New Cockroach Invades New York’s High Line
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Transform Your Body Forever Using the Secrets of the Leanest People in the World
Genre: Health & Fitness
Price: $13.99
Publish Date: December 10, 2013
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Seller: Random House, LLC
A no-nonsense plan that has been proven and tested by more than 300,000 people in 154 countries. Whether you want to shed 10 pounds or 100, whether you want to build muscle or just look more toned, this book is the original “bible of fitness” that shows you how to get permanent results the safe, healthy, and natural way. Do you want to shed fat and sculpt a new body shape at the same time? Do you want a program without gimmicks, hype, or quick fixes? Do you want a program guaranteed to work, no matter how old you are or what kind of shape you’re in now? For twenty-five years, industry veteran and bestselling author Tom Venuto has built a reputation as one of the world’s most respected fat-loss experts. In Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle —known by fans as “the bible of fat loss”—Tom reveals the body transformation secrets of the leanest people in the world. This is not a diet and it’s not just a weight-loss program; this is a breakthrough system to change your life and get you leaner, stronger, fitter, and healthier with the latest discoveries in exercise and nutrition science. Inside, you’ll discover: – The simple but powerful LEAN formula, revealing the four crucial elements of body transformation success. – The New Body 28 (TNB-28): a four-week training plan for sculpting lean muscle, plus a quick start primer workout perfect for beginners – A lifestyle program that’s more flexible and easier than ever to follow, even if you are busy, have dietary restrictions, or have never worked out before. – The motivation strategies it takes to stick with your plan. Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is not about getting as ripped as a fitness model or becoming a bodybuilder like Tom did (unless you want to); it’s about using their secrets to achieve your own personal goals. You are sure to call it your fitness bible for many years to come. From the Hardcover edition.
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Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage
Richard Stengel & Nelson Mandela
Genre: Self-Improvement
Price: $9.99
Publish Date: March 30, 2010
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Seller: Random House, LLC
A compact, profoundly inspiring book that captures the spirit of Nelson Mandela, distilling the South African leader’s wisdom into 15 vital life lessons We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who recently celebrated his ninety-fourth birthday, is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint. He liber­ated a country from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite oppressor and oppressed in a way that had never been done before. Now Richard Stengel, the editor of Time maga­zine, has distilled countless hours of intimate conver­sation with Mandela into fifteen essential life lessons. For nearly three years, including the critical period when Mandela moved South Africa toward the first democratic elections in its history, Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom , and traveled with him everywhere. Eating with him, watching him campaign, hearing him think out loud, Stengel came to know all the different sides of this complex man and became a cherished friend and colleague. In Mandela’s Way, Stengel recounts the moments in which “the grandfather of South Africa” was tested and shares the wisdom he learned: why courage is more than the absence of fear, why we should keep our rivals close, why the answer is not always either/or but often “both,” how important it is for each of us to find something away from the world that gives us pleasure and satisfaction—our own garden. Woven into these life lessons are remarkable stories—of Mandela’s child­hood as the protégé of a tribal king, of his early days as a freedom fighter, of the twenty-seven-year imprison­ment that could not break him, and of his fulfilling remarriage at the age of eighty. This uplifting book captures the spirit of this extraordinary man—warrior, martyr, husband, statesman, and moral leader—and spurs us to look within ourselves, reconsider the things we take for granted, and contemplate the legacy we’ll leave behind. From the Hardcover edition.
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What Are You Hungry For?
The Chopra Solution to Permanent Weight Loss, Well-Being, and Lightness of Soul
Deepak Chopra
Genre: Health & Fitness
Price: $11.99
Publish Date: November 12, 2013
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Seller: Random House, LLC
Basis for the upcoming PBS Special! After promoting this message worldwide for thirty years, bestselling author Deepak Chopra focuses on the huge problem of weight control in America with exciting new concepts. What Are You Hungry For? is the breakthrough book that can bring weight under effortless control by linking it to personal fulfillment in every area of a reader’s life. What are you hungry for? Food? Love? Self-esteem? Peace? In this manual for "higher health," based on the latest findings in both mainstream and alternative medicine, Deepak Chopra creates a vision of weight loss based on a deeper awareness of why people overeat – because they are trying to find satisfaction and wind up using food as a substitute for real fulfillment. Repudiating the failed approaches of crash dieting and all forms of deprivation, Chopra’s new book aims directly at the problem of finding fulfillment. When that problem is solved, he argues, normal eating falls into place automatically, and the entire system of mind and body achieves what it really desires. “Everyone’s life story is complicated, and the best intentions go astray because people find it hard to change,” writes Chopra. “Bad habits, like bad memories, stick around stubbornly when we wish they’d go away. But you have a great motivation working for you, which is your desire for happiness. I define happiness as the state of fulfillment, and everyone wants to be fulfilled. If you keep your eye on this, your most basic motivation, then the choices you make come down to a single question: “What am I hungry for?” Your true desire will lead you in the right direction. False desires lead in the wrong direction.” Wherever you are in life, this book will help point you in that right direction.
