Regardless of whether you plan to make bread, cakes, or cookies over the long holiday weekend, with luck these tips will keep you and your guests or family happy. What baking tips would you add to the list? Share your oven-baked secrets in the comments below.
Baking 911 [Infographic] | America's Test Kitchen
rambus pabst blue ribbon pabst blue ribbon mac miller omarion gabby gabby
hell on wheels new york city marathon andy williams andy williams nyc marathon nyc marathon coriolis effect
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) ? An Ethiopian court found two Swedish journalists guilty on Wednesday of helping and promoting the outlawed Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) rebel group, and entering the Horn of Africa nation illegally.
Reporter Martin Schibbye and photographer Johan Persson were arrested in July after they entered Ethiopia's Ogaden province from Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region with a team of ONLF fighters.
Sentencing is due next week and the prosecution asked for a combined sentence of 18 years 6 months for both charges. Sileshi Ketsela, one of the defense lawyers, said they would now discuss with their clients about whether to appeal.
Sweden said it was very concerned about the verdict and was making contact with the Ethiopian government at a high level.
"The government takes a very serious view of the verdict today," Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in statement.
"Our starting point is and remains that they have been in the country on a journalistic assignment. They should, as soon as possible, be released so that they can be reunited with their families in Sweden," he said.
Addis Ababa has blacklisted the ONLF as a terrorist group, and its recently-adopted anti-terrorism legislation outlaws promotion of the insurgents' activities.
The two Swedes had also been charged with terrorism but were acquitted in November on that count as the court did not believe they were involved in carrying out any attacks. They did admit to crossing the border without a permit.
Judge Shemsu Sirgaga told the court the two journalists had entered Ethiopia illegally under the pretext of investigating the impact of potential oil discoveries and production in the region on the local population.
"Instead they accompanied the ONLF into the country and were caught alongside the rebels. This contradicts their claims," he said in handing down the guilty verdict.
The freelance journalists say they were covering the ONLF as a news story and deny assisting their cause.
During the November trial, prosecutors screened a three-hour video they said was obtained from one of the Swedes' laptops, showing footage of them hoisting rifles alongside armed men and being briefed over a map on how to infiltrate the region.
The editor in chief of Filter, the magazine where they worked, called the journalists "political prisoners."
"I have both a pessimist and an optimist within. For the pessimist, it was really expected, but for optimist it was a shock," Mattias Gransson told Reuters in Sweden.
"When the judge read out the grounds it sounded positive, he had virtually nothing against them. Everything he said was speaking for an acquittal, and then he found them guilty anyway. This indicates they are political prisoners and nothing else."
(Additional reporting by Daniel Dickson and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm; Editing by David Clarke and Peter Graff)
california earthquake jenna lyons jenna lyons san francisco earthquake san francisco earthquake nextdoor premier fitness
The coolest things of the future might be created using what are essentially refrigerators that work on the atomic level, researchers say.
The level of control over matter that scientists are now developing to create ultra-cold objects could also be used to create entirely new states of matter and super-powerful quantum computers, researchers added.
Scientists routinely cool matter to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically possible, which corresponds to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-273.15 Celsius). Still, they would like to chill matter to even-colder temperatures to better understand other extreme phenomena, such as superconductivity, where electrons zip without resistance through objects.
More science news from MSNBC Tech & Science
Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: You'll be hearing a lot about impending doom over the next year, demonstrating the powerful hold that even a bogus doomsday has on the human psyche.
Now physicists reveal a new way to create ultra-cold matter, with an idea similar to how fridges work. Refrigerators pump a fluid known as a refrigerant around the area they are cooling. This fluid sucks up heat. The refrigerant is then pumped someplace where it dumps this heat.
Chill atoms
First the researchers cooled atoms of rubidium with lasers. When set up properly, these beams can force atoms to glow in a way that makes them emit more energy than they absorb, thus making them colder.
