Poor Bush

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President Bush Pleased With Lowered Poverty Rate

Data show first U.S. poverty rate drop since election of George W. Bush:

The Census Bureau said that 36.5 million Americans, or 12.3 percent, were living in poverty last year, down from 12.6 percent in 2005.

The U.S. poverty rate dropped last year, the government reported Tuesday, in the first significant decline since President George W. Bush took office.

The Census Bureau said that 36.5 million Americans, or 12.3 percent, were living in poverty last year, down from 12.6 percent in 2005. The median household income was $48,200, a 4.1 percent increase from the previous year after adjusting for inflation.
But all is not quite as rosy as it might seem...
From the hardworking Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a mainstream centrist think tank, comes this analysis:

New Census data show that in 2006, both the number and the percentage of Americans who are uninsured hit their highest levels since 1999 …

Today’s figures also show that while the overall poverty rate declined slightly (from 12.6 percent to 12.3 percent) between 2005 and 2006, the decline was largely concentrated among the elderly. The poverty rates for children and for working age adults remained statistically unchanged as compared to 2005, and well above their levels in 2001, when the last recession hit bottom.

There are 73 million children in the United States.
• 39 percent — 28.4 million — live in low-income families.

Perhaps of greatest concern, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 2.2 million in 2006, and the number of uninsured children jumped by more than 600,000. The steady progress of recent years in reducing the number of uninsured children stalled in 2005 and began to reverse in 2006.

Note: The federal poverty level is $20,000 annual income for a family of four. That's about £196 a week.



David who?

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My new camera arrived today.  I decided to upgrade from my old 2MP Fujifilm but I was determined to avoid the trap that most of us men fall into, of going for the biggest, fastest, most expensive, most technically advanced etc. and instead to just get a camera which did everything I needed it to do, do it well, but no more. That meant a point and shoot with anti-blur, good low-light performance, a half-decent zoom and good (lithium) battery life and over 5 megapixels, which is ample for what I want.

I drew up a short list which included three or four Fujis, the Nikon Coolpix S7c, the Canon A570is (or A710is) and the Panasonic Lumix TZ23 (or 22). In the end it was between the Lumix 23 and the much cheaper Fujifilm Finepix F31fd and I finally plumped for the latter. It's got everything I need and, with an added 2gig memory card, and a 580 shot battery life and an ISO up to 3200, I can take hundreds of pics at a time if need be (even in the dark!). I got mine from Amazon  for £117.50,  a price I was perfectly happy with.

Had I been a better photographer or just more ambitious, I would have gone for the superb Finepix S9600, which I would still strongly recommend for anyone looking to move up from a compact camera to an (almost) digital SLR. (It's about twice the price of the F31fd).


The world's most beautiful loose object

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Mark Steel: It's obvious whose fault it was that Diana died
Camilla has worked this out brilliantly. Not only has she got one of the best-paid jobs in the world for just the odd day's work, but she's been told, "This Friday, you must have the day off, is that understood?" So she gets off having to attend a memorial for a woman she couldn't stand. Instead she'll be at her estate in Aberdeen where, a source says, "She'll have to be so careful not to be spotted out shopping or with the slightest smile on her face." Nonsense. She should spend the day at Alton Towers. And she should time it so that during the minute's silence she's got her arms in the air and going "Wheeeeeee" on the water chute.

Now she won't have to sit through some dreadful service, full of minor nobles reading out lines specially composed for the occasion, such as, "O sweet Diana, You touched all our hearts when it mattered, And we all shed a tear at the manner, In which you were tragically splattered."





Memorial

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The Mountain Parted   Dasrath Manjhi: 1934 -2007
Dasrath Manjhi eked out a living as a farm hand, toiling in the fields of local landlords on bare subsistence wages. One day, in the early '60s, his wife Phaguni fell ill and Dasrath set off with her to the nearest hospital. She died on the way. If only there was no hill blocking the road to the town, Dasrath would have made it to the hospital in time, and perhaps his wife's life would have been saved. The villagers of Gelaur had to take a circuitous route and travel 19 km to Wazirganj, the nearest district town. This was because the massive 360 feet long, 25 feet high and 30 feet wide sheer rock came in the way of the shortest possible route between the village and the town.

The situation would have brought about a feeling of resignation or fatalism in the average man...Dasrath's response was different and radical, at once unthinkable and stunningly simple. He decided to alter geography with chisel and hammer, to cut a road through the huge mass of rock.
Every morning he set out with hammer and chisel and, after 22 years of backbreaking work, he had carved an opening through the sheer rock, reducing the distance to the town to just six kilometres.

What a guy!

Via Madhukar


Visualising information

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Modern Approaches - Smashing magazine

Very interesting links to new and creative methods of presenting data. I particularly liked this video of a talk by Professor Hans Rosling, ' Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen'. Whether you agree or not with his perspective on the figures he uses is beside the point, it's the presentation that is impressive.