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Mother Jones
Earlier this month, the ABC News affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, aired a strange story: Police in Springfield had received a call-in report that a man was standing on a street corner and “shooting a gun off all day.” After a five-hour standoff, they arrested the man and searched his house. They found guns, knives, swords, and in the basement, hot plates, pots and pans, and boxes of teeth. Perplexed, they investigated further and discovered that the man’s brother had been running a dental lab out of the home for about a year, supplying devices such as dentures to local dentists’ offices. The photos of the basement lab are sickening: paint peeling off the walls, dust everywhere, lots of clutter. Not exactly the kind of pristine environment you’d imagine for the manufacture of something that goes in your mouth.
Amazingly, the scuzzy basement lab was completely legal. In fact, I, Kiera Butler, could go home tonight and start making dentures in my basement and selling them to dentists. Ohio is one of many states where dental labs and their employees—who produce crowns, night guards, dentures, and your kids’ braces and retainers—don’t have to be trained, licensed, or certified in any way. Heck, they don’t even have to register with the state health department. While Ohio at least asks dental labs to disclose to clients what their products are made of and where they come from, most states have no such requirement. (You can check out the rules for individual states here.)
Is your dentist even aware of this? Perhaps not. In a 2008 survey by the American Dental Association, fewer than half of dentists knew whether their state regulates these labs, and 86 percent couldn’t say whether the federal government does. As it turns out, the manufacturers of many common dental devices are actually exempt from federal rules that medical-device makers have to follow. The FDA “handles questions associated with these dental-device exemptions on a case-by-case basis,” explains David Gartner, who heads the regulatory policy division of the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.
The National Association of Dental Labs (NADL) estimates that Americans spend around $7 billion on dental devices annually, and that there are some 10,000 dental labs in the United States. But the FDA has inspected only 146 of them during the last decade. Because most don’t have to register, state and federal authorities have no real record of their existence.
Domestic dental labs get a good portion of their materials (about 38 percent, the NADL estimates) from thousands of overseas labs, which are supposed to register with the FDA. But the agency has inspected only 113 of those labs in the last decade—even after lead was found in some imported Chinese crowns in 2008.
So are these unregulated devices creating problems for patients? Hard to say, says Eric Thorn, the NADL’s chief staff executive. “In the vast majority of these occurrences the patient would report it to their dentist and their dentist would address the issue,” he says. Dentists are not requires to file official reports of most problems with appliances.
The ABC reporters asked the Springfield man whether he had any training as a dental lab technician, and it turned out he did: He got certified in prison—which actually makes him more qualified than the law requires.
Both NADL and the American Dental Association are urging states to require dental labs to register. That way, at least authorities will be able to track them. “It’s really important that these devices get made in clean, hygienic labs, and that states require those labs to be registered,” says Bennett Napier, NADL’s executive director. “Otherwise, patients have no way of knowing their devices are made under acceptable conditions.”
Here are a few more pictures that the Springfield, Ohio, police took of the basement dental lab:
Police Department of Springfield, Ohio
Police Department of Springfield, Ohio
Police Department of Springfield, Ohio
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Were Your Dental Crowns, Retainers, and Dentures Made in Someone’s Dirty Cellar?
Mother Jones
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Congratulations, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.): You just said the most ridiculous thing anyone in the House of Representatives has uttered about the debt ceiling in…at least a few days. Griffith, asked by the Capitol Hill daily The Hill about the urgency of raising the debt ceiling, suggested the nation might be better off if it defaulted—even if that triggered a new recession and perhaps a global economic crisis—than if it continued to spend money at the current rate. He’s not the only Republican congressman to make this claim (Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) suggested a default would calm global markets). But Griffith’s spin was, to put it charitably, unique:
We have to make a decision that’s right long-term for the United States, and what may be distasteful, unpleasant and not appropriate in the short run may be something that has to be done. I will remind you that this group of renegades that decided that they wanted to break from the crown in 1776 did great damage to the economy of the colonies. They created the greatest nation and the best form of government, but they did damage to the economy in the short run.
