JERUSALEM – Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.
The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.
Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."
The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.
In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."
Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.
Hiss became director of the institute in 1988. He said in the interview that the practice of harvesting organs without permission began in the "early 1990s." However, he also said that military surgeons removed a thin layer of skin from bodies as early as 1987 to treat burn victims. Hiss said he believed that was done with family consent. The harvesting ended in 2000, he said.
Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report "anti-Semitic."
The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.
Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."
While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel's Health Ministry told Channel 2, "The guidelines at that time were not clear." It added, "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."

WASHINGTON – Outnumbered Republicans are vowing to delay passage of historic health care legislation as long as possible after jubilant Democrats locked in Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson as the 60th and decisive vote.
Nelson's backing puts President Barack Obama's signature issue firmly on a path for Christmas Eve passage. Democrats will need to show 60 votes on two additional occasions, with the next — and most critical — test vote set for about 1 a.m. Monday.
"This bill is a legislative train wreck of historic proportions," the Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said at a Saturday news conference. He pointed to cuts to Medicare that CBO said totaled more than $470 billion over a decade, with reductions in planned payments to home health care agencies and hospices. He also said the bill includes "massive tax increases" at a time of double-digit unemployment.
Republicans also noted that CBO concluded that under the bill, "federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period, as would the federal budgetary commitment to health care."
To get Nelson's vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., agreed to a series of concessions on abortion and other issues demanded by Nelson, a Democrat, then informed Obama of the agreement as the president flew home from climate talks in Copenhagen.
Obama welcomed the breakthrough, saying, "After a nearly centurylong struggle, we are on the cusp of making health care reform a reality in the United States of America."
The Congressional Budget Office said the Senate bill would extend coverage to more than 30 million Americans who lack it. It also imposes new regulations to curb abuses of the insurance industry, and the president noted one last-minute addition would impose penalties on companies that "arbitrarily jack up prices" in advance of the legislation taking effect.
CBO analysts also said the legislation would cut federal deficits by $132 billion over 10 years and possibly much more in the subsequent decade.
At its core, the legislation would create a new insurance exchange where consumers could shop for affordable coverage that complied with new federal guidelines. Most Americans would be required to purchase insurance, with federal subsidies available to help defray the cost for lower and middle income individuals and families.
In a concession to Nelson and other moderates, the bill lacks a government-run insurance option of the type that House Democrats inserted into theirs. In a final defeat for liberals, a proposed Medicare expansion was also jettisoned in the past several days as Reid and the White House maneuvered for 60 votes.

PARIS – France's biggest rock star, Johnny Hallyday, has been hospitalized in Los Angeles for an infection following back surgery.
A statement from his Paris press office says Hallyday, an entertainment icon for decades, is "under observation" for the infection linked to Nov. 26 surgery on a herniated disc.
The statement late Tuesday says he should be out in a few days but gives no other details.
Hallyday is on a multi-country tour called "Route 66," a reference to his age and homage to the American rock that has inspired his music.
Producer Jean-Claude Camus said on French radio that Hallyday's hospitalization could thwart his plans to spend the holidays at his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, where filmmaker Roman Polanski is under house arrest.

The
first-ever Monarch butterflies in space have taken flight on the International Space
Station to the delight of astronauts aboard.

Space
station commander Jeff Williams, of NASA, beamed video of the first of several
Monarch butterflies fluttered its gossamer wings in weightlessness last week,
just after the insect emerged from its cocoon and began floating around their
enclosure.

"It is
beautiful," Williams radioed Mission Control. "It's always beautiful to see a
little bit of Earth up here."

The video
showed one adult Monarch butterfly floating gently in microgravity as it opened
and closed its wings to dry them.

"Congratulations
to the experiment team," Williams said.

"They are
very proud parents," Mission Control radioed back. "Glad you finally got the video.
It's a pretty awesome site."

The Monarch
butterflies are the first ever sent to space. They began emerging just days
after several Painted Lady butterflies began emerging from their own cocoons in
a separate enclosure.

The Monarch
and Painted Lady butterflies arrived at the station as catepillars last month on the space
shuttle Atlantis as part of an educational experiment. And while butterfly
larvae have been sent to space before, the colorful insects on the space
station now are the first to successfully go through all phases of their
development — from larva to pupa to adult butterfly — in orbit.

