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POPSFishing Cat Would Rather be Fishing in Sri Lanka
According to wikipidiot: "The Fishing Cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) is a medium-sized cat whose disjunct global range extends from eastern Pakistan through portions of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, throughout Bangladesh and Mainland Southeast Asia to Sumatra and Java. Its fur has an olive-grey color with dark spots arranged stripe-like running along the length of the body. The face has a distinctly flat-nosed appearance. The size varies between locations. While Indian specimens grow to 80 cm (32 in) plus 30 cm (12 in) tail, Indonesian fishing cats only reach 65 cm (26 in) plus 25 cm (10 in) tail. Indian individuals weigh up to 11.7 kg (26 lbs), while in Indonesia adult fishing cats weigh in at up to approximately 6 kg (13 lbs). They are stocky of build with medium short legs, and a short muscular tail of one half to one third of the length of the rest of the animal. Like its closest relative, the Leopard Cat, the Fishing Cat lives along rivers, brooks and mangrove swamps.
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POPS No Eyewitnesses to the Crime Still, the world is watching. As we Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence, let’s stand with Iran by recalling the first democratic revolution in Asia. It began in 1905 in Iran, driven by the quest to secure parliamentary government and a Constitution from the Qajar dynasty. Now, 104 years on, Iranians demand that the Constitution they have be respected through Islamic democracy and a government accountable to the people. They will not be silenced. The regime’s base has narrowed dramatically. Its internal splits are growing with the defection of much of the clerical establishment. One distinguished Iran scholar, Farideh Farhi, wrote this to me: “So I cry and ask why we have to do this to ourselves over and over again. Yet I do have hope, perhaps for purely selfish reasons " because I don’t want to cry all the time, but also because of the energy you keep describing.
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POPSPalin, Cloward, Piven and Kafka Some of the complaints her legal team responded to were simply absurd. Complaint alleging interference in a job hiring was filed under the name of Edna Birch, a busybody character on the British soap opera Emmerdale. Palin's attorney, Thomas Van Flein, said no one by that name could be found living in Alaska and the filer refused to use a real name, so the complaint was dismissed Feb. 20. Forget about the fairness or irrationality of this complaint. The mere fact that she had to engage an attorney to respond to it means anyone with a computer, printer and a few stamps can force a politician to incur thousands of dollars in legal fees. And while these sort of Kafkaesque tribunals have normally been reserved for prominent Americans, we might all get to participate in the future.
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POPSMacro Shots: The Hidden World of Ants Mark Moffett's photographs are featured at the National Museum of Natural History, "Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants," which runs through October 10.
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POPS Some Time To Ponder Some welcome those fur-laced straps, and the goad of the baton to us, as a people. They think they will guide this necessary evil once they make it into a pure evil. Yet they, too, are being fitted for those things they beg to have done to others and debase themselves ever faster to reach such moral decrepitude as to depend upon the punisher for sweet cakes... and the lash... so that they can do as they are told. I do, indeed, support Gov. Palin no matter where she goes, and if it is away from the spotlight, then none can say that she did not do good in her time in office as Governor. America, however, needs to stand up and look away from its navel and pull the choke chain leash on this beast we call government and remind it that it serves to protect. It needs some meals taken from it so that it can drop weight and get about its job as it is now too fat to actually protect anything... and far too hungry to be safe to us.
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POPSDemocrat Health Care, By The Numbers they were forced to wait 60 days to begin post-operative radiation treatments. 280,392: The number of jobs that employers would shed if government levied an employer mandate, requiring them to insure all employees. A 2007 study by Katherine Baicker of Harvard University and Helen Levy of the University of Michigan ("Employer Health Insurance Mandates and the Risk of Unemployment") 37: The "health care ranking" assigned to the U.S. by the World Health Organization among the world's countries. This oft -quoted number is used to justify an overhaul of the U.S. health care system and lists countries like Italy (2), Andorra (4), Malta (5), Singapore (6), Oman (8), Portugal (12), Greece (14), the United Kingdom (18), Ireland (19), Columbia (22), Cyprus (24), Saudi Arabia (26), the UAE (27), Morocco (29), Canada (30), Chile (33), the Dominican Republic (35) and Costa Rica (36) ahead of the U.S.
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POPSEpic Trek of 'Lost Boy' more (at source): It is not hard to see why. The book's publication, and the astonishing world it opens up, is further evidence of the tenacity and desire that took a young boy across a vast continent. ''My motivation is to make money to pay my law studies which cost 27,000 rands a year ," he said "and to get my two brothers through school. I have put them into a boarding school in Uganda."
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POPSMental Illness and the 80% Genetic Myth "Music is not melody versus rhythm, wine is not grapes versus alcohol and we are not environment versus genes. We are their sum, their product and their expression. They dance together and we are their performance, but neither is an adversary. The art of understanding this elegant ballet is complex and arcane but you may never realise this from reading the quoted results of genetic studies, because the extent to which a trait is heritable, that is, accounted for by genetics, is usually expressed as a simple percentage.
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POPSIs wisdom in the brain? Wisdom for centuries has been a religious or philosophical concept that varies somewhat by culture. But Jeste tells ScientificAmerican.com that there is reason to believe that it's rooted in neurobiology.
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