Media investing popular with lawmakers | Marketplace from ...

This news from the Center for Responsive Politics... Members of Congress may complain about the fourth estate, but at least they put their money where their mouths are. The center says about 60 lawmakers own stock in 19 different media companies.

Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry is the number one investor with multimillion dollar holdings in several news organizations, including News Corp., which owns Fox News.

Media investing splits just about evenly, by the way, between Democrats and Republicans. You can find who else is on the list by clicking here.

Source: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/news-brief/media-investing-popular-lawmakers

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Republican hopeful Cain's wife: he would not harass women (reuters)

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Veterans Day ravioli: Is that a real tradition?

Ravioli is the meal of choice for Veterans Day, at least according to an Internet meme. But is it a real tradition?

To all current and former American?soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and Coast Guardsmen: Thank you.

Skip to next paragraph

If you're not a veteran, consider serving those who have served. For instance, you can volunteer at a site near you that serves?meals to homeless veterans.?Alternatively, you could interview a veteran by recording his or her story for the?Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.

If you are a veteran, you should do whatever you want. It's your day, after all.?

Veterans and non-veterans alike, we all have to eat. Is there a traditional Veterans Day meal??

Wikipedia says there is. Near the end of their Veterans Day entry, we spotted something we've never heard of before:

The holiday is often celebrated by having a?ravioli?meal. This tradition dates back to the ending days of?World War I?when President?Woodrow Wilson, aware that the returning soldiers would be longing for home cooked meals, invited 2,000 soldiers to the?White House?and helped his staff chefs cook them ravioli, which had just become a mainstay in mainstream American kitchens due to commercial canning.

For most news organizations, this would be more than enough evidence to start passing the Parmesan. But we like to go the extra mile here at the Monitor, which in this case means making sure that Wikipedia's source checks out.?

It doesn't. The link takes you to page 290 of "The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink,"?which notes that canning during the 1930s introduced Americans to a number of formerly exotic foods, including enchiladas, chili con carne, goulash, and yes, ravioli. But it says nothing about the stuffed pasta being a Veteran's Day tradition.

Just to be sure, we also searched the websites of the VFW and the Veterans Administration. No mentions of ravioli there either.?

One great feature about Wikipedia is that it lets you travel back in time to the moment when something was added. Using WikiBlame, a browser-based tool that let's you search Wikipedia to find out who changed an entry and when, you can see that the part about ravioli being a Veterans Day tradition was added by a user named Jerdobias?on Veterans Day, 2010.

Back then, the sentence, "The holiday is often celebrated by having a?ravioli?meal" was followed by a footnote citing a column from 2009 appearing??in the Lebanon, Ohio, Western Star newspaper. The columnist notes that ravioli was on her son's school-lunch menu on Nov. 10, but it makes no reference to the pasta being a traditional Veterans Day meal.

So what gives? Is the Jerdobias?secretly flacking for Chef Boyardee? (Doubtful, as he says he's a vegan.) Or could it be that he sincerely believed that there existed a Veterans Day ravioli tradition, couldn't find a decent source to back it up, so just linked to the first Google search result for "veterans day ravioli." Or is there something else going on?

Either way, if eating ravioli on Veterans Day wasn't a tradition, it looks like it is starting to become one, thanks to Wikipedia. A handful of small papers, along with many more Twitter users, are now spreading the word, most likely using the Wikipedia entry as their source.?

Of course, it could still very well be true that people have been eating ravioli on Nov. 11 every year since Armistice Day. After all,?not every fact has made it on to the Internet (yet). It could have been that?Jerdobias just happened to be the first person to put this information on the Web.?

And even if it's a completely made-up tradition, it's not a particularly bad one. Who doesn't like a nice plate of ravioli every once in awhile?

So in keeping with tradition, in the loosest sense of the term, here is our recipe for canned ravioli.

Step 1: Obtain a can of ravioli, preferably through legal means.

Step 2: Heat the contents of the can to your desired temperature.?

Step 3: Eat.

For a much better recipe from far more qualified cooks, check out the Monitor's Stir It Up food blog and its recipe for ravioli caprese.

