- Funny how that works. When you become the most scandalized athlete in all of sports and don’t win a single tournament all year, companies don’t want to be in business with you any longer. Tiger Woods used to be a hot commodity for the corporate world, but he’s fallen from grace and so has his worth as a spokesman for products. Accenture LLP, AT&T Inc. and Gatorade all dropped Woods as an endorser soon after then-wife Elin chased him from the house with a 9-iron and he bounced his car off a fire hydrant on Thanksgiving night last year. Other endorsers like Nike Inc. and Electronic Arts, which had more invested in his skills as a golfer rather than an all-around good guy and role model, stuck with him. Others, such as Gillette and Tag Heuer, stuck with Woods but stopped featuring him in their ads. Now that Woods’ contract with Gillette’s parent company Procter & Gamble Co. is about to end, he won't be repping their razors any more. Along with other past-their-prime athletes like soccer stars Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, and Kaka, Woods is out as a Gillette pitchman. But according to the company, it is merely phasing out that program and not renewing the contract with Woods and several other athletes. Of course Procter & Gamble isn’t going to unnecessarily stir up a hornets’ nest by linking the decision to the fact that Woods is still Public Enemy No. 1 for many would-be customers because of his plowing through a chorus line of hookers, club promoters, Perkins hostesses and porn stars and cheating on his wife in as prolific a fashion as any husband ever has. Just yank him from your ad campaigns - which the company did months ago - and wait for his contract to expire. Then you can walk away and explain your decision as simply the natural end of the three-year "Gillette Champions" marketing campaign. For Woods, it’s a fitting end to a year that ends as his first in which he failed to win a tournament since turning pro and lost his ranking as the top player in the world. For Gillette, it’s a chance to dump dead weight and move forward with non-scandal-riddled, still-successful stars like Federer, NHL star Alex Ovechkin and New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter -- for new local marketing campaigns……….
- About that whole closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay……not quite yet, it seems. Given that the Obama administration said more than one year ago that the military prison would close, it has made little or no progress toward achieving that goal. In fact, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday that the facility won't go away in the near future. He appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" and explained that even though the site is a recruiting tool for Islamic terrorists, various legal and legislative issues have prevented its closing.
"It's certainly not going to close in the next month. I think it's going to be a while before that prison closes," Gibbs stated. "I think part of this depends on the Republicans' willingness to work with the administration on this." Nice, put the blame on the GOP for Gitmo remaining open and provide a built-in excuse any time someone asks you why that hell hole is still open. Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham previously negotiated with the White House on closing the prison, but those talks arrived at a dead end and no one has restarted them. Lest anyone forget, closing down Guantanamo Bay was a frequent campaign promise by Obama during the 2008 election. Saying that would happen and making it happen have proven to be two extremely different things and a large part of the controversy has come from the debate over whether to try the suspected terrorists imprisoned there in federal court or in military commissions.
"Well, obviously, there are prohibitions, legislatively, on the transfer of some of the prisoners," Gibbs said. "Some would be tried in federal courts, as we've seen done in the past. Some would be tried in military commissions, likely spending the rest of their lives in a maximum-security prison that nobody, including terrorists, have ever escaped from. And some, regrettably, will have to be indefinitely detained." Sounds like Gitmo is going to be around for a nice, long time………
- This may not be the best time of year to share this news, but many of you are probably finding it out the hard way anyhow, so science may as well go and confirm what was so emphatically hammered home to you as you spent time with your family over the holidays: stressful relationships with family members can be extremely bad for your heart. While positive social connections have been linked with greater longevity, and a good companion may lower heart disease risk, a new study suggests that if relationships are stressful, it could lead to you developing heart disease of some sort. According to the study, published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, middle-age people who feel that their family members are excessively demanding or a source of worry are more than twice as likely as worry-free people to develop angina, the chest pain that occurs with exercise or exertion due to a reduced blood flow to the heart. The study, which took place over a six-year span, included people in their 40s and 50s, about 1 in 10 people developed angina. Angina can be a precursor of more serious problems such as heart attacks and even death. Perhaps lending a bit of credence to the study, it involved 4,573 healthy Danish men and women. Since Europeans tend to live a more relaxed lifestyle than their American counterparts, finding out that these situations and relationships impact them so profoundly is noteworthy. Researchers found that 8.3 percent of those in their 40s developed angina during the study as did 10.2 percent of those in their 50s. The angina risk was 3.5 times higher for people who had a demanding or worrisome spouse and twice as high if the problems