More than 170,000
students between kindergarten and 12th grade and 2,800 teachers are following
the experiment on Earth, where they are comparing the space butterflies'
lifecycle with that of similar insects on the ground. The butterflies also have
their own Twitter page "ButterflySpace" where status updates of their space
mission appear.

At least
one difference between space Monarch butterflies and their terrestrial
counterparts has already been revealed. On Earth, the wings of a newly-emerged
Monarch butterfly can take anywhere between three and five minutes to dry. But
aboard the space station, it took about 15 minutes. 

The Monarch
and Painted Butterflies were delivered to the space station inside a habitat
known as the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus Science Insert – 03. It
was built by BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado at
Boulder.

Because of
the cramped quarters, the Monarch butterflies — which began emerging Nov. 30 — were
only expected to live about four days, instead of the two weeks they would
survive on Earth, NASA officials said. The space Painted Lady butterflies,
meanwhile, are expected to live about a week, about half what they would on
Earth.

The
butterflies are not the first critters to live among the human crew of the
International Space Station. Two orb weaving spiders managed to spin
wild webs in weightlessness last year, with astronauts checking in on them
from time to time.

Spider
Success! Weightless Webs Spun in Space
The
Strangest Things in Space
SPACE.com
Video Show - Life Aboard the International Space Station
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At first it sounded like science fiction, curing genetic diseases by giving people new genes. Then it seemed like simple fiction: while theoretically possible, gene therapy appeared unlikely to become a true therapeutic option, the field having suffered years of complications and high-profile setbacks. But over the past year, a series of small but intriguing advances has suggested that the technique may hold real future potential.
In September, researchers at the University of Washington reported in the journal Nature that they had produced color vision in squirrel monkeys, which are normally born colorblind. Using a tiny syringe, researchers injected the single missing gene for color vision into the monkeys' eyes. The result was clear: monkeys that previously could not distinguish red, green and gray were easily able to pass a simian equivalent of a color-detection test. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)
Another study published in the Lancet in October found that gene therapy had restored partial vision to five children and seven adults with a congenital eye disease that causes blindness. And a paper published earlier this month in Science reported the successful treatment of two children with ALD, or adrenoleukodystrophy - a neurological disorder that leads to progressive brain damage and death in two to five years.
In the most recent study, published in November, researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported they had successfully gotten monkeys to grow bigger, stronger muscles within weeks - no anabolic steroids, exercise or genetic engineering required. Scientists injected genes directly into the right quadriceps of six healthy monkeys, and eight weeks later, the changes were plainly visible. The muscles in each monkey's right leg were larger and measurably more forceful than those in the left leg, and the effects remained for 15 months.
That study built on previous research by the Columbus-based team, which had successfully used gene therapy to treat rodents with the muscle-wasting disease muscular dystrophy. "We wanted to raise the bar and test a species closely related to humans," says neuroscientist Brian Kaspar, a co-leader of the study published in Science Translational Medicine. (Read "What Can Genetic Tests Tell You?")
The single gene injected into the monkeys was coded for the naturally occurring protein follistatin, which blocks the function of another protein called myostatin that hinders muscle growth. Past research in mice that were genetically engineered to have an extra copy of the follistatin-producing gene has shown that blocking myostatin, by increasing follistatin, causes muscles to bulk up fast. What Kaspar and his team found was that the same effect could be achieved simply by injecting genes - ferried aboard a small, non-disease-causing virus known as AAV, or adeno-associated virus - into the muscle. They further discovered that once the gene was delivered into the muscle-cell nucleus, muscles began producing their own constant supply of follistatin, and muscle fibers kept growing. Think of it as the body producing its own muscle-boosting drugs.
The findings got headlines, not least because they immediately raised the possibility of power-hungry athletes someday using gene doping to improve performance - a technique that would be much harder to detect than using performance-enhancing drugs. And while myostatin-blocking drugs are not yet available, the pharmaceutical companies Amgen and Wyeth are currently experimenting with myostatin inhibitors, with encouraging early results, and it's clearly something that antidoping agencies around the world are concerned about. The World Anti-Doping Agency has banned gene doping, and included "agents modifying myostatin function(s)" on its list of prohibited substances.
Scientists do not yet know whether myostatin-related gene therapy will even work in humans. Given the financial and regulatory hurdles to launching a first-phase trial, it could take years and several million dollars before researchers could replicate their animal findings in people. But advances like the muscle trial in monkeys help attract funds - largely from advocacy groups like the Muscular Dystrophy Association and charitable organizations founded by patient families, as well as drug companies and the federal government - to a field that has until now been somewhat better known for its failures. In 2003, for instance, two French children with a rare genetic immune disorder developed leukemia after they received gene-therapy injections containing retroviruses. The other 18 children in the trial were cured, but the setback reverberated through the field, dissuading researchers and funding. "A lot of financial interest has disappeared since it became clear that it's going to take a long time and it's not going to be easy [to develop gene-therapy drugs]," says Hank Greely of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics.
But despite gene therapy's public-image problem, scientists are optimistic. Many believe that over the next four to five years, they will be able to apply what they have learned from studying gene therapies for rare diseases to the treatment of more common ailments like epilepsy, arthritis and congestive heart failure. "[Gene therapy] still needs one killer app. One clear, unambiguous success," says Greely. "And then the money will flood in."
Read "A Gene to Cure Blindness."
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
View this article on Time.comRelated articles on Time.com:Troubled Soil How to Handle a Medical Crisis Dead Tree Alert: Paging Dr. Obama Dead Tree Alert: In Treatment Returns When Doctors Say, "We're Sorry"

