What Punk Taught Me As A Parent

Growing up in New York City, in the heyday of CBGBs, I used to cross the street to avoid punk rockers. It wasn't only the metal and follicular spikes that scared me, they exuded something very raw and angry. And I was likely an unappealing stereotype to them: a plaid-uniformed product of an all-girls' school, my Tretorns maybe a bit too clean. Better to keep a safe distance.

Until I gave birth to one. My third child was still a toddler when it became clear he was the punker his older siblings weren't. If they said something that even slightly smacked of pandering to his diminutive size or age, he'd look them right in the eye and tear up the artwork they'd just brought home. He took no prisoners.

Read the whole story

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/what-punk-taught-me-as-a-_n_1076364.html

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Triple blasts in Iraq capital, at least 8 dead: sources (Reuters)

BAGHDAD (Reuters) ? Three bomb blasts rocked a busy market in Iraq's capital on Sunday, killing at least eight people and wounding 26 others, police and hospital sources said.

The blasts occurred in Shurja, an important commercial district in central Baghdad, on the first day of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.

"I can see fire and black smoke mounting and a large number of fire engines, ambulances and police patrols rushing to the market," a Reuters witness close to Shurja market said.

A source at al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad said the facility had received eight dead and 26 wounded from the attack.

Iraqi forces are preparing to take full responsibility for security by year-end when all U.S. troops pull out of the country, nearly nine years after the U.S.-led invasion.

Military leaders have expressed concerns that militants might ramp up attacks as the 33,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq pack up to leave.

Although violence has dropped since the peak of sectarian fighting in 2006-7, bombings and killings occur on a daily basis and a stubborn Sunni insurgency linked to al Qaeda and Shi'ite militias remain capable of carrying out lethal attacks.

The number of civilians killed in violence in Iraq climbed sharply in October following a string of suicide and roadside bombings in Baghdad. Attacks have also increased against Iraq's army and police.

(Reporting by Kareem Raheem; Writing by Serena Chaudhry)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111106/wl_nm/us_iraq_violence

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Health insurance hikes causing about 2000 education employees to ...

The latest numbers from the Retirement Systems of Alabama show that about 2,000 education employees will retire on Dec. 1, up from just a few hundred the year before. The increase in mid-school year retirements is being caused by changes to retirees? contribution to their health plan, which they can duck by retiring before Dec. 1.

Marc Reynolds, deputy director for the Retirement Systems of Alabama, said 1,660 educators and 480 support employees are set to retire on Dec. 1.

The increases, part of a plan to bolster the finances of the Public Education Employees Health Insurance Plan, require substantially higher monthly premiums from education employees.

According to the Retirement Systems of Alabama website, current education employees pay $7 per month for single coverage and $177 per month for family coverage. This excludes a $28 per month fee charged to smokers. The actual cost of insurance is $729 for single coverage and $891 for family coverage. The difference is made up by employer contributions.

Employees? contributions to their health plans increase substantially once they retire. Retirees who are too young to receive Medicare are required to contribute more because their employers are no longer making contributions to the plan.

Contributions are assessed based on employees? age and years of service. The Retirement Systems of Alabama website provides a calculator that allows visitors to see how much the increases cost employees next year.

For example, a 60-year-old retiree with 30 years of service currently pays $100 per month for single coverage and $340 per month for family coverage. Under the new rules, next year that retiree would pay $124 per month for single coverage and $364 per month for family coverage. The premiums will continue to increase at about the same rate until 2016, when 60-year-old retirees with 30 years of service would be paying $220 for single coverage and $460 per month for family coverage.

A 55-year-old employee with 25 years of service currently pays $151 per month for single coverage and $391 per month for family coverage. Under the new rules, that retiree would pay $180 per month for single coverage and $420 per month for family coverage. The premiums will continue to increase at about the same rate until 2016, when 55-year-old retirees with 25 years of service would be paying $296 for single coverage and $536 per month.

Reynolds said the increases were phased in over five years to help education employees who had already been planning to retire adjust to the changes.

Once retirees and/or their dependents are eligible for Medicare, the rates decrease as Medicare becomes the retirees? primary insurer.

The PEEHIP program does offer premium assistance to active and retired members whose family income is less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level. The federal poverty level in 2011 was $22,350 for a family of four, and $10,890 for a single person. Members eligible for assistance can receive discounts on their premiums.

Source: http://www2.dothaneagle.com/news/2011/nov/04/health-insurance-hikes-causing-about-2000-educatio-ar-2655188/

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Kristen Stewart Punched Chris Hemsworth In The Face On 'Snow White' Set (VIDEO)

Kristen Stewart promised a badass Snow White, and we're pretty confident that punching the God of Thunder square in the face qualifies.

