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| Featured Topics |
Go to page 1, 2, 3 ... 12, 13, 14 |
| I mean really!? |
Posted by Paaskynen on May, 16. :: 9 Comments
A seven-year-old boy is taken from his parents, has his stomach pumped and is placed in care, because his dad mistook something called Mike's Hard Lemonade for a soft drink and gave it to him. I can understand the mistake, for I could easily have made the same mistake (Apparently, the professor asked for a lemonade. Is it even written on the label that the above drink icontains alcohol? I have never heard of the brand.). I cannot understand the reasoning of the other people involved.
The story
The bottle:
The sign at the ball park didn't even say "hard" lemonade. The image link didn't work.
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| Spirivia use |
Posted by lazydaize on May, 15. :: 2 Comments
My doc just told me that if my lung function was under 40 percent that spiriva doesn't do any good. I thought it was suppose to help maintain what lung function I had left. Am I just wasting my money to buy this expensive drug for nothing. Anyone know anything about it.
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| Woman Indicted in MySpace Suicide Case |
Posted by edgarblythe on May, 15. :: 2 Comments
By LINDA DEUTSCH
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — A federal grand jury today indicted a Missouri woman for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide.
Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis allegedly helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Josh didn't exist.
Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.
Salvador Hernandez, assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, called the case heart-rending.
"The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl's weaknesses," Hernandez said. "Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she's responsible for her actions."
Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.
Drew has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan.
U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said this was the first time the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. It has been used in the past to address hacking.
"This was a tragedy that did not have to happen," O'Brien said.
Both the girl and MySpace are named as victims in the case, he said.
MySpace is a subsidiary of Beverly Hills-based Fox Interactive Media Inc., which is owned by News Corp. The indictment noted that MySpace computer servers are located in Los Angeles County.
Due to juvenile privacy rules, the U.S. attorney's office said, the indictment refers to the girl as M.T.M.
FBI agents in St. Louis and Los Angeles investigated the case, Hernandez said.
Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.
Drew will be arraigned in St. Louis and then moved to Los Angeles for trial.
The indictment says MySpace members agree to abide by terms of service that include, among other things, not promoting information they know to be false or misleading; soliciting personal information from anyone under age 18 and not using information gathered from the Web site to "harass, abuse or harm other people."
Drew and others who were not named conspired to violate the service terms from about September 2006 to mid-October that year, according to the indictment. It alleges they registered as a MySpace member under a phony name and used the account to obtain information on the girl.
Drew and her coconspirators "used the information obtained over the MySpace computer system to torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass the juvenile MySpace member," the indictment charged.
After the girl killed herself, Drew and the others deleted the information for the account, the indictment said.
Last month, an employee of Drew, 19-year-old Ashley Grills, told ABC's "Good Morning America" she created the false MySpace profile but Drew wrote some of the messages to Megan.
Grills said Drew suggested talking to Megan via the Internet to find out what Megan was saying about Drew's daughter, who was a former friend.
Grills also said she wrote the message to Megan about the world being a better place without her. The message was supposed to end the online relationship with "Josh" because Grills felt the joke had gone too far.
"I was trying to get her angry so she would leave him alone and I could get rid of the whole MySpace," Grills told the morning show.
Megan's death was investigated by Missouri authorities, but no state charges were filed because no laws appeared to apply to the case.
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| Tension Headache |
Posted by Montana on May, 13. :: 33 Comments
Has anyone ever had a tension headache that lasted several weeks?
I had a head cold which started several weeks ago (around 5-6 weeks) and the headache started in the front working it's way to the back of my head. Now it's been stuck there for about a month now and it just won't go away.
I've been majorly stressed lately and it feels just like a tension headache, but I've never had a headache last so long.
Just wondering if tension headaches can last this long.
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| School Yearbooks: Another Tradition in the Crapper |
Posted by edgarblythe on May, 13. :: 13 Comments
By SARAH VIREN
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
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Seniors Rafael Rodriguez and Oscar Lopez expect to graduate this month, leaving their lives at Alief Hastings High School behind forever. But when their campus' yearbook arrived last week, the friends paused by the sales table only briefly to tease their classmate, a yearbook staffer trying desperately to hawk the memory tomes.
