Eideard

A megachurch paid a 20-year-old man to keep silent about a sexual relationship he had with disgraced evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, a senior church pastor said. Haggard, who was fired amid allegations that he used drugs and patronized a male prostitute in 2006, had a sexual relationship with a second man — a 20-year-old volunteer at his megachurch, said the Rev. Brady Boyd.

The church agreed to pay the man in exchange for his pledges not to talk publicly about the relationship, Boyd said, referring to a settlement reached by the man’s lawyer and the church’s insurance company. Under the settlement, the church provided the man money to pay his college tuition, moving expenses and counseling, Boyd said. “This was compassionate assistance. It was to help him move forward, not a settlement to keep him quiet,” said Boyd…

In the last three weeks, Boyd said, the young man told him that he was considering going public with his story because Haggard was portraying himself as a victim in an upcoming HBO documentary called “The Trial of Ted Haggard,” which is scheduled to air Thursday…

In a settlement with New Life, the church and Haggard agreed that he would retain his six-figure salary for a year, leave the Colorado Springs area, receive counseling, and not speak publicly about what had happened for one year, according to a church staff member with knowledge of the settlement who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Despite the fresh scandal, Boyd said he is hopeful for the future.

So am I. When our species moves to a level of education and understanding beyond witchdoctor ideology.

Empty chair the Judiciary Committee saw the last time they subpoenaed Rove

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Monday subpoenaed former White House adviser Karl Rove, The Hill reported. The subpoena is intended to compel Rove to testify about his role in the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys during the administration of former President George W. Bush, as well as the Justice Department’s prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, the report said.

Rove is one of several former White House officials who refused to testify voluntarily in the House and Senate in 2007 on the dismissal of the federal prosecutors. The Bush White House offered to allow executive branch officials to be interviewed behind closed doors, but insisted the officials could not be put under oath and there would be no transcripts of the interviews.

Rove has claimed executive privilege exemption from being compelled to testify but a federal court has rejected the claim.

“I have said many times that I will carry this investigation forward to its conclusion, whether in Congress or in court, and today’s action is an important step along the way,” said Conyers in announcing the subpoena.

So, is this when Karl Rove switches from “executive privilege” to the Fifth Amendment?

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A German motorist missed a bend in the road, broke through a barrier and hurtled up a bank, crash-landing on a church roof in eastern Germany.

The bank acted like a springboard, propelling the black Skoda about 35 meters (115 ft) forward and straight into the church’s roof frame, where it remained wedged 7 meters off the ground, police said in a statement.

“We’ve never ever had a case of a car landing in a church before,” said Frank Fischer, a spokesman for Chemnitz police in the state of Saxony.

The 23-year-old driver suffered serious injuries. The damage to the car, which was extracted from the roof by a crane, amounts to about 10,000 euros ($13,000), police said. The cost of damage to the church has not yet been estimated.

Har!

Traditional salt-making, hand harvesting
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In the early 1990s, João Navalho, a microbiologist fresh out of graduate school, came to the salt marshes in the Algarve region with a handful of young partners to grow and harvest microalgae. The business foundered…After years of frustrated effort, the partners suddenly changed course. “We looked around and said, ‘We’re stupid!”‘ Navalho recalled. “We have a lot of land here. What we should do with the salinas is produce salt!”…

Like everything else in this undertaking, the answer was staring them in the face. Living on the edge of the marshes was Maximino António Guerreiro, a sunburned retired salt worker with a grizzled beard and missing teeth, who started harvesting here with his father more than four decades ago.

In 1997, the salt project began. Guerreiro cleaned out and rebuilt the long-abandoned patchwork of rectangular, clay-lined salt beds. With young workers from Eastern Europe, he opened sluices from the sea and set up a damming system to control the water flow. He shared the secrets of salt: how to measure evaporation levels and determine the correct salt density and water temperature, when to add water and to rake and skim.

Two years later, Necton, the salt company that Navalho created here, produced its first salt crop. Now it is one of the region’s new salt pioneers, struggling to revive what was once a flourishing trade in this part of Portugal. They are trying to persuade consumers of the health and taste benefits of handmade, nonindustrial salt and to compete in an increasingly sophisticated global salt market. “Life begins in the ocean,” Navalho said. “What we are selling is ocean salt water without the water. Call it sea dust.”