This is an absolutely backward understanding of US history. Breaking away from Great Britain was indeed a hugely disruptive economic event—so much so that it almost proved to be the nation’s undoing. States were swimming in debt and unable to pay soldiers, who in turn staged open rebellions, which, in turn, prompted politicians to get together to come up with a better governing document.
The central problem was that the nation had basically no access to credit, because it was $77 million in debt with no real means to pay it back. (It owed about $12 million of that to foreign creditors.) The solution, as outlined in Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s First Report on the Public Credit, was to absorb all state-level debts (totaling about $25 million), issue new bonds to fund the federal government and allow it to start borrowing money again, and then raise tariffs to pay off the debt.
Griffith’s right that the revolution caused an economic mess, but he should’ve read the next chapter in his history book—America didn’t get out of that economic mess until it had demonstrated to foreign creditors it was good on its word. Whether that’s still the case is up to Griffith and his colleagues.
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Unpacking the Dumbest Thing Said by a GOP Congressman About the Debt Ceiling
Mother Jones
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The government will shut down at midnight unless President Obama and Congress can agree on a temporary resolution to continue funding federal agencies. (Spoiler: They probably won’t.)
Here’s a quick guide to who and what will be most affected:
Anyone who might get sick: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would lack funding to support its annual flu vaccination program.
Military personnel: Barring last-minute congressional action, members of the armed forces would have their paychecks put on hold while they continue to work.
People who use boats: The Coast Guard will cut back on routine patrols and navigation assistance.
Civilian defense employees: 400,000 Department of Defense employees will be given unpaid vacations.
Family members of fallen soldiers: Death benefits for military families will be delayed.
Gun owners: During the 1990s shutdown, applications for gun permits were delayed due to furloughs at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Trees: Hundreds of US Forest Service workers face furloughs in California during peak forest fire season.
Visa applicants: Furloughs at the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs mean tens of thousands of visa applications are put on hold.
People traveling abroad: A shutdown would cause delays in the processing of passport applications.
Sick people: The National Institutes of Health will not admit new patients unless ordered by the director.
Factory workers: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration will halt regular inspections.
Hikers: All 401 National Park Service sites will be closed.
People who make money off tourists: Shuttered national parks are bad news for the hotels, restaurants, and other attractions that feed off them.
Small business loan applicants: The Small Business Administration will furlough 62 percent of its workforce.
Employers: The Department of Homeland Security’s e-Verify program will be offline for the duration of the shutdown.
Fountains: 45 of them will lose water.
People applying for mortgages: The Federal Housing Administration and the USDA won’t guarantee new loans.
Oil and gas exploration: The Bureau of Land Management will stop processing permits for oil and gas drilling on federal lands.
Chemical site facility security: Funding for Department of Homeland Security regulatory program ends October 4.
FOIA requests: The Social Security Administration says it won’t respond to Freedom of Information Act Requests during the shutdown.
Docents: All Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington, DC, will be closed.
@CuriosityRover: 98 percent of NASA’s staff will be furloughed, and the agency’s website and live-streams will go dark.
Renewable energy permits: The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will stop all new offshore renewable-energy projects.
Campers: People living (or vacationing) in national parks and forests will have 48 hours to relocate.
Animal voyeurs: Watch the National Zoo’s Panda-cam while you still can.
Native Americans: The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement will suspend oversight of active and abandoned coal mines “primarily in Tennessee and on Indian lands.”
Pesticide regulators: The Environmental Protection Agency will all but shut down at midnight.
Veterans pensions: The Department of Veterans Affairs says it will run out of funding for regular payment checks after a few weeks.
US Geological Survey researchers: The agency would stop most new scientific research and water analysis.
Disability payments: Although the VA will continue to provide medical care, disability payments may also be disrupted after a few weeks.
Winery permits: Couldn’t they take the wine coolers instead?
Ponies: The Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse and burro adoption programs would cease.
Infectious disease surveillance: The CDC will be unable to track outbreaks and monitor infectious diseases at a local level.
People on food assistance: The USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) will stop making payments on October 1.