When the atoms gave off light as a result of being hit with the laser, this exerted a slight pressure on them. The scientists took advantage of that pressure to control the atoms, either keeping them in place or moving them around, sometimes creating collisions.
The researchers then made the atoms even colder with evaporative cooling, in which matter gets cooled in much the same way as a cup of coffee loses its warmth ? the hottest atoms are allowed to evaporate, leaving behind the colder ones.
Finally, the researchers used webs of lasers known as "optical lattices." When two atoms are made to collide within the optical lattice, the excitations of one suppress the excitations of the other, a phenomenon called "orbital excitation blockade." The excited atoms are then removed from the system ? taking away entropy, the amount of energy available for work ? thus causing the remaining atoms to chill down.
In experiments with rubidium atoms in optical lattices, the physicists successfully demonstrated they could remove entropy from atoms via orbital excitation blockade. In principle, they can reach temperatures 10- to 100-times colder than currently achieved, to temperatures of tenths-to-hundredths-of-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. However, they likely need lasers of longer wavelengths to do so in real life, said researcher Markus Greiner, a physicist at Harvard University.
Exotic matter
Their research could help "create exotic new states of matter, ones never seen before," Greiner told LiveScience. "Who knows what the properties of these materials might be?"
The ability to create perfect arrays of atoms could also be "a great starting point for a general-purpose quantum computer," Greiner said. Quantum computers exploit the bizarre nature of quantum physics ? such as how subatomic particles can effectively spin in two opposite directions at the same time ? to run calculations exponentially faster than normal computers for certain problems.
Research into quantum computers has mostly been on devices designed to each crunch one specific kind of problem, but optical lattices could lead to general-purpose quantum computers that, like modern personal computers, can tackle many different kinds of problems.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Thursday issue of the journal Nature.
? 2011 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755781/ns/technology_and_science-science/
gold rush gold rush chili recipe chili recipe grimm jello shots tashard choice
mirror mirror tanuki mirror mirror trailer bob knight bob knight lavar arrington hope solo dancing with the stars
New York ? President Obama's health-care bill requires that every American have health insurance. Is that constitutional?
Who first proposed making health insurance compulsory?
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. In the late 1980s, when Democrats were pushing to require employers to provide health insurance, the foundation started thinking about ways to achieve universal coverage without placing a heavy burden on business. Its experts soon encountered the "free rider" problem: In a system where insurers are barred from refusing applicants with pre-existing conditions, many people ? especially the young and healthy ? would only buy a policy when illness struck. But if only sick people bought coverage, insurers would pay out more in doctors' bills than they received in premiums, and quickly go bust. To overcome this death spiral, the Heritage Foundation suggested that every American be required to buy health insurance, a requirement known as the individual mandate.
Which politicians took up that idea?
Many Republicans did in the early 1990s, after President Clinton introduced a plan that would have forced companies to cover employees. "I am for people, individuals ? exactly like automobile insurance ? having health insurance and being required to have health insurance," said Newt Gingrich, then House minority whip, in 1993. When the Clinton plan collapsed in 1994, talk of the individual mandate died with it. But a decade later, Mitt Romney, then the governor of Massachusetts, resurrected the concept for his state health-care plan, which requires residents to buy health insurance or pay up to $1,212 in annual penalties. "It's a Republican way of reforming the market," Romney said when the law debuted, in 2006. "[To have] people show up [at a hospital] when they get sick, and expect someone else to pay, that's a Democratic approach."
SEE MORE: Should the Supreme Court's 'ObamaCare' arguments be televised?
?
So why did Obama adopt a Republican proposal?
At first, he didn't want to. During his 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination, Obama ran a TV ad criticizing rival candidate Hillary Clinton's support for a mandate, saying she would force everyone "to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it." But after President Obama and the Democratic Congress began to construct his health-care plan, advisers warned that free riders would undermine the objectives of extending insurance coverage to anyone who wanted it. For health reform to work, young, healthy people had to be pushed into the pool, to spread cost and risk. So the president allowed his 2010 Affordable Care Act to incorporate a provision that, by 2014, all Americans must have health coverage or face a tax penalty. Conservatives decried that directive as a gross infringement of individual liberty, and their anger helped fuel the rise of the Tea Party. Twenty-six states and the National Federation of Independent Business are now challenging the mandate's constitutionality at the Supreme Court, which will make a final judgment by June.