Get daily or weekly updates from CSMonitor.com delivered to your inbox.?Sign up today.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/5xYFd6RR4Wo/Veterans-Day-ravioli-Is-that-a-real-tradition

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Miraculous Microbes: They Make Holy Statues "Bleed"—and Can Be Deadly, Too

Features | More Science

A sinister bacterium implicated in Catholic miracles and "blood"-tainted polenta also kills coral, insects, and are even are up to no good in your contact lens case.

By Jennifer Frazer ?| November 11, 2011

A pigmented strain and various mutant versions of Serratia marcescens. Image: Robert Shanks, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

The Killer Bacteria Hall of Fame no doubt houses the usual suspects: Yersinia pestis, perpetrator of the Plague; Treponema pallidum, the spiral-shaped culprit in syphilis; and Vibrio cholerae, the swimmer that causes cholera. But you have probably never heard of one of the inductees.

Serratia marcescens is a forgotten but ubiquitous bacterium that can produce a red pigment called prodigiosin and likes to hang out as a pink film in the shower grout and toilet bowls of less-than-scrupulously clean homes. The pigment is so persistent that giant amoebas called slime molds that dine on S. marcescens turn red just as flamingoes that eat shrimp turn pink. Yet the picture emerging of this unsung organism is increasingly sinister.

These bacterium first attracted scientific attention in early modern times when it was found oozing out of damp Italian statues, communion wafers and, of all things, polenta doing its best impersonation of "blood." And blood it was taken to be?usually miraculously?until a pharmacist named Bartolomeo Bizio started trying to get to the bottom of what peasants declared to be an outbreak of diabolically cursed polenta in 1819.

Bizio believed a microorganism was responsible. In the test chamber, he found the bacterium happily chowing down on polenta while cranking out red pigment. Believing it to be a fungus, he named it Serratia in honor of Italian physicist Serafino Serrati, and marcescens because of the pigment's tendency to fade or decay rapidly.

Fast forward to the middle of the 20th century. In the early 1950s the U.S. government decided it would be a good idea to use S. marcescens in a bioweapon dispersal experiment dubbed Operation Sea-Spray. They burst balloons filled with Serratia over San Francisco Bay. Chosen because the red pigment makes it easily traceable, the supposedly innocuous bacterium so generously sprinkled over the bay was subsequently linked to several respiratory infections and at least one death.

Since then the bacterium has been widely found to be an opportunistic human pathogen, capitalizing on its prowess in forming tight-knit surface communities called biofilms wherever it can. It infects urethras through catheters, lungs via respirators, and premature babies by way of hospital caregivers. S. marcescens turns out to be one of the top 10 causes of all hospital-acquired respiratory, neonatal and surgical infections, said Robert Shanks, associate professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who studies S. marcescens.

It has also been found irritating or infecting the corneas of contact lens wearers who fail to clean their cases with enough diligence (or at all). "What I think is sort of strange about S. marcescens is so many people have them in their contact lens cases," said Regis Kowalski, an ocular microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Although it often lives there harmlessly, S. marcescens is the third-most common cause of ocular keratitis, a corneal infection usually caused by poorly cleaned cases.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=5acbbc2b2b71bee79ddc7347029d692f

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Arne Schmidt and Claudia Hirschberger: The Place To Be In Berlin: Potsdamer Platz (VIDEO)

A traffic junction already in the 18th century, Potsdamer Platz became famous in the Golden 1920s, a metropolitan heart back then, with its grand luxury hotels like the Esplanade and artists' meeting points like Caf? Josty. It was a subject for painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and journalist and writer Kurt Tucholsky, who had more than one satirical say about the crowded place.

Masses of people crossed its streets in those times, many of them arriving at or departing from the railway station that connected the growing city with destinations near and far. Others came in search of entertainment. In the late 1920s, Haus Vaterland became the hot spot of amusement with its large cinema as well as its many theme restaurants and caf?s ranging from a Japanese tea house to Spanish bodega or Italian osteria.

After World War II, the place was nothing more than burned wasteland. It again became famous as a vast empty space after 1961, divided into an Eastern and a Western section by the Berlin Wall. It was here that film maker Wim Wenders shot the famous feature film "Wings of Desire" (Der Himmel ?ber Berlin).

