atest News Clips 2013.04.15

                     Bengo’s Latest News Clips                2013.04.15

1.      Nature’s Drone, Pretty and Deadly

The New York Times     April 1, 2013

 African lions roar and strut and act the apex carnivore, but they’re lucky to catch 25 percent of the prey they pursue. Great white sharks have 300 slashing teeth and that ominous soundtrack, and still nearly half their hunts fail.

Dragonflies, by contrast, look dainty, glittery and fun, like a bubble bath or costume jewelry, and they’re often grouped with butterflies and ladybugs on the very short list of Insects People Like. Yet they are also voracious aerial predators, and new research suggests they may well be the most brutally effective hunters in the animal kingdom.

When setting off to feed on other flying insects, dragonflies manage to snatch their targets in midair more than 95 percent of the time, often wolfishly consuming the fresh meat on the spur without bothering to alight. “They’ll tear up the prey and mash it into a glob, munch, munch, munch,” said Michael L. May, an emeritus professor of entomology at Rutgers. “It almost looks like a wad of snuff in the mouth before they swallow it.”

Next step: grab more food. Dragonflies may be bantam, but their appetite is bottomless. Stacey Combes, who studies the biomechanics of dragonfly flight at Harvard, once watched a laboratory dragonfly eat 30 flies in a row. “It would have happily kept eating,” she said, “if there had been more food available.”

In a string of recent papers, scientists have pinpointed key features of the dragonfly’s brain, eyes and wings that allow it to hunt so unerringly. One research team has determined that the nervous system of a dragonfly displays an almost human capacity for selective attention, able to focus on a single prey as it flies amid a cloud of similarly fluttering insects, just as a guest at a party can attend to a friend’s words while ignoring the background chatter.

2.      Sodium, Hiding in Plain Sight

The New York Times    APRIL 1, 2013

Centuries ago, salt was more valuable than gold, but today the condiment has fallen out of favor. Now we know that its main component, sodium, can raise blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke.

A new report, prepared by experts from three leading universities, projects that a small, steady reduction of sodium in the American diet could save up to half a million lives over the next decade. And a more rapid reduction could save even more lives — as many as 850,000.

The Finns have already proved this projection. As described last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, since the early 1970s, when Finland launched a national campaign to reduce salt intake, daily consumption has dropped by 3,000 milligrams a day in men and women, with a corresponding decline in death rates from stroke and coronary heart disease of 75 to 80 percent.

In the last decade or so, many food producers have introduced low-sodium or reduced-sodium versions of popular products, including soups, vegetables, fish, sauces, cereals, nuts, dips and even chips. But Americans still consume far too much sodium — a third more, on average, than the amount recommended for an otherwise healthy person and more than twice the amount recommended for people with high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease or kidney disease.

Sodium is an essential dietary element, but a mere 200 milligrams a day is all one needs for good health. The average American, however, takes in 3,300 milligrams daily, primarily from salt added to foods prepared commercially and in restaurants.

The federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend a maximum of 2,300 milligrams of sodium daily — the amount in one teaspoon of salt — for an otherwise healthy person. The guidelines, and the American Heart Association, recommend an even lower limit, 1,500 milligrams daily, for about 60 percent of American adults: those already afflicted with ailments adversely affected by sodium, African-Americans (who are more susceptible to high blood pressure), and everyone age 51 and older.

Too much sodium in the diet causes the body to retain water, placing an added burden on the heart and blood vessels. The new report, published in the journal Hypertension, projects that 280,000 to 500,000 lives would be saved by a 40 percent reduction in sodium intake, to about 2,200 milligrams a day, over 10 years. An instantaneous reduction, to 1,500 milligrams, could avert between 700,000 and 1.2 million deaths in 10 years, the experts calculated.

3.      Hillary Clinton, a mistake for 2016 CNN    April 01, 2013

Hillary Clinton sits with then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at the Pentagon on February 14.

Washington (CNN) -- Democrats seem poised to choose their next presidential nominee the way Republicans often choose theirs: according to the principle of "next in line."

Hillary Clinton came second in the nomination fight of 2008. If she were a Republican, that would make her a near-certainty to be nominated in 2016. Five of the past six Republican nominees had finished second in the previous round of primaries. (The sixth was George W. Bush, son of the most recent Republican president.)

Democrats, by contrast, prefer newcomers. Six of their eight nominees since 1972 had never sought national office before.

Obviously, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Democrats chose the next guy in line in 2000 -- Vice President Al Gore -- and they may well do so again. But speaking from across the aisle, it's just this one observer's opinion that Democrats would be poorly served by following the Republican example when President Obama's term ends.

Hillary Clinton is 14 years older than Barack Obama. A party has never nominated a leader that much older than his immediate predecessor. (The previous record-holder was James Buchanan, 13 years older than Franklin Pierce when the Democrats chose him in 1856. Runner-up: Dwight Eisenhower, 12 years older than his predecessor, Thomas Dewey.)

Parties have good reasons to avoid reaching back to politicians of prior generations. When they do, they bring forward not only the ideas of the past, but also the personalities and the quarrels of the past.

One particular quarrel that a Hillary Clinton nomination would bring forward is the quarrel over the ethical standards of the Clinton White House -- and, maybe even more, of the Clintons' post-White House careers. Relying on Hillary Clinton's annual financial disclosure reports, CNN reported last year that former President Bill Clinton had earned $89 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House in 2001. Many of these earnings came from foreign sources. In 2011 alone, the former president earned $6.1 million from 16 speeches in 11 foreign countries.

4.       Kim Jong Un is not crazy By Stephan Haggard , Special to CNN     April 2, 2013

 (CNN) -- March brought us a series of what pundits like to call "provocations" by North Korea. On closer inspection, Pyongyang has opted for rhetoric over actual military actions.

While Kim Jong Un's pursuit of nuclear and missile capability remains worrisome, escalating signals of resolve could suggest nervousness as much as strength.

So, is the regime in trouble?

The first round of saber-rattling came as the U.N. Security Council deliberated on a new sanctions resolution after North Korea's satellite launch in December and its third nuclear test in February. The Supreme Command of the Korean People's Army, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a party organ dealing with North-South relations began putting out public statements in an effort to chip away at the institutions of the armistice, such as military hot lines and the stationing of a North Korean military mission in Panmunjom.

North Korea ultimately "withdrew" from the armistice, but it had done so before and it is not clear what its recent statements actually mean. The armistice is not a peace treaty, but merely a cease fire. The armistice is stable not because of verbal commitments but because of the deterrent capability of both sides.

Is anything really different as a result of this "re-withdrawal"? It doesn't seem like it.

Equally unfortunate was North Korea's decision to renege on a number of North-South agreements, such as a North-South agreement on the denuclearization of the peninsula. But Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons had made this and a number of other agreements moot in any case.