were between that person and a child or other family member. Furthermore, people who frequently fought with a partner had an angina risk 1.4-fold higher than conflict-free people and a contentious neighbor led to an even bigger risk -- 1.6 times higher. These results were constant regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic class, use of heart medications and whether or not the person lived alone or had depression. Critics point out that the researchers didn't check whether or not the symptoms translated into actual heart disease, which puts a hole in the findings. Other factors could be in play, but those factors were not measured. Those critics can take their complaints up with the lead author of the study, Rikke Lund, MD, PhD, an associate professor of social medicine at the Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. "More attention to this should be drawn by both doctors and ourselves. It might be as important to know if your patient has very demanding/worrying social relations as to know if they are smokers," Dr. Lund stated. "Although we admit that the solution to that problem is more challenging than asking people to stop smoking." More complex indeed, which means back to the lab for a lot more of that expensive, long-term research that the scientific community is so fond of………
- Attention all! We have the most concrete, definitive proof yet that horrible, unimaginative, ridiculously bad and formulaic movies can in fact make money based solely on the horrible movie taste of the American public. That’s right, Little Fockers is your top film for this Christmas weekend and while it has a long way top go before breaking even, this disaster of a movie made $48.3 million in its opening week, including a $34 million tally for the three-day holiday weekend. In its debut, Fockers beat out fellow newcomer True Grit for the top spot. True Grit made $25.6 million for the weekend alone and has conjured up $36.8 million overall since its release. Both newbies did well enough to beat out last weekend’s top flick, Tron Legacy, which fell to third place with a so-so tally of $20.1 million, a 53-percent decline from its own opening weekend. With a massive $170 million budget and $88.3 million in earnings thus far, the movie has a long, long way to go before turning any semblance of a profit. Fourth place went to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which dropped off just 13 percent but only made $10.8 million and has been wildly disappointing thus far with $63.9 million in cumulative earnings. Right behind Narnia and in the fifth spot was another free-falling returner form last weekend, Yogi Bear. The animated/live action mix fell off 46 percent, made $8.8 million and raised its overall take to $36.8 million and counting. The rest of the top 10 consisted of: The Fighter (No. 6 and still in only 2,511 theaters, but making $8.5 million and with a three-week total of $27.6), Gulliver's Travels (No.7 as the weekend’s biggest flop with $7.2 million in its opening frame), Black Swan (No. 8 and still in limited release - 1,466 theaters - but making $6.6 million and elevating its overall tally to $29 million for one month in theaters), Tangled (No. 9 after adding $6.5 million to its coffers following a 25-percent decline in its fifth week but still boosting its five-week total to a solid $143.8 million) and The Tourist (No. 10 with just $5.7 million following a 33-percent drop-off). Falling out of the top 10 from last weekend was Sony’s How Do You Know, which fell all the way to 12th with a measly $3.7 million………
- Big news for you, Pakistan. Your ever-responsive government has decreed that it will review blasphemy laws to prevent them from targeting innocent people. Shahbaz Bhatti, the federal minister for minority affairs, announced this past week the formation of a committee (always a recipe for swift, decisive action) of scholars to review the law. That committee will submit its suggestions and procedures, which will be implemented to stop the law's misuse. "After the formation of the committee we will .... find the way that whether through the legislation or some other procedural way we can stop the blasphemy law," Bhatti said. The laws came to the forefront due to the now-infamous case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy of Islam. In regards to her case and a possible pardon, Bhatti said the president has no choice but to wait for the judicial proceedings to run their course. Bibi’s attorney has argued that the proceedings might take years because the case is still in high court and may later go to the Supreme court. The governor of Punjab province drew heavy criticism for helping file a mercy petition with President Asif Ali Zardari's office requesting a pardon for Bibi. Bibi has drawn international attention ever since November, when a Pakistani court found her guilty of defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed during a 2009 argument with Muslim fellow field workers. In a rather stunning twist, the offense is punishable by death or life imprisonment, according to Pakistan's penal code. Working in Bibi’s favor is the fact that an investigation by a Pakistani government ministry found the charges stemmed from "religious and personal enmity" and recommended Bibi's release. Zadarai continues to hide behind the fact that, while he would supposedly pardon Bibi, a court has ruled that the president can't act until the sentence is confirmed by a higher court, which could take two to three years. The outcome of the case is of particular interest to the approximately 2 million Christians living in Pakistan amongst a heavily Islamic population of about 170 million. Religious parties are already planning protests against possible changes, so it should be a fun battle that only has the interests and futures of millions of people hanging in the balance, so really, it’s no big deal at all………
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