Ten days until the end of 2012.? End the year right.? It is not too late.? Start right now with some exercise.? I am serious.? Read this and then do it!? Today, after the last word on this blog do one rep of each of these exercises.?? Then tomorrow simply do two.? I realize it is the holiday, but who cares.? Everyone has a few minutes to become healthier and offset all the amazing food that is being consumed.
This is a simple top ten list of exercises that can be done anywhere.? Even if you are out of town at your new girlfriend?s house for the holiday , hosting or simply swinging by your mom?s, you have 3-10 minutes to do this every day until the end of the year.? This series of exercises are the basics of body weight training. You cannot go wrong with the list.? Make sure you add one rep of each exercise every day.? I promise you will feel like you are starting the New Year one step ahead of everyone else.
Jumping Jack
Squat
Jump Shot or 2 foot vertical jump
Push up
Mountain Climber
Sit Up
Dip
Lunge on each leg
?Plank Hold ( the up position of the push up, 10 seconds, then add 10 seconds every day)
Sit and Reach (10 seconds, then 10 seconds for every day)
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) ? Gunmen attacked a supply tug boat off the coast of Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta, kidnapping foreign sailors, including Italians, in the latest attack in the West African region that is increasingly dangerous for shippers and oil companies, officials said Monday.
The attack happened 40 nautical miles off the coast of Bayelsa state in the Niger Delta on Sunday night, as the gunmen stormed the moving vessel, the International Maritime Bureau said Monday in a warning to other shippers. The gunmen seized four workers and later fled, the bureau said. Those remaining onboard safely guided the ship to a nearby harbor, the bureau said.
The bureau did not identify the shipper, nor the sailors. However, a separate notice to private security contractors working in Nigeria and seen by The Associated Press identified the four hostages as foreigners.
In Rome, the Foreign Ministry confirmed the kidnapping, saying the four hostages were members of the crew. A Foreign Ministry official said three of the four were Italian. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information publicly, said he didn't know the nationality of the fourth hostage.
Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi was following the case personally, and the ministry was working with Nigerian officials to secure the safe return of the crew, the official said. The official and the private security notice seen by the AP identified the vessel attacked as the Asso Ventuno, operated by Augusta Offshore SpA, a Naples-based shipping company.
Calls to the company were not successful on Monday, Christmas Eve. Someone who answered the phone hung up when contacted by the AP, and then didn't pick up on subsequent calls. The company's website says it does business with oil companies Total SA and Exxon Mobil Corp. in Nigeria.
Commodore Kabir Aliyu, a spokesman for Nigeria's navy, declined to immediately comment Monday.
Pirate attacks are on the rise in West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, which follows the continent's southward curve from Liberia to Gabon. Over the last year and a half, piracy there has escalated from low-level armed robberies to hijackings and cargo thefts. Last year, London-based Lloyd's Market Association ? an umbrella group of insurers ? listed Nigeria, neighboring Benin and nearby waters in the same risk category as Somalia, where two decades of war and anarchy have allowed piracy to flourish.
Analysts believe many of the attackers come from Nigeria, whose lawless waters and often violent oil region routinely see foreigners kidnapped for ransom. Increasingly, criminal gangs also have targeted middle- and upper-class Nigerians as well.
Typically, foreign companies operating in Nigeria's Niger Delta pay cash ransoms to free their employees after negotiating down kidnappers' demands. Foreign hostages can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.
Foreign companies have pumped oil out of the Niger Delta, a region of mangroves and swamps the size of Portugal, for more than 50 years. Despite the billions of dollars flowing into Nigeria's government, many in the delta remain desperately poor, living in polluted waters without access to proper medical care, education or work. The poor conditions sparked an uprising in 2006 by militants and opportunistic criminals who blew up oil pipelines and kidnapped foreign workers.
That violence ebbed in 2009 with a government-sponsored amnesty program that offered ex-fighters monthly payments and job training. However, few in the delta have seen the promised benefits and sporadic kidnappings and attacks continue. The end of the year in Nigeria usually sees an uptick in criminal activity as well, as criminal gangs target the wealthy returning to the country to celebrate the holidays.
Sunday's kidnapping is just the latest attack in the region. On Dec. 17, gunmen kidnapped five Indian sailors on the SP Brussels tanker as it sat about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the coast of the Niger Delta. That came the same day gunmen abducted four South Koreans and a Nigerian working for Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. at a construction site in the Brass area of Bayelsa state. Those workers were later released, though the Indians are still believed to be held by the abductors.
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Nicole Winfield reported from Rome.
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Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP .
Egypt's opposition alleges fraud tainted the country's constitutional referendum. Results are delayed while Egypt's judiciary investigates.