In the United States, if a consumer purchases goods from an out-of-state vendor, the consumer's state may not have jurisdiction over the out-of-state vendor and no sales tax would be due. However, the customer's state may make up for the lost sales tax revenue by charging the consumer a use tax in an amount equal to the sales taxes avoided.

For example, if a person purchases a computer from a local brick-and-mortar retail store, the store will charge the state's sales tax. However, if that person purchases a computer over the internet or from an out-of-state mail-order seller, sales tax may not apply to the sale, but the person could owe a use tax on the purchase. Some states may also charge a use tax on the in-state transfer of used goods such as automobiles, boats and other consumer goods.

Sales Tax Consulting

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Sweeping from lush mountain rain forests to pristine beaches, a corridor of land protected by Puerto Rico's last governor hosts dozens of rare and endangered species and was championed by celebrities who helped fight off resort proposals.
Now new Gov. Luis Fortuno has revoked the reserve as part of a drive to bring jobs and investment for the U.S. territory's struggling economy. And activists see a broader pattern of looser protection for the island's environment.
Fortuno's Oct. 30 order allows large-scale development inside the 3,200-acre 1,300-hectare) parcel of land immediately north of El Yunque, the only tropical rain forest in the U.S. National Forest system.
Previous Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila had declared the Northeast Ecological Corridor off-limits to all but small, eco-friendly projects after a preservation campaign backed by actor Benicio del Toro and attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Fortuno also backs legislation that would make it harder for environmental groups to block construction permits and he supports a new coal-fired power plant and garbage facilities that worry environmentalists.
"We could be in quite a lot of trouble as an island," said Camilla Feibelman, the Sierra Club's coordinator in Puerto Rico.
The Caribbean territory of 4 million people already struggles with overpopulation and the legacy of decades of industrial contamination. Polluted surface water and reservoirs mean Puerto Rico has a tenth as much fresh water per person as the U.S. mainland, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The island is also dotted with Superfund sites where the EPA is overseeing the cleanup of contaminants.
"We have to be a lot more careful than any territory or state in the U.S. with how we use our scarce resources, and we are not doing that," said Abel Vale Nieves, president of the Citizens for the Karst group that promotes protection for sensitive limestone terrain.
But spurring the economy has been Fortuno's top priority since his election last year as the island's first Republican governor in four decades. The 49-year-old former tourism chief faces an unemployment rate that has soared above 16 percent.
His office declined to grant an interview but Planning Board president Hector Morales denied Fortuno's policies threaten the environment.
"The government of Puerto Rico has been clear about creating a balance between conserving important natural resources and sustainable development," Morales said.
Fortuno says most of the northeast corridor will endure as a preserve, and all plans there are on hold while the government evaluates which lands are the most sensitive.
But developers recently have pitched hotels, a golf course and a shopping center.
Fortuno's policies have encountered little strong political opposition because both houses of the legislature and most of the island's mayorships are controlled by his New Progressive Party, which supports making Puerto Rico a U.S. state.
But hundreds have demonstrated against the decision on the Northeast preserve and the governor's approval ratings have dropped sharply since his landslide victory against an incumbent facing a federal indictment on corruption charges.
Political analyst Manuel Alvarez-Rivera said some Puerto Ricans believe "Gov. Fortuno is trying to rule as if he is in a state in the U.S. mainland."
Environmental groups complain that a bill meant to speed issuance of development permits restricts input from outsiders, making it tougher to halt projects they see as dangerous.

