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Doug's Sasha taking a nap.
Tosi ihana! Kaunis ääni, ja ihanaa että kerranki joku miespuolinenki laittaa näitä omia tulkintojaan tänne...? Ja hieno kappale! En oikee perusta noista "me singing"-videoista missä tytöt kiekuu millon kuinkaki karmeesti bändien biisejä ja tää on siis erinomaista vaihtelua sellasille! :D
Truly fine! A beautiful voice, and it's great that for once someone of the male sex puts his own interpretations here...? And a fine piece! I don't really like those "me singing" videos where girls cock-a-doodle however horribly the songs of bands and this is therefore an excellent change from that!
Of course, none of this is Kissling's concern. She merely wants to takedown a pro-life Democrat who represents a new generation of women, a generation tired of the "Stay away from my ovaries!" pro-choice shouting that Kissling made famous. The good news is that the President is evidently listening to Kelley not Kissling. The bishops who are about to meet in San Antonio should note that fact. And, we pro-life Democrats should make sure the White House knows that we applaud the selection of Kelley for such an important and sensitive position.
In this election, the three candidates challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose tenure has included a crackdown on women's-rights activists, have tried to set themselves apart from the incumbent by focusing on female voters.
"Iranian women can be a major force and now candidates are realizing our support can deliver them victory and credibility," says Elahe Koulaee, a professor of political science at Tehran University and a former parliament member.
The top reform contender, Mir Hossein Mousavi, broke the taboo of mixing personal life with politics by campaigning with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, an artist and scholar who has been dubbed Iran's Michelle Obama by local media.
Presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist cleric, has said he is against forcing women to wear the Islamic veil. He recently debated with his team the number of cabinet posts women should fill. Mr. Karroubi's top advisers lobbied for the foreign ministry, speculating that when relations with the U.S. normalize, the new foreign minister could shake hands with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
...
Last year, Mr. Ahmadinejad's government introduced two bills that would impose a tax on a woman's dowry and make it easier for a man to practice polygamy. The bills were dropped after an uproar and pressure from women's-rights activists who marched to the parliament by the tens of thousands, demanding to meet with lawmakers.
For women backing Mr Mousavi, or the other reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi, they know equality has limits. It is an issue of rights: the right to study what they choose; to have a say if their husband wants to take a second wife; to do jobs they are qualified for.
"I'm a graduate from one of our country's best universities," Sara tells me in Isfahan in a quiet voice tinged with palpable frustration. "But I still can't do everything I want. I can't say everything I want."
Many young Iranians attend University and 65% of them are women.
Trained as an architect, Sara has found she is allowed to design buildings, but supervising her projects on site can be difficult, and sometimes its forbidden.
"Whoever comes to power has to respond to the demands of the women's rights movement," said rights campaigner Sussan Tahmasebi. "We are no longer invisible."
Activists say women in Iran are subject to discrimination that makes them second-class citizens in divorce, inheritance, child custody, legal matters and other aspects of life.
Under Ahmadinejad, there was an attempt to push women back into the "private sphere and promote them as mothers and wives," Tahmasebi said.
Iran says women in the country are better treated than in the West, where it says they are often seen as sex symbols.
Iranian women are able to hold most jobs and, unlike in Saudi Arabia across the Gulf, they can vote and drive.
But activists say dozens of campaigners have been detained since they launched a campaign in 2006 to try and collect one million signatures on a petition demanding greater women's rights. Most of them were released after a few days or weeks.
I didn't catch who was speaking on the phone to MSNBC, but he said this kind of violence can be attributed to what he called "the Obama effect," basically racist nutjobs being driven insane by President Obama.
I'm somewhat optimistic that there are fewer of these people than one might fear, but...
In thinking about the Republican Party's troubles, consider this: One-third of Republicans now say they have an unfavorable opinion of their party.
There's no such dyspepsia among Democrats. Just 4% have an unfavorable view of their party.
The findings of a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll underscore the perilous state of the GOP. Over the past three years, Republicans have lost control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, and they're now struggling to forge a unified response to the popular new Democratic president.
That rain also wipes away signs of echidna foraging and denning. It took Mr. Opiang months of searching before he found his first echidna. Then he discovered that if he followed trails of freshly dug nose pokes at night — the holes that echidnas made with their beaks as they foraged for earthworms — he could find a den where a sated echidna would be hiding. He learned to grab them under the stomach, where there were no spines. "If you hold them against yourself, they're friendly and they won't struggle," he said.
If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.
The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases — and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller's murder.
Gigot: The Obama administration is making a kind of a core argument on health-care reform. It's saying if we insure more people, bring more people under government subsidies, we can save money. Save money--is that possible?
McCaughey:: No, it is very important that everyone has coverage. But it will not save money. Once people are insured, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, they will use about 70% more health services than they currently do. The most problematic area of this effort is this: The president wants to slow the flow of dollars into the health-care system.
Gigot: Right.
McCaughey: That's going to force cuts in hospital budgets, fewer nurses on the floor, less diagnostic equipment available, and waits for treatment.
Gigot: But if you talk to the Obama administration people, they say, Look, we spend 18%, almost one out of every five dollars of this whole economy, on health care. And they say, That's too much, because the costs are rising. We've got to get this under control.
McCaughey: Well, actually--
Gigot: Are you saying that's not the right direction for policy?
McCaughey: No. Americans spend more on health care than Europeans, for example, because they earn more. Ninety percent of the difference in spending is due to higher per capita incomes in the United States. And we spend more, but we also get more. For example, American women have mammograms more frequently. Their breast cancer is detected sooner and treated faster, and they have much better survival rates than in most parts of Europe.
