What a joke.

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“Will someone please think of the fat children?”

Associated Press – July 12, 2007:

Overweight children are stigmatized by their peers as early as age 3 and even face bias from their parents and teachers, giving them a quality of life comparable to people with cancer, a new analysis concludes.

Youngsters who report teasing, rejection, bullying and other types of abuse because of their weight are two to three times more likely to report suicidal thoughts as well as to suffer from other health issues such as high blood pressure and eating disorders, researchers said.

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Video: Chuck Storm Reports…Ouch!

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Well, there is a mole in the picture

It is, on the face of it, a frankly random connection, as random as the distribution of those highly pigmented blotches tends to be. But the answer, according to researchers at King’s College, London, is yes. The effect is even quantifiable: if you have always resented your 100-plus moles, you can now take comfort from the fact that you will probably live six or seven years longer than someone with only 25 or so of the pesky things. That is, if a malignant melanoma doesn’t get you first.

The answer – 15 years of research (and more than 900 sets of twins) later – was to be found in telomeres, strands of inactive DNA at the ends of each of our 46 chromosomes. They are at their longest when we are born, and shorten as we age; the shorter they are, the less time we have left.

The twist is that they shorten at different rates, depending on what else is going on: genetic inheritance, for example, or early heart disease – or some environmental factors: smokers tend to have shorter telomeres. People with lots of moles tend to have longer telomeres than people of the same age with fewer moles. So count – literally – your blessings. Unless, of course, they get larger, or start to itch.

I haven’t finished counting, yet.

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Air travelers in Canada will from now on only be arrested if it is clear they are making a serious threat.

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A fake firm obtained a license to buy enough radioactive material to build a dirty bomb.

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Your choice in the great debate.

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A year in the works, the electronic tissue dispenser is being rolled out to the masses.

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“Our baby-daddy is Al Gore!”

Associated Press – 7/11/07:

Nearly half of pregnant teens in China’s financial center Shanghai met their partners on the Internet, according to a newspaper report that also spotlighted widespread ignorance about sexual health.

Fully 46 percent of the more than 20,000 girls who called the city’s pregnancy hot line during the past two years said they had sex with boys they met online, the China Daily said, citing Dr. Zhang Zhengrong of Shanghai’s No. 411 Hospital.

Most of the would-be fathers disappeared after being told of the pregnancies, while in some cases the girls did not even know their partners’ true names, the report said.

The report said calls to the hot line have shot up 12 percent since the start of school holidays, which began two weeks ago and run through August.

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