To many people, salt is salt. But to those for whom it is a gourmet condiment, few varieties compare to the crème de la crème of salt known as fleur de sel, harvested by gently skimming the white, lacy film from the surface of salty beds when weather conditions in summer allow.

RTFA. Lots of interesting history. A fair piece of info about the craft.

I have a favorite sea salt – though I won’t bring it up since it has naught to do with the article. I think all the methods and styles have a place – just like all the denominations of olive oil or where your favorite scallops grow. The flavor is in the taste buds of the taster.

The usual crap excuses apply. Regardless, it still boils down to the gutting of BBC integrity by Blair – and right-wing business as usual from Murdoch and his Sky flunkys.

They could perform just the tiniest bit of good by allowing these appeals for aid on their networks. That is not as important as space under the sheets with reactionary politicians.

Brings new meaning to the term “church services.”

Paul Yager

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a prototype malaria test printed on a disposable Mylar card that could easily slip into your wallet and still work when you took it out, even months later.

Paul Yager, UW bioengineering professor, and colleagues described the prototype cards in the December issue of the journal Lab on a Chip. These cards are a critical step in a long-term project funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative to develop affordable, easy-to-use diagnostic tools for the developing world.

“A pivotal issue in having this technology work is making these tests storable for long periods of time at ambient temperatures,” Yager said. “Normally people work with wet reagents. We’re saying we can dry the reagents down in order to store them without refrigeration. It’s the astronaut-food approach.”

The malaria cards contain reagents that would normally require refrigeration, but the researchers figured out a way to stabilize them in dry form by mixing them with sugar. Results showed that malaria antibodies dried in sugar matrices retained 80 percent to 96 percent of their activity after 60 days of storage at elevated temperatures.

While the prototype developed by the UW researchers only tests for malaria, Yager and his collaborators are working towards cards that also will test for five other diseases that, like malaria, cause high-fever symptoms: dengue, influenza, Rickettsial diseases, typhoid and measles. The “fever panel” of six diseases is merely a starting point, Yager said. The UW technology could be adapted to include other diseases in the future.

Third World, developing nations, anyplace with substandard access to medical diagnosis – all will benefit from research like this. RTFA. The Bil and Melinda Gates Foundation is picking up the tab.

Monster.com is advising its users to change their passwords after data including e-mail addresses, names and phone numbers were stolen from its database. The break-in comes just as the swelling ranks of the unemployed are turning to sites like Monster.com to look for work.

The company disclosed on its Web site that it recently learned its database had been illegally accessed. Monster.com user IDs and passwords were stolen, along with names, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, ethnicity, and in some cases, users’ states of residence. The information does not include Social Security numbers, which Monster.com said it doesn’t collect, or resumes.

USAJobs.com, the U.S. government Web site for federal jobs, is hosted by Monster.com and was also subject to the data theft. USAJobs.com also posted a warning about the breach.

The company advised users to change their passwords and reminded them to ignore e-mails they may get that purport to be from the company and that ask for password information or instruct the user to download anything.

I think it’s reasonably creepy that monster.com isn’t directly contacting users whose accounts were compromised. Is that arrogance or are they just cheapskates?

Har!

Reminder at the edge of Track 17, Grunewald Station, Berlin
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On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, two experts on Auschwitz argue for and against the idea that the former Nazi death camp should be allowed to crumble away.

ROBERT JAN VAN PELT, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR

Many Auschwitz survivors have told me that a visit to the camp can teach little to those who were not imprisoned there.

Their view is best summarised in the text of Alain Resnais’ celebrated movie Night and Fog (1955), written by the camp survivor Jean Cayrol. As the camera pans across the empty barracks, the narrator warns the viewer that these remains do not reveal the wartime reality of “endless, uninterrupted fear”. The barracks offer no more than “the shell, the shadow”.

Should the world marshal enormous resources to preserve empty shells and faint shadows?

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