Rallies against Zimmerman verdict being held in US

NEW YORK (AP) ? From New York to California, demonstrators are rallying against a Florida verdict acquitting George Zimmerman in the death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin.

Protests are planned in cities including Boston, New York City, Chicago and San Francisco on Sunday, a day after a jury found the former neighborhood watch volunteer not guilty. The case unleashed debate across the U.S. over racial profiling, self-defense and equal justice.

Civil rights leaders, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have urged peace. Jackson says the legal system "failed justice," but violence isn't the answer.

After the verdict, some angry protesters in Oakland, Calif., broke windows, burned flags and started small street fires. In Florida, about 200 demonstrators marched in Tallahassee carrying signs that said "Racism is Not Dead" and "Who's Next?"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/rallies-against-zimmerman-verdict-being-held-us-145627206.html

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Source: http://www.facebook.com/techcrunch/posts/10151799848937952

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Westpac-Owned BT Funds Management In Spat With FMA... | Stuff ...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Westpac-owned fund manager BT Funds Management (NZ) invested KiwiSaver money in bonds issued by an insurance scheme designed to earn profits from the deaths of elderly Maori.

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/8915566/Bank-funds-death-bonds-scheme

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Lakers Know Money Can't Buy Them A Championship

The days where the Lakers could vastly rely on their poker chips to build championship contending teams will become a distant memory this offseason.

The Lakers can offer Dwight Howard the most money of any NBA team, a five-year deal worth $118 million as opposed to a four-year deal worth $87.6 million for everyone else. But that may not convince Howard he would look best in purple and gold once he becomes an unrestricted free agent today at 9 p.m.

The Lakers have a 25-year, $5 billion deal with Time Warner Cable that paid the team around $120 million in the first year, a partnership Lakers president Jeanie Buss said "exceeded beyond our wildest expectations." That lucrative contract, however, won't convince the Lakers to go on a shopping spree this offseason for reasons beyond giving the NBA about $50 million of those earnings in revenue sharing.

More punitive luxury taxes for high-spending teams will kick in during the 2014 offseason when a crop of superstars such as LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Paul George and John Wall enter the free-agent market. That's why the Lakers have echoed the need to keep "financial flexibility." "There are teams that have tried to buy championships, but it doesn't work that way," Buss said recently at a Time Warner Cable Media sponsored event.

"It's not always about the team with the highest payroll."

The Lakers discovered this past season that money doesn't always buy happiness. They shelled out nearly $100 million in player salaries and $29.6 million in luxury taxes after acquiring Howard from Orlando, Steve Nash from Phoenix and keeping Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol and Metta World Peace.

A swift coaching change from Mike Brown to Mike D'Antoni, overlapping injuries and competing coach and player agendas contributed to the Lakers losing in a first-round playoff sweep to the San Antonio Spurs. If the Lakers maintained a similar payroll next season, they would owe about $78.2 million in additional taxes. For the 2014-15 season, that figure would climb to $85 million because of the so-called "repeater tax."

What happens if Howard ignores the billboards the Lakers put up around Los Angeles pleading him to stay?

"Whether Dwight's here or he's not, what we can do to improve the team remains the same," Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak said. "It's not like if one player is not here, we have more resources in having that money to sign another player."

Should Howard walk away without the

$20.5 million the Lakers would owe him next season, they still would approach a $79.6 million payroll. Larry Coon, an independent NBA salary cap expert who works as an IT director at UC Irvine, estimated the league will set this year's tax threshold at around $71.5 million.

Any team that spends above that apron can't land any free agent via sign-and-trade, giving the Lakers no shot to grab Chris Paul, Monta Ellis, Josh Smith or Andre Iguodala. Such high-spending teams next season can't acquire players under contract through a sign-and-trade. Luxury-tax penalty teams also will have a smaller mid-level exception in both years (three instead of four) and salary ($3 million instead of $5 million).

"The worst position you can be in this league is to have multi-year contracts that are big numbers on players who are just OK players," Kupchak said. "It insures you're in the middle of the pack and have no way to move up."

