A Chinese cop has taken it on herself to breastfeed as many as nine children either orphaned by the massive quake or whose mothers' are too traumatized to produce milk.

She has a six month old of her own and, much to her chagrin, has become a national celebrity; China's "Mother #1". "I think what I did was normal," she said. "In a quake zone, many people do things for others. This was a small thing, not worth mentioning." She's still nursing two in addition to her own. And elsewhere in chick news?


I bought groceries at Trader Joe's the other day. As anyone who has ever shopped there knows, Trader Joe's is full of incredibly attractive, cheap food, which, if you manage to make it through all the plastic packaging it comes in, you can actually eat. Unfortunately, by the time I started cooking I had more or less lost my appetite, since every time I discarded one of those packages I felt like I dropped another circle in hell.

So I pretty much love Daniel Burd right now. The 16-year-old from Waterloo, Ontario, as part of a science fair project, figured out a way to break down the polymers in plastic bags—compounds that can last for over 1,000 years—in about three months. Essentially, Burd hypothesized that since the bags eventually do degrade, it must be possible to isolate and augment the degrading agents.

Turns out that it's not only possible, it's kind of easy. Burd combined ground polyethylene plastic bags, sodium chloride, dirt from a landfill (which theoretically contains the microorganisms that ultimately degrade the plastic) and a yeast mixture in shakers for four weeks at a consistent temperature of about 86 degrees. At the end of the month, he took a sample of that mixture and combined it with a new one, with the goal of increasing the overall concentration of microbes. After one more repetition, he put fresh plastic bags in his solution for six weeks. In the end, the plastic degraded nearly 20%. A little more filtering to figure out exactly which microbes were the most effective, and he upped the degradation rate to 32%. He concludes, "The process of polyethylene degradation developed in this project can be used on an industrial scale for biodegradation of plastic bags. As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills."

So, will this really work? Has a teenager really found a way to rid us of one of our most persistent environmental problems? Who knows, but judges at the Canada-Wide Science Fair apparently agree that it's worth pursuing. They sent Burd home with $30,000 in awards and scholarships. You can read his final report (all six pages of it) here (.pdf).

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Arbel Egger.

—Casey Miner






What is McCain up to?

Even with pundits opining that McCain hurt himself with his "Man, am I old!" turn on SNL last weekend, he's continuing to go kamikaze on us. On a soon-to-air Ellen show, the affable talk show host dogs him about her upcoming marriage to long time girlfriend Portia DeRossi, which he opposes. He tried to segue with talk of civil unions, etc. but both held fast, however nicely. Homey didn't budge but he was clearly dodging bullets.

Then, as if he hadn't suffered enough, he sat down with Essence "Sister Grrl" magazine, even as MoJo's catalogued the dearth of black GOP candidates. Then, his mega-rich and pretty f'ing hot wife vogued barefoot and all natural in Vogue.

WTFO, with McCain? Desperation or penance?

As Joe Sudbay at AMERICAblog points out, there's a serious problem with the idea of Hillary Clinton as Obama's VP. She, but much more likely Bill, might not pass the vetting process.

mccain_bush_hug.jpg From AFP:

Bush and McCain plan to appear side by side at a May 27 fundraiser, their first public embrace since March 5, making the most of one of the president's most potent remaining political weapons.
Bush has done 19 political fundraisers in 2008, scooping up 37,142,500 dollars, according to records carefully kept by CBS news. His totals since 2001, including his 2004 reelection, are 310 events and 766,782,500 dollars.
The White House says the president plans to campaign vigorously for fellow Republicans, including McCain... "I think you'll see the president out on the campaign trail quite a bit. We'll keep you posted on their events that they may have together," spokesman Scott Stanzel said Monday.

This is helpful for McCain in that Bush can open the wallets of members of the conservative base that have not yet and probably will not warm to McCain. But if Bush does rallies and TV spots instead of just closed-door fundraisers, well... that's Christmas come early for the Democrats.





Once John McCain had resolved on Thursday to repudiate fundamentalist preacher John Hagee (who had called the Catholic Church "the great whore" and who had said Hitler was doing God's work during the Holocaust), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee went on a roll, and in the same news cycle he also rejected the endorsement of Reverend Rod Parsley, the megachurch pastor who had said it was the United States' historic mission to see the "false religion" of Islam "destroyed."

After issuing a statement dumping Hagee, McCain told the Associated Press that he also was now refusing Parsley's support: "I believe there is no place for that kind of dialogue in America, and I believe that even though he endorsed me, and I didn't endorse him, the fact is that I repudiate such talk, and I reject his endorsement." McCain and Parsley had campaigned together in February in Ohio, and at a rally McCain had hailed Parsley as "one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide."

Two weeks after that rally, on March 12, Mother Jones first reported that Parsley in a 2005 book, Silent No More, had essentially called upon Christians to wage a "war" against Islam with the aim of eradicating it. For that article and subsequent pieces, I called the McCain campaign for comment multiple times to ask if the Arizona senator would repudiate Parsley, who is a powerful political player in the critical state of Ohio. McCain's press office ducked each call.