How has Obama responded?
His administration argues that the mandate is authorized by the Constitution's commerce clause, which allows the federal government to regulate interstate economic activity. Several conservative judges agree. In a November appeals court decision that upheld the mandate, Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, declared that Congress must "be free to forge national solutions to national problems." And this summer, Judge Jeffrey Sutton ? a George W. Bush appointee to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ? concluded that the individual mandate is a legally sound way to prevent taxpayers and hospitals from having to pick up the cost of treating the uninsured. "Not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally intrusive law," he wrote.
SEE MORE: The Supreme Court takes on 'ObamaCare': Will it hurt the president?
?
Haven't other judges disagreed?
Yes. In August, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals declared that it could find no precedent for ordering Americans to buy health insurance. "Even in the face of a Great Depression, a World War, a Cold War, recessions, oil shocks, inflation, and unemployment," the majority wrote, "Congress never sought to require the purchase of wheat or war bonds, force a higher savings rate or greater consumption of American goods." Other federal judges and critics of "Obamacare" warn that the mandate sets a dangerous precedent that the government could use to make citizens purchase whatever it deems good for them ? or for the economy. "Congress could require every American to buy a new Chevy Impala every year," said a 2009 Heritage Foundation report.
What happens if the individual mandate is voided?
It depends. If the Supreme Court decides that the Affordable Care Act can't function without the individual mandate, it could strike down the entire law. But it might declare the mandate "severable," and remove that particular part of the law, while letting the rest of it limp along, with far fewer uninsured people covered and less ability to rein in costs. Some experts have proposed that instead of the uninsured being required to buy insurance, they could be "nudged" into the health-care system by giving them a window of time during which they could buy insurance relatively inexpensively; once that window closed, the cost would rise sharply. The problem with any alternative to the individual mandate, said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, is that it would have to be approved by the bitterly divided Congress. "You can't expect that in these times," he said. "People don't work on these compromises too readily anymore."
SEE MORE: A conservative judge's 'compelling' defense of 'ObamaCare'
?
How the Supreme Court could punt
Next year's Supreme Court hearing has been billed as judgment day for Obama's Affordable Care Act. But it might end with no judgment at all. Before the justices rule on the individual mandate's constitutionality, they will first have to decide whether the 1867 Anti-Injunction Act bars the claimants' challenge. That law prevents citizens from challenging the legality of a tax before it goes into effect. If the court finds that the penalty for defying the Affordable Care Act's mandate is a tax, they could push a legal challenge back to 2015, when the first fines will be levied. And that, said Simon Lazarus, an expert at the National Senior Citizens Law Center, might "be a good solution for a court that doesn't really care to be Public Issue No. 1 in an election year."
View this article on TheWeek.com
Get 4 Free Issues of The Week
Other stories from this topic:
Like on Facebook?-?Follow on Twitter?-?Sign-up for Daily Newsletterdos santos waterboarding boxing news boxing andy dalton corporal kelsey de santis corporal kelsey de santis
The judges are not ready to crown Melanie Amaro X Factor champion just yet.
Following one of Chris Rene's two performances last night, Nicole Scherzinger and Paula Abdul jokingly argued about whether or not he looks like $1 million on stage... or $5 million the grand prize that will be awarded to next week's winner.
Does Rene have the best voice in the competition? No. But his spirit "transcends across the universe," according to Scherzinger. That, or he's just very good looking, right, ladies? Watch Chris cover "Fly" and "No One" now:
Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/12/chris-rene-transcends-the-universe-on-x-factor-semifinal/
marlins marlins sugar bowl kourtney kardashian pregnant kourtney kardashian pregnant wormwood bcs bowl games