Jump to our video of Potsdamer Platz

Then came 1989 and with the fall of the wall, Potsdamer Platz again changed its face. Having been a no man's land for many decades, the place returned to the middle of the soon-reunited city. But before the competition for the best rejuvenation plan opened, Potsdamer Platz went down in music history with a gigantic rock concert: Roger Waters' "The Wall" in 1990, still the only concert performed on one stage in two countries as the German reunification took place three months later.

Today, this is all history -- and it's not part of our short film and second contribution to "Berlin 01:30." However, some traces of the past can still be seen among the conglomerate of modern architecture by Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki and Hans Kollhoff to name but a few of the starchitects that have reshaped Potsdamer Platz. But you have to take a close look not to miss them: some Berlin Wall pieces for example, the old Weinhaus Huth or a new caf? with the old name Josty.

Yet the most obvious first impression visitors have today is probably the same as they would've had 100 years ago: a busy place filled with shops, restaurants and hotels, crowded with people, cars, bicycles -- and sometimes even with animals, as Husky-drawn tours are offered! There are other options as well, like taking the elevator to the Panoramapunkt on top of the Kollhoff Tower. The building is more than 300 feet high and provides a great view on the urban scenery with the Berlin outskirts far away and the offices in the neighboring towers very close. It's a celebration for the filmmaker and it's a struggle as well: Just imagine carrying heavy tripods, a camera assistant suffering from vertigo and crowds of people sparring for the best vantage point on a platform that is just a small aisle with a tall balustrade.

Down on the ground, it's not about tourists but rather it's about colleagues. While flaneurs from all over the world stop when facing a camera, fellow film makers are not all that tender-footed when meeting each other. The best time of the year to provoke this effect is of course the Berlinale International Film Festival, when stars and starlets grace the place that is home to the event. It's the only season when nearly everyone in the city agrees that Potsdamer Platz is the place to be -- while for the rest of the year, there are controversies about whether it's too cool or not cool enough (or not in the right way), too crowded or to empty, too sober or not sober enough, too exclusive or too cheap.

There's just one way to find out the truth: finding one's own perspective. Ours is the film makers view since we never get tired of finding new angles, moods, seasons and encounters at this, the most urban place in the city, where we can have an espresso break in our favorite coffee shop and wait for the next best moment to catch.

Jump to our video of Potsdamer Platz

Information about Potsdamer Platz

Shopping: Besides Sony Center with its Sony Store, Potsdamer Platz Arcaden is the place's shopping area, with the usual range of stores for fashion, perfumes, electronics and jewelery. Moreover, construction for a huge new shopping center at the historical Wertheim-area that was once home to the famous Wertheim Kaufhaus at the near-by Leipziger Platz has already begun.

Eating out: There are plenty of opportunities around Potsdamer Platz, from international to local Berlin cuisine. Many caf?s and bars can be found as well. A special tip might be the many hotel bars and, for wine lovers, the Weinhaus Huth.

Entertainment and culture: There's mass entertainment and fine culture side by side, for example a casino, four cinemas (ranging from multiplex blockbuster places to the true institution Kino Arsenal), the art gallery Daimler Contemporary and a musical theatre. For cineastes, the place's high time of the year is Berlinale International Film Festival.

Cinemas and places all over the city are involved, but the heart and center is located here, with the Berlinale Festival Palace at Marlene-Dietrich-Platz. Lots of journalists, critics, stars and producers -- in other words, the whole festival crowd -- packs restaurants, caf?s and hotel lobbies in the area. Throughout the year, there are other events taking place as well like concerts (some planned and some performed spontaneously) or the Festival of Lights in autumn.

Special tips: Watch out for the team of nice husky dogs for a guided tour. Another attraction is the Panoramapunkt on Kollhoff Tower with a panorama platform. There's a nice caf? with a great view as well.

?

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arne-schmidt-and-claudia-hirschberger/berlin-place-to-be-potsdamer-platz_b_1087667.html

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Murdoch limits damage in parliament grilling (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) ? James Murdoch, fighting for his career, held his line that he was innocent of covering up phone-hacking at the News of the World tabloid and blamed other former executives in a UK parliamentary hearing on Thursday.