Though most of the talk on her guest appearance on Thursday night's "Tonight Show" centered, predictably, on her upcoming new "Twilight" film, and the almost-R rated sex scene that will be discussed ad-nauseam for the next few weeks, Stewart was able to get in a little promotional tease for "Snow White and the Huntsman," the radical retelling of the old fairytale in which she plays a princess that becomes a warrior.

Chris Hemsworth, best known for his role this summer as "Thor," plays said Huntsman, sent to kill the princess but instead becoming her mentor in the wild, and while he is a rock of a human being, Stewart explains that she got the best of him with a smack, however accidental the move may have been.

"Girls, if you've ever wondered if it works -- it works!" she said. "I was supposed to miss him by this much. I basically knocked him right out of his close-up."

Maybe she just got carried away with the whole revenge thing?

"I wasn't initially jumping at the chance [to play Snow White] but she is one of the most heavy-handedly sincere, seriously doesn't let her heart cloud her mind characters," Stewart said at Comic-Con this summer. "Also, I get to have a sword and stuff."

Still, she should probably save the aggression for Charlize Theron, who plays the Evil Queen.

WATCH:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/kristen-stewart-punched-chris-hemsworth_n_1075735.html

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FCC Fridays: November 4, 2011

We here at Engadget Mobile tend to spend a lot of way too much time poring over the latest FCC filings, be it on the net or directly on the ol' Federal Communications Commission's site. Since we couldn't possibly (want to) cover all the stuff that goes down there, we've gathered up all the raw info you may want (but probably don't need). Enjoy!

Phones


Tablets and peripherals

FCC Fridays: November 4, 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/04/fcc-fridays-november-4-2011/

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A 50-50 split may be best offer players get

FILE - In this Sept. 15, 2011 file photo, Los Angeles Lakers' Derek Fisher, center, president of the NBA players union, is joined by union executive director Billy Hunter, right, and NBA players during a news conference in Las Vegas. With progress stalled since talks broke off over the revenue split, the union's executive committee is to meet in New York. Union President Fisher and executive director Hunter sent separate letters to members this week denying reports about a rift. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 15, 2011 file photo, Los Angeles Lakers' Derek Fisher, center, president of the NBA players union, is joined by union executive director Billy Hunter, right, and NBA players during a news conference in Las Vegas. With progress stalled since talks broke off over the revenue split, the union's executive committee is to meet in New York. Union President Fisher and executive director Hunter sent separate letters to members this week denying reports about a rift. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)

NBA players could have a choice Saturday: Accept a 50-50 division of basketball-related income or risk having more owners join the hardline faction that wants a 53-47 split in its favor? and a hard salary cap.

When talks resume, they may quickly break down unless the sides can compromise on positions that seem to be hardening by the minute.

A person briefed on the owners' position Friday told The Associated Press that there were many hardline owners who want a deal at 53-47 in their favor as well as a hard cap, and that the rest wouldn't go beyond a 50-50 split.

Players have been seeking 52.5 of revenues in their favor ? leaving a gap of about $100 million annually vs. the owners' proposal ? and there is a group of players who have discussed decertification of the union if they are forced to accept less than 52.

Both sides return to the bargaining table Saturday with federal mediator George Cohen, with some salary cap system issues still unresolved along with the BRI split.

Only one thing appears certain ? the threat of losing the season has never been greater.

Two people with knowledge of the negotiations told the AP that the divide between the sides could grow wider if serious progress isn't made this weekend. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the negotiations.

"Both sides started out with everybody together. Everybody was together because both sides were asking for the world," one person said. "Now we're into real life, and neither side is going to get everything we want."

At issue from the beginning has been the division of about $4 billion in revenues, along with a system makeover that Commissioner David Stern insists must happen to fix what he considers a broken economic model.

Owners are determined to reshape the league by creating a system like the NFL or NHL, where spending is capped and small-market teams truly can compete with the big boys. But reforming the NHL's financial structure wiped out the entire 2004-05 season. And the NFL is making money, not losing it.

The players have offered to reduce their guarantee of BRI from 57 percent to 52.5 percent, a concession they feel is more than enough to cover their end of the league's stated $300 million in annual losses. Owners have offered a 50-50 split, along with significant changes to the system that include a more punitive luxury tax on teams that exceed the salary cap, shorter contracts and a lower mid-level exception.

But that 50-50 split is unacceptable to the players, as well as some owners, who want the players' share to be no higher than 47 percent.

"When people hear 50-50, they think, 'Oh, it's going to be a partnership. That's half,'" Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade told the AP in a recent interview. "No. It's not. That's not how it works."

