For years, doctors have advised people to limit their daily salt intake to 1,500 milligrams in order to protect their hearts. Now, other doctors say that keeping your salt intake that low will hurt your heart. What we can say for sure: salt, heart.
Police have confirmed that Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch found dead this weekend, died from a hanging. Despite the many conspiracy theories, authorities say there was no evidence of struggle before his death, and the examination results support claims that he killed himself.
Ten years ago next week, the United States invaded Iraq. The ensuing decade of war would destroy Iraq, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers, and cost trillions of dollars. It was not worth it. Not even close. A new accounting from the Costs of War project at Brown University lays bare just how much blood and treasure ten years of the War in Iraq has cost. For example:
Women. They're dying younger. What is up with that, ladies?
I was about to fold a pair of jacks when my little brother died. I was seated at a round table in the hospital waiting room with two cousins and my brother-in-law, taking a break from the prayer meeting my family had convened in the adjoining space. Not a very Christian way to avoid the assembly, in retrospect, but we were playing for artificial sweetener packets, so it wasn't really gambling. Besides, that level of deep and intense intercession is draining. I was exhausted, and I was losing, and then the room went weirdly quiet.
As science predicted, the universe, in its magisterial indifference, has not bothered destroying life on Earth right now. You'd better thaw something out for dinner. Might as well go ahead and tell the people you love that you love them, though.
All the scientists are quite confident that asteroid 2012 DA14 is going to miss us when it comes by at 2:25 Eastern time. It is not all going to come burning through our atmosphere with the force of umpty many hydrogen bombs, burying whole taxa in iridium and ash, reducing human civilization to a concentrated smear of silicon and copper for far-future sentient descendants of lobsters to mull over as they drill down into old rock, seeking whatever mineral resources the industries of the lobster-people will depend on. Definitely not. It is not even big enough accomplish that, really, even if it did hit us. The appointed minute will come and 2012 DA14 will almost certainly swing harmlessly past our planet, right under our communications satellites, and back out into the interplanetary void till its next pass.
The best interviews either confirm something that viewers have always hoped to be true or surprises them utterly; Emmanuelle Riva does both. Of course she is too tired to attend the BAFTAs; of course she is happiest when she is working. She is everything we want an 85-year-old Frenchwoman in the middle of an unexpected career resurgence and more.
In New York City last year, 141 were struck by subway trains, and 55 were killed. There have been several recent high-profile deaths on the tracks, including one that made the cover of the NY Post. Falling (or being pushed) in front of a train is a classic nightmare scenario. So what should we do to prevent it? Well... something cheap, if anything.
Last night, on the eve of the release of her Remembering Whitney book, Whitney Houston's mother Cissy sat down with and croaked at Oprah Winfrey for a very special episode of Oprah's Next Chapter. Crankily honest, Cissy discussed the longstanding rumor that Whitney was involved in a romantic relationship with her best friend and one-time executive assistant Robyn Crawford. In the book, Cissy alludes to Whitney "experiment[ing]" with this friendship. She told Oprah that she just didn't like Robyn. "She just spoke too much…disrespectful sometimes," she explained. But the real brutality came as a result of Oprah asking Cissy if it would have bothered her if Whitney were gay.
