- Well, it’s definitely a change. It may not be the change the University of Pittsburgh was looking for when it hired Mike Haywood on Dec. 16 to replace football coach Dave Wannstedt, who resigned under pressure from the school’s administration, but having your head football coach jailed on a domestic violence charge and spend New Year’s Eve behind bars is definitely unique. Just two weeks after being hired to help elevate a Pitt program that has become mired in mediocrity, Haywood apparently got into a custody issue with a woman with whom he has a child. According to assistant St. Joseph County Police Chief Bill Redman, the unidentified woman told police that Haywood grabbed her by the arm and neck and pushed her as she tried to leave his South Bend home. Redman says the woman had marks on her neck, arms and back, so some sort of physical altercation clearly occurred. Haywood was arrested around 3 p.m. and then had the distinct privilege of spending his New Year’s Eve being held without bond in the St. Joseph County jail. He will remain there until he goes before a judge, which will happen some time between now and Monday. I do have to wonder if the officer on duty at the jail provided Haywood with some champagne and party poppers at midnight or at least hauled in a TV so he could contemptuously despise that tool Carson Daly as he hosted Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve live from Times Square. So while this incident may not be what Pittsburgh had in mind when they hired Haywood away from Miami (Ohio) after he led the RedHawks to 9-4 record this season and the Mid-American Conference championship, the Panthers are, in a sense, getting exactly what they wanted. After all, Wannstedt never spent his New Year’s Eve being held without bond in the St. Joseph County jail. By the way, Pitt must not concur with that assessment because they didn’t even wait for Haywood to be released from jail before firing him late in the day on Saturday………
- New year, same old North Korea. The numbers on the calendar are irrelevant when discussing the world’s kookiest, craziest dictator, Kim Jong Il, and his crew. It should surprise no one that in the same breath in which it called for dialogue and peace on the Korean Peninsula, the North Korean government then issued ominous comments about how a war with the South "will bring nothing but a nuclear holocaust." An official government statement mocked South Korea's government as a "minion of war" beholden to "pro-U.S. war hawks" while calling for more cooperation. Right, because deriding a nation’s government is always the best way to convince them to cooperate. "Active efforts should be made to create an atmosphere of dialogue and cooperation between North and South by placing the common interests of the nation above anything else," proclaimed the official message, which was carried by state media. That would suggest a (temporarily, at least) softening stance by the North coming off a year rife with some of the worst tensions on the Korean Peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean War. Maybe, just maybe this combustible mix is about to settle down. After all, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said Wednesday that he saw no choice but to resume six-party talks with the North that also include Russia, China, Japan and the United States. Russia and China have been adamant about the need to resume negotiations after the North pulled out of them last year. Even Lee sounded optimistic in his New Year's address to his nation on Saturday, telling his country he is "confident that we will be able to establish peace on the Korean Peninsula." Getting to the whole peace thing is going to mean somehow moving past the nasty little incident in March when North Korea allegedly torpedoed a South Korean submarine, an incident for which the North still refuses to accept any responsibility. Oh, and the official state message from North Korea also emphasized the need to "further strengthen the militant might of the People's Army" and advance its "fighting spirit with which to annihilate the enemy," so there’s that as well. Those words don’t exactly scream “desperate for peace,” not unless you define peace as annihilating your enemy with a nuclear bomb and possibly touch off World War III in the process………
- Are prisons going soft? What is this world coming to when one inmate can't poison another inmate with a tainted apple without prison authorities getting involved and completely blowing things out of proportion? So what if Genesee County (Mich.) jail inmate Andre Franklin attempted to serve a poisoned apple to serial stabbing suspect Elias Abuelazam? It was probably just a friendly cell block D prank, even if the two reportedly had an altercation behind bars. Franklin used his job in the kitchen to procure and taint the apple - allegedly - back in September by spraying it with oven degreaser with "poison components in it." Unfortunately for Franklin, his friendly prank never got off the ground. Someone ratted him out, although Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell refused to say exactly who the rat was or even confirm how guards found out about the apple. "We found out immediately," he said. The sheriff added that the two men "had some words with each other." Abuelazam is a suspect in 18 stabbings in Michigan, Virginia and Ohio, five of which were fatal. He has been charged with homicide in three of the five deaths and has been charged with six counts of assault with intent to commit murder. So far, he has maintained his innocence and remains jailed awaiting trial. Making Franklin’s side of the story truly amazing is that he was, by most accounts, a model prisoner. He had nearly completed his sentence for a simple assault charge and was a trustee: a nonviolent prisoner who qualified for jobs that could help reduce his sentence. Instead, he now faces a charge of attempted poisoning for the September incident and if convicted, could face up to 15 more years behind bars. All because prison officials had to take what was clearly a good-natured prank between two inmates who may have wanted to kill one another and turn it into something ugly……….
