Nurse administers chemotherapy to patient. Credit: National Cancer Institute.
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Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News
GAZA (Reuters) - The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel's on-going offensive reached 100 on Monday, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said.
On his Facebook page, ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra listed Mohammed Tbail, killed in an air strike in Nusseirat refugee camp, as the 100th Palestinian fatality.
Qidra said the Palestinian dead included 24 children and 10 women. Ministry figures for the number of men killed in the conflict with Israel make no distinction between civilians and militants.
According to the ministry, 850 people have been wounded in Gaza since the hostilities began on Wednesday. They included 260 children and 140 women.
Israel puts its death toll since Wednesday at three civilians - two men and a woman killed by a rocket fired from Gaza. Police said more than 60 people have been wounded.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem, Editing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan)
GAZA (Reuters) - The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel's on-going offensive reached 100 on Monday, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said.
On his Facebook page, ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra listed Mohammed Tbail, killed in an air strike in Nusseirat refugee camp, as the 100th Palestinian fatality.
Qidra said the Palestinian dead included 24 children and 10 women. Ministry figures for the number of men killed in the conflict with Israel make no distinction between civilians and militants.
According to the ministry, 850 people have been wounded in Gaza since the hostilities began on Wednesday. They included 260 children and 140 women.
Israel puts its death toll since Wednesday at three civilians - two men and a woman killed by a rocket fired from Gaza. Police said more than 60 people have been wounded.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem, Editing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan)
Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire Mark Cuban has confirmed reports from last week, in a post on his personal blog today, that he has a serious beef with Facebook. But before getting into all the reasons he no longer loves the social network, he clarifies one small point: “First, I’m not recommending to any of my companies that we leave facebook,” he writes. Last week ReadWriteWeb’s Dan Lyons kind of made it seem like Cuban planned to pull out altogether because of the way Facebook’s algorithm has affected the way people see his brands’s posts. The algorithm, Edgerank, controls brand posts so that not all fans are forced to see each one in their news feeds. Because of this, he quoted Cuban saying “We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook.” And later he had him talking about all the reasons he finds it horrible for businesses. Like, mainly, that it’s too expensive, a point that GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram called naive. “Really? That surprises you? What else did you think Facebook was going to do when it gave you a giant social platform for nothing?” Cuban now explains that he isn’t bailing on Facebook, just de-emphasizing it in favor of other Internet places, like Tumblr and Twitter. But, that does not mean that he does not hate Facebook as much as everyone has been saying he hates Facebook. He does.
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You can read the laundry list of reasons over at his personal blog, but some highlights include:
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Basically Mark Cuban thinks Facebook should stop trying to make money and stop trying to get too smart, which might work in the favor of Cuban who doesn’t want to spend too much money on something silly like social media. But,this doesn’t sound too appealing to Facebook, which as a public company needs to make money. Unless more join his cause, which could maybe happen. At least the Miami blog the 305 agrees with him. Anyone else?
Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Skiing is a such a skill-based activity that if you don’t start learning until you are 20, it will take 20 years to learn.
But fitness experts say proper conditioning can make the difference between a fun weekend on the slopes and one waylaid by injury.
“Skiing first is technique,” said Robert Forster, a Los Angeles-based physical therapist and founder of Phase IV Scientific Health and Performance Center. “If your quads (muscles) are just burning up on the runs, then you’re not skiing right. That’s a good sign that you might need a lesson.”
To minimize fatigue and risk of injury, Forster, physical therapist to 42 Olympic medalists, suggests getting in ski-shape before hitting the slopes.
“All fitness begins with an aerobic base,” he said. “So six weeks before, start training with an elliptical trainer or stationary bike, or running or walking. Build up to 20 to 30 minutes three times a week.”
Aerobic training also strengthens muscles, Forster said, so any subsequent agility drills, such as running sideways or skipping, will be even more effective if you’ve established an aerobic base.
Stretch before skiing to protect against injury and enhance freedom of motion; stretch afterward to return the muscles to their normal length, said Forster.
He calls stretching the single most important thing people can do for body health maintenance.
“Connective tissue shortens with time,” he explained. “We stretch to maintain good alignment of the bones.”
If your skiing holiday lasts a week, limit your time on the slopes the first day, Forster suggests. And reconsider that dehydrating après-ski cocktail.
“We know that a glass of wine and a hot tub is not a good idea. Heat adds to inflammation. It will only increase swelling the next day,” he said.
Save that soak for the morning, and then not more than five minutes.
Ice down any sore spots or tight areas. “Ice is a great treatment for tightness,” he said.
Jessica Matthews, an exercise physiologist with the American Council on Exercise, suggests that even those already in good condition would benefit by integrating sports-specific pre-ski training into their workout.
“Prepare the body to move in short bursts,” said Matthews, who notes that skiing demands carving back and forth, rapid turns and sudden changes of direction.