Food inspections: The Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration warned of “inability to investigate alleged violations” due to a lack of funding; food imports will also go unexpected.
Automobile recall inspectors: “Routine defects and recall information from manufacturers and consumers would not be reviewed,” according to the Department of Transportation.
Food and drug safety research: The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, will furlough 52 percent of its staff.
ARPA-E: The Department of Energy’s cutting-edge research arm—and one of the crowning legacies of the stimulus—will shut down, putting projects such as “squirtable batteries” on hold.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: The agency could furlough more than 92 percent of its employees next week, with much of the remaining staff handling inspections.
People without heat: If the shutdown persists, it could affect the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which funds heating assistance programs.
Consumers: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will furlough 652 of its 680 employees and maintain only a “bare minimum level of oversight and surveillance” to stop fraudulent practices.
People trying to pay taxes: The Internal Revenue Service will shutter its tax hotline, and stop processing tax payments.
College students: Cutbacks at the Department of Education could slow Pell grant and student-loan payments.
Economists: The Bureau of Economic Analysis will cut back on its data collection.
Welfare recipients: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—welfare—runs out of funding on October 1, although individual states may pick up the tab.
Head Start: The child development program, already hammered by the effects of sequestration, will stop doling out new grants on October 1.
Air monitoring: A 94 percent reduction in staff won’t leave the EPA much room to enforce its new carbon regulations.
Golf: Courses at National Park Service sites will close for the shutdown. So at least we have that going for us.
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The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause
Suzanne Somers & Prudence Hall, M.D.
Genre: Health & Fitness
Price: $13.99
Publish Date: September 24, 2013
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Seller: Random House, LLC
Why Wait to Feel Good Again? If you're in your thirties or forties, your body is changing, and so are your moods, sleep, health, and weight. Tired of being at the mercy of your hormones? Armed with the knowledge in this book, you don't have to be. Perimenopause can be enjoyable if you know what to do. I'm Too Young for This! details how you can get your body and mind back on track, safely and without drugs, including: – How our bodies transition hormonally—from puberty through perimenopause. – The common complaints of perimenopause—and hidden factors that may keep you symptomatic. – What are the minor and major hormones, and the important role they play in feeling good and staying vibrant and healthy. – What to eat—including Perimenopausal Power Foods—as well as other lifestyle shifts that are critical to your successful transition. – Cutting-edge research that proves the safety and efficacy of bioidentical hormone replacement (BHRT). – The Symptom Solver: a state-of-the-art guide to immediate relief for your hormonal complaints. Plus, how to find the right doctor as well as get your most frequently asked questions answered by expert hormone specialists. Your life is about to change for the better. You can feel great, be vibrant, healthy, thin, and sexy! This book shows you how.
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I’m Too Young for This! – Suzanne Somers & Prudence Hall, M.D.
OK, but what are you going to do with the carbon after you’ve extracted the energy?
The EPA’s new proposed power plant rules offer an unyielding compromise: If you want to burn coal in America in the 21st century, fine, but you have to clean up after yourself. The rules would basically make it impossible to open a new coal-powered facility unless it has carbon-capture-and-sequestration (CCS) technology that can keep some of its carbon dioxide emissions from being released into the air.
Despite an abundance of underground storage space where CO2 could conceivably be stashed, only a dozen or so carbon-capture projects are operating or under construction worldwide. And in a bad sign for any coal barons who might still be optimistic about the future of coal burning in the U.S., one of the world’s most ambitious carbon-capture efforts has just been abandoned in Norway. That development coincides with news of nearly billion-dollar cost overruns at another CCS project in Mississippi.
Reuters reports that Norway’s outgoing center-left government dropped its plans Friday for a CCS project that it had once likened in ambition to sending humans to the moon. It would have pumped CO2 from a natural gas plant at the industrial site of Mongstad deep underground:
“A full-scale carbon dioxide capture facility is still the objective. The government has, however, concluded, after careful consideration, that the risk connected to the Mongstad facility is too high,” Energy Minister Ola Borten Moe said.