And one person with knowledge of the discussions said there's no guarantee a majority of owners would be "willing to do 50-50 for very much longer."

That's a big reason why decertification talk bubbled to the surface this week amid reports that union president Derek Fisher and executive director Billy Hunter are not seeing eye to eye. The union spent most of Thursday trying to project a united front even as a group of about 50 players held two conference calls to build momentum to eliminate the union.

Although Miami Heat owner Mickey Arison was fined last week for hinting on Twitter that he was ready to get a deal done, about a dozen small-market owners are pushing for even more concessions. So the league has invited all 29 owners to New York for a meeting on Saturday to affirm their bargaining position. There are about 20 owners who have not actively participated in the talks who must be brought up to speed on the latest offers.

A group of about a dozen owners, led by Charlotte's Michael Jordan, was upset that players were offered a 50-50 split and want the players' share to be no higher than 47 percent, one person told the AP as first reported by The New York Times.

A deal at 50-50 wipes out about $280 of what owners say were $300 million in losses last season.

Among the system issues already agreed upon are a more punitive luxury tax for teams who spend over the salary cap, a reduction in the midlevel exception from about $6 million to $5 million annually and the shortening of contracts by one year.

The big hurdles remain the revenue split and the owners' desire to limit teams who pay the luxury tax from using the midlevel exception to sign veteran free agents.

Wade is one of a handful of big-name stars ? Boston's Paul Pierce and Orlando's Dwight Howard were among the others ? to sit in on the conference calls to discuss decertification.

The move could swing some negotiating leverage to the players, antitrust attorney David Scupp said Friday. But he added that taking the fight to court through an antitrust lawsuit also would make it difficult to resolve the matter in time to have a season.

"Once you get the courts involved and you end the collective bargaining process, it does slow things down and it does make it a little bit more complicated," said Scupp, who works at New York-based law firm Constantine Cannon.

The first month of the NBA season, originally scheduled to tip off Tuesday, already has been canceled, with more games on the chopping block if an agreement is not reached soon.

During the NFL lockout this summer, the NFLPA did decertify, which allowed a group of players to file an antitrust lawsuit against the league.

Labor unions are granted exemptions to U.S. antitrust laws that prohibit staples to their economic models such as salary caps and college player drafts because they are agreed upon under collective bargaining. If there is no union, antitrust laws would once again apply.

"It gave the NFL players another weapon," said John Hancock, a labor law expert with the Detroit firm of Butzel Long. "It did give the players something more to hold on to. But ultimately, both sides just got together and decided, 'This is silly. We don't have any life-or-death issues. Why are we doing this?"

Whereas NFL players and owners were fighting over how to split billions of dollars of revenue, the NBA says it lost $300 million last season and that only eight of its 30 clubs made money.

Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Clark said he believes disbanding the union helped the NFL players.

"It's not going to help them, though," Clark said. "Their owners are really losing money. Our owners weren't."

Even if players do go forward with decertification, their chances of success in the courtroom could be harmed by their football brethren's experience there this summer. A federal judge in St. Paul, Minn., initially ruled that the NFL union's antitrust case had merit and issued an injunction that forced the league to lift the lockout.

But that ruling was overturned on appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court in St. Louis, and the two sides came to agreement on a new deal in July after losing only one preseason game.

"Given what happened over the summer with the NFL players, the NBA players have an uphill battle toward getting the lockout (lifted)," Scupp said.

The NBA already has filed a lawsuit seeking to retain their non-statutory labor exemption even if the players dissolve the union. U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe did not immediately issue a ruling when the two sides met in court this week.

One person with knowledge of the league's thinking said that decertification wasn't an immediate concern because of the long-term impact it would have on the negotiation process.

"If they've decided to do that," the person said, "they've decided to lose the whole season."

___

AP Sports Writers Jon Krawczynski in Minneapolis, Tim Reynolds in Miami and freelance writer Chris Adamski in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-11-05-NBA%20Labor/id-5177027c899b4be6b7a18fd107d90f8b

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IBM: Mobile Retail Traffic Will More Than Double This Holiday Season

ibmIBM's Coremetrics Benchmark is releasing data around holiday shopping trends we can expect over the next few months. Big Blue says that mobile retail traffic will more than double this holiday season. During this year?s November holiday season, an unprecedented 15 percent of people in the U.S. logging onto a retailer?s web site are expected to do so through a mobile device, says IBM. All online sales in November will experience a growth of 12-15 percent over the same period in 2010.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/N4Yci77c8lE/

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What's in a name? Nokia's new Lumia and Asha line explained

