You could call Michael Brooks a supplement junkie. He pops exactly six pills a day, three times a day, not to mention powders and shakes and chews. "A multivitamin, vitamin C, omega-3s, alpha lipoic acid," he says. "I'm taking a digestive enzyme."
Brooks is a personal trainer in Birmingham, Ala. He's healthy and fit, but he almost obsessively wants to know more, which is why we find him here, a few doors down from a sandwich shop and a nail salon, at a storefront lab called Any Lab Test Now.
Daoud Kuttab, executive producer of Shara'a Simsim, the Palestinian version of Sesame Street, holds a Muppet at his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah earlier this month. The producers say they have been forced to put production for the 2012 season on hold because of a funding freeze by the U.S. Congress.
This used to be a busy time of year for Shara'a Simsim, the Palestinian version of Sesame Street.
Producers and educators would be choosing the "words of the day" for the upcoming season. Writers would be brainstorming ideas around a large conference table. Project director Laila Sayegh says everyone would be working long days.
"From the morning, like 8 until 6 o'clock in the evening. And now as you can see, it's empty. We have nothing," she says.
A nurse weighs an Afghan child at a U.S.-funded clinic in Farza, Afghanistan, on Sept. 7, 2011. A new U.S.-sponsored survey shows dramatic gains in life expectancy and other aspects of health care in Afghanistan. But some experts are questioning the accuracy of the results.
Dr. Mohammed Rashidi talks to a mother about her severely malnourished baby at a makeshift mobile health clinic in a remote village in Afghanistan's Bamiyan province, June 12, 2011.
A U.S.-sponsored mortality survey released last year announced huge improvements in health across Afghanistan. But the gains are so great — including a 20-year increase in life expectancy since the U.S.-led invasion a decade ago — that experts are still arguing about whether it's correct.
During three decades of war, Afghanistan remained a black hole of health information. The few mortality studies looked at a small slice of the population and then extrapolated.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a trio of cases involving free speech and religion.
In the first set of cases, the court declined to address the burgeoning legal debate over what powers school officials have to censor students who are at home, working on their personal computers, when they create parodies or personal attacks involving school officials or fellow students.
Ani DiFranco called on a diverse lineup of guests, including Pete Seeger and Anais Mitchell, for her first new record in three years. Over the course of 21 studio albums in a 21-year career, DiFranco's folk-rock music has broached topics from politics to love, but has never strayed from being, as she would say, "righteous." In every sense of the word
The employees of Morgan Stanley, owner of the world's biggest brokerage, will receive a maximum cash bonus of $125,000, this year. As The New York Times puts it, the cap reflects "the difficulties that new financial regulations and the debt turmoil in Europe have posed to Morgan Stanley and its rival firms."
And with tongue firmly in cheek, it also notes that the bankers "may want to put their kitchen renovations off until next year."