The Lakers vow not to fall into that trap.

Only Nash remains under contract beyond next season for $9.7 million. Even if Howard returns and Bryant plays beyond next season, the Lakers would have enough cap space in 2014 to sign a max-contract player.

On Saturday, the Lakers waived backup guard Chris Duhon, who will receive only $1.5 million of the $3.75 million he would have earned this season.

The Lakers also can use the amnesty provision sometime between July 10-16 to waive either Bryant, Gasol, World Peace or Steve Blake. Pencil Bryant out even if Coon estimated the Lakers would save $55 million in luxury taxes and fall under the apron. The Lakers would experience a public relations nightmare. They also estimate Bryant will return from a left torn Achilles tendon sometime next season.

The amount the Lakers would save in luxury taxes by waiving Gasol ($40 million), World Peace ($30 million) or Blake ($15 million) still wouldn't bring them under the luxury tax threshold. Even if the Lakers use this tool, they can only sign a player at the mini mid-level exception at $3.2 million or at the veteran's minimum at $1.4 million.

"If it's a younger player, he's probably not going to take the veteran's minimum," Kupchak said. "If he does, he's probably not good enough to play.

"As much as I'd like to sit here and say we're going to get young, athletic players that can really shoot the ball at the veteran's minimum when they're 20to 25 years old, that's probably not realistic."

Indeed, the Lakers will encounter plenty of spending restrictions this offseason. They also face uncertainty without the late owner Jerry Buss.

The Lakers still maintain they will find a way.

"As much as they try to make things more fair, they can never take away what the Lakers have with our history, experience and our brainpower in our front office," Jeanie Buss said. "We'll always have an advantage."

Earlier on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/lakers-money-championship_n_3526115.html

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Controlling blood pressure, cholesterol may significantly cut heart disease risk

July 1, 2013 ? Simultaneously controlling your high blood pressure and high cholesterol may cut your risk for heart disease by half or more, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. Yet fewer than one in three people achieve this goal.

Researchers also found:

• Prescribing medications to better manage blood pressure and cholesterol would greatly benefit people who are older, diabetic, have cardiovascular disease or are Hispanic or African-American.
• Going to the doctor at least twice a year could help.

Undertreated high blood pressure and cholesterol affect millions of Americans -- posing a major public health threat, said Brent M. Egan, M.D., lead study author and a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C.

"The reality is, we know more than enough to prevent 75 percent of heart disease and strokes, but we're not doing everything we could be doing or even doing it at a reasonable level," he said. "We've made some gradual improvements over the years, but there is still a lot of progress to be made."

High blood pressure affects about 33 percent of the U.S. adult population and doubles the risk for heart disease. About 32 million Americans have dangerously high total blood cholesterol levels of 240 mg/dL or higher. Previous research indicates that treating high blood pressure reduces the risk of heart disease by 25 percent and treating high cholesterol in hypertensive patients can lower the risk by more than 35 percent, researchers said.

The findings are based on data of more than 17,000 American adults who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys during in 1988-94, 1999-2004 and 2005-10. In addition to reviewing patients' blood pressure and cholesterol levels, researchers considered race, age, insurance status, whether patients smoked, had diabetes, had diagnosed heart disease and/or chronic kidney disease, and if they visited a doctor every year.

Cholesterol readings need closer attention, Egan said. "If patients' cholesterol tests show a good high-density lipoprotein (HDL) level, which is the healthy, protective cholesterol, then the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) number might get overlooked. Unfortunately, not all HDL is equally protective and some people with a normal HDL are at high risk. In those patients, there might be a false sense of assurance that cholesterol really isn't a problem. But LDL and non-HDL readings are the ones to really watch. Patients seeing their doctors for blood pressure treatment should ask about their LDL and non-HDL levels and make sure both are under control at the same time."

