationalism run by elite, highly educated, and socially conscious technocrats — albeit themselves Western — supported by a progressive press more interested in effecting social change than in merely reporting the tawdry news.
Obama can still push that story, but more and more Americans disagree with his 21st-century vision. Stuck in the past, they instead believe that capitalism, not socialism, brings prosperity; that to reach a green future we need to survive for now in a carbon and nuclear present; that all, not some, laws must be enforced; that our country is different from others and needs to maintain the integrity of its borders; and that there are always going to be a few bad actors abroad who must be deterred rather than appeased.
We will hear all sorts of angry charges as these dreams die, but that will not mean they are not dead — even if we are lucky and they go out with a whimper rather than a bang.
ANN CURRY ADDRESSES WRONG SCHOOL: Maybe her brain stops working after 8 a.m.? When Today show host Ann Curry gave the commencement address at Wheaton College in Massachusetts on Saturday, she accidentally listed alumni from a small evangelical school in Illinois also known as Wheaton. Not that they weren’t impressive—Wes Craven and Billy Graham are alumni of the Illinois school; but the Wheaton she was actually speaking to also had some impressive alums, including Christine Todd Whitman and Catherine Keener. "I am mortified by my mistake, and can only hope the purity of my motive, to find a way to connect with the graduates and to encourage them to a life of service, will allow you to forgive me," Curry said in an open apology letter on Wheaton's website.
Tough, they of course were, and without the technological advantages of our own age, much less the social services safety nets. My father told me his grandfather was directed by the local doc to drink a turpentine concoction to expel a large tape worm of several feet from his gut; he himself at 12 fell on a hay-rake, was impaled, and had half his liver removed (but remember the myth of Prometheus). Another uncle pushed the bellows of a stuck hand-sulfurer and burned out his eye. These were common rural experiences; and I have to assume that our modern ailments like allergies (I saw an ad yesterday for a medicine to address sweaty palms) were not quite considered ailments by the old breed. My point is not to suggest that they were Titans and we mere mortals, but simply to suggest the streets, buildings, and culture we enjoy were all inherited from those who created them at a physical cost we often are clueless about.
When the day comes that Tehran can announce its nuclear capability, every shred of international law will have been discarded. The mullahs have publicly sworn—to the United Nations and the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency—that they are not cheating. As they unmask their batteries, they will be jeering at the very idea of an "international community." How strange it is that those who usually fetishize the United Nations and its inspectors do not feel this shame more keenly. In the meantime, the very force in Iran that holds the keys to the secret nuclear sites is also the force that rapes its prisoners, humiliates its womenfolk, represses its "voters," empties its universities, and murders its national minorities. The urgent task of statecraft is to evolve a policy that can synchronize the disarmament demand with the idea that all Iranians, Kurdish and Azeri as well as Persian and Armenian and Jewish, can have a say in their own "internal affairs." No sign of any such statecraft exists. Welcome, then, to a world in which we will have to be fawningly polite to men like Ayatollah Kharrazi.
IRAN TO SEND NUKE MATERIAL TO TURKEY: Iran will send its nuclear material to Turkey, marking a major diplomatic breakthrough in the standoff with Tehran over its nuclear program. The country says it is for peaceful uses, but many nations worry it is intended to build a nuclear weapon. Brazilian and Turkish officials brokered the deal during a marathon 18-hour session in Tehran Sunday.
FEMALE CEOS OUT-EARN MEN: According to a report from Bloomberg News, in 2009 female CEOs earned 40 percent more than men. The average annual salary for female head honchos over the last few years topped $14 billion. Yahoo's CEO Carol Bartz earns $47.2 million a year. And while in 2009 men were taking pay cuts, women execs were making bank, pulling in raises averaging almost 30 percent. Despite these stats, the business word is largely still a boys' club: Of companies listed by the S&P 500, only 16 of them are run by women. Marie Wilson of The White House Project, a women's advocacy group said, "I'm concerned about the vast majority of women who are now the majority of the workforce it's kind of like the 16 super-corporate women are doing well. And that's a good sign—but it's not good enough."
Nominations like Kagan's are the result of a network of graduates who work consciously or unconsciously to see that their own are nominated. Notably, after Kagan's nomination, powerful figures from her Harvard years came forward to vouch for her abilities. Their message was the same: Despite her lack of a record, she is known in our circle as a real winner. She is, in a phrase, one of us. Indeed, reporters breathlessly reported how Kagan and Scalia are good friends and how she knows many of the main players from Harvard, as if it is the judicial equivalent to having graduated from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
The favoritism shown Harvard and Yale should be viewed not just as incestuous but as scandalous. It undermines educational institutions across the country by maintaining a clearly arbitrary and capricious basis for selection. It also runs against the grain of a nation based on meritocracy and opportunity.
It's a stark illustration of the inequities of capitalism that organized labor can only afford to buy one political party, but Wall Street can buy both of them. ...
After all, in no particular order, we would have to close the borders; adopt English immersion in our schools; give up on the salad bowl and return to the melting pot; assimilate, intermarry, and integrate legal immigrants; curb entitlements and use the money to fix infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports, trains, etc.; build 4-5 new damns to store water in wet years; update the canal system; return to old policies barring public employee unions; redo pension contracts; cut about 50,000 from the public employee roles; lower income taxes from 10% to 5% to attract businesses back; cut sales taxes to 7%; curb regulations to allow firms to stay; override court orders now curbing cost-saving options in our prisons by systematic legislation; start creating material wealth from our forests; tap more oil, timber, natural gas, and minerals that we have in abundance; deliver water to the farmland we have; build 3-4 nuclear power plants on the coast; adopt a traditional curriculum in our schools; insist on merit pay for teachers; abolish tenure; encourage not oppose more charter schools, vouchers, and home schooling; give tax breaks to private trade and business schools; reinstitute admission requirements and selectivity at the state university system; take unregistered cars off the road; make UC professors teach a class or two more each year; abolish all racial quotas and preferences in reality rather than in name; build a new all weather east-west state freeway over the Sierra; and on and on.
Risk has taken a beating recently, thanks to the financial crisis. Risk is supposed to be about choice and consequence. You take a chance and you win or you lose. But then banks and insurance companies found ways to pervert this. They devised ever more esoteric ways to pass risk on to others, so there was, in fact, no risk to them at all. In this distortion, insurance techniques, created to limit risk, exposed millions to it. The laws of probability, originally devised to solve a moral dilemma—how to equitably distribute winnings in a game of chance—wound up inequitably distributing losses to people who didn't even know they were at the table. The architects of these gambles left their jobs with enormous bonuses, and companies that helped cripple the financial system were repaid by the government bailout. They took a chance, and lost—but they still won.
"Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting customers loans).
Word gets around about Heidi's 'drink now, pay later' marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit. By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages.
Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.
At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders transform these customer bonds into DRINKBONDS, BOOZEBONDS, and WHOAREYOUAGAINBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. The bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.
One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. He so informs Heidi. Heidi then demands payment from her patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics, they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations, she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.
Overnight, DRINKBONDS, BOOZEBONDS, and WHOAREYOUAGAIN BONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank's liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community. The suppliers of Heidi's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the various bond securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.
Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion-dollar no-strings-attached cash infusion from their cronies in government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi's bar."
Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door ad odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.