Resolving to surprise her husband, an executive’s wife stopped by his office. She found him with his secretary sitting in his lap.

Without hesitating, he dictated, “…and in conclusion, gentlemen, shortage or no shortage, I cannot continue to operate this office with just one chair

They said antidepressants, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, which affect a message-carrying brain chemical called serotonin, may raise the risk of pre-term delivery and affect a baby’s health at birth.

Some prior studies have found that drugs in this class can cross the placenta and appear in the umbilical cord blood of babies whose mothers have taken them.

“The study justifies increased awareness to the possible effects of intrauterine exposure to antidepressants,” Dr. Najaaraq Lund of the Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

About one in 10 pregnant women experience depression during pregnancy. Because depression can jeopardize a pregnant woman’s health, doctors often prescribe antidepressants, but it is not yet clear how these drugs affect a baby’s health.

To study this, Lund and colleagues analyzed data on 57,000 pregnancies and deliveries at Aarhus University Hospital in Skejby, Denmark, between 1989 to 2006.

They identified 329 pregnancies in which the mothers took an SSRI medication, another 4,902 with a history of psychiatric illness not treated with an antidepressant, and 51,700 with no history of psychiatric illness.

Women who took antidepressants while pregnant delivered their babies five days earlier than other women in the study, and had twice the risk of pre-term delivery than women with no history of psychiatric illness.

Babies exposed to antidepressants during pregnancy were far more likely than those in the other two groups to have a five-minute Apgar score — a measure of a newborn’s health — of seven or below. Seven is typically an indicator of a healthy baby.

They were also more likely to be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit, and some of these babies showed signs of withdrawal, such as jitters, seizures, respiratory problems, infections and jaundice.

The team found no differences in the babies’ head size or birth weight among the three groups.

Antidepressants used by women in the study included Pfizer Inc’s Zoloft, known generically as sertraline; Forest Laboratories Inc’s Celexa, or citalopram, and Lexapro, or escitalopram; Eli Lilly and Co’s Prozac or fluoxetine; and GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil or paroxetine.

Although treating depression might be warranted, the team said more studies are needed to see if some drugs in the class pose less risk than others.

In olden days when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” there was a morals clause written into an actor’s film contract. The purpose was to restrain an actor from engaging in public behavior that might offend the audience and harm ticket sales.

Today, lewd and crude behavior can boost ticket sales and TV ratings and what passes for a morals clause deals with sexual harassment in the workplace.

Which brings me to David Letterman’s recent disclosure that he has had sex with female subordinates. Much of the coverage has mentioned that this was before his marriage to his live-in girlfriend of more than a decade with whom he fathered a child.

On his show, Letterman admitted only to “creepy” behavior. Does this make him a “creep”? Not in our modern cultural view of morality. To admit to being a creep would exact a moral judgment and suggest a line exists that divides the creep from the non-creep.

CBS president Leslie Moonves is unlikely to be helpful in the Letterman affair(s) as rumor has it that while he was still married he famously “dated” a subordinate by the name of Julie Chen, who coincidentally was promoted to co-host of the network’s morning show.

More disturbing than Letterman’s behavior and acknowledgment of sex with subordinates was the reaction from the studio audience. When Letterman mentioned that a man – allegedly “48 Hours” producer Robert Halderman – had tried to extort $2 million from him in return for the man’s silence, Letterman transformed himself into a victim and the audience laughed and applauded. He said he wanted to protect his wife, the women with whom he had had sex, himself and his job. I can hear my late father now: “If you want to protect yourself, you should not engage in behavior that puts you at risk. That would be the best protection.” Dad was so old-fashioned and so right.

Stephanie Birkitt, who was described by The New York Times  as “Letterman’s long-time personal assistant,” is one of the women alleged to have had a sexual relationship with Letterman. She has appeared in numerous skits on the show. Apparently the casting couch lives at CBS.

A Washington Times headline revealed the shallowness in our moral water table: “Letterman’s TV Affairs Admission Called Adept PR Move.” It’s all about public relations and survival these days, not contrition and repentance.

The legalities of all this have yet to be worked out, but as Halderman’s lawyer said last week, what is known is not all that will be known. That will keep the tabloids busy. But this should be a reminder to the rest of us that television has become a rude and unwelcome guest in our homes. If my children were young, I would get rid of it. It has little that is worth watching and a lot that is harmful to what remains of the rapidly unraveling moral fiber of America. In fact, a strong case can be made that so much of what is on TV is aiding and abetting the unraveling.

source:http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view/20091006david_letterman_creepy_behavior_understatement_at_last_jokes_on_letterman/

The cost of government benefits for seniors soared to a record $27,289 per senior in 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis.