"Where's my book?" Rodriguez asked, grinning. When pressed to purchase, the lanky senior shook his head.
"I am just not interested," he said.
The boys are hardly alone at Alief Hastings, where in recent years only 10 percent to 15 percent of students bought the yearbook, said teacher Peggy Miller. That's down from nearly 80 percent when Miller started as yearbook adviser 28 years ago.
Several schools in the Houston Independent School District have even done away with yearbooks all together. Nationally, four college annuals folded this year alone. Teachers such as Miller blame the shift on changing times, changing demographics and the popularity of social networking Web sites, which are becoming the new repository of school memories.
"They all want them, but it's like, who's got $60?" Miller said of yearbooks. "They would rather go buy their tennis shoes or buy a grill for their mouth or something. A book is not as significant today to a child."
No national group tracks the number of high schools or colleges publishing yearbooks, but those working in the industry note lackluster sales on many campuses.
Entire publications have shut down at others — including Furr High School, where Principal Bertie Simmons said the last yearbook was printed in 2002 at a loss of about $3,000.
At South Houston High School in Pasadena ISD, yearbook adviser Melissa Neely remembers the annual book as a must-have when she graduated in 1989. These days, on a campus of 2,400 students, only about 300 copies sell.
Blaming demographics
Neely blames demographic shifts. Her school, she said, is now predominantly Hispanic, with many students raised by immigrant parents who may not have attended high school in the United States. At the college and high school level, advisers say they often rely on parents who understand nostalgia to push yearbooks on their children.
"My dad was like, 'You are going to get a yearbook for every year,' " Neely said. "These kids will ask, and their parent will say, 'You don't need one until you are a senior.' Or, 'You don't need one at all.' "
Lisa Schwartz, a manager at the Houston office of Taylor Publishing, which produces more than 600 yearbooks in this area, said demographic shifts are hardly new. But Internet social networking is.
"I think it is directly related to the popularity of Facebook," she said of declining sales. To counteract this, the Dallas-based publishing company will next year begin offering personalized supplements to the traditional books most schools sell. Under this marketing plan, teenagers could design their own pages, with personally picked pictures, quotes and background graphics.
"The printed yearbook will always be around," Schwartz said. "(But) the trend seems to be more personalization."
That's a concept Kathy Lawrence, media adviser at the University of Texas, tossed around a few years ago while trying to raise yearbook revenue there.
In the 1980s, the university's yearbook sold 14,000 copies. Now that figure is closer to 2,500, only a mild improvement from the 1,700 low in 1997.
Lawrence eventually opted to hold off on the personalized pages, reasoning that the cause of the decline was bigger than MySpace.
At UT, yearbook interest waned noticeably, she said, when the college moved from in-person class registration, in which students were routinely asked to buy the yearbook after filing through a line to sign up for classes, to phone-based registration. Growing student bodies and declining campus involvement are other factors advisers attribute to the shrinking pool of college yearbooks.
"Four have died this year, which I am sorry to say," noted Lawrence, also a past-president of College Media Advisers. "The problem is, when a yearbook dies there is no other institution or organization on the college campus that is doing a capsule version of the history of the year, written and photographed by the students who lived through that history."
'A tradition'
The situation is not universal. Bellaire High School in Houston regularly wins national high school yearbook awards. At Tomball High School, adviser Joanie Gill boasts that at least half of all students buy yearbooks.
"It is a tradition," she said. "It helps that we are still the only public high school in Tomball. Our junior highs have yearbooks so students and their families learn about them then, and we try to get as many kids in the book as much as possible."
At Alief Hastings last week, a couple hundred students picked up a yearbook the first day of sales. In the lunchroom that afternoon, Katherine Anderson, 18, and her friends giggled over some of the pictures as they flipped through pages to see how their personal snapshots turned out.
"I had to get it for all the memories," said the senior.
This year, Miller agreed to pay for mostly color pages, hoping the more flashy look would lure in new buyers. Each spring she also orders extra copies — aware that years later, a few former students will call, hoping to buy a copy from their high school days.
"It is special," she said. "They don't realize it until later."
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