Some of the presentations have been widely seen and well reviewed, such as the British History Timeline from the BBC, others are less well known:



Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There are various conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years. So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before? Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.

Via Guy Kawasaki

Speedballs

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Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand
The only way, repeat the only way, of curbing the heroin trade is by curbing demand. London's policy, shared with Washington, of trying to stop its people from consuming heroin and cocaine by disrupting the supply chain, was never going to work. It has merely made supply more profitable. It has been pursued for the cynical reason that politicians find it easier to blame some poor foreign country for a British social problem than to tackle that problem domestically. While Britons and Afghans are dying in Helmand, the budget for drug rehabilitation at home is pitiful even by European standards.


Searching for meanings

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Can’t we leave Rhys Jones alone? | spiked

The shooting dead of 11-year-old Rhys Jones as he walked home from football practice in Croxteth, Liverpool was a shocking tragedy. It has come as less of a shock, however, to see so many trying to stand on his coffin to make moral and political speeches about the state of the nation. The fact that nobody yet knows who shot the lad or why has left a blank space on which anybody can write their own script. That the killing appears meaningless has been widely taken as a licence to imbue it with whatever meaning you see fit.


Still earning from Iraq

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The Bush Beat: Profit of Doom
The latest quarterly report by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, revealed that numerous contracts for weapons and armor have gone unfulfilled. An audit last October by Bowen's office revealed that we weren't even keeping track of — or prepared to maintain — the thousands of weapons we were handing out to Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.

Just about the same time, ex Iraq czar and Medal of Freedom winner Paul 'Jerry' Bremer, the Bush regime's former head man in Iraq when the country started descending into civil war, joined the board of directors of BlastGard, which sells a reinforced wrap to protect Humvees from mines and homemade bombs. He's also a lobbyist for BlastGard.

Meanwhile, inspector Bowen's report last October showed that of a $531,000 contract for reinforced armor for the Iraqi Army, $424,800 hadn't even been spent. The Pentagon has, however, completed a $76,955.50 contract to put decals on the Iraqi Army's Hummers.


Should have stuck to typing

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Insult to a hero: Horrifically-injured soldier gets a mere £150,000 in compensation
Ben Parkinson volunteered to serve his country on the Afghan front line - and paid a terrible price. The young paratrooper suffered a total of 37 terrible injuries when he was blown up by a landmine. He lost both his legs and sustained grievous damage to his spine, skull, pelvis, hands, spleen and ribcage, leaving him in a coma for months. Incredibly, 23-year-old Ben is still alive almost a year later - according to his doctors the most badly-injured soldier ever to survive.

All his mother wants is to buy a bungalow so she can care for him there. Yet as recompense for his ruined life, Ben has been offered only £152,150 - little more than half the maximum award for maimed military personnel and less than a third of the £484,000 doled out to an RAF typist who claimed she had suffered repetitive strain injury to her thumb.


UPDATE: The government bowed last night to the outcry over its ‘insulting’ compensation plans for a young paratrooper horrifically injured in Afghanistan. The Ministry of Defence has signalled for the first time that it will review the case of 23-year-old Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, whose injuries have left him disabled for life.

Maliki, Allawi and the slimey Zelikow

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In depth report from Glenn Greenwald (incl. updates)
Over the past several weeks, there has arisen a palpable and coordinated shift among the Washington establishment to blame Iraq's problems on Prime Minister Maliki and to suggest that salvation lies in his replacement. The only real alternative ever identified is former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Fred Hiatt turned his Op-Ed page over to Allawi two weeks ago to argue -- in the most establishment-pleasing tones -- that "Responsibility for the current mess in Iraq rests primarily with the Iraqi government" and that "Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has failed to take advantage of the Iraqi people's desire for peaceful and productive lives and of the enormous commitment and sacrifices made by the United States and other nations." In other words, our wise Washington Leaders have done the Right and Good thing in Iraq, but that scoundrel Maliki is the key impediment preventing Success.

In a solid piece of reporting, CNN yesterday disclosed that the most powerful GOP lobbying firm, founded by former GOP Party Chair and current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and staffed by key former Bush national security officials, is being paid by Allawi to coordinate these anti-Maliki, pro-Allawi efforts...

Via Village Voice


Keep on puffin' old gal!

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100-year-old celebrates her birthday by smoking 170,000th cigarette
An iron-lunged pensioner has celebrated her 100th birthday by lighting up her 170,000th cigerette from a candle on her birthday cake. Winnie Langley started smoking only days after the First World War broke out in June 1914 when she was just seven-years-old - and has got through five a day ever since. She has no intention of quitting, even after the nationwide ban forced tobacco-lovers outside. Speaking at her 100th birthday party Winnie said: "I have smoked ever since infant school and I have never thought about quitting.
The photo of her lighting her fag from the candle is a cracker.