That’s a 24% increase above the inflation rate since 2000. Medical costs are the biggest reason. Last year, for the first time, health care and nursing homes cost the government more than Social Security payments for seniors age 65 and older. The average Social Security benefit per senior in 2007 was $13,184.
EXAMINING THE TREND: Seniors care costs to soar as boomers age

“We have a health care crisis. We don’t have an entitlement crisis,” says David Certner, legislative policy director of the AARP, which represents seniors.

He says seniors shouldn’t be blamed for the growing cost of government retirement programs.

The federal government spent $952 billion in 2007 on elderly benefits, up from $601 billion in 2000. It’s the biggest function of the federal government. States chipped in another $27 billion in 2007, mostly for nursing homes.

All three major senior programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — experienced dramatically escalating costs that outstripped inflation and the growth in the senior population.

Benefits per senior are soaring at a time when the senior population is not. The portion of the U.S. population age 65 and older has been constant at 12% since 2000.

The senior boom, however, starts big time in 2011 when the first baby boomers — 79 million people born between 1946 and 1964 — turn 65 and qualify for Medicare health insurance. The oldest baby boomers turn 62 this year and qualify for Social Security at reduced benefits.

USA TODAY used a variety of government data to calculate the cost of providing Social Security, medical benefits and long-term care to an aging population. Billions of dollars paid to non-seniors — the disabled, children and others in the programs — were removed to create an estimate that focuses exclusively on seniors.

Findings include:

•Medicare experienced the most explosive growth from 2000 to 2007. The Medicare prescription drug benefit, started in 2006, accounts for about one-fourth of the increase in Medicare, which provides health benefits for people 65 and older.

•Long-term care costs per senior have declined slightly in the last three years because of a move away from nursing homes to less-expensive home care.

•The cost of senior benefits is equal to $10,673 for every non-senior household.

•About 35% of the federal budget is spent on senior benefits, up from 32% in 2004.

Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Urban Institute, notes that the full cost of senior benefits goes beyond Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A complete estimate would include other programs for retirees, such as military and civil servant pensions and medical benefits, he says.

The Urban Institute estimates that kids receive an average of about $4,000 per child in benefits, including the child tax credit and other indirect assistance.

Economist Dean Baker calls it “granny bashing” to focus on the cost of senior benefits. The elderly paid a designated tax for Social Security and Medicare taxes during their decades of working to support these programs when they retired, says Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic Policy and Research.

A leaky faucet is a common problem that may seem complicated without a plumbing knowledge. Repair or Replace the leaky faucet are fairly simple to fix if approached methodically. With the detailed step-by-step guides, you’ll be able to resolve the issue that leads you to save both your time and money by saying goodbye to waiting around for high priced plumbers.
 
Before You Start

• Shut off the water under the sink.
• Close the sink drain; cover it with a rag to catch dropped parts.
• Tape the jaws of your wrench with a layer of duct tape to avoid scratching the fixture.
• Establish a place to lay out parts in order of removal.
• Use distilled white vinegar and a soft scouring pad for removing mineral deposits on faucet parts.

Find Your Faucet

There are four kinds of faucets: compression, cartridge (sleeve), ceramic disk, and ball type. Each type is illustrated here. Except for the ball-type faucet, there are two illustrations for each. The less detailed version will identify the kind you have. The more detailed one will help as you make repairs.

A compression faucet relies on rubber washers to seal the valve seat. Rubber washers wear out and must be replaced occasionally. The other types, often called washerless faucets, last longer but they too can develop leaks. When these cartridge, ceramic-disk or ball-type faucets leak, you can either replace the O-ring or neoprene seal that’s causing the leak or replace the entire assembly for less than $20.

Compression Faucets

Most leaky compression faucets need new seat washers. Pry off the decorative cap on the handle, remove the handle screw, pull off the handle and use a crescent wrench to unscrew the packing nut. After unscrewing the stem, remove and replace the seat washer held in place by a brass screw. Coat the washers with nontoxic, heat-proof plumber’s grease. Pop the stem out of the packing nut and replace the O-ring, the culprit for leaky handles.

O-rings range in size from 3/8 to 5/8 in., so it’s crucial to exactly match the size on your faucet. Coat the new O-ring with the plumber’s grease. Reassemble the faucet and tighten the packing nut.