By Tamim Elyan,?Reuters / December 24, 2012
Egyptian judges were investigating opposition accusations of voting irregularities today before declaring the result of a referendum set to show that a contentious new constitution has been approved.
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President Mohamed Morsi sees the basic law, drawn up mostly by Islamists, as a vital step in Egypt's?transition to democracy almost two years after the fall of military-backed strongman Hosni Mubarak.
The opposition, a loose alliance of liberals, moderate Muslims and Christians, says the document is too Islamist, ignores the rights of minorities and represents a recipe for more trouble in the Arab world's most populous nation.
Critics have also said the vote, conducted over two stages in a process that ended on Dec. 22, was marred by a litany of irregularities, and have demanded a full inquiry.
"The committee is currently compiling results from the first and second phase and votes from Egyptians abroad, and is investigating complaints," Judge Mahmoud Abu Shousha, a member of the committee, told Reuters.
He said no time had been set for an announcement of the final outcome, but it appeared unlikely to be today.
A tally by the Muslim Brotherhood, which lifted Mr. Morsi into the presidency, indicated a 64 percent "yes" vote, although only a third of the 51 million eligible Egyptians took part. An opposition count was similar, but they said the ballot had been marred by abuses in both rounds.
By forcing the pace on the constitution, Morsi risks squandering the opportunity to build consensus for the austerity measures desperately needed to kickstart an ailing economy.
Highlighting investor concerns, Standard and Poor's cut Egypt's?longterm credit rating today and said another cut was possible if political turbulence worsened.
The low turnout also prompted some independent newspapers to question how much support the charter really had, with opponents saying Morsi had lost the vote in much of the capital.
"The referendum battle has ended, and the war over the constitution's legitimacy has begun," the newspaper Al-Shorouk wrote in a headline, while a headline in Al-Masry Al-Youm read: "Constitution of the minority."
What happens next
If the "yes" vote is confirmed, a parliamentary election will follow in about two months, setting the stage for Islamists and their opponents to renew their battle.
Under the new constitution, legislative powers that have been temporarily held by Morsi move to the Islamist-dominated upper house of parliament until a new lower house is elected.
The make-up of the Supreme Constitutional Court, which Islamists say is filled with Mubarak-era appointees bent on throwing up legal challenges to Morsi's rule, will also change as its membership is cut to 11 from 18.
Those expected to leave include Tahani al-Gebali, who has described Morsi as an "illegitimate president."
The head of the Muslim Brotherhood's?Freedom and Justice Party, Saad al-Katatni, wrote on Facebook that the group's members were "extending our hands to all political parties and all national forces," adding: "We will all start a new page."
But the opposition National Salvation Front says the new basic law deepens a rift between the liberals and Islamists who combined to overthrow Mubarak, and will extend the turbulence that has taken a heavy toll on society and economy.
The opposition said they would continue to challenge the charter through protests and other democratic means.
"We do not consider this constitution legitimate," liberal politician Amr Hamzawy?said yesterday, arguing that it violated personal freedoms. "We will continue to attempt to bring down the constitution peacefully and democratically."
The run-up to the referendum was marred by protests, originally sparked when Morsi awarded himself broad powers on Nov. 22. At least eight people were killed when rivals clashed in protests outside Morsi's official palace in Cairo. Violence also flared in the second city, Alexandria.
Dec. 23, 2012 ? A monkey would probably never agree that it is better to give than to receive, but they do apparently get some reward from giving to another monkey.
During a task in which rhesus macaques had control over whether they or another monkey would receive a squirt of fruit juice, three distinct areas of the brain were found to be involved in weighing benefits to oneself against benefits to the other, according to new research by Duke University researchers.
The team used sensitive electrodes to detect the activity of individual neurons as the animals weighed different scenarios, such as whether to reward themselves, the other monkey or nobody at all. Three areas of the brain were seen to weigh the problem differently depending on the social context of the reward. The research appears Dec. 24 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Using a computer screen to allocate juice rewards, the monkeys preferred to reward themselves first and foremost. But they also chose to reward the other monkey when it was either that or nothing for either of them. They also were more likely to give the reward to a monkey they knew over one they didn't, preferred to give to lower status than higher status monkeys, and had almost no interest in giving the juice to an inanimate object.
Calculating the social aspects of the reward system seems to be a combination of action by two centers involved in calculating all sorts of rewards and a third center that adds the social dimension, according to lead researcher Michael Platt, director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
The orbital frontal cortex, right above the eyes, was activated when calculating rewards to the self. The anterior cingulate sulcus in the middle of the top of the brain seemed to calculate giving up a reward. But both centers appear "divorced from social context," Platt said. A third area, the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg), seemed to "care a lot about what happened to the other monkey," Platt said.