You'll notice that there is enormous variation in health spending per capita in different countries within the O.E.C.D. But the graph also indicates that there exists a very strong relationship between the G.D.P. per capita of these countries (roughly a measure of ability to pay) and per-capita health spending. The dark line in the graph is a so-called regression equation (whose precise mathematical form is shown in the upper left corner).
That line tells us something important about the relationship between a country's wealth and its health care spending.
Just knowing the G.D.P. per capita of nations helps us explain about 86 percent of the variation in how much different countries pay for health care for the average person. Canada, for example, on average spent only PPP$3,678 on health care per person in 2006, which is about 55 percent of the amount the United States paid per person. But Canada's G.D.P. per capita in 2006 was also smaller than the comparable United States figure, although not that much smaller (it was 84 percent of the American level).
The line helps us estimate that roughly $1,141 of the $3,036 difference between Canadian and American health spending per capita – or 38 percent — can be explained by the underlying difference in G.D.P. per capita alone.
An additional insight from the graph, however, is that even after adjustment for differences in G.D.P. per capita, the United States in 2006 spent $1,895 more on health care than would have been predicted after such an adjustment. If G.D.P. per capita were the only factor driving the difference between United States health spending and that of other nations, the United States would be expected to have spent an average of only $4,819 per capita on health care rather than the $6,714 it actually spent.
Women are under-represented in clinical cancer research published in high-impact journals, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Taking into account the incidence of particular types of cancer among women, studies included a smaller proportion of women than should be expected. The analysis looked specifically at studies of cancer types that were not gender specific, including [sarcoma,] colon cancer, oral cancers, lung cancer, brain tumors and lymphomas.
The authors looked at 661 prospective clinical studies with more than 1 million total participants. Results of this study appear online in the journal Cancer and will be published in the July 15 print issue.
“In the vast majority of individual studies we analyzed, fewer women were enrolled than we would expect given the proportion of women diagnosed with the type of cancer being studied. We’re seeing it across the board in all cancer types,” says study author Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., assistant professor of radiation oncology at the U-M Medical School.
“It’s so important that women are appropriately represented in research. We know there are biological differences between the sexes, as well as social and cultural differences. Studies need to be able to assess whether there are differences in responses to treatment, for example, between women and men,” she adds.
The National Institutes of Health’s Revitalization Act of 1993 explicitly calls out the importance of including women in clinical research, noting that clinical trials should enroll adequate numbers of women to allow for subgroup analysis.
The U-M researchers found that studies reporting government funding did include higher numbers of women participants, but the impact was modest – 41 percent, compared to 37 percent for studies not receiving government funding.
Traditionally, researchers were told not to include people of vulnerable populations in their studies. This group included women of childbearing age. “By protecting them from research, we’re excluding them,” Jagsi notes.
Previous studies have found some barriers to clinical trial participation are lack of information, fear and a perception of interfering with personal responsibilities, such as child care.
“Sometimes participating in research studies can be time intensive. Women today are often stretched very thin trying to deal with the balance between domestic responsibilities, their cancer diagnosis, and often a career as well. They may be particularly likely to find clinical trials too burdensome. In that case, researchers should consider providing compensation to help with transportation or child care expenses,” Jagsi says.
This under-representation of women is not necessarily the result of conscious decisions, points out senior author Peter Ubel, M.D., director of the Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine at U-M.
“Clinical researchers are not purposely trying to exclude women from their studies. All the more reason they need to consciously and earnestly revise their recruitment methods to give more women a chance to volunteer,” Ubel says.
Methodology: The researchers looked at all original clinical cancer research published in five top oncology journals and three top general medical journals in 2006. The journals included were the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Lancet Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research and Cancer. Articles were analyzed to determine factors including the number of participants, gender of participants, type of cancer and funding source.
The percent of women was summarized in two ways: The overall percent of women from all studies; and the average percent from each study that were women. The first method gives greater weight to larger studies, while the second method allows each study to have equal weight. Women’s representation was lower than expected, based on general population incidence data, according to both analyses.
When Germany's first woman flier, Melli Beese, took the test for her license in 1911, male colleagues at the flying field tried unsuccessfully to sabotage her by tampering with the plane's steering mechanism and partially emptying the gas tank; for a woman to fly, said one of them, "would take the glory away from us."
President Barack Obama's appointment of Alexia Kelley, founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, as director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives took the pro-choice movement by surprise. On Thursday, the day that news of the appointment leaked out, Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center and a quintessential Washington insider, told me that she "hadn't heard anything about it till today, and we are trying to get to the bottom of it."
What Greenberger and others will want to know is why the post, which includes oversight of the department's faith-based grant-making in family planning, HIV and AIDS and in small-scale research into the effect of religion and spirituality on early sexual behavior, has gone to someone who both believes abortion should be illegal and opposes contraception. That's right -- Kelley's group of self-described progressive Catholics takes a position held by only a small minority, that the Catholic church is right to prohibit birth control. Were there no qualified religious experts who hold more mainstream views on family planning and abortion, views that are consistent with those of President Obama?
Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, ... e-mailed The Associated Press, saying: "This guy is a fruit and a lunatic."Let me get this straight: Is Newman calling Roeder gay, or just using that as a demeaning epithet? I checked Google definitions to make sure I wasn't missing something, and I'm pretty sure that Newman wasn't insinuating that Roeder is a ripened ovary.