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Saturday, March 2, 2013

Spring-Green Lawn Care Commits to Planting Trees - Franchising.com

Lawn care company partners with Arbor Day Foundation.

Plainfield, IL (PRWEB) February 28, 2013 - Spring-Green Lawn Care has been working with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant trees for several years, and they have renewed that commitment in 2013. Spring-Green has participated in the Arbor Day Foundation?s initiative to increase awareness of tree care programs for three years, planting at least 10,000 trees each year.

This year, Spring-Green has added a component that allows customers to make their own donation to plant a tree. The partnerships allows customers to donate via a special website host be Arbor Day or text message. The Arbor Day Foundation logo is featured on Spring-Green?s website.

?One of our franchise owners in Texas received a letter from a young boy in his territory with $2 to go toward planting trees,? said President James Young. ?That sparked the idea to give customers more direct access to our commitment to planting trees, in addition to our corporate promise of 10,000 trees this year. We have always made being environmentally responsible a priority by enlisting the best practices in lawn and tree care and helping to create both beautiful and beneficial lawns and landscapes. This partnership is just another step toward our goal of being green.?

Spring-Green also added a social aspect to their Arbor Day Foundation alliance last year. The company made a donation to plant a tree in a forest that has been damaged by wildfire, insects or disease for every new Spring-Green franchise customer and Facebook ?like? in 2012.

About Spring-Green Lawn Care

Founded in 1977, Plainfield, Illinois-based Spring-Green Lawn Care has been delivering lawn and tree care services nationwide for over 35 years. Its service is centered on the beautification of residential and commercial customers in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods and communities. Spring-Green is an attractive opportunity for green industry professionals who want to align themselves with a franchise opportunity that has proven economic resilience, healthy profit margins, industry leading business and marketing intelligence, recurring revenue and retirement & family planning through business ownership. Spring-Green currently has 117 franchises operating in 26 states. Spring-Green Lawn Care franchise owners gave the franchise opportunity a 94 percent overall quality rating, according to the Franchise Research Institute 2011 survey. For more information, visit http://www.springgreenfranchise.com, http://www.spring-greenfranchiseblog.com or follow Spring-Green Franchise on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+.

Contact:

James Young
Spring-Green Lawn Care
http://franchise.spring-green.com/
815-230-1302

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Source: http://www.franchising.com/news/20130301_springgreen_lawn_care_commits_to_planting_trees.html

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Game of Thrones Season 3: New Posters!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/03/game-of-thrones-season-3-new-posters/

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Friday, March 1, 2013

Premium cigarettes lift BAT Zimbabwe earnings

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars" trilogy, was briefly hospitalized due to her bipolar disorder, the actress' spokeswoman said on Tuesday after video emerged of Fisher giving an unusual stage performance. The video came from a show Fisher gave aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean last week, according to celebrity website TMZ, which posted the clip. The clip shows Fisher, 56, singing "Skylark" and "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," at times appearing to struggle to remember the lyrics. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/premium-cigarettes-lift-bat-zimbabwe-earnings-092636227--sector.html

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Were those the bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister?

Experts doubt that the 2,000-year-old bones, unearthed?in 1904 in what is now Turkey, belonged to?Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra's younger half-sister whom she ordered killed.?

By Stephanie Pappas,?LiveScience / February 26, 2013

The site of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, where Cleopatra had her sister Arsinoe murdered.

Adam Carr distributed by Wikimedia under a Creative Commons License

Enlarge

A Viennese archaeologist lecturing in North Carolina this week claims to have identified the bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister or half-sister. But not everyone is convinced.

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That's because the evidence linking the bones, discovered in an ancient Greek city, to?Cleopatra's sibling Arsinoe IV is largely circumstantial. A DNA test was attempted, said Hilke Thur, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a former director of excavations at the site where the bones were found. However, the 2,000-year-old bones had been moved and handled too many times to get uncontaminated results.

"It didn't bring the results we hoped to find," Thur?told the Charlotte News-Observer. She will lecture on her research March 1 at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh.

