It can take 20 years to make a reputation and only 5 minutes to ruin it.
by Payton Manning
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Happy April Fools Day! Every culture has examples of humor
I did a google search for "words to describe Jesus." The search lead me to a website http://www.onechristianministry.com/christian-prayers-poetry-367.html that list 100 words to describe Jesus. Funny or Humorous was not among them. Do you think Jesus had / has a scene of humor? Did or does he laugh?
Mississippi Moves to Execute First Female Convict in 7 Decades
Mississippi's attorney general has asked the state's top court to set an execution date for Michelle Byrom, who murdered her husband in 1999 and who would become the first woman put to death there since 1944
Mississippi will execute its first female death row inmate in seven decades this week, if the state Supreme Court approves the Thursday date requested by the attorney general.
Attorney General Jim Hood requested Tuesday that Michelle Byrom be executed by lethal injection for the 1999 murder of her husband, Edward Byrom Sr. If the state Supreme Court, which has the final say on executions, confirms the date, Byrom will be the first woman put to death in the state since 1944.
Byrom, who is one of two women on death row in Mississippi, was convicted of killing her husband, who was, according to many accounts, abusive to her and her family. But according to the Jackson, Miss. Clarion-Ledger, Byrom only admitted guilt when the sheriff asked if she was going to allow her son to take the rap for the murder. “No, he’s not going to. I wouldn’t let him. … I will take all the responsibility,” she said, according to the paper.
Byrom’s son, Edward Byrom Jr., confessed to killing his abusive father four times – in three letters smuggled to his mother in jail, and once to a court-appointed psychologist –CNN reports. Byrom’s attorneys, who were trying their first capital murder case, never had the confessions entered into evidence, and Byrom Jr. took a plea deal for a reduced sentence.
The son’s reported confessions are among the chief reasons Byrom’s advocates believe she deserves a stay of execution. The fact that a jury never heard any of Byrom Jr.’s confessions is a “perversion of American jurisprudence,” according to Warren Yoder, executive director of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi.
According to the Clarion-Ledger, only 53 women have been executed in the United States since 1900, and if Byrom is put to death, she would be only the fifth woman executed in the past ten years. But former state Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr. believes Byrom should get a new trial. “The majority of Mississippians support the death penalty because they think that people get fair trials and they think that they have competent attorneys representing them,”Diaz told CNN. “In this case, she didn’t have either one.”
How long can a baby born today in Minnesota expect to live?
Minneapolis-St. Paul is among the regions topping the list of 25 largest metro areas in terms of well-being. But the new American Human Development Index finds the picture is not so rosy for everyone in Minnesota.
The index is part of a larger project by the New York non-profit Social Science Research Council.
It crunches numbers from a variety of U.S. government data, including from the Census and the CDC, to measure the distribution of well‐being and opportunity in three basic dimensions: health, access to knowledge, and living standards.
The index also looks at changes in well-being in states since 2000 and in metro areas before and after the Great Recession. That’s when wages between 2000 to 2005 stalled or declined in thirty-nine states after four decades of slow but steady national progress in earnings.
According to the American Human Development Index, Minnesota’s current life expectancy at birth is 81.1 years.
Minnesota received a 5.56 score on the education index, with school enrollment at 79.2 percent, 61.5 percent of the population having received a high school diploma, and 21.5 percent having received a bachelor’s degree.
Minnesota reported median income of $30,939.
Scores like these landed the Twin Cities in the top 10 best performing metro areas along with Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, the District of Columbia and Maryland.
But the well-being is not distributed equally.
According to the index, in no major U.S. metropolitan area do either African Americans or Latinos have well-being levels that equal or exceed those of Asian Americans or whites.
Nationally, Asian Americans live the longest, have the most education and earn the most. Latinos have the second-longest life span, outliving whites, on average, by nearly four years.
African Americans have the shortest lives of any other group.
Minnesota’s performance is similar, and in some cases even worse, than the national trend when it comes to the gap between African Americans and whites.
For example, while Minnesota’s overall infant mortality rate is among the best in the country, African-American babies are twice as likely as white babies to die in their first year, MPR News reports. This disparity is the worst in the country.
And research shows people of color in Minnesota are more likely to be poor and sick.
- More likely to live in poverty
- Less likely to graduate from high school
- Less likely to own their own home
- More likely to suffer from chronic illness
Insufficient income, unhealthy environments and inadequate access to opportunity contribute to disparities between racial and ethnic groups in Minnesota, studies show.
You can see similar disparities on yet another recent ranking, where some Minnesota counties were among the most – and least – healthy in the nation.
The County Health Rankings measured 29 factors, including childhood poverty, smoking, college attendance, physical inactivity and access to healthcare, to compare the health of counties within each state, KARE 11 reports.
