ELIZABETH JACKSON: To Christians it might seem way overdue, but the church where Jesus was believed to have been born has now been added to the World Heritage Register.

A UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) committee meeting in Russia has made an urgent vote to add the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem to the list.

A young, new preacher was walking with an older, more seasoned preacher in the garden one day. Feeling a bit insecure about what God had for him to do, he was asking the older preacher for some advice. The older preacher walked up to a rosebush and handed the young preacher a rosebud and told him to open it without tearing off any petals.

The young preacher looked in disbelief at the older preacher and was trying to figure out what a rosebud could possibly have to do with his wanting to know the will of God for his

Google’s new Nexus 7 proves smaller tablets aren’t completely worthless.

In the fall of 2010, Steve Jobs made an unusual appearance on an Apple earnings call. He’d come to rant. The CEO had prepared a nine-minute broadside against Android, Google’s mobile operating system,

The amazing health benefits of papaya are practically visible. Just looking at the rich yellow color you know that it must be chock full of vitamin A, and you'd be right. It's more than just a vitamin A vessel, it also contains B vitamins like thiamin, riboflavin and niacin and Vitamin C as well.

The papaya also has many minerals necessary for good health. What a great way to get calcium, iron, phosphorus and potassium. It's more than just a list of vitamins because it has other properties that make it the "food of the angels", as noted by Christopher Columbus when he first encountered it.

Jana stands at the podium, palms sweaty, looking out at hundreds of colleagues who are waiting to hear about her new initiative. Bill walks into a meeting after a failed product launch to greet an exhausted and demotivated team that desperately needs his direction. Robin gets ready to confront a brilliant but underperforming subordinate who needs to be put back on track.

The 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud mother-in-law of my best friend, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o'clock, with her hair fashionably coifed and makeup perfectly applied, even though she is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today. Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary.

Tomatoes, which are actually a fruit and not a vegetable, are loaded with all kinds of health benefits for the body. They are in fact, a highly versatile health product and due to their equally versatile preparation options, there's really no reason to neglect the tomato as part of a healthy diet.
 
One of the most well known tomato eating benefit is its' Lycopene content. Lycopene is a vital anti-oxidant that helps in the fight against cancerous cell formation as well as other kinds of health complications and diseases.

Thales has debuted its new F90 assault rifle at this year’s Eurosatory exhibition in Paris, France.

The F90 is an innovative and lightweight weapon that is a direct product of modern day soldier requirements on today’s battlefields. Building on the company’s extensive

Is 2012 the end of the world? A new Maya text says absolutely not. While apocalyptic predictions will abound throughout the year,

Creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world — or so said 1,500 CEOs across 60 countries in a recent survey by IBM. And yet federally funded research and development — creativity, institutionalized — is down 20% as a share of America's GDP since the late 1980s. Private R&D spending has also tailed off since then, when it brought us

FLOWERS and guns might conjure up images of flower power, but coating bullet casings in lily pollen could help forensic teams identify a gunman.

It is difficult to get useful DNA evidence from a spent bullet casing: copper and zinc ions from the brass alloy react with sweat to break down DNA, destroying evidence about who may have loaded a gun.

BECAUSE I am a middle school reading enrichment teacher, parents and colleagues often ask my advice about summer assignments. My automatic reply echoes a hit song from the ’70s, “any love is good lovin’.” I tell them blithely that any reading is good reading, while I think to myself, we’ll take whatever we can get.

How to get ideas by reversing your assumptions.

Years back, chemists had great difficulty putting a pleasant-tasting coating on aspirin tablets. Dipping tablets led to uneven and lumpy coats. They were stumped until they reversed their thinking.

I can't see the stars tonight.
Shadowed by silence,
I close my eyes tight.
Pray against the odds of uncertainty
All I want is to believe.

Asking so many questions, only wanting one truth
I realize confusion is tainting my youth.
I want to wish upon a star
But the sky, tonight, seems so very far.

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally...,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.

In a seven-month experiment, 21 overweight men and women had their diets strictly controlled down to each last morsel. Scientists found that a traditional low-fat diet seemed to make the metabolism far slower than a high-protein one during the most difficult part of weight loss, which entails keeping the fat off.

We have a subconscious bias against creative ideas.

Does society really value creativity? People say they want more creative people, more creative ideas and solutions, but do they really?

The Greek philosopher Democritus (460-370 BC) promulgated the atomic theory, which asserted that the universe is composed of two

Stuart Lawley navigates Bear’s Club Drive in his midnight sapphire Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupé, a $464,000, 3-ton, 12-cylinder land yacht so well-engineered that ensconced in its butter-soft leather, one barely senses motion at all. Lawley docks gently at a French-style château adjacent to the 15th

Hey java drinkers, that coffee buzz you love so much may also help prevent heart failure, according to a new study published in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation Heart Failure.