The Ptolemy's bloody history

Arsinoe IV was Cleopatra's younger half-sister or sister, both of them fathered by Ptolemy XII Auletes, though whether they shared a mother is not clear. Ptolemic family politics were tough: When Ptolemy XII died, he made Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII joint rulers, but Ptolemy soon ousted Cleopatra. Julius Caesar took Cleopatra's side in the family fight for power, while Arsinoe joined the Egyptian army resisting Caesar and the Roman forces. [Cleopatra & Olympias: Top 12 Warrior Moms in History]

Rome won out, however, and Arsinoe was taken captive. She was allowed to live in exile in Ephesus, an ancient Greek city in what is now Turkey. However, Cleopatra saw her half-sister as a threat and had her murdered in 41 B.C.

Fast forward to 1904. That year, archaeologists began excavating a ruined structure in Ephesus known as the Octagon for its shape. In 1926, they revealed a burial chamber in the Octagon, holding the bones of a young woman.

Thur argues that the date of the tomb (sometime in the second half of the first century B.C.) and the illustrious within-city location of the grave, points to the occupant being Arsinoe IV herself. Thur also believes the octagonal shape may echo that of the great Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the?Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That would make the tomb an homage to Arsinoe's hometown, Egypt's ancient capital, Alexandria. ?

Controversial claim

The skull of the possible murdered princess disappeared in Germany during World War II, but Thur found the rest of the bones in two niches in the burial chamber in 1985. The remains have been debated every step of the way. Forensic analysis revealed them to belong to a girl of 15 or 16, which would make Arsinoe surprisingly young for someone who was supposed to have played a major leadership role in a war against Rome years before her death. Thur dismisses those criticisms.

"This academic questioning is normal," she told the News-Observer. "It happens. It's a kind of jealousy."

In 2009, a BBC documentary, "Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer," trumpeted the claim that the bones are Arsinoe's. At the time, the most controversial findings centered on the body's lost skull. Measurements and photographs of the incomplete skull remain in historical records and were used to?reconstruct the dead woman's face.

From the reconstruction, Thur and her colleagues concluded that Arsinoe had an African mother (the Ptolemies were an ethnically Greek dynasty). That conclusion led to splashy headlines suggesting that Cleopatra, too, was African.

But classicists say the conclusions are shaky.

"We get this skull business and having Arsinoe's ethnicity actually being determined from a reconstructed skull based on measurements taken in the 1920s?" wrote David Meadows, a Canadian classicist and teacher, on his blog?rogueclassicism.

Not only that, but Cleopatra and Arsinoe may not have shared a mother.

"In that case, the ethnic argument goes largely out of the window," Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard wrote in the?Times Literary Supplement?in 2009.

Without more testing, the bones remain in identification limbo.

"One of my colleagues on the project told me two years ago there is currently no other method to really determine more," Thur told the News-Observer. "But he thinks there may be new methods developing. There is hope."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter?@sipappas?or LiveScience?@livescience. We're also on?Facebook?&?Google+.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/M6-C1QiGsb0/Were-those-the-bones-of-Cleopatra-s-murdered-sister

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First lady announces effort to help kids exercise

CHICAGO (AP) ? Imagine students learning their ABCs while dancing, or memorizing multiplication tables while doing jumping jacks.

Some schools are using both methods of instruction, and Michelle Obama would like to see more of them use other creative ways to help students get the recommended hour of daily exercise.

In Chicago Thursday, the first lady announced a new public-private partnership to help schools do just that. "Let's Move Active Schools" starts with a website, www.letsmoveschools.org , where school officials and others can sign up to get started.

Mrs. Obama said too many penny-pinched schools have either cut spending on physical education or eliminated it outright to put the money toward classroom instruction. But the first lady who starts most days with a workout ? and other advocates of helping today's largely sedentary kids move their bodies ? say that's a false choice, since studies that show exercise helps youngsters focus and do well in school.

The effort is one of the newest parts of Mrs. Obama's 3-year-old campaign against childhood obesity, known as "Let's Move," which she has spent the week promoting.

"With each passing year, schools feel like it's just getting harder to find the time, the money and the will to help our kids be active. But just because it's hard doesn't mean we should stop trying," the first lady said. "It means we should try harder. It means that all of us ? not just educators, but businesses and nonprofits and ordinary citizens ? we all need to dig a little deeper, start getting more creative."