Activists also say they are skeptical of a proposed plant to generate power from garbage, most likely by burning it, in the southeastern city of Yabucoa.

Ports Authority director Alvaro Pilar said it could process waste imported from other Caribbean islands and he said the government is pursuing as many as five such plants, which are common on the U.S. mainland.

He said they would help the island cope with a solid waste crisis and said the idea will eventually win over critics concerned about the risk of contamination and the island's tourism image.

"At the end of the day, the electricity and savings are going to be enjoyed by the Puerto Rican people," he said.

You don't have to spend much time with teenagers to know that the average adolescent would rather devote an afternoon to sitting in front of the TV, computer or video-game console than working out in a gym. And in recent years, as physical-education classes have been progressively cut from cash-strapped public-school curriculums, teens have had even more time to lounge, slouch, hang out or do anything but break a sweat.
It's no surprise, then, that obesity rates among U.S. youngsters have skyrocketed, tripling from 1976 to 2004. Public-health experts and obesity researchers attribute the trend in part to kids' increasingly sedentary lifestyles. As teens spend more and more time anchored before a screen - burning fewer and fewer calories each day - they're storing more of that unused energy as fat. Hence, the ballooning rates of obesity. (See TIME's video "Obesity and Social Networks.")
That's precisely why the findings of a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health came as such a surprise. The report, published last week in the journal Obesity Reviews, finds that the amount of physical activity among U.S. teens has not in fact changed significantly over the past two decades, even while that population has gotten heavier. "On the one hand, we have seen the obesity-prevalence increase, but we don't see a decrease in physical activity," says Dr. Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Center for Human Nutrition at Hopkins and lead author of the study. "This suggests that physical activity is not a good explanation for the increase in prevalence of obesity."
In simple terms, body weight is a reflection of the balance between two variables: the calories a body takes in and the calories it burns off. As far as the average U.S. teen is concerned, the study suggests, the culprit behind weight gain is not a decrease in exercise but an increase in consumption. Of course, that doesn't mean teens are getting adequate exercise: Wang analyzed data from nearly 16,000 high school students between the ages of 15 and 18, who took part in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's longitudinal Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, about their physical activity. He and his team found that in 2007, only 34.7% of teens met federal physical activity recommendations, which call for activity strenuous enough to cause heavy breathing for a total of an hour a day for five or more days a week. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)
But the survey also found that teens' overall rate of daily exercise had not changed much since 1991, when the study sample was first asked to report their participation in gym classes in school and their level of physical activity at home. The percentage of teens attending daily gym class has stayed relatively steady since 1991; on average, the yearly change in the proportion of students participating was less than 1%. The percentage of ninth- through 12th-graders getting adequate levels of moderate physical activity - exercise such as slow bicycling, fast walking or pushing a lawn mower, which did not make participants break a sweat - also changed very little, from 26.7% in 1999 to 26.5% in 2005, the latest year for which the data was available. Yet obesity rates continued to rise.
So does this mean that exercise isn't important in controlling weight? As tempting as that conclusion might be, Wang and other health experts say that's not exactly what the new data show. The findings may say less about the role of exercise by itself than about the other variable in the weight equation - diet - and the interaction of the two. While exercise may not contribute directly to weight loss, it is critical for maintaining a healthy weight, since it helps calibrate the balance between energy taken in and energy burned off. "The data is too gross, and too general to assume that [exercise doesn't count]," warns Dr. Janet Walberg Rankin, a professor in the department of human nutrition, foods and exercise at Virginia Tech. "We need to have a dual approach to weight involving both activity and diet. I would hate for people to take away from this study that activity has nothing to do with weight." (See pictures of what makes you eat more food.)
Rankin points out that even small changes in a person's energy balance can have a significant effect on weight. Studies have shown that eating just 10 to 20 extra calories per day - that's one peanut M&M or one tortilla chip - that don't get burned through activity can result in a 2-lb. gain on average over the course of a year. "But none of the methods we have now are accurate enough to pick that up," says Rankin.
She advises people to take the new data with, well, a grain of salt. The information was collected by asking participants to self-report their exercise habits, which is a notoriously unreliable method - people are not very good at gauging their activity accurately. Add to that the fact that questionnaires are not refined enough to pick up small changes in people's energy intake and expenditure, and it's obvious why the findings are informative but not game-changing. "These data are useful in highlighting who should be targeted - the most difficult cases," says Rankin. In the new study, that group includes African-American girls, who got the least amount of exercise among all adolescent groups.
Still, the study highlighted some encouraging trends. For instance, the percentage of teens who spent more than three hours a day in front of the TV dropped from 1999 to 2007, from 43% to 35%. While Wang acknowledges that students may simply be substituting computer or other sedentary screen time for television-viewing, he notes that it's still a trend in the right direction. Far from being an excuse not to exercise, Wang sees the data as a wake-up call for parents and teens. "The important message is that compared to the recommendations for physical activity, the physical activity of American adolescents is still at a very low level," says Wang. "We still need to make a greater effort to promote physical activity. Even if it does not explain obesity, it has many other beneficial effects."
See a special report on the science of appetite.
See the top 10 food trends of 2008.
See how to plan for retirement at any age.
View this article on Time.comRelated articles on Time.com:Teen Obesity: Lack of Exercise May Not Be to Blame One Obesity Remedy: Get Out and Play