But the 38-year-old News Corp executive and son of media mogul Rupert had no answer during his two-and-a-half-hour grilling to accusations he should have asked more questions, particularly when approving a huge payoff to a hacking victim.

Murdoch accused his former editor and legal chief of misleading him and parliament, after Colin Myler and Tom Crone publicly contradicted his previous testimony to the committee of British MPs investigating the phone-hacking.

"This was the job of the new editor who had come in ... to clean things up, to make me aware of those things," said Murdoch, appearing confident under interrogation by lawmakers even when compared by MP Tom Watson to a Mafia boss.

Observers said Murdoch, who as executive chairman of News Corp's British newspaper arm News International was ultimately responsible for the now-defunct tabloid, acquitted himself well by not damaging his reputation any further.

"There was definitely no knock-out punch delivered," said Ian Whittaker, media analyst at Liberum Capital.

But his performance will have done nothing to win over those with doubts about his ability to run a large company like News Corp. Until recently he had been expected to succeed his father at the head of the media group.

"Murdoch stood up well to two-and-a-half hours of questioning, did not concede anything of significance, but simply reinforced the two major questions that either he was not telling the truth or he was not in full control of News International," said Ivor Gaber, director of a political journalism program at London's City University.

The committee will now draw up a report of its findings, which it expects to publish by Christmas.

"Mr Murdoch, I think, did do his best to give his full account to the committee. Clearly there are contradictions between what he said and others have told us," the committee's chairman, John Whittingdale, told reporters after the hearing.

"We are going to have to spend a long time, I suspect, deliberating before we reach decisions and conclusions. However it is plain that those two accounts we've heard -- one of them cannot be true," he said.

ROGUE REPORTER

The News of the World was revealed this year to have run an industrial-scale operation to hack into the phones of murder victims including schoolgirl Milly Dowler as well as celebrities and politicians.

The scandal caused a wave of public anger which ultimately brought about the closure of the tabloid, shook the political establishment and saw the head of the country's largest police force resign.

Prime Minister David Cameron was also damaged by his decision to hire former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his communications chief in 2007.

Previously, News Corp had maintained the hacking at its tabloid was the work of a lone, "rogue" royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and private detective Glenn Mulcaire.

Both went to jail for the offence in 2007.

In 2008, James Murdoch approved a payoff of about 750,000 pounds ($1.2 million) to hacking victim and soccer boss Gordon Taylor, who had in his possession an email of hacking transcripts appearing to show the hacking went beyond Goodman.

He reiterated to MPs on Thursday he had approved the unusually large payoff only because he was following legal advice, and not because he knew the so-called "for Neville" email could implicate other journalists.

"I was given sufficient information and only sufficient information to authorize the increase of the settlement offered, that Mr Crone and Mr Myler had already eagerly been increasing in order to achieve a settlement even before it had come across my desk," he said.

Opposition Labour Party MP Tom Watson, the toughest member of the committee, asked Murdoch: "Do you think Mr Crone misled us?" Murdoch answered: "It follows that I do, yes."

Crone later issued a statement to media rebutting Murdoch's version of events. "The simple truth is he was told by us in 2008 about the damning email and what it meant in terms of wider News of the World involvement," he said.

"Perhaps Mr Murdoch could explain who he thought was doing the authorising at the News of the World."

Myler likewise rejected Murdoch's account. "My evidence to the select committee has been entirely accurate and consistent," he said in a statement. "I've been clear throughout about the significance of the 'for Neville' email."

Last week, a journalist working for sister newspaper The Sun was arrested on suspicion of bribing police. When asked, Murdoch said he could not rule out shutting down the daily tabloid, should widespread malpractice be discovered there.

SURVEILLANCE

Any notion that News International was a reformed organization was undermined this week by its admission that the News of the World had put lawyers defending hacking victims under surveillance as recently as this year.

James Murdoch also said that members of the parliamentary committee questioning him had been put under surveillance, for which he apologised "unreservedly."

