Congratulations Mr. Roberts

Senate Confirms Roberts As Chief Justice By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - John Glover Roberts Jr. became the 17th chief justice of the United States Thursday, overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate to lead the Supreme Court through turbulent social issues for generations to come.

The Senate voted 78-22 to confirm Roberts — a 50-year-old U.S. Appeals judge from the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Md. — as the successor to the late William H. Rehnquist, who died earlier this month. All of the Senate's majority Republicans, and about half of the Democrats, voted for Roberts.

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I'm Thinking Appetizers

Giant Squid Photographed for First Time By HIROKO TABUCHI, Associated Press Writer
Squid Vid

TOKYO - The giant squid can be found in books and in myths, but for the first time, a team of Japanese scientists has captured on film one of the most mysterious creatures of the deep sea in its natural habitat.

The team led by Tsunemi Kubodera, from the National Science Museum in Tokyo, tracked the 26-foot long Architeuthis as it attacked prey nearly 3,000 feet deep off the coast of Japan's Bonin islands.

"We believe this is the first time a grown giant squid has been captured on camera in its natural habitat," said Kyoichi Mori, a marine researcher who co-authored a piece in Wednesday's issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The camera was operated by remote control during research at the end of October 2004, Mori told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Mori said the giant squid, purplish red like its smaller brethren, attacked its quarry aggressively, calling into question the image of the animal as lethargic and slow moving.

"Contrary to belief that the giant squid is relatively inactive, the squid we captured on film actively used its enormous tentacles to go after prey," Mori said.

"It went after some bait that we had on the end of the camera and became stuck, and left behind a tentacle" about six yards long, Mori said.

Kubodera, also reached by the AP, said researchers ran DNA tests on the tentacle and found it matched those of other giant squids found around Japan.

"But other sightings were of smaller, or very injured squids washed toward the shore — or of parts of a giant squid," Kubodera said. "This is the first time a full-grown, healthy squid has been sighted in its natural environment in deep water."

Kubodera said the giant squid's tentacle would not grow back, but the squid's life was not in danger.

Jim Barry, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, has searched for giant squid on his own expeditions without luck.

"It's the holy grail of deep sea animals," he said. "It's one that we have never seen alive, and now someone has video of one."

New Zealand's leading authority on the giant squid, marine biologist Steve O'Shea, praised the Japanese team's feat.

"Through sheer ... determination the guy has gone on and done it," said O'Shea, chief marine scientist at the Auckland University of Technology, who is not linked to the Japanese research.

O'Shea said he hopes to capture juvenile giant squid and grow them in captivity. He captured 17 of them five years ago but they died in captivity.

"Our reaction is one of tremendous relief that the so-called ... race (to film the giant squid) is over ... because the animal has consumed the last eight or nine years of my life," O'Shea said of the film.

Giant squid have long attracted human fascination, appearing in myths of the ancient Greeks, as well as Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." Scientific interest in the animals has surged in recent years as more specimens have been caught in commercial fishing nets or found washed up on shores.

Kubodera would make no claims about the scientific significance of his team's work.

"As for the impact our discovery will have on marine research, I'll leave to other researchers to decide," he said.

Other biologists saidi they expected the video would provide insight on the animal's behavior underwater.

"Nobody has been able to observe a large giant squid where it lives," said Randy Kochevar, a deep sea biologist also with the Monterey aquarium. "There are people who said it would never be done."

___

Associated Press reporters Ray Lilley in Wellington, New Zealand, and Terence Chea in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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Light one up Johnny

'Light' Smoking Takes Heavy Toll on Health

THURSDAY, Sept. 22 (HealthDay News) -- There's sobering news for "light" smokers, or smokers who decide to cut down rather than quit: A new study finds that smoking just one to four cigarettes per day nearly triples risks for dying of heart disease or lung cancer.
The study dispels the notion that so-called "light" smokers aren't threatened by the serious health problems faced by heavy smokers.

Reporting in the current issue of Tobacco Control, researchers analyzed health and mortality data on nearly 43,000 men and women collected from the mid 1970s until 2002. All the people were between 35 and 49 years of age at the start of the study.

Compared with people who'd never smoked, those who smoked one to four cigarettes a day were nearly three times as likely to die of heart disease. Men who were light smokers were nearly three times as likely to die of lung cancer, while women who were light smokers were nearly five times as likely to be killed by lung cancer, compared with non-smokers.

The study also found that light smokers were at a 50 percent higher death rate from all causes than people who'd never smoked.

The American Cancer Society applauded the research.

Thomas J. Glynn, the ACS director of cancer science and trends and international tobacco programs, said in a prepared statement, "The finding that smoking just 1 to 4 cigarettes a day can significantly boost heart disease and cancer rates is important because many smokers, due to expanding restrictions on smoking in public places and at work, are cutting back on the number of cigarettes they smoke each day. By doing so, they often feel that they are sharply reducing or eliminating the health dangers from smoking. But this study shows that this is not the case and reiterates the important message that there is no such thing as a safe level of smoking."