ADDIS ABABA (AFP) –
Twenty-five years after Ethiopia's famine killed a million people and spurred a massive global aid effort, the government appealed Thursday for help for more than six million facing starvation.

State Minister for Agriculture Mitiku Kassa said the drought-stricken country needed 159,000 tonnes of food aid worth 121 million dollars between now and year's end for 6.2 million people.

He said nearly 80,000 children under five were suffering from acute malnutrition and that nine million dollars were required for moderately malnourished children and women.

"Since... January, the country continues to face several humanitarian challenges in food and livelihood security, health, nutrition, and in water and sanitation," Mitiku told donors.

In a report to mark the 25th anniversary since the 1984 famine, Oxfam called for a change of strategy towards human suffering in Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous country after Nigeria.

It urged donors to focus on helping communities devise ways of preparing and dealing with disasters, such as building dams to collect rain water to be used during dry seasons rather than sending emergency relief.

Ethiopia adopted a controversial aid law early this year, under which any local group drawing more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad would be classified as foreign and subjected to tight government control.

Oxfam said lessons still had to be learned from the 1984 crisis, and bemoaned that long-term strategies receive less than one percent of international aid.

"Sending food aid does save lives, (but) the dominance of this approach fails to offer long-term solutions which would break these cyclical and chronic crises," said the report: "Band Aids and Beyond."

"We cannot make the rains come, but there is much more that we can do to break the cycle of drought-driven disaster in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa," Oxfam director Penny Laurence said.

"Food aid offers temporary relief and has kept people alive in countless situations, but does not tackle the underlying causes that continue to make people vulnerable to disaster year-after-year."

Of the 3.2 billion dollars of US aid to Ethiopia since 1991, 94 percent is food which is delivered there rather than grown locally or imported from the region, said the aid group.

However, some Ethiopian regions have learnt from the adversity of the 1984 drought and the palliative effects of emergency food aid and turned to modern agriculture for sustenance.

"It was horrible. There was nothing I could do to save some of my dying neighbours," recalls 55-year-old farmer Tayto Mesfin in Abay village, some 800 kilometres (500 miles) north of the capital Addis Ababa.