What rhymes with Nokia? Why, Lumia, of course. And there, fellow gadget freaks, lies the poetic branding key to Espoo's first, great Windows Phone. Alright, it's not that simple, but the company's marketing team did make a concerted effort to find a moniker ending with a vowel sound. Of course, before this catchy, albeit odd, name could be settled upon, a list of potential winners had to be cross-checked with over 300,000 tech trademarks. After broaching that hurdle, "only a handful" survived and were then parsed by linguistic experts to avoid any embarrassing malapropisms and pronunciation difficulties across 84 dialects. Despite finding "lumi" to be an out-of-date Spanish slang term, resulting surveys found most Spaniards associated the term with "'light' and 'style'," and thus it was saved. We know how this genesis story ends, so we'll spare you the obvious marketplace conclusion. And as for that new Asha range? Well, the thinking there is quite simple. It's the word for hope in Hindi, and as the line is intended for emerging markets, that just seemed apropos. Click through to the source for a more detailed walk through this mobile origin story.

What's in a name? Nokia's new Lumia and Asha line explained originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/LDdsVLXkXnI/

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Warbling wrens don't just tweet, they sing duets

They may not be Sonny and Cher, but certain South American birds sing duets, taking turns as the tune goes along.

"Calling it a love song is probably too strong a word," says researcher Eric S. Fortune of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But, he adds, the little wrens shift their heads around and move closer together as they sing.

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Fortune thinks it's a test, with the female birds choosing mates based on how well the males can follow cues and keep up with the song.

Birds singing duets isn't unheard of, but it's rare and these perform the fastest and most precise songs known, Fortune said in a telephone interview.

The birds live in dense bamboo groves in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador, Fortune and colleagues report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The females start the song, he said, and the males join in. Sometimes the males will drop out for a bit. He isn't sure if it's a mistake on their part, or they just can't keep up. Indeed, the birds alternate chirps so quickly it can sound like a single bird singing.

"It's as if the birds each sing their own unique part," Fortune explained. If the song had lyrics that went A, B, C, D, the female might be doing A and C while the male did B and D, he said. And, he added, the duet songs vary slightly from place to place.

Reports of the duets from field biologists prompted Fortune, who studies psychology and brain science, to begin his research, seeking to learn how the brain handles details of the shared song.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45153520/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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Mom says Kim Kardashian 'heartbroken' over divorce (AP)

NEW YORK ? Kim Kardashian is "heartbroken" over her decision to divorce professional basketball player Kris Humphries after only two months of marriage, but life will go on, her mother says.

"Just because somebody is getting a divorce doesn't mean life is over," mom Kris Jenner said. "She's not the first person to get a divorce, and she won't be the last, no matter what the length of the marriage."

Jenner, who divorced Kardashian's father, O.J. Simpson's attorney Robert Kardashian, in the early 1990s and is married to former Olympic decathlon gold medalist Bruce Jenner, said reports her reality TV star daughter's relationship was made for TV are false.

"That would be insulting to this wonderful viewership that has followed us from Day 1," she said. "I don't think any of us are in that kind of situation where we have to go out and ... create opportunities to make more money. I think we are just fine."

She also said the family members won't stop sharing their lives with the public.

"(The breakup) doesn't mean that the rest of us are going to change our personalities in any way and, you know, completely turn into different people," she said Thursday. "We're going to carry on and hopefully be much stronger as human beings and as a family."

After Kardashian, 31, filed for divorce earlier this week, citing irreconcilable differences, she left for a business trip to Australia with her sister Khloe Kardashian.

Jenner said it was important for Kim Kardashian to follow through on her business commitment.

"She takes a great deal of pride in her business relationships, and she's let a lot of people down, especially her family, she feels, on a personal level," Jenner said. "So, for her to let anyone else down is hard for her. She wanted to go, and these commitments were made months and months ago and something that she feels responsible for."

Kardashian made it to Australia on Tuesday but ended up cutting the trip short.

Jenner, meanwhile, had planned to make the media rounds this week in New York City to promote her new memoir, "Kris Jenner ... and All Things Kardashian."

Kardashian's decision to split from her husband after just 72 days moved the attention off her mother's book and onto her.

Jenner said Kardashian needs to weather the storm.

"Right now, the best advice I can give her is to just keep your head held high and ... get her heart in the right place," Jenner said. "That's all I care about."

Jenner said she hadn't spoken with Humphries about the split and didn't know if her daughter had, either.

___

Online:

http://kimkardashian.celebuzz.com/

http://krisjenner.celebuzz.com/

___

Alicia Rancilio covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/aliciar

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/celebrity/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111104/ap_en_ot/us_people_kris_jenner

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