She said it’s easy to set up fitness drills using plastic cones, which can be had at any sporting goods store.
“There’s great stuff you can do with cones,” she said. “Those newer to fitness can begin with stepovers, laterally, side to side. Those more seasoned can make them hops, or invent more intricate drills.”
For those who prefer to train in groups, the fitness company Equinox recently launched a class at its clubs called Core Values, which uses low parallel bars, called parallettes, and medicine balls to enhance mobility and stability skills.
“It’s geared to help sports people get in condition for their sport,” said Lisa Wheeler, who created the class to train across all ranges of motion.
“Even downhill, skiing is about rotation,” said Wheeler, an experienced skier. “Most people scoop right and left as they are going downhill.”
Falls account for 75 to 85 percent of all skiing injuries, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. Most common is damage to the knee.
Forster said even though more runners than skiers are injured every year, ski injuries tend to be more serious.
“Skiing has much more traumatic injuries that can have long-lasting effects,” he explained.
The National Areas Association, the trade association for ski area owners and operators, said U.S. ski areas tallied an estimated 51 million skier and snowboarder visits during the 2011-2012 season.
Forster advises skiers to assess themselves and the slopes before diving down the mountain.
“Is there fresh snow? Heavy, wet snow?” he said. “Be aware of conditions. Fatigue is a big factor. If I had a dollar for every client who got hurt on the last run …”
(Editing by Patricia Reaney and John Wallace)
Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News
OTTAWA/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Canadian government on Friday reiterated its intention to balance its budget by 2015, three days after projecting there would be deficits until 2016-17.
In separate appearances in Quebec City and New York, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty were at pains to say they still intended to end the red ink by 2015.
“It remains the government’s plan, intention, to balance the budget prior to the next federal election. The recent economic and fiscal update by the minister indicates we are actually very close to that objective,” Harper told reporters in Quebec City. The next election is in October 2015.
Flaherty’s fall fiscal update on Tuesday had pushed back the target date for eliminating the deficit by a year, to 2016-17, citing a weak global economy.
But the minister said in a speech in New York that the government was on track to balance the budget in the next two to three years, barring major external events, and he later clarified that he intended a balanced budget by 2015.
“The prime minister’s always correct,” he chuckled.
He sought to explain the discrepancy by saying the fiscal update had built in a C$ 3 billion ($ 3 billion) contingency cushion, meaning there was an underlying surplus of C$ 1.2 billion for 2015-16. He said the projection of a C$ 1.8 billion deficit amounted to about half a percent of the C$ 275 billion federal budget.
“There’s lots of water to go under the bridge between now and then,” he said.
The opposition New Democratic Party noted the discrepancy in a release headlined: “Stephen Harper makes stuff up about balancing the budget.”
It pointed out that balancing the budget by the next election was not the same as balancing it by 2016-17.
As it is, even the 2015-16 timetable is a year later than offered in the Conservative campaign for reelection in May 2011. They had promised a balanced budget by 2014-15, followed by major personal income tax relief before the 2015 election.
Flaherty’s timetable drew criticism this week from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which said the minister had become expert at kicking the can down the road.
The projections could be thrown out of whack if the United States goes off the fiscal cliff, a set of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that are to be triggered on January 2 if legislators and the White House cannot agree on a more nuanced budget deal.
Flaherty said U.S. failure to avert the fiscal cliff would cause a significant and immediate decline in Canada’s gross domestic product, and he would counter it.
Referring to a possible economic shock from Europe or the United States, he said: “If that were to happen and if the Canadian economy were to be pushed back into recession with the resulting danger for higher unemployment and the danger always of a prolonged recession, then we would act.”
He added: “We would not stand by and let that happen. The kinds of measure we can take: there are various tax measures we can take, there are measures with respect to stimulus we can take, these are things that we have done before and we can do again.”
On Tuesday, Flaherty spoke of having prepared various contingency plans.
(Additional reporting by Louse Egan; Editing by David Gregorio)
Canada News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) – Aaron Lewis stands as one of the more unusual crossovers into country music, but the singer of the metal band Staind believes it was a fit made in the cradle.
“It’s been quite the pleasant eclectic mix of tattoos and black eyeliner, and Stetsons, cowboy boots and big shiny buckles,” Lewis said in an interview after the release of his first full-length country studio album, “The Road,” this week.
Lewis, 40, was raised on what he terms his grandfather’s country music: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Charlie Daniels and George Jones. He collaborated with Daniels and Jones on his country EP, “Town Line,” released last year.
This made the transition from the angst-ridden world of metal to the laid-back country scene an easy step for him, but perhaps not so much for his head-banging fans.
“A few fans are really having a hard time with it,” Lewis said. “I can’t make everyone happy. Music is about making me happy first. For those who wish I would stick with Staind, they’ll get what they want, too.”