"There is nothing worse than food aid, it is never sustainable," said Tayto, standing at the gate of an expansive wheat farm. "If the right methods are practiced, food shortages can be overcome."

Abay residents have built silos and farmers have been provided with drought-resistant seeds as well as training with the help of Oxfam.

"Drought does not need to mean hunger and destitution," said Lawrence. "If communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores and wells to harvest rains then they can survive despite what the elements throw at them."

Although none of Ethiopia's six national droughts since 1984 have been as devastating, aid groups say the grim prospects of food shortages will linger for years to come due to climate change.

Average temperatures in Ethiopia are predicted to rise by 3.9 degrees celsius by 2080, Oxfam said, making drought "the norm, hitting the region in up to three in every four years in the next 25 years."

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) –
When he's far away from the bright lights of Hollywood, actor Kevin Bacon spends much of his time in second-rate hotels and hauling his own bags while trudging through airports.

And he wouldn't change it for anything.

For the last 14 years, the star of such movies as "Footloose" and "Apollo 13" has sung alongside his older brother Michael as a member of the Bacon Brothers, a six-member rock group that plays up to 60 shows a year.

"There's a lot of stuff you have to do that's not fun," Bacon told Reuters recently. "Getting places. Airports. You get there, you get the gear, you put the gear on the sidewalk. You stand around. You eat bad food. You stay in crappy hotels.

"The cliches of playing in a rock band are very applicable. There is a certain amount of drudgery.

"But the time that you get to play is still great. It's so much fun. Playing in a band is such a lucky thing to experience. To be able to share music is a rush," he said.

Bacon, who has made more than 40 movies, knew it was risky to become a singer in a rock band. But taking a chance is a fundamental part of living, he said, leaning back, stretching out, and locking his hands behind his head.

"There is a certain element of risk to it," the 51-year-old Bacon said about an actor who turns to music, a transition that usually raises eyebrows, elicits groans, and can do irreparable harm to a hard-earned reputation.

"I knew that going in. So what do you do? Do you say, 'Therefore I'm not going to do it?' Risk is really an essential part of being a creative person.

"If you're not risking, then sing karaoke. You have to be pushing yourself. Doing something outside your wheelhouse, that's what keeps you alive as a creative person," said Bacon who sings, plays guitar and percussion.

The band played recently at the 500-seat Birchmere, a club in suburban Washington. In the opening song of the two-hour set, Bacon delighted the audience with a rousing version of "Only A Good Woman," a single from their 1997 CD Forosoco.

HUMBLE ROOTS

Kevin and Michael Bacon come from humble roots and were encouraged as children to explore their artistic side.

"We always played music in our house. We grew up in a very skinny townhouse in the middle of downtown Philadelphia," said Michael, 60, an award-winning TV and film composer.

"Our parents were sort of hippies, even though there weren't hippies back then. They believed in creativity. Play an instrument, get acting lessons, paint, dance -- that's what they valued. And that's what they gave us."

The brothers began by writing country songs to pitch to other artists when a friend of Kevin's asked them to get a band together and play a show in Philadelphia.

"We just really enjoyed it," recalled Kevin, who is married to actress Kyra Sedgwick, star of TV crime show "The Closer."

"We've been following it ever since. There was never really any kind of master plan. We're just taking it one show, one record, one song at a time."

He concedes, however, that he would love the band to create a top-selling record.

"You'd have to live under a rock if you didn't want a hit record," he said. "You have the dreams that you put in the back of your mind. In your quiet moments, you can fantasize about things like hit records, stadiums, rock stardom."

Perhaps ironically, it's Kevin, despite his often hectic movie schedule, who is the more productive writer.

"He's a really interesting and talented songwriter with no training in music whatsoever," Michael said of his younger brother. "I have all the training.

"But Kevin has a wonderful way of communicating through songs. He has a need to do it. That's what I hear in the songwriting that he does."

SWOOPE, Virginia (AFP) –
A diehard activist for some, a pioneer for others, Joel Salatin is fighting against America's genetically-modified foods and for local subsistence farming.

Leading his crusade from the heart of the Shenandoah Valley in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, this anti-globalization messenger who dubs himself a "Christian Libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer" has become the face of healthy eating and agriculture.