If your faucet continues to leak, the seat may be pitted. Remove the stem and grind smooth the valve seat with a valve-seat dresser, a tool you temporarily screw down into the faucet.

Just off the north coast of Cebu, Philippines nestled another unspoiled idyllic paradise island ideal for those tourist looking for best destination in the Philippines. Its name literally means “Unfortunate Christmas”, Malapascua, boasts its name as Philippines’ perfect vacation destination for all tourist and beach lovers. Malapascua is a beautiful sleepy island with white sandy beaches cover with green palm trees and surrounded by blue clear waters, which is one of the best in the Philippines. The island’s exceptional long white beach stretches around the south-east coast of the island facing Cebu, Leyte and Biliran.

Malapascua also called “Logon” is located about 8 km. northeast of Cebu mainland and 25 km. west of Leyte. In the island you cannot see cars and most buildings are only one floor high that makes Malapascua Island seemed to be a lonely planet and labeled as new Boracay but without the crowds. But behind that silence laid the natural beauty of the island that will certainly keep your day busy.

Malapascua’s main attraction are the beaches that is best for diving and snorkeling that often ideally located at the west cost of the island. With its wonderful place to dive most visitors are divers or backpackers, making Philippines as their destination for newest diving spots. Diving at Malapascua will make worth of your stay to enjoy with thresher shark sightings in the world, seasonal hammerheads, white tip sharks, mantas, mandarin fish, pygmy seahorses, cuttlefish, beautiful coral gardens and a huge diversity of marine life that well-preserved.

As for those who love to feel the nature, Malapascua’s white sand beaches would be ideal to take a walk around to see the local villages and feel the natural breeze along the shore. The island is small that it only takes about 3 hours to walk around and witness the fantastic views over from the lighthouse that is open to the public will surely worth your visit.

The island is suitable for families and young children too. There are resorts in Malapascua with swimming pool ideally for family vacation and relaxation. If you want to completely unwind massage services are also available around the island. When you are in the island you will not feel your stomach to be empty. Malapascua has some excellent restaurants with excellent quality, and is generally a mix of Filipino and European dishes. The next time you seek for best white sand beach and diving spot in the Philippines consider Malapascua.

source: http://visitwowphilippines.blogspot.com/

Hamburgers and French fries could be as addictive as heroin, scientists have claimed.
Researchers in the United States have found evidence to suggest people can become overly dependent on the sugar and fat in fast food.

The controversial findings add weight to claims that over-eating is simply down to a lack of self-control.
 
It may also explain soaring rates of obesity in the western world.
 
Dr John Hoebel and colleagues at Princeton University in New Jersey based their theory on a study of rats.
‘Cold turkey’

They found that rats fed a diet containing 25% sugar are thrown into a state of anxiety when the sugar is removed.

Their symptoms included chattering teeth and the shakes – similar to those seen in people withdrawing from nicotine or morphine, according to researchers.

Dr Hoebel said he believed high-fat foods stimulate opioids or ‘pleasure chemicals’ in the brain.

“The implication is that some animals – and by extension some people – can become overly dependent on sweet food,” he said.

Further studies published in New Scientist magazine back up this theory.

Ann Kelley, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, the behaviour of rats after the were given sweet, salty and fatty foods.

She found a link between the brain’s pleasure chemicals and a craving for this type of food.

She stimulated the rats’ brains with a synthetic version of the natural opioid enkephalin. This caused rats to eat up to six times their normal intake of fat.

In addition, Dr Kelley identified long-lasting changes in rats’ brain chemistry – similar to those caused by extended use of morphine or heroin.

Dr Kelley said: “This says that mere exposure to pleasurable tasty foods is enough to change gene expression and that suggests that you could be addicted to food.”

However, other experts expressed doubts over whether people can become addicted to food.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition lobby group in Washington DC, said there was a lack of evidence.

“I think the burden is on advocates of the addiction argument to provide evidence of addiction,” he said.

Dr Jeane Randolph, from the University of Toronto, dismissed the theory. She said fast food causes blood sugar to peak and then plunge, creating a natural desire for another snack.

“It’s a set-up for a late-afternoon binge rather than addiction,” she said.

The major focus of stem cell research in cardiology is promoting regeneration of the heart or preventing scar formation, said Jeffrey Karp, who runs a stem cell biology lab at Harvard University.