While many believe coffee drinking may be dangerous to the heart, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston said moderate consumption of your daily jo could be beneficial.

Slumbering Dragon is a new rare red creature card fromWizards of the Coast's upcoming "Magic 2013 Core Set." Slumbering Dragon is "Magic: The Gathering's" first one mana dragon.

Slumbering Dragon - Rare

Creature - Dragon (Rare)
Flying
Slumbering Dragon can't attack or block unless it has five or more +1/+1 counters on it.
Whenever a creature attacks you or a planeswalker you control, put a +1/+1 counter on Slumbering Dragon.
3/3

Last week, the latest digital version of uber-popular collectible card game Magic: the Gathering was released. There could be no better time, then, to cover the "real life" version of Magic for Tabletop Co-Op. Magic is, generally speaking, a highly competitive game, but what if there were a way to play it in co-op? I've got good news for you, reader, the always innovative Magic community has created just such a format. Horde Magic blends the awesome deckbuilding fun of Magic with the unrelenting pressure and tension of survival modes, like Gears of War 3's Horde mode, or Left 4 Dead's Survival. The combination is glorious!

Students today may have less time for free play, but new research suggests their imaginations have actually sharpened compared with children two decades ago.

In an analysis published in May 2011 in the Creativity Research Journal and posted online last month, researchers from Case Western University in Cleveland found elementary school children in 2008 were significantly more imaginative and took greater comfort in playing make-believe than their counterparts in 1985 despite having less time either during or after school for free play.

Essayist, playwright and director Nora Ephron, who gave us "Sleepless in Seattle" and "When Harry Met Sally" -- and so many famous scenes and lines -- has died at the age of 71, just as she was beginning to milk the aging process for laughs and life lessons.

Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good? Are we built to pledge our lives to a group, even to the risk of death, or the opposite, built to place ourselves and our families above all else? Scientific evidence, a good part of it accumulated during the past 20 years, suggests that we are all of these things simultaneously. Each of us is inherently complicated. We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners — not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal — but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

Want to nail that tune that you've practiced and practiced? Maybe you should take a nap with the same melody playing during your sleep, new provocative Northwestern University research suggests.

The research grows out of exciting existing evidence that suggests that memories can be reactivated during sleep and storage of them can be strengthened in the process.

How to grow your idea by annexing its neighbor

Dean Keith Simonton, in his 1989 book Scientific Genius suggests that geniuses are geniuses because they form more novel combinations than the merely talented. His theory has etymology behind it: cogito-"I think"- originally connoted "shake together," intelligo, the root of "intelligence," means to "select among." This is a clear early intuition about the utility of permitting ideas and thoughts to randomly combine with each other and the utility of selecting from the many the few to retain.

Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, "Mother, you must come see the daffodils before they are over." I wanted to go, but it was a two-hour drive from Laguna to Lake Arrowhead. "I will come next Tuesday," I promised, a little reluctantly, on her third call.

Next Tuesday dawned cold and rainy. Still, I had promised, and so I drove there. When I finally walked into Carolyn's house and hugged and greeted my grandchildren, I said, "Forget the daffodils, Carolyn! The road is invisible in the clouds and fog, and there is nothing in the world except you and these children that I want to see bad enough to drive another inch!"

According to a New York Times exposé, the company's retail stores are staffed with true believers, many of whom tolerate paltry paychecks to answer a higher calling

The average salesperson at an Apple store racks up nearly $500,000 in revenue per year for the gadget purveyor, says David Segal at The New York Times. But that same salesperson's yearly salary comes to just $25,000 or so — better than Gap, but far below the six figures that commission-earning employees at Verizon can rake in. Delving deep into the culture of the Apple store, Segal says Apple's 30,000 retail employees are often worn out by the hectic pace of sales life and frustrated by a dearth of opportunities to climb the corporate ladder. Yet Apple's retail success continues, largely because it has a "built-in fan base that ensures a steady supply of eager applicants and an employee culture that tries to turn every job into an exalted mission," says Segal. The result is a workforce that in many respects eerily resembles a cult. Here, five signs that Apple is a religion unto itself:

Around 2:20 p.m. last Thursday, my bicycle was stolen in Brooklyn, N.Y. Just after 6:45 that evening, I got the bike back—5 miles away on the other side of the East River, near Union Square in Manhattan. It felt like a miracle.

In fact, it was a team effort. I was helped by several dozen strangers; by Slate's political blogger Dave Weigel and film critic Dana Stevens; by New Yorker music critics Sasha Frere-Jones and Alex Ross; by singer-songwriter Neko Case; by three plainclothes New York City policemen; and especially by writer and musician Nick Sylvester. All those people—and Twitter—found my bicycle.