Based on results of various combinations of the reward-giving scenario the monkeys were put through, it would appear that neurons in the ACCg encode both the giving and receiving of rewards, and do so in a remarkably similar way.
The use of single-neuron electrodes to measure the activity of brain areas gives a much more precise picture than brain imaging, Platt said. Even the best imaging available now is "a six-second snapshot of tens of thousands of neurons," which are typically operating in milliseconds.
What the team has seen happening is consistent with other studies of damaged ACCg regions in which animals lost their typical hesitation about retrieving food when facing social choices. This same region of the brain is active in people when they empathize with someone else.
"Many neurons in the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg) respond both when monkeys choose a drink for themselves and when they choose to give a drink to another monkey," Platt said. "One might view these as sort of mirror neurons for the reward system." The region is active as an animal merely watches another animal receiving a reward without having one themselves.
The research is another piece of the puzzle as neuroscientists search for the roots of charity and social behavior in our species and others. There have been two schools of thought about how the social reward system is set up, Platt said. One holds that there is generic circuitry for rewards that has been adapted to our social behavior because it helped humans and other social animals like monkeys thrive. Another school holds that social behavior is so important to humans and other highly social animals like monkeys that there may be some special circuits for it, Platt said.
This finding, in macaques that have only a very distant common ancestor with us and are "not a particularly prosocial animal," suggests that "this specialized social circuitry evolved a long time ago presumably to support cooperative behavior," Platt said.
The research was supported by grants from the Ruth K. Broad Biomedical Foundation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, National Institute of Mental Health (MH095894), and Department of Defense (W81XWH-11-1-0584).
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Duke University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Steve W C Chang, Jean-Fran?ois Gari?py, Michael L Platt. Neuronal reference frames for social decisions in primate frontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3287
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
You usually can judge Vladimir Putin?s dislike of a reporter's question by the intensity of his expression. Such was the case this week at his annual news conference, when he greeted with a hard scowl the subject of pending Russian legislation that would ban Americans from adopting orphaned children. Mr. Putin unleashed invective on the fact that consular representatives aren?t allowed to visit adopted Russian children in the United States.
?I believe that is unacceptable. Do you think this is normal? How can it be normal when you are humiliated? Do you like it? Are you a sadomasochist or something? They shouldn?t humiliate our country,? he told reporters in Moscow.
As is often the case in Russia, there is the issue of what is going on versus what is really going on. And as is often the case in Russia, it?s complicated.
Recommended: Do you know anything about Russia? A quiz.
There is very little doubt as to the goal of the legislation, which passed its third and final reading in the lower house of parliament Friday and must still be signed by Putin. The bill is named after Dima Yakovlev, the toddler who died of heat stroke in 2007 after his adopted father forgot him in a locked car in Virginia for nine hours. The father, Miles Harrison, was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Dima, whose adopted name was Chase. His acquittal in 2008 sparked banner newspaper headlines, incendiary TV news reports, and howls of outrage in Russia.
Lawmakers in the State Duma made it clear that today's legislation is a direct response to the US ?Magnitsky Act,? a law designed to sanction a particular group of Russian officials connected to the death of a whistle-blowing lawyer in a Moscow prison.
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In other words, a law designed to punish people tied to a lawyer?s prison death has been answered with a law to prevent people from adopting orphaned children, many of whom have have developmental or other disabilities and will otherwise end up living much of their lives in orphanages that often resemble state mental hospitals of a bygone era.
Adoption is a searingly emotional issue for Russians, and one easily manipulated by the Kremlin. The institution of adoption is relatively uncommon in Russia, for cultural and other reasons. And judging by headlines in the Moscow tabloids, and the rhetoric of some state lawmakers, you?d think that Americans adopt Russian children to eat them.
Bolstering those who are suspicious of adoption is a smattering of abuse cases in Russian orphanages that have seized the public attention. In one notorious case, a nurse in a southern Russian children?s home was accused of taping pacifiers to the mouths of children to keep them from crying. And cases like that of Dima and of Artyem Savelyev, whose adoptive American mother sent the then-7-year-old boy home to Russia with a "to whom it may concern" note of rejection in 2010, give Russians fair reason for pause over foreign adoptions.
But for many Russians, the adoption of children by foreigners is a polite way of saying ?foreigners are purchasing our children for export.? Some 60,000 Russian children have been adopted by Americans in the past two decades, and Russia trails only China and Ethiopia in popularity for Americans seeking to adopt foreign children, according to the US State Department.