Mark Lewis, who is representing victims including the Dowler family, told Reuters: "It's useful that I have an apology for something that shouldn't have happened."

"But we need to know what did happen, who was doing it, why were they doing it, the full extent and why they were bothering to trail my family."

Murdoch survived a massive protest vote against his membership of the board of News Corp last month, and faces a shareholder vote on his chairmanship of British satellite broadcaster BSkyB at the end of November.

Liberum's Whittaker said he expected him to remain as chair of the company he used to run and which News Corp tried to buy last year, unless new revelations intervened.

"Does he get forced out as Sky chairman? Unless something new that directly contradicts his evidence comes out, my guess would be no," he said.

James Murdoch adopted a more contrite tone than on his previous appearance before the committee together with his father Rupert in July.

"It is a matter of great regret that things went wrong at the News of the World in 2006. The company didn't come to grips with those issues fast enough," he said.

The sometimes testy Murdoch also failed to rise to the bait when Watson compared him to a Mafia boss, responding mildly: "Mr Watson, please, I think that's inappropriate."

(Additional reporting by Keith Weir, Paul Sandle and Michelle Martin; Editing by Sophie Hares and Andrew Heavens)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/enindustry/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111110/media_nm/us_newscorp_murdoch1

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Romario vows to investigate FIFA irregularities

By TALES AZZONI

Associated Press

Associated Press Sports

updated 11:31 a.m. ET Nov. 10, 2011

SAO PAULO (AP) -Former star striker Romario is pledging to step up his efforts in Brazil's parliament to shed light on alleged irregularities involving FIFA and Brazilian football federation president Ricardo Teixeira.

Romario, now a congressman, said he is teaming up with other Brazilian legislators to investigate football's governing body ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Romario will pressure Swiss authorities to release documents which allegedly show that Teixeira was one of the members accused of taking kickbacks from a former FIFA marketing partner in the 1990s.

Teixeira is president of the organizing committee for the 2014 World Cup.

Romario said on his website Thursday that he and other legislators will ask Swiss authorities to let them review files from a court case involving former FIFA marketing partner ISL, which collapsed in 2001.

Romario said access to the documents is "crucial for the (World Cup) to take place with clarity and honesty in our country."

British broadcaster BBC has reported that court documents name Teixeira and President Sepp Blatter's predecessor, Joao Havelange, as two FIFA members who repaid kickbacks worth $7 million. FIFA has blocked the court in Zug from identifying the officials.

Blatter last month promised to release the files from the 10-year-old corruption scandal as part of his efforts to reform FIFA and world football after a slew of scandals involving bribery, vote-rigging and ticket scams. He said his executive committee will reopen the ISL dossier at a Dec. 16-17 meeting in Tokyo.

Teixeira and FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke participated in a congressional committee meeting Wednesday, in which Romario asked them several questions about alleged irregularities involving the Brazilian football official and the sports' governing body, but got few and evasive answers from the duo.

The congressional committee was meeting to discuss the approval of a law needed for the 2014 World Cup and was not directly related to Romario's decision to investigate Teixeira and FIFA.

In his first year as a congressman, Romario has been very active in monitoring Brazil's preparations for the World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics, saying he wants to make sure that everything will be ready in time and that public money will be well spent.

The Brazilian Congress has twice investigated Teixeira for alleged wrongdoing, but the inquiries were never completed.

One of the most powerful men in Brazilian football, Teixeira has been repeatedly attacked by local media over alleged irregularities during his reign since taking over the federation in 1989.

Earlier this year, a prosecutor ordered Brazilian police to investigate him over a money transfer allegedly stemming from the ISL kickbacks.

Teixeira has never been convicted and denies any wrongdoing.

He recently also was accused of unethical behavior by the former chairman of England's Football Association, David Triesman, who said during a British parliamentary inquiry that Teixeira and other FIFA executive committee members engaged in improper conduct during bidding for the 2018 World Cup.

FIFA dismissed those accusations, and the Brazilian official said the allegations were made because the English were upset over losing the World Cup bid.

---

Follow Tales Azzoni at http://twitter.com/tazzoni

? 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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