- WOW, WOW, WOW, WOW, WOW!!!! You’ve been waiting for it (probably not) and circled the date on your calendar (definitely not) and now you can officially rejoice in the knowledge that the Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN for short, is officially on the air. This has been the moment Winfrey has been pointing toward long before she announced the ending of her daily, syndicated daytime talk show on ABC. Running your own network is certainly a step up, even for someone as powerful as Winfrey, who launched the network at noon EST with a one-hour preview special she hosted in order to put as positive and sunny a spin as possible on the sort of programming that the Oprah Winfrey Network will feature. The network, a joint venture between Winfrey’s Harpo Inc. and Discovery Communication, is replacing the Discovery Health network. That had better mean plenty of health-centric programming from OWN, or else I’m going to be pissed, by the way. OWN will initially be available in more than 80 million homes and with its startup costs having skyrocketed to a reported $189 million, it had better catch on quickly in each and ever last one of those homes. Winfrey announced plans for her own network three long years ago, but the project hasn’t exactly sped forward at lightning speed since then. As for her weekday syndicated show, Winfrey will put the wraps on it in June after 25 successful years. She will host a show on OWN, but it will be a drastically different one than fans have grown accustomed to. In previous comments about the nature of the new show, Winfrey alluded to hopes to take the program to newsworthy places all around the world as opposed to being tied to a physical studio location in Chicago. But no matter what network she’s on, there’s no disputing that Winfrey is still more over-the-top, goofy and kooky than just about anyone on television……….
- Wanna rethink your love of FAT babies, America? While you might think little Jimmy being chunky, pudgy or whatever adjective you want to use to describe a flabby infant, a new study suggests that a baby being overweight could portend bad things for him or her going forward. According to the study, led by Brian Moss, PhD, of Detroit’s Wayne State University, obesity in infants may be a warning sign of obesity in early childhood. I know, being FAT in one stage of life increases the likelihood of being FAT in the next stage of life - stunning. For the study, Moss and his team examined data for infants across different racial and ethnic groups and found that babies who weighed the most at the age of 9 months tended to be among the heaviest when they reached age 2. Amazingly, this is the one of the first studies to monitor the weight of a nationally representative sample of very young children. The only negative here is Moss trying to couch the potential impact of his team’s findings by backpedaling and saying that being a FAT baby doesn’t doom a person to a life of obesity. “We are certainly not saying that overweight babies are doomed to be obese adults,” Moss stated. “But we did find some evidence that being overweight at 9 months of age is a predictor of being overweight or obese later in childhood.” Moss and his team found themselves in uncharted territory because there is no accepted measure of obesity in very young children, so they elected to include kids in the study to be at risk for becoming obese if their weight was in the 85th to 95th percentile on standard growth charts. Babies and 2-year-olds whose weight was above the 95th percentile were deemed obese for the study and using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, researchers tracked the weight of around 7,500 children at age nine months and 2 years. All of the children were born in 2001. What researchers found was that 32 percent of the children were either at risk for becoming obese or were obese at the age of nine months and 34 percent were at risk or obese by the age of 2. Not so surprisingly, children who were considered obese at the age of 9 months had the highest risk for being obese at age 2. In fact, a whopping 42 percent of babies who met the study’s definition of obese remained obese at age 2, while the overall percentage of children considered obese increased from 17 percent at nine months to 20 percent at age 2. Hispanics received especially bad news with the study, as Hispanic children had the highest risk for obesity at both time points. Children of low-income families were also at an elevated risk for obesity at both measuring points in the study. By the time children of low-income families in the study reached age 2, 40 percent of them were obese or at risk for obesity, compared to 27 percent of children living in the highest-income homes. The same figures hold true for Hispanic children, as opposed to 31 percent of white children and 35 percent of blacks. To read more, just wait for the January-February 2011 issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion to land in your mailbox. And until then, remember that it’s never too early to tell your obese infant to go on a diet and exercise more………
No comments:
Post a Comment