There are oh-so-many studies and expert opinions evaluating the ways our parenting choices affect our kids and oh-so-few considering how we grown-ups will fare. Read enough of them, and you’ll be misled to believe that parents are fixed entities with little capacity to feel or grow.
This is particularly the case when it comes to time management. We’re told that children need lots of unstructured time, and it’s up to us to cultivate it. But we’re also told that children need to be challenged and inspired, and it’s up to us to arrange it. So off we go to karate and violin and religious school and soccer and dance, while making sure there is enough time in there for wandering in the woods or building a treehouse, or whatever else passes for low-pressure character-building these days.
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As a parent of a 5- and a 1-year-old, I’m fairly new to the scheduling trenches. And yet a small voice has emerged, a faint chant from the back of my brain, repeating: Where do my needs fit into all this?
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Parents are “thinking about what works for the kids, but they also need to think about what works for them,” an author says.
Aretha Franklin — the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and known as the “Queen of Soul” for powerful anthems like “Respect” and “Chain of Fools” — died Thursday morning at her home in Detroit. She was 76.
Franklin died of pancreatic cancer, the singer’s publicist said in a statement issued by the family.
“In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart,” the family said. “We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family.”
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Aretha Franklin in an undated portrait. RB / Redferns
About 20,000 people have lost their homes and many moved to unaffected areas of the Indonesian island of Lombok after a powerful 6.9 magnitude earthquake left nearly 100 people dead.
Boats were sent to evacuate about 2,000 tourists from the nearby Gili islands.
Witnesses spoke of chaos and terror during Sunday’s quake, with thousands of buildings damaged, and power and communication lines cut.
Aid agencies said the priority was to provide shelter for residents.
Many are said to be too scared to return to their homes.
The agencies said the impact was far bigger than another quake that hit Lombok last week, killing 16 people.
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Image caption Moment the quake struck caught on camera
The Crozet islands is located halfway between the southern tip of Africa and Antarctica. One of the islands in the archipelago, named Île aux Cochons, is home to the largest colony of king penguins on earth. The king penguin is the second largest penguin species on earth after the emperor penguin. The last time scientists counted the population there was an estimated population of 2,000,000 of the 3 foot tall highly specialized birds. Reviewing satellite images and other photographic evidence, Antarctic scientists report that the colony has collapsed to a population of only 200,000. This is significant because the Île aux Cochons represents one third of the earth’s King Penguin population. These birds do not make a nest on the treeless island, instead they “lay one egg at a time and carry it around on their feet covered with a flap of abdominal skin, called a brood patch”.
The University of Vienna describes the conditions on which this particular penguin requires for survival. Hint, they are not flexible.
King penguins are in fact picky animals: in order to form a colony where they can mate, lay eggs and rear chicks over a year, they need tolerable temperature all year round, no winter sea ice around the island, and smooth beach of sand or pebbles. But, above all, they need an abundant and reliable source of food close by to feed their chicks. For millennia, this seabird has relied on the Antarctic Polar Front, an upwelling front in the Southern Ocean concentrating enormous amounts of fish on a relatively small area. Yet, due to climate change, this area is drifting south, away from the islands where most King penguins currently live. Parents are then forced to swim farther to find food, while their progeny is waiting, fasting longer and longer on the shore. This study predicts that, for most colonies, the length of the parents’ trips to get food will soon exceed the resistance to starvation of their offspring, leading to massive King penguin crashes in population size, or, hopefully, relocation.
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A huge colony of king penguins on the Île aux Cochons in 1982
The owners and operators of a duck boat that sank in Missouri, killing 17 people, put passengers’ lives at risk by going out to water when severe thunderstorms were predicted, lawyers involved in a $100 million federal lawsuit argued Monday.
“For 20 years, we have known that duck boats are death traps. It was proven yet again in devastating fashion in Branson, Missouri,” attorney Robert Mongeluzzi said during a news conference Monday morning.
“It is clear that they knew severe weather was coming and they tried to beat the storm by going on water first rather than refunding the 40 bucks that each of these people paid putting their lives at risk,” he said, later adding. “This was not in any way a storm that came out of nowhere.”
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The duck boat that sank is lifted out of Table Rock Lake in Branson, Missouri, on July 23, 2018.Lora Ratliff / U.S. Coast Guard
The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.
The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.
The isolated base is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future for generations to come — often in ways that directly undermine the United States’ political, economic and strategic power in the region.
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Our correspondent went to the deserts of Patagonia to examine how China secured its new base, a symbol of its growing clout in the region.
Tributes have been paid to three former stars of the wrestling world who died on the same day this weekend.
Brian Lawler, Nikolai Volkoff and Brickhouse Brown all passed away on Sunday aged 46, 70 and 57 respectively.
The WWE said it was ” saddened ” to hear Lawler and Volkoff had died, while the National Wrestling Alliance sent its ” deepest condolences and sympathies “.
US and Olympic wrestler Kurt Angle said it had been “a very sad day in the history of sports entertainment”.
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Image caption Brian Lawler, Nikolai Volkoff and Brickhouse Brown all passed away on Sunday
Tributes have been paid to three former stars of the wrestling world who died on the same day this weekend.
Spinning objects are hypnotic and fascinating, as last year’s fidget-spinner craze overwhelmingly demonstrated. But even the fastest fidget spinner trails the new reigning champion of fast-whirling objects: a tiny dumbbell that can rotate 60 billion times per minute.
It’s enough to make your head spin.
Spin doctors — er, researchers — recently created the nanoscale rotor and levitated it in a vacuum, blasting it with lasers to set it spinning. Their research, described in a new study, could help reveal how different substances respond under extreme conditions and how friction behaves in a vacuum, Tongcang Li, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, as well as electrical and computer engineering, at Purdue University, said in a statement.
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Researchers at Purdue University have levitated a nanoparticle in vacuum and driven it to rotate at high speed, bringing them one step closer to figuring out the properties of vacuum and quantum mechanics.Vincent Walter / Purdue University
Rachael Pomerleau, 40, had taken opioids before, having had procedures like wisdom teeth removal and gallbladder surgery.
But during the tumultuous two years that her children, now ages 7 and 8, were born, opioids took over her life, she told HuffPost. She was put on bed rest as a result of complications with the pregnancy of her daughter. A few months after her daughter’s birth, she became pregnant with her son. This time, her back and abdominal pain grew so severe that doctors prescribed Vicodin followed by Percocet during her pregnancy ― which wasn’t an unusual prescription for pregnant women at the time, prior to the onset of the opioid epidemic.
“It hurt so bad,” she said. “There were times when I could hardly walk without being in pain.”
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Erin Schumaker/HuffPost
Rachael Pomerleau, 40, was prescribed opioids in a medical setting. Her years of addiction have included homelessness, loss of custody of her children and struggles to get the resources she needs.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Our correspondent went to the deserts of Patagonia to examine how China secured its new base, a symbol of its growing clout in the region.
James' World 2 