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The American Cancer Society has more about smoking and health.

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It's electric, boogey woogey woogey

Power-dressing man leaves trail of destruction

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together.

When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet.

"It sounded almost like a firecracker," Clewer told Australian radio Friday.

"Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt."

Employees, unsure of the cause of the mysterious burning smell, telephoned firefighters who evacuated the building.

"There were several scorch marks in the carpet, and we could hear a cracking noise -- a bit like a whip -- both inside and outside the building," said fire official Henry Barton.

Firefighters cut electricity to the building thinking the burns might have been caused by a power surge.

Clewer, who after leaving the building discovered he had scorched a piece of plastic on the floor of his car, returned to seek help from the firefighters.

"We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited," Barton said.

"I've been firefighting for over 35 years and I've never come across anything like this," he said.

Firefighters took possession of Clewer's jacket and stored it in the courtyard of the fire station, where it continued to give off a strong electrical current.

David Gosden, a senior lecturer in electrical engineering at Sydney University, told Reuters that for a static electricity charge to ignite a carpet, conditions had to be perfect.

"Static electricity is a similar mechanism to lightning, where you have clouds rubbing together and then a spark generated by very dry air above them," said Gosden.

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The cause of & solution to

German brews world's strongest beer

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German brewer has concocted what he says is the world's strongest beer, a potent drink with an alcohol content of 25.4 percent that is served in a shot glass.

"Everyone who has tried it is enthusiastic. It tastes like a quirky mixture of beer and sherry," said Bavarian brewer Harald Schneider.

Schneider, who lives in southern Germany where beer is a tradition, said his beer fermented for 12 weeks for an alcohol content twice that of Germany's other strongest beers.

"People will only be able to drink two or three glasses, otherwise they'll drop like flies," he said.

Schneider expects the holders of the world's strongest beer, the Boston Beer Company, to put up a fight.

"I'm pretty sure the Americans have something up their sleeve."

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Unfortunate

Girls On Film
The dangerous devolution of video vixens.
By Tamara Palmer

Published: Wednesday, September 7, 2005

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to appear in music videos. Yes, sometimes they do get to act, but more often women are little more than silicone-stuffed blowjob machines. It's especially true in rap, where women-as-pleasure-objects remains the dominant visual paradigm. Many call them video ho's, but we'll be nicer and adopt the term used in Karrine Steffans' dishy new bestseller, Confessions of a Video Vixen.
The book is one hell of a beach read. It charts how Steffans appeared in a number of rap videos, began fraternizing a little too intimately with the stars, and took a destructive path through drugs and indiscriminate sex as she devolved into her persona as "Super Head," a lady whose name needs no explanation.

Datwon Thomas is editor-in-chief of King, a New York-based men's magazine that profiles video vixens. He notes that Steffans' story is tragic, adding that it portrays an extreme side of an industry that is typically less glamorous, less lucrative, and less dangerous than she describes.

"I think Karrine had a unique experience that not too many women had at that level," he says. "[In the book] she's saying step one can lead to step two and that type of thing, but I think she was on step 12."

Thomas describes an industry that is largely underpaid. The average video vixen is not getting flown to Los Angeles and New York; she might even be catching a bus down to the beach for a day of boring, tedious work on a video that never makes it to cable. But the brisk sales of Confessions reinforces the most lurid and negative stereotypes about video vixens: They're loose and fucked up, with money to burn.

But it would be disingenuous to lay the blame solely at hip-hop's doorstep. Damn, when you really think about it, the decline of Western female civilization is all Duran Duran's fault. The group kicked off this whole mess when it released its raunchy video for "Girls on Film" in 1981, the year MTV launched. The band set the infinite loop in motion, and its themes are still the axis around which these videos rotate.

It's a long way from the pillow fights of carefree Duran girls to the travails of Super Head, though. And young ladies looking for role models in music videos are still crazily malnourished, with little relief in sight. It takes more than a few girl-power clips from Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott, and Kelly Clarkson to combat the faceless army of clapping butt cheeks.

The prevalence of jiggling women in videos may never change if artists don't dictate it first, suggests Ben Mor, director of T.I.'s booty-free "U Don't Know Me," a 2005 MTV Video Music Award nominee for Best Rap Video.

"A lot of those [ideas] come from the artist, meaning the artists want that," says Mor, who has also directed narrative-style, unvixenly videos for Nas and John Legend.

"It might be their first video, and they want to do what they've been watching. It's like a vicious cycle: 'I want the ho's in my video, and I wanna look like a pimp in my video.' But yo, we've done the chicks-in-bikinis-by-the-pool scene a million times!"

MTV is doing its part to encourage other themes in music videos by rewarding people like Mor and T.I. with VMA nominations. But on the other hand, "U Don't Know Me" faces stiff competition from vixen-strewn clips such as the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait (The Whisper Song)" and Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot." Will the booties have it? Only the MTV gatekeepers know for sure.

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