Many also see it as ironic that Russia is being sanctioned for human rights violations by a country whose policies over the past decade have seared ?Guantanamo? into the English language lexicon ? an irony that Putin, who like many Russians has a nose for hypocrisy, clearly relished in pointing out.
?Not only are those prisoners detained without charge, they walk around shackled, like in the Middle Ages. They?ve legalized torture in their own country. Can you imagine if we had anything like this here? They would have eaten us alive a long time ago,? he said.
But regardless of the moralities involved, the fact of the matter is that there will be clear winners and losers from this ordeal.
The winners will be the middlemen, the orphanage directors, the bureaucrats, and the administrators all of whose signatures or stamps, essential to the adoption process, can yield a lucrative stream under-the-table revenues ? revenues from well-meaning, would-be foreign parents with the means to pay thousands of dollars for the right to adopt a Russian orphan.
And the losers will be orphaned children who remain institutionalized. That was the point of US Ambassador Michael McFaul?s statement released Friday after the Duma vote: ?The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to others issues in our bilateral relationship.?
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a man not known for pulling his punches when it comes to US policy, has voiced his doubts, suggesting that more moderate voices might stop the bill's passage. Perhaps Putin, having made his point with his press conference performance and with the performance of the malleable State Duma, will relax his rhetoric and soften the bill to open the door to foreign adoptions again, thus portraying himself as doing the best for the children.
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NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Three miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, a white Colonial-style building stands about 50 feet back from the road, an unassuming presence in a town that never got much attention until now. On a recent day, a security guard got out of a parked car at the end of the driveway and said he?d received instructions to turn away anyone who didn?t work in the building. It wasn't hard to see why his employers might have hired him. In what appears to be a bizarre coincidence, the people working inside were among the country's most adamant champions of the kinds of weapons and ammunition that Adam Lanza used to kill 26 children and adults just down the road last week.
The Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, or NSSF, is the nation's premier gun manufacturers trade association, and in recent years the group has concentrated on marketing military-style assault weapons of the kind used by Lanza, James Holmes and other mass murderers. In the last decade, as the national interest in hunting has declined, gun manufacturers have increasingly relied on the sale of high-powered rifles, capable of killing many people in seconds. Behind the scenes, the NSSF has done much of the work of pitching those products to politicians, the media and gun buyers.
Doug Painter, a former NSSF president, delivered a pitch characteristic of the NSSF?s folksy approach in a video released by the group in 2009, a year when many gun-owners were worried that the newly Democratic White House would try to take away their weapons.
Holding up the same kind of rifle that Adam Lanza would eventually use to commit mass murder, Painter asked the camera, ?Am I gonna trade in Ol? Betsy for one of these?? He answered himself, ?Maybe not. But there?s a more important point to consider. Anti-gun folks insist on labeling these rifles as ?bad guns,? as opposed to more traditional-looking ?good guns.? How can any inanimate object be considered ?good? or ?bad???
The ad was part of a broad, multi-year effort by the gun industry-backed NSSF "to put a happy face on these military weapons,? said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the gun-control advocacy group the Violence Policy Center. "People would be shocked if they knew that the industry has taken guns that were designed for warfare and marketed them to civilians," said Sugarmann, who happens to be a native of Newtown, Conn.
* * * * *
Since the Sandy Hook massacre, the NSSF has stated publicly that it will not respond to media requests, and attempts to reach Steve Sanetti, the president, were unsuccessful. Nor did anyone answer at two publicly listed numbers for Painter, the former president. In a statement posted on its website, the group acknowledged the NSSF's proximity to the school, saying, ?there are not many degrees of separation in small communities like Newtown, and so, not surprisingly, we had family, friends and acquaintances that were affected.?
The group later added another statement, claiming that it would ?welcome the opportunity? to eventually become part of a ?full national conversation? aimed at improving the ?protection of our children and our communities.?
As that conversation unfolds, Sanetti, the group?s president since 2008, is likely to emerge as a controversial figure. A former Army captain, Sanetti previously served as president of Sturm & Ruger, a Connecticut-based company that produced the assault weapon used in the Norway massacre of 2011. He helped direct "the successful coordinated response to municipal lawsuits that threatened the firearms industry in the late 1990s,? according to a 2008 press release from the firm.
"I think the world of him," said Russ Thurman, a gun magazine editor and a member of NSSF's board of governors, who has noted in the past that while Sanetti's "long-term involvement in the legal issues has not been pleasant or glamorous," it is "important.?
The NSSF?s efforts to rebrand military-style semi-automatic rifles, or ?AR-15 rifles? in industry speak, as consumer-friendly recreational products can be traced back to 2009, when the group launched a national media campaign designed to convince hunters of the benefits of the newer, more expensive assault weapons.