One study reporting successful results in humans involves harvesting patients’ own stem cells, purifying them, and injecting them directly into the heart muscle. The stem cells have a surface marker called CD34, which means they are capable of growing new blood vessels.

The study, sponsored by Baxter Inc., is the largest adult stem cell study for heart disease in the U.S., said Dr. Douglas Losordo, cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, who is leading the trial. The researchers will present their one-year findings from Phase II of the trial in September, Losordo said.

“It’s important to point out that this is a use of a patient’s own body’s repair capabilities,” Losordo said.

If everything goes well, it’s conceivable this treatment could be widely available in a little over four years, he said. The target patient population, consisting of end-stage cardiac patients who have tried all other available therapies, is about 300,000 to 900,000 people, he said.

So far, researchers have not found side effects from this method, Losordo said. However, because it is an invasive surgical procedure in which stem cells are delivered through a catheter, there is a risk of perforation of about 1 percent, he said. There is also a small risk of blood clotting from the drug, GCSF, which mobilizes stem cells.
Injecting stem cells into the heart muscle carries the risk of arrhythmia, said Techung Lee, associate professor of biochemistry at the State University New York at Buffalo. But Losordo said this risk is theoretical in his trial, and is believed to be very low with CD34 cells in general.
Lee and colleagues are working on a less-invasive technique. In a study in mice, they injected stem cells from bone marrow into skeletal muscles of limbs. They found that the stem cells produced growth factors that traveled to the heart, in addition to stimulating the muscle itself to make growth factors that also improved cardiac function.

The challenge for translating this method to humans would be that, while each mouse needed only a few million stem cells, each human patient would need close to a billion stem cells for the therapy — which would be far too expensive and logistically difficult.

“This is a problem that’s been experienced by everyone in the field,” Lee said. He estimates that his method could be available clinically in five years, after researchers find ways to reduce the required number of cells by a factor of 10 or even 100.

Another therapeutic possibility is giving a patient an IV of stem cells, which would come from a stem cell bank or a company. The challenge is that the cells may not have the right homing receptors to land in the heart, Karp said.

Karp’s group is working on an approach to chemically modify the surface of cells to enhance their targeting to specific sites. Results from animal models have shown promising results for targeting sites of inflammation, he said.

“Essentially we know the ZIP code of vessels within a certain tissue, we can program the address on the surface of the cell,” he said.

Lee’s and Karp’s teams use adult mesenchymal stem cells, which may develop into connective tissue, lymphatic tissue, and blood vessels. These stem cells are largely interchangeable between patients and don’t require matching, as organ transplants do. However, as more becomes known about the relatively new field of stem cell therapy, a more specific matching system may be required, said Dr. Joon Lee, cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Some stem cell therapies for the heart are being tested in human clinical trials. Osiris Therapeutics Inc. is enrolling patients in a phase II trial for Prochymal, which contains mesenchymal stem cells. The company intends to use this drug, which gets injected into the vein, to repair heart damage in patients who have just experienced their first heart attack.

More than 90 percent of research on using stem cells to repair the human heart involves adult stem cells, Lee said.

That means the controversy about using stem cells derived from human embryos is largely absent from this line of research. For developing treatments that involve transplanting stem cells from adults, there is no ethical concern about the use of embryos, Lee said.

Embryonic stem cells are advantageous in research because they can be grown more easily than adult stem cells in a culture, and are pluripotent, meaning they can develop into any of the various cell types of the body, according to the National Institutes of Health. But it is not yet known whether tissues derived from embryonic stem cells would cause transplant rejection, whereas this does not seem to be a problem with adult stem cells.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates which adult stem cell techniques are allowed to go into clinical trials and sets the requirements for more routine use. Whether the FDA will become more or less lenient in these respects is unclear, Lee said.

It’s not unfathomable that within the next two to five years, some FDA-approved stem cell treatments will be available for cardiovascular disease, Lee said.

Karp has a longer view — five to 10 years before stem cell treatments become widely available for heart problems, he said.

The biology of stem cell treatments for the heart is not well understood, said Dr. Ronald Crystal, chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

One of the challenges is that once a stem cell gets put into a person’s body, no one can get it out, Crystal said. This is the opposite of other kinds of medications — for instance, a person may get sick from taking too many aspirin, but eventually the drug leaves the system. Not so with stem cells, he said.

Crystal expressed general caution about the future of stem cell research, which is still experimental, for heart patients.