The government said it would keep a research center at Mongstad, testing various carbon capture schemes, with funding of 400 million crowns ($67.4 million) over four years.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, whose Labour Party and coalition allies lost power last week to right-wing and centrist parties in an election, said in 2007 that Norway would try to lead the world in carbon capture. …
“This is one of the ugliest political crash landings we have ever seen,” said Frederic Hauge of the Norwegian environmental group Bellona of the decision to drop the carbon capture plan.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg brought us news last week of the costly travails of a “clean coal” plant with CCS being built in Mississippi’s Kemper County. Instead of being pumped underground, CO2 from Southern Co.’s plant would be piped and sold to oil companies to help them extract more oil from aging fields. But the cost overruns have already reached $900 million:
Altogether, the project is now expected to cost $4.7 billion. At that cost, the plant is now one of the most expensive power plants ever built for the amount of electricity it will produce. …
But capital costs are only part of the equation. Kemper will be the cheapest plant to operate once it’s up and running next year because it sits next to the reserve of low-cost lignite [coal]. It will also be selling carbon dioxide, sulfuric acid and ammonia that it pulls from its gasifier for an estimated $50 million a year.
Well, the EPA said that carbon capture is possible — it never said it would be easy. If the coal industry wants to build new plants, it looks like it has some serious innovating do it.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology
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One failed project, another over budget, hint at carbon-capture challenges under EPA rules

Mother Jones
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Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2013 Prensa International Miss America/Ho
I felt terrible for Nina Davuluri this week after she was crowned Miss America 2013, because I knew what was coming. Davuluri is the first Indian-American woman to win the pageant. The moment that special tiara was lowered onto her fabulously coiffed head, a barrage of hateful, outraged, resentful, and predictably inaccurate tweets and posts came hurtling her way, hundreds at a time.
And my personal favorite: “WHEN WILL A WHITE WOMAN WIN #MISSAMERICA? Ever??!!” (The first nonwhite pageant winner was Norma Smallwood, of Cherokee descent, in 1926. It wouldn’t happen again until 1984, when Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America. Not a bad streak!)
Norma Smallwood, Miss America 1926 Archival photo
Davuluri, whose parents are a software engineer and an OB/GYN from the north Indian state Andhra Pradesh, grew up in Oklahoma, and wants to become a cardiologist, went on Fox News this morning to talk about the hostility over her “race. . . and ethnicity. . . and everything,” as Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy put it.
“It was an unfortunate experience, but for each negative tweet, there were dozens of positive remarks and support,” said Davuluri. “A lot of that stemmed from ignorance, and that’s why my platform is so timely right now.”
Like presidents, Miss America candidates run on platforms. Davuluri’s is “celebrating diversity through cultural competency.” Cultural competency is that idea that everyone’s responsible for sorting through their own cultural biases and trying harder when it comes to interacting with different sorts of folks. It comes up a lot in conversations about public education and health care, places where people from different backgrounds cross paths regularly and have to (or should) make it work.
“I have always viewed Miss America as the girl next door, but for me the girl next door’s evolving as the diversity in America evolves,” said Davuluri on Fox & Friends. “It’s not who she was ten years ago, and she’s not going to be the same person ten years down the road.”
I cringe at the “girl next door” trope. I can’t stand the Miss America contest for that matter, for reasons many, many, many smart people have articulated well elsewhere. But if someone’s gonna go on Fox News and talk about being “Miss America,” I prefer Nina Davuluri at the podium.
This was hardly the first time the racist side of Twitter flipped its presumably ultrablonde wig over a person of color showing up in a familiar media space. When the character of Rue from The Hunger Games, described as “dark skinned” in the book, was played by the young black actress Amandla Stenberg, angry viewers took to Twitter to complain the movie had been “ruined.” When Cheerios released a commercial in which a little girl adorably pours cereal all over her (black) sleeping dad’s chest because her (white) mom said Cheerios is “heart healthy,” the company had to disable YouTube comments because thousands of Americans think it’s still 1966.
But all this trembling at the mere sight of little brown girls hasn’t stopped the rapid colorization of our country. So why bother bringing Davuluri’s attackers up at all? Because of the class-act performance she’s been delivering in the face of so much ugliness. She’s handling the ugly backlash with grace and poise, and working in some teachable moments along the way.
A few years ago, I made a promise to myself. I’d never again eat at an Indian restaurant where scenes of “traditional” Indian women were hung on the walls, rows and rows of doe-eyed women coyly hiding their smiles beneath gauzy scarves while performing traditional Indian activities such as pouring water from jugs and strumming wooden harps. I wouldn’t have held it against Nina Davuluri if she’d stuck to the high road, refusing to dignify ugly attacks with a forceful response. But it means a lot to me that she’s talking back.
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