Lewis, who sold seven studio albums over a 17-year career with Staind, says he has two musical careers because he is “creatively bipolar” and suffers from attention deficit disorder.
“I need to switch it up a little bit,” he said. “It’s kind of nice to write a song about taking my daughters to the beach instead (of) about something that’s tearing me apart from the inside.”
For Lewis, each song on “The Road” is the opportunity to explore his creativity in music, while winding down a road filled with new country listeners and taking Staind fans along for the ride.
“The Road” includes “Forever,” a thoughtful song of life on the road, and “Endless Summer,” a simple track about digging up clams and casting for striped bass with his daughters.
“If we catch a keeper we throw it on the grill,” he says. “The beauty of the adventure that I’m on now is I can write songs about stuff like that. I could never bring a song like that to the table for Staind.”
He describes writing “Endless Summer” as a “refreshing and a nice change” from his metal past.
“I remember having a big smile on my face the whole time I was writing it,” he said. “In the past, what’s usually coming up for lyrics is not smiley material. The song wrote itself in 10 minutes.”
In contrast, “Party in Hell,” which has fans up and dancing, was the last song Lewis wrote for the album and was inspired by a stint in Las Vegas.
“Las Vegas really is, in a metaphorical sense, a party in hell; you can get into anything you want to,” he said. “It was like well, ‘OK, I’m going to hell, who else is going to be there? We might as well have a party with it.’”
SAME PROCESS
His previous country EP, “Town Line,” featured the gold-selling single “Country Boy,” a collaboration with Daniels and Jones that hit the top of the “Billboard” album charts and topped off at No. 7 on the Top 200.
“That’s crazy, right?” Lewis asks, shaking his head. “It was pretty amazing for me, pretty surreal. I was actually in the studio with Charlie, which was a lot of fun. We have become good friends.”
The writing process for country or rock is the same, according to Lewis.
“The music is always first, then the melody, and the lyrics third,” he said. “I need the music to know what the landscape is that I’m singing over, and I need the melody to fit the words in, and then the words come last.”
But the lyrics do not come while he is writing on a piece of paper. “They come with me standing in front of a microphone with the song playing in the background and singing,” he said. “It’s total improv, right off the cuff.”
As with recording, Lewis does not approach a rock performance differently from a country performance.
“I go out on stage and perform those songs I recorded to the best of my ability to sound just like the recording,” he said. “I have always tried to approach every show like it’s the only show that I have. That’s kind of how I’ve gone about this crazy career I’ve had now coming up on 15 years.”
(Reporting by Vernell Hackett; Editing by Christine Kearney and Lisa Von Ahn)
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel bombed Palestinian militant targets in the Gaza Strip from air and sea for a fifth straight day on Sunday, preparing for a possible ground invasion though Egypt saw “some indications” of a truce ahead.
Militant rocket fire into Israel subsided during the night but resumed in the morning with three rockets fired at the nearby coastal city of Ashkelon, the Israeli army said.
“As of now we have struck more than 1,000 targets, so Hamas should do the math over whether it is or isn’t worth it to cease fire,” Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, over Twitter.
“If there is quiet in the South and no rockets and missiles are fired at Israel’s citizens nor terrorist attacks engineered from the Gaza Strip, we will not attack.”
Forty-eight Palestinians, about half of them civilians, including 13 children, have been killed in Israel’s raids, Palestinian officials said. More than 500 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel, killing three people and injuring dozens.
Israel unleashed intensive air strikes on Wednesday, killing the commander of the Hamas Islamist group that governs Gaza and spurns peace with the Jewish state. Israel’s declared goal is to deplete Gaza arsenals and press Hamas into stopping cross-border rocket fire that has plagued Israeli border towns for years.
Air raids continued past midnight into Sunday, with warships shelling from the sea. A Gaza City media building was hit, witnesses said, wounding 6 journalists and damaging facilities belonging to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV as well as Britain’s Sky News.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said the strike had targeted a rooftop “transmission antenna used by Hamas to carry out terror activity”.
Two other predawn attacks on houses in the Jabalya refugee camp killed two children and wounded 13 other people, medical officials said.
These attacks followed a defiant statement by Hamas military spokesman Abu Ubaida, who told a news conference: “This round of confrontation will not be the last against the Zionist enemy and it is only the beginning.”
The masked gunman dressed in military fatigues insisted that despite Israel’s blows Hamas “is still strong enough to destroy the enemy”.
An Israeli attack on Saturday destroyed the house of a Hamas commander near the Egyptian border.
Casualties there were averted however, because Israel had fired non-exploding missiles at the building beforehand from a drone, which the militant’s family understood as a warning to flee, and thus their lives were spared, witnesses said.
Israeli aircraft also bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza on Saturday, including the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a police headquarters.