In a newsletter released at the time, Sanetti emphasized how important the guns were to the industry?s bottom line. "The best-selling rifles in America today are those based on the AR-15 platform," he said.
In 2010, the group began working to promote the AR-15 with Guns and Ammo, a major gun magazine that devoted a recent cover story to the best guns for surviving a zombie apocalypse. The group also held combination seminars and shooting sessions where members of the media were lectured on the differences between machine guns and semi-automatic rifles (machines guns are even more dangerous). And yet it has rarely, if ever, attempted to advance the argument that these weapons are necessary, or even particularly useful. "Why are these guns so popular?" asks a lecturer in a video of one of the NSSF media seminars. "One word: They're fun!"
"These are fun fun guns to shoot," says an unidentified journalist in the same video. "As a mother of three I'd have no problem letting my kids, with the correct supervision and safety gear, you know, try one of these guns."
In order for gun manufacturers to keep growing, Sugarmann said, "they've got to do two things. First, find new markets, which is what they're doing with their womens' and childrens' programs. The other option is to find something new to sell the guys who already have guns. The answer for that is increasingly militarized weapons."
* * * * *
Statistically, it's difficult to discern how well these efforts are working. The gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, has a long history of suppressing statistical reports on both gun registrations and gun violence, while simultaneously painting a rosy picture of industry growth.
What's clear is that the gun industry's growing dependence on AR-15s has made it more vulnerable to any legislation that might limit the sale of ARs or high-capacity magazines. And so in April of 2010, the NSSF launched its first-ever political action committee, called NSSFPAC.
In its first nine months, the PAC raised $10,000. In the next election cycle, in 2012, it raised ten times that, $102,000. NSSF also spent $500,000 in the first ten months of 2012 on lobbyists, a nearly five-fold increase over the 2008 total.
The increased presence on Capitol Hill appears to have paid dividends. In its 2011 report, the NSSF boasted that its annual members' lobbying trip to Washington, D.C. had an "immediate result," the introduction of legislation in both the House and Senate to exempt lead bullets from regulations of toxic substances. And indeed, on April 14, less than a week after the NSSF visited Congress, one member in each house, Montana's Sen. Jon Tester (D) and Florida's Rep. Jeff Miller (R), introduced the legislation.
Asked about the timing of the bill, a spokeswoman for Sen. Tester disputed the NSSF's characterization. Tester, she said, consults his own constituents on Second Amendment issues, and "was getting ready to introduce the bill long before NSSF's fly-in." Miller's office did not respond to questions from HuffPost about the bill.
The group has also helped lead a successful lobbying effort in Connecticut, working with the NRA and other organizations to help defeat a proposed ban on high-capacity ammunition clips -- magazines containing more than 10 bullets. Jake McGuigan, the NSSF's government-relations director, told lawmakers that the bill would take a heavy toll on the state?s $1.3 billion firearms industry.
Adding to the irony of NSSF's proximity to Sandy Hook Elementary, the weapons industry's history in Connecticut stretches back almost to the very founding of the country, earning the state a proud nickname: "the arsenal of democracy."
Eli Whitney began manufacturing pistols in Connecticut in 1797, and Samuel Colt, the inventor of the Colt 45 and one of the architects of the industrial revolution, was born in Hartford and started producing guns there in 1848. The Connecticut River Valley, which stretches from Springfield, Mass., in the north to Old Saybrook, Conn. in the south, made Connecticut an ideal setting for industry. For more than two centuries, the fate of the state's industrial plants, gun businesses and military bases have been closely intertwined. As NSSF and many other proponents of the latest and most dangerous weapons models are quick to point out, gun makers in America have long looked to the military for inspiration and funding; the Colt 45 was initially designed for soldiers, and the Civil War financed the construction of many stately homes along the Connecticut River.
Last year, Marlin Firearms, a well-regarded manufacturer that had been in business in Connecticut for a century, closed its plant, costing the state hundreds of jobs. Following the Newtown shooting, the NSSF is facing what may be a far more formidable challenge. Legislation to ban assault weapons has gained momentum in Congress, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has vowed to reintroduce the expired 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban on the Senate's first day back in 2013.
One recent evening outside Sandy Hook Elementary School, a local man who'd come by to pay his respects said he owned a semi-automatic rifle and some 30-round magazines -- the same kind of ammunition that Lanza used and that the NSSF promoted.
He said he'd never heard of the NSSF, but he agreed with their message: powerful, military-style guns are fun.
"But big deal," he added. "I wouldn't mind if they banned them at all."