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s president hit back Saturday at President Barack Obama’s accusation that his country had sought to hide its construction of a new nuclear site, arguing that Tehran reported the facility to the U.N. even earlier than required.

The Iranian president defended his government’s actions as the head of the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, arrived Saturday to arrange an inspection of the uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom.

The revelation that Iran has been building a new nuclear plant has heightened the concern of the U.S. and many of its allies, which suspect Tehran is using a civilian nuclear program as a cover for developing a weapons-making capability. Iran denies such an aim, saying it only wants to generate energy.

Obama and the leaders of France and Britain accused Iran of keeping the construction hidden from the world for years. The U.S. president said last month that Iran’s actions “raised grave doubts” about its promise to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes only.

ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has also said Tehran was “on the wrong side of the law” over the new plant and should have revealed its plans as soon as it decided to build the facility.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad challenged that view in a speech Saturday, saying that Iran voluntarily revealed the facility to the IAEA in a letter on Sept. 21. He said that was one year earlier than necessary under the agency’s rules.

“The U.S. president made a big and historic mistake,” Iranian state TV quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. “Later it became clear that (his) information was wrong and that we had no secrecy.”

White House spokesman Tom Vietor said the administration had no comment on Ahmadinejad’s remarks.

Iran agreed to allow U.N. inspectors into the facility at a landmark meeting with six world powers near Geneva on Thursday that put nuclear talks back on track and included the highest-level bilateral contact with the U.S. in three decades.

Iranian officials argue that under IAEA safeguard rules, a member nation is required to inform the U.N. agency about the existence of a nuclear facility six months before introducing nuclear material into the machines. Iran says the new facility won’t be operational for 18 months, and so it has not violated any IAEA requirements.

The IAEA has said that Iran is obliged under the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to notify the organization when it begins to design a new nuclear facility.

Iran says it voluntarily implemented the Additional Protocol for 2 1/2 years as a confidence-building gesture, but its parliament passed legislation in 2007 forcing the government to end such cooperation after the country was referred to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

The IAEA has countered by saying that a government cannot unilaterally abandon such an agreement.

Suspicion that Iran’s newly revealed nuclear site was meant for military purposes was heightened by its location, at least partly inside a mountain and next to a military base.

Iran has said it built the facility in such a way only to ensure continuity of its nuclear activities in case of an attack.

“Some are allowing themselves to threaten our legal facilities with military attack, and so we are going to come up with security measures for our nuclear facilities,” Iran’s senior nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said Friday after returning from the talks in Switzerland. “One of them is that we need to have a facility for uranium enrichment with a higher level of security and that’s why we decided to establish the new facility that is under construction.”

An IAEA spokesman said that in addition to the new nuclear facility, ElBaradei will also discuss a plan to allow Russia to take some of Iran’s processed uranium and enrich it to higher levels to fuel a research reactor in Tehran.

Western officials said Iran agreed to the plan at Thursday’s meeting, a potentially significant move that would show greater flexibility by both sides.

Obama noted the deal in comments on the meeting. But Mehdi Saffare, Iran’s ambassador to Britain and a member of the Iranian delegation at the talks, said Iran had not yet agreed to such a plan.

The Obama administration, together with the U.S. Congress, is drawing up plans for tough new sanctions if the talks with Iran show signs of faltering. Obama said the new penalties could target Iran’s energy, financial and telecommunications sectors.

A congressional committee will hold a hearing Tuesday on the possibility of expanding sanctions to cover a wider range of financial transactions, including a new ban on exporting refined petroleum to Iran.

For generations, old-money families have managed their complex affairs through family offices. These offices employ full-time C.P.A.s, attorneys, financial planners, financial analysts and, sometimes, fraud examiners. So when Joe Kopcynski was looking at ways to expand his investment-management firm, Universal Advisory Service, in Albuquerque, he first studied the family-office model.

Kopcynski saw an opportunity to offer a similar suite of services to a new breed of wealthy individuals — business owners, top executives, entertainers and athletes. On average, his 14-employee business has grown 25% annually since 1990.

“History can be a great teacher,” says Kopcynski. “We were always looking back to see what did and did not work. It was fundamental. And it was what my clients were telling me to do.”

Before you set out to change an industry, know its history.

“It’s like trying to catch a baseball,” says Steve McKee, author of When Growth Stalls, which surveys executives at 700 companies about what they learned from crises. “You’re in a better place if you know where the ball has been. Then study the needs of your customers. Where are their frustration points? Where is their productivity being hampered?”