Among those killed in air strikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding motorcycles, and several civilians including a 30-year-old woman.
ISRAELI SCHOOLS SHUT
Israel said it would keep schools in its south shut on Sunday as a precaution to avoid casualties from rocket strikes reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the past few days.
Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile interceptor system destroyed in mid-air a rocket fired by Gaza militants at Tel Aviv on Saturday, where volleyball games on the beach front came to an abrupt halt as air-raid sirens sounded.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, the third against the city since Wednesday. It said it had fired an Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of Gaza.
In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.
Israel’s operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel’s right to self-defense, but there was also a growing number of calls from world leaders to seek an end to the violence.
British Prime Minister David Cameron “expressed concern over the risk of the conflict escalating further and the danger of further civilian casualties on both sides,” in a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a spokesperson for Cameron said.
London was “putting pressure on both sides to de-escalate,” the spokesman said, adding that Cameron had urged Netanyahu “to do everything possible to bring the conflict to an end.”
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said the United States would like to see the conflict resolved through “de-escalation” and diplomacy, but also believes Israel has a right to self-defense.
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi said in Cairo as his security deputies sought to broker a truce with Hamas leaders, that “there are some indications that there is a possibility of a ceasefire soon, but we do not yet have firm guarantees.”
Egypt has mediated previous ceasefire deals between Israel and Hamas, the latest of which unraveled with recent violence.
A Palestinian official told Reuters the truce discussions would continue in Cairo on Sunday, saying “there is hope,” but it was too early to say whether the efforts would succeed.
In Jerusalem, an Israeli official declined to comment on the negotiations. Military commanders said Israel was prepared to fight on to achieve a goal of halting rocket fire from Gaza, which has plagued Israeli towns since late 2000, when failed peace talks led to the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising.
Diplomats at the United Nations said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt in the coming week to push for an end to the fighting.
POSSIBLE GROUND OFFENSIVE
Israel, with tanks and artillery positioned along the frontier, said it was still weighing a ground offensive.
Israeli cabinet ministers decided on Friday to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000 and around 16,000 reservists have already been called up.
Asked by reporters whether a ground operation was possible, Major-General Tal Russo, commander of the Israeli forces on the Gaza frontier, said: “Definitely.”
“We have a plan. … It will take time. We need to have patience. It won’t be a day or two,” he added.
A possible move into the densely populated Gaza Strip and the risk of major casualties it brings would be a significant gamble for Netanyahu, favored to win a January election.
The last Gaza war, a three-week Israeli blitz and invasion over the New Year of 2008-09, killed 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died in the conflict.
But the Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.
One major change has been the election of an Islamist government in Cairo that is allied with Hamas, potentially narrowing Israel’s maneuvering room in confronting the Palestinian group. Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979.
(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Douglas Hamilton)
World News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Amazon.com Inc. started shipping a large-screen version of its Kindle Fire tablet computer on Thursday, ahead of schedule. Here is a look at the new Fires announced in September:
— Kindle Fire, with 7-inch screen, 1024 by 600 pixels. $ 159, with 8 gigabytes of storage. Weighs 14.1 ounces. Battery life of 8.5 hours. Started shipping Sept. 14.
— Kindle Fire HD, with 7-inch screen, 1280 by 800 pixels. $ 199 with 16 GB of storage or $ 249 with 32 GB of storage. Weighs 13.9 ounces. Battery life of 11 hours. Started shipping Sept. 14.
— Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, with 8.9-inch screen, 1920 by 1200 pixels. $ 299 with 16 GB of storage or $ 369 with 32 GB of storage. Weighs 20 ounces. Battery life of 10 hours. Started shipping Thursday.
— Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G LTE Wireless, with 8.9-inch screen, 1920 by 1200 pixels. $ 499 with 32 GB of storage or $ 599 with 64 GB of storage. Can connect to AT&T Inc.‘s 4G LTE wireless network. Weighs 20 ounces. Battery life of 10 hours. Will start shipping Tuesday.
Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The sun has set on the “Twilight” franchise with one last blockbuster opening for the supernatural romance.
“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2″ sucked up $ 141.3 million domestically over opening weekend and $ 199.6 million more overseas for a worldwide debut of $ 340.9 million.
The finale ranks eighth on the list of all-time domestic debuts, and leaves “Twilight” with three of the top-10 openings, joining 2009′s “New Moon” (No. 7 with $ 142.8 million) and last year’s “Breaking Dawn — Part 1″ (No. 9 with $ 138.1 million).
Last May’s “The Avengers” is No. 1 with $ 207.4 million. “Batman” is the only other franchise with more than one top-10 opening: last July’s “The Dark Knight Rises” (No. 3 with $ 160.9 million) and 2008′s “The Dark Knight” (No. 4 with $ 158.4 million).
Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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