Darling's emergency budget does little to offset damage to the lowly
paid.

Assume my yearly income is £13 335, the upper 10%% tax threshold last
year.

After Darling's emergency budget tax now begins at £6035. Last year it
began at £5225.

So last year I would have paid tax (at 10%%) of £811.

This year I will pay tax (at 20%%) of £1460.

This means my tax bill will be £649 higher!

To set a rate that does not make anyone earning less than £13335 worse
off is very simple.

Set the 20%% tax rate to start at the point midway between £5,225.00
and £13 335!

To pay for this you can reduce the 40%% tax threshold, or (better) set
up new taxes to hit overpaid bankers.

NYT
May 14, 2008

Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face

By NINA BERNSTEIN

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman
university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised
across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked
by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian,
Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was
welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his
girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at
Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border
Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after
hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome,
either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted
that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for
asylum.

1. Palliative Care means that a dying person is given care that is not
curative; that will not sustain life. It will however, ensure that
what life remains can be lived in comfort and without pain.

2. Hospice may be a place but is definitely a “way”. It’s a method of
offering palliative care to the terminally ill. It can take place in a
definite location and be called a Hospice or it may be a way of
allowing people to die with dignity at home.

3. Dame Cicely Saunders is the founder of the Hospice movement and
started the first hospice in 1967 in England. The first hospice in
U.S. began in 1974 by Florence Wald in Connecticut.

4. Some hospice patients have a DNR order nearby. It means Do Not
Resuscitate as they want no heroic measures taken to prevent their
natural death.

5. Hospice volunteers, who provide respite care or run errands for the
patient or family, usually participate in highly focused training.

6. Many insurance health plans cover all or much of hospice care.
Because the hospice team is comprised of many people, including social
workers, much effort is put into successfully coordinating care and
benefits, including Medicare.

NYT
May 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Neural Buddhists

By DAVID BROOKS

In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called “Sorry, but Your
Soul Just Died,” in which he captured the militant materialism of some
modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might
exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything
arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape
behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an
illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion
is an accident.

Breast-feeding raises children's IQs, study says

Children whose mothers took part in a program that encouraged the
practice had
higher verbal scores than children in a control group, a large study
finds.

By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 6, 2008

Increased breast-feeding during the first months of life appears to
raise a
child's verbal IQ, according to a study of nearly 14,000 children that
was
released Monday.

The study in Archives of General Psychiatry found that 6-year-olds
whose mothers
were part of a program that encouraged them to breast-feed had verbal
IQs that
were an average of 7.5 points higher than those of children in a
control group.

New MRI Technique Detects Subtle But Serious Brain Injury
ScienceDaily (May 13, 2008) - A new technique for analyzing magnetic
resonance
imaging data, developed by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical
Center, can
reveal serious brain injury missed by current tests and help predict a
patient's
degree of recovery.

In brain injuries sustained when the head suddenly stops moving -
during a motor
vehicle accident, for instance - the force can shear and damage nerve
cells.
This kind of injury does not show up on computerized tomography scans,
the
researchers said, and magnetic resonance imaging does not yet reliably
detect
this type of injury.

James Randerson, science correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday May 13 2008

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source
of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim
the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.

A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the
argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.

Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private
collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that
the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which
he regarded as "childish superstitions".

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric
Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical
Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has
remained in private hands ever since.

I see that the Blasphemy laws are to be repealed in the UK:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1942668/Blasphemy-laws-are-lifted.html

I think that this is a good move, for the reasons given. There is an
unfortunate side to it, though. If you enjoy blasphemy, you can't
indulge in it in the UK anymore, you have to travel to places where
they take it much more seriously and are consequently at higher risk
than before. It will be quite difficult for atheists to blaspheme at
all now, since they are forbidden entry to Saudi Arabia.

It is also hard on witches (who like to call themselves follower's of
Wicca because it sounds more hey-wow) as well. The receipt for the
potion cooked up in 'Macbeth' has "liver of blaspheming Jew" as one of
the important ingredients - these livers will now have to be imported
from Saudi Arabia, or similar, putting up the cost of knowledge of the
future quite considerably. I'm sure that it's been hard enough to come
by good quality finger's of birth-strangled babes, ditch delivered by
drabs as it is, the NHS keeping drabs out of ditches almost entirely
during their confinements these days.

The Holy Shroud in Turin is and remains a riddle, as honestly
recognised by the manager of the most important of the three
laboratories which analysed the cloth by using the carbon 14. This
manager acknowledged a serious mistake in the dating.
The only means we have at disposal to solve the riddle is that of
recognizing that, without any doubt, in such Holy Linen happened
something that we cannot and never we’ll be capable to explain : the
Resurrection of Christ.

Website : http://digilander.libero.it/antoniobragadin/mystery.htm
Email : ricercapap.bra@alice.it

NYT
May 9, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

The Conservative Revival

By DAVID BROOKS

For years, American and British politics were in sync. Reagan came in
roughly the same time as Thatcher, and Clinton’s Third Way approach
mirrored Blair’s. But the British conservatives never had a Gingrich
revolution in the 1990s or the Bush victories thereafter. They got
their losing in early, and, in the wilderness, they rethought modern
conservatism while their American counterparts were clinging to
power.

Today, British conservatives are on the way up, while American
conservatives are on the way down. British conservatives have moved
beyond Thatcherism, while American conservatives pine for another
Reagan. The British Conservative Party enjoyed a series of stunning
victories in local elections last week, while polls show American
voters thoroughly rejecting the Republican brand.