She was joined at McCormick Place in her hometown by several Olympians, including gymnasts Dominique Dawes and Gabby Douglas, sprinter Allyson Felix, tennis player Serena Williams and decathlete Ashton Eaton, along with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and triathlete Sarah Reinertsen, whose left leg was amputated above the knee when she was a child, and other athletes. Thousands of students from city middle schools also were being brought in for the event.

Research shows that daily exercise has a positive influence on academic performance, but kids today spend too much time sitting, mostly in school but also outside the classroom while watching TV, playing video games or surfing the Internet. Federal guidelines recommend that children ages 6-17 get at least 60 minutes of exercise daily, which can be racked up through multiple spurts of activity throughout the day.

The White House says the most current data, from 2007, shows that just 4 percent of elementary schools, 8 percent of middle schools and 2 percent of high schools provided daily physical education.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he's proof of the link between exercise and academic performance. As a boy, he said, he had a hard time sitting still in class but that exercise helped him focus.

"What's true for me is true for many of our nation's children," he said in an interview.

Duncan, who played basketball professionally in Australia, said the choice is not between physical activity or academics, especially with about one-third of U.S. kids either overweight or obese and at higher risk for life-threatening illnesses like heart disease or diabetes.

"It's got to be both," he said. Duncan cited the examples of students learning the alphabet while dancing or memorizing multiplication tables while doing jumping jacks.

Mrs. Obama called on school staff, families and communities to help get 50,000 schools, about half the number of public schools in the U.S., involved in the program over the next five years.

The President's Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation will oversee the program. Funding and other resources will come from Nike Inc., the GENYOUth Foundation, ChildObesity180, Kaiser Permanente and the General Mills Foundation.

Under the new initiative, modest grants will be available from the Education Department to help some programs get started. The GENYOUth Foundation and ChildObesity180 also will be awarding grants.

Nike has committed $50 million to the effort over the next five years; the remaining groups together have pledged more than $20 million.

Williams said it's important to structure the activity so that it doesn't feel like a workout.

"I had fun and I didn't realize it was work," she said about her years of practice before becoming one of America's top tennis players.

___

Online:

Let's Move: http://www.letsmove.gov

___

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsuperville

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/first-lady-announces-effort-help-kids-exercise-110207731--politics.html

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The Communications Network ? WEBZ's Birther Controversy

Guest Post: ?Mitch Hurst

In what?s been referred to by The New York Times as a ?saucy? new marketing campaign, Chicago?s venerable NPR affiliate is pushing procreative sex. Advertisements plastered around the area, including on the sides of buses, are asking Chicagoans to ?do it for the city? and ?make babies today? in an effort to create a new generation of WBEZ listeners.

Like much of old media public radio knows it desperately needs to appeal to a new generation of potential listeners who have a smorgasbord of options that were unavailable to their parents and grandparent. If you believe WBEZ?s marketing department, the campaign is satire, designed to be provocative and grab attention. That it did, in a ?what the hell were they thinking? sort of way.

wbez

For the most part, the public radio brand is associated with in-depth, high-quality coverage of and discussion about politics, policies, and issues that impact the lives of its listeners, who tune in because they assume a half hour later they?ll come away a bit smarter about their community or their world. It?s for that reason public radio ? like public television ? has consistently attracted substantial support from foundations that believe it helps burnish their brands.

I can understand how that cultivated image of self-restraint makes it difficult to gain traction with the Instagram generation, who seem to demand a slice of your soul in exchange for their attention.

But this campaign could be for Doritos or Snapple or, for that matter, the Howard Stern Show. Every organization wants their customers to pass along their brand loyalties to their kids. Even if it?s all tongue-in-cheek, the campaign has the hallmark of a battle between old and new that neither side won. It fails to sell anything.

In addition it?s remarkably tone deaf. Public radio is one of the few news organizations that seriously covers the environment and other issues closely associated with population growth. That?s yet another reason it gets a fair chunk of funding from private foundations that are financing efforts to limit over-population and its deeply negative impacts on the planet.

I?ll keep listening to WBEZ because it rises well above the news and talk claptrap offered by money machines like Clear Channel. But it?s put a dent in its brand by launching a campaign that does nothing to highlight its distinguishing virtues.

Communications Network board member Mitch Hurst is?founder?of?MH Communications?and a frequent contributor to our blog.

Source: http://www.comnetwork.org/2013/02/webzs-birther-controversy/

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) -- Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/slight-cancer-risk-japan-nuke-202354306.html

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