"The desire from consumers to eat this kind of food is exploding," Salatin said at his 500-acre (200-hectare) farm in Swoope, Virginia.

Small farmers' markets -- still scarce just a few years ago -- are now in full swing in the United States.

The online Farmers' Market Directory lists 5,274 markets across the country, a 13 percent rise from 4,685 a year ago. The number has grown by nearly 4,000 nationwide since 1994.

"Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food," said Salatin, surrounded by the many cows, pigs, turkeys, rabbits and chickens he raises in methods that remain unconventional in the highly-industrialized US agricultural sector.

"The distrust is very real."

An iconoclast who has authored several books with titles like "Everything I Want to Do is Illegal," Salatin makes regular media appearances and now spends a third of his time at conferences.

But farming is still a family affair built over three generations on the rocky terrain of his "Polyface Farm".

Chickens and turkeys run free here, transported in a chicken coop built on wheels to a different pasture every three days.

The 1,000 cows and 700 pigs raised for meat each year change pastures every week.

Salatin, 53, hails his "healing farming" method, where each animal plays an environmental role.

"The cows shorten the grass and the chicken eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation," he explained.

This natural approach to farming is just as profitable as industrial farming, Salatin insists, because he saves where big chicken and beef producers are forced to invest in structures, drugs and labor.

His customers are 400 families, about 50 restaurants and a dozen shops in the area. He also charges 800 dollars for a two-hour tour of his farm.

"Yes, the prices are higher, but it's because all of the costs are in the price of this chicken and you are paying it here at the cash register, not paying it in sickness and disease and pollution and stink," he explained.

But his unorthodox methods leave some thinking Salatin is a "terrorist", he claimed, "because the new word is science-based agriculture and this is not science-based."

Salatin's products are not certified as organic -- a booming food sector in the United States, now accounting for 3.5 percent of all food sales -- because he refuses to do the necessary inspections and paperwork.

"We are beyond organic," exclaimed Salatin, observing that government-certified organic meat products do not necessarily come from chicken and cows on pasture.

"Organic doesn't mean what people think it means."

NEW YORK – Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero slipped a little present in with their new album: a DVD tutorial of how to play one of their songs.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Pop that disc in and you'll quickly find out why this acoustic guitar duo known as Rodrigo y Gabriela have a legion of fans transfixed by their unmatchable, frantic fretwork.
Still, it was a nice gesture.
"I know there are a few musicians who don't like to share their tricks but I think that's silly," says Sanchez, 35, by phone from western Mexico as he and Quintero rest up for a U.S. tour. "To share music is something I think everyone should do if they know how to play."
These two definitely know how to play. Their sophomore album, "11:11," recently debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard World Albums chart, hit No. 12 on the Rock Album list, and peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard 200.
Both began playing in a little-known Mexico City speed-metal band. They then teamed up, moved to Ireland and played unplugged Slayer tunes on the streets of Dublin until the 2006 release of their self-titled U.S. debut.
Describing what they do isn't easy: With Sanchez's mesmerizing finger-picking and Quintero acting as the rhythm section — complete with drumming on the guitar body — they meld the power of thrash metal with fiery Spanish melodies. It's hard to believe just two people playing guitars can make music this powerful and absorbing.
"You can make aggressive, fast music from just strings," says Quintero, also 35. "Mentally, we are still a rock band and we still make music that way. It's the energy of a different technique."
The new CD dedicates 11 songs to 11 of their musical influences, ranging from old-schoolers like Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana to metalheads like Dimebag Darrell of Pantera to world-fusion pioneers like Al Di Meola, Paco de Lucia, and Strunz and Farah.
There are a few non-acoustic guitar touches — Alex Skolnick of the band Testament adds an electric solo to one song and Sanchez's brother adds piano to another — but the duo insist they aren't wavering from their core sound, whatever that is exactly.
"Honestly, we don't know either," says Sanchez, laughing.
"Music is music. It speaks with one language," says Quintero. "We divide it and label it, but the bottom line is that the expression is the same."
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On the Net:
http://www.rodgab.com

The term Halloween (and its alternative rendering Hallowe'en) is shortened from All-hallow-evening, as it is the eve of "All Hallows' Day", which is now also known as All Saints' Day. It was a day of religious festivities in various northern European Pagan traditions, until Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved the old Christian feast of All Saints' Day from May 13 (which had itself been the date of a pagan holiday, the Feast of the Lemures) to November 1. In the ninth century, the Church measured the day as starting at sunset, in accordance with the Florentine calendar.