MN State Lawmaker wants to prohibit use of tanning beds for minors
The author of a new bill in the Minnesota Legislature is looking to curb the incidence of melanoma by prohibiting the use of tanning beds by minors, the Star Tribunereports.
Sen. Chris Eaton, D-Brooklyn Center, said the state has one of the highest rates of melanoma – the most deadly form of skin cancer – in the nation because of tanning beds. The National Cancer Center has reported 9,700 deaths from melanoma this year already and another 76,000 new cases in the U.S.
The Minnesota Cancer Alliance says the state already requires parental consent for children younger than 16 to use tanning beds. If the proposed legislation passes, however, it would make the state’s tanning regulations among the strictest in the nation.
The National Conference of State Legislatures says at least 33 states and the District of Columbia regulate the use of tanning facilities by minors. California, Illinois, Nevada, Texas, Vermont are among the states that ban the use of tanning beds by minors, the organization says.
The use of tanning beds is fairly common among teen girls. AMinnesota Student Survey in January found that 34 percent of white 11th grade girls said they had tanned indoors in the last year, theMinnesota Department of Health reported – and about half of them said they used tanning beds 10 or more times.
Melanoma is the second most common cancer among females ages 15 to 29 years old, according to the Minnesota cancer registry, and it continues to be one of the most rapidly increasing cancers in the state, the MDH says.
Time Mag. Study finds that marriage is good for the heart
The study found that married people had a five-percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared to single people. The project at NYU's Lagone Medical Center is the largest study to ever look at the link between marriage and heart health
Lovelorn singles, that ache in your heart will subside once you get married. Sort of.
A study of 3.5 million American adults has found that married people have lower odds of cardiovascular disease than those who are single, divorced or widowed.
“Our survey results clearly show that when it comes to cardiovascular disease, marital status really does matter,” Dr. Carlos Alviar, who led the study at New York University’s Lagone Medical Center, told the Associated Press. He called it the largest study to ever look at the link between marriage and heart health.
“A spouse can help keep doctor’s appointments and provide transportation, making for easier access to health care services,” Dr. Jeffrey Berger, another senior member of the project, says in an infographic laying out the study’s findings.
The study found that married people had a five-percent lower risk of any cardiovascular disease compared to single people, that widowed people had a three-percent greater risk, and divorced people a five-percent greater risk. Those numbers improved significantly for younger married couples, as those under age 50 had a 12-percent lower chance of heart disease than other young single people.
The study also found that smoking, a major cause of heart disease, was highest among divorced people and lowest in widowed ones. Obesity was most common in those single and divorced, and widowed people suffered from the highest rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and inadequate exercise.
The study was conducted from 2003 through 2008 at more than 20,000 screening sites in all 50 states. The average age was 64 years, and 63% of the participants were women. Almost 90% were white.
The study will be presented March 29 in Washington, D.C., at the annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology.
MN Teen Wins $70,000.00 Settlement After School Demanded Her Facebook Password
School officials forced a female student to give up her password after she posted about a mean hall monitor and flirted with a classmate on Facebook, even though the post and conversation happened off-campus and after school hours
A Minnesota teen is getting a $70,000 payday because school administrators demanded her Facebook password to investigate her social media history when she was caught doing totally normal tween things in sixth grade.
Riley Stratton, now 15, was questioned by school administrators and a police officer after posting on Facebook that she hated a mean school hall monitor and had a sexually-charged conversation with a boy in her class. This was a shocking allegation, since everyone knows that sixth grade girls LOVE hall monitors and HATE flirting with boys.
Administrators demanded that she tell them her Facebook password so they could investigate her social media history, even though both the post and the conversation happened off-campus and outside of school hours. “I was in tears,” Stratton told the Star Tribune Tuesday, “I was embarrassed when they made me give over my password.”
The ACLU took up Stratton’s case, and won her $70,000 in damages from the school district, and the administration has promised to rewrite its privacy policies. “A lot of schools, like the folks at Minnewaska, think that just because it’s easier to know what kids are saying off campus through social media somehow means the rules have changed, and you can punish them for what they say off campus,” said Wallace Hilke, the Minnesota ACLU lawyer who argued Stratton’s case. “They punished her for doing exactly what kids have done for 100 years — complaining to her friends about teachers and administrators.”
Minnewaska Superintendent Greg Schmidt did not admit any district liability in the incident, but said the case highlights the debate over how big a role schools should play in parenting their students, especially when it comes to delicate issues like cyberbullying.
“Some people think schools go too far and I get that,” Schmidt told the Star Tribune. “But we want to make kids aware that their actions outside school can be detrimental.”
Now, thanks to the justice team at the ACLU, tweens everywhere can sleep at night knowing their principal will never see their steamy convos with Josh from P.E.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)