Co-authors are: Jiexiang Li, Ph.D.; Suparna Qanungo, Ph.D.; and Tamara Wolfman, M.D.?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state of South Carolina and the National Institutes of Health partly funded the study.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/KgJ56o62cYU/130701163847.htm

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To Be A Writer Now, Always | By St?phane Erickson ? The Wanderer

?If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind?

?Yet it is as evident in itself, as any amount of argument can make it, that ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions now general will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.?

? John Milton (1644)

There?s an unspoken courage to writing. To pencil dissent. To type emotion. To defy. To question. To dare. To go against.

To make the natural unnatural ? or to make the unnatural natural.

To recognize that every era has its own natural makeup of things, its own natural order of being, its own definition of normalcy, its own idea of acceptance and tolerance.

But not to accept it blindly. To rather think. To ask. To seek.

Ideas change. People change. Societies change. And humankind thus evolves and progresses.

To be a writer at the forefront of societal transformation. To contribute. To write ideas knowing that they may not be met with welcome. That they may not be received by your peers, tutors, family, friends.

To be young and, in spite of everything, you write. You write knowing that your work is not subtracted from the equation of future repercussions. And in spite of uncertainty, of fear, of doubt, you write from your humanity, from you. You write from human experience. Not just from your own, but from those who surround you. From the role models, colleagues, communities, enemies, loved ones, hated ones, who left a part of them with you ? making your writing your own, while also reflecting the shadows and impact of others in your work.

Looking at an issue and seeing wrong, but seeing an ocean of obstacles. Yet not abandoning the question. But instead transforming your penciled voice, abstract colors of thought and argument, into black and white ? letters, words becoming creativity and passion onto virgin pages once naked and blank, once empty of humanness.

Knowing that you are but one. Knowing that you are but you. Still taking the universe on, regardless. And seeing purpose. Self-justified, self-given purpose, but purpose nonetheless.

Believing that if you write on an issue, if you dare to write, then that issue will not loose its importance, and continue to live through your words, through the timelessness of language.

Understanding that writing is documenting. Writing is sharing. Writing is making the mortal immortal. Writing makes the silence speak. It makes the forgotten remembered. The unwritten written. It cultivates and celebrates memory. It challenges the comfortableness of apathy, ignorance and greed. It adds to who we are as a community, as a people, as a whole.

To be a writer is to be a storyteller. And it?s to make stories transcend through time and borders. To remind others that, collectively, our community is a myriad of stories interacting with one another. A reminder that our actions affect others, that every person is not for him or herself, that islands do not exist in human collectiveness.

And that is why it is also a message of hope. Hope to those who believe that change is impossibly monumental or that the status quo cannot be overcome. To those who believe that their humanity is a solitary experience. To those who fail to see ? or who have not been allowed to see ? that we humans are indeed bound by one another.

Writing is more than an art. It?s an expression of our values, of our heritage. It?s a testimony of our identity. Of our belonging. Of our selves. Of our very essence.

Photo du coucher de soleil ? Edmonton | Edmonton sunset photo: Courtoisie de Julianna Damer, C?est moi [Say-mouah] sur Tumblr

St?phane Erickson holds a Bilingual Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Alberta and is currently a J.D. and LL.L. candidate in the Programme de droit canadien at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.

Source: http://www.thewandereronline.com/2013/06/30/to-be-a-writer-now-always-by-stephane-erickson/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=to-be-a-writer-now-always-by-stephane-erickson

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Guest lineups for the Sunday news shows

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Guest lineups for the Sunday TV news shows:

ABC's "This Week" ? Julian Assange, founder of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks; Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights director at the Government Accountability Project; Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign; Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage; Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md.; state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Texas.

___

NBC's "Meet the Press" ? Davis; Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.

___

CBS' "Face the Nation" ? Davis; Ted Olson, a former solicitor general; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA; NAACP President Ben Jealous.

___

CNN's "State of the Union" ? Reps. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., and Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.; David Boies, a lawyer for the couples that challenged California's gay marriage ban; John C. Eastman, chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage.

___

"Fox News Sunday" ? Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/guest-lineups-sunday-news-shows-183815643.html

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