Unmarried women were frequently told that if they sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on Halloween night, the face of their future husband would appear in the mirror. However, if they were destined to die before marriage, a skull would appear. The custom was widespread enough to be commemorated on greeting cards from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mirror gaze was one of many forms of love divination around Halloween and other ancient holy days.

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WASHINGTON – The awarding of the Nobel Peace Price to President Barack Obama landed with a shock on darkened, still-asleep Washington. He won! For what?
For one of America's youngest presidents, in office less than nine months — and only for 12 days before the Nobel nomination deadline last February — it was an enormous honor.
The prize seems to be more for Obama's promise than for his performance. Work on the president's ambitious agenda, both at home and abroad, is barely underway, much less finished. He has no standout moment of victory that would seem to warrant a verdict as sweeping as that issued by the Nobel committee.
And what about peace? Obama is running two wars in the Muslim world — in Iraq and Afghanistan — and can't get a climate change bill through his own Congress.
His scorecard for the year is largely an "incomplete," if he's being graded.
He banned torture and other extreme interrogation techniques for terrorists. But he also promised to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a source of much distaste for the U.S. around the world, a difficult task that now seems headed to miss his own January 2010 deadline.
He said he would end the Iraq war. But he has been slow to bring the troops home and the real end of the U.S. military presence there won't come until at least 2012, and that's only if both the U.S. and Iraq stick to their current agreement about American troop withdrawals.
He has pushed for new efforts to make peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. But he's received little cooperation from the two sides.
He said he wants a nuclear-free world. But it's one thing to telegraph the desire, in a speech in Prague in April, and quite another to unite other nations and U.S. lawmakers behind the web of treaties and agreements needed to make that reality.
He has said that battling climate change is a priority. But the U.S. seems likely to head into crucial international negotiations set for Copenhagen in December with legislation still stalled in Congress.
And what about Obama's global prestige? It seemed to take a big hit last week when he jetted across the Atlantic to lobby for Chicago to get the 2016 Olympics — and was rejected with a last-place finish.
Perhaps for the Nobel committee, merely altering the tone out of Washington toward the rest of the world is enough. Obama got much attention for his speech from Cairo reaching out a U.S. hand to the world's Muslims. His remarks at the U.N. General Assembly last month set down new markers for the way the U.S. works with the world.
But still ... ?
Obama aides seemed as surprised at the news as everyone else, not even aware he had been nominated along with a record 204 others. Awoken by press secretary Robert Gibbs about an hour after the vote was announced, the White House says the president responded that he was humbled to be only the third sitting U.S. president to win.
The award could be as much about issuing a slap at Obama's predecessor, former President George W. Bush, as about lauding Obama. Bush was reviled by the world for his cowboy diplomacy, Iraq war and snubbing of European priorities like global warming. Remember that the Nobel prize has a long history of being awarded more for the committee's aspirations than for others' accomplishments — for Mideast peace or a better South Africa, for instance.
In those cases, the prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments.
Obama likely understands that his challenges are too steep to resolve — much less honor — after just a few months. "It's not going to be easy," the president often says of the tasks ahead for the United States and the world.
The Nobel committee, it seems, had the audacity to hope that he'll eventually produce a record worthy of its prize.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Jennifer Loven is the AP's chief White House corespondent.

Ultrasound Equipment

The structure of the heart varies among the different branches of the animal kingdom. (See Circulatory system.) Cephalopods have two "gill hearts" and one "systemic heart". Fish have a two-chambered heart that pumps the blood to the gills and from there it goes on to the rest of the body. In amphibians and most reptiles, a double circulatory system is used, but the heart is not always completely separated into two pumps. Amphibians have a three-chambered heart.

Birds and mammals show complete separation of the heart into two pumps, for a total of four heart chambers; it is thought that the four-chambered heart of birds evolved independently from that of mammals.