New University of Otago research suggests that when non-religious people think about their own death they become more consciously skeptical about religion, but unconsciously grow more receptive to religious belief.T

he Department of Psychology research also found that when religious people think about death, their religious beliefs appear to strengthen at both conscious and unconscious levels. The researchers believe the findings help explain why religion is such a durable feature of human society.

Because he stopped being a writer and became an idea man.

On Tuesday morning, media watcher Jim Romenesko caught Jonah Lehrer stealing. The victim: Jonah Lehrer. The newly minted New Yorker staff writer’s June 12 blog post “Why Smart People Are Stupid” copied, at times word for word, three paragraphs from Lehrer’s 2011 Wall Street Journal story “The Science of Irrationality.” A few hours later, New York’s Joe Coscarelli and writer Jacob Silverman discovered a bunch more instances in which Lehrer reheated his leftovers. The New Yorker has now appended editors’ notes to all five posts on Lehrer’s new blog Frontal Cortex and to an additional post he wrote about Steve Jobs in 2011. Those notes acknowledge that “paragraphs,” “portions,” or “details” originally appeared in writing that Lehrer had done elsewhere.

Alan Moore is angry about DC Comics’ Watchmen prequels. He’s right.

Even by the wretched standards of the entertainment industry, superhero comics are known for their dreadful labor practices. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, famously sold the rights to the character to DC Comics for $130, and spent the latter part of their lives, and virtually all their money, fighting unsuccessfully to regain control of him. Similarly, Jack Kirby, the artist who co-created almost the entire roster of Marvel characters, was systematically stiffed by the company whose fortunes he made. Though most of the heroes in the Avengers film were Kirby creations, for example, his estate won’t receive a dime of the film’s $1 billion (and counting) in box office earnings.

How the star of a cheesy Canadian detective show became a political hero in Serbia.

Rob Stewart was a famous actor for 16 years before he realized it. He was an unemployed writer/director $6,000 in debt when he started going on auditions in his late 20s, hoping to land a role that might fund his other projects. In 1990, he tried out for a new show called Sweating Bullets, what he calls “a B-version Magnum, P.I.” about a Don Juan detective named Nick Slaughter who solves local crimes in the fictional Florida beach town of Key Mariah.

If you're looking for another way to reduce stress, consider tai chi (TIE-chee). Tai chi is sometimes described as "meditation in motion" because it promotes serenity through gentle movements — connecting the mind and body. Originally developed in ancient China for self-defense, tai chi evolved into a graceful form of exercise that's now used for stress reduction and to help with a variety of other health conditions.

How to change the way you think.

The dominant factor in the way our minds work is the buildup of patterns that enable us to simplify and cope with a complex world. These patterns are based on our past experiences. We look at 6 x 6, and 36 appears automatically without conscious thought. We examine a new product for our company and know it's a good design at an appropriate price. We look at a business plan and know that the financial projections make sense. These things we do routinely because of our thinking patterns which are based on our past experiences. These thinking patterns enable us to perform routine tasks, such as driving an automobile, rapidly and accurately. But this same patterning makes it hard for us to come up with creative solutions to problems, especially when confronted with unusual data. If you always think what you've always thought, you'll always get what you've always got.

Staying highly active may protect against breast cancer whether it's walking, running, or anything in between, researchers found.

Women who got around 2 hours of exercise a day most days of the week were about 30% less likely to develop breast cancer whether pre- or post-menopausal in a population-based study by Lauren E. McCullough, MSPH, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and colleagues.

High-intensity exercise didn't appear any better than low-intensity activity, the group reported online in Cancer.

It is official. Stonehenge was not built by aliens. Nor is it a place of healing, or a temple of the ancient druids, a decade-long study has suggested. The study claims that the monument was built to cement a new East West alliance between the former warring tribes of Britain as the country started to become a United Kingdom after centuries of strife.

Every single one of us lived our lives a different way.
Some of us grew strong, while others grew weaker by each day.
Some of us were healthy, while others were sick.
Some of us flew through the day, while others watched the minutes tick.
Some of us ran to help those in need,
While others took advantage and strengthened their greed.

Each year, 24/7 Wall St. identifies 10 important American brands that we predict will disappear within a year. This year’s list reflects the brutally competitive nature of certain industries and the reason why companies cannot afford to fall behind in efficiency, innovation or financing.

American Airlines will disappear in 2013 because of its inefficiency. It was the premier carrier in the United States for almost 30 years — even surviving through periods when most other carriers went bankrupt. However, it lost its critical advantage of scale when Northwest merged with Delta (NYSE: DAL) and Continental merged with United (NYSE: UAL). Within two years, American became a medium-sized carrier.

In the history of art, most people could easily argue that Salvador Dalí is the father of surrealistic art. Surrealism is the art of writing or painting unreal or unpredictable works of art using the images or words from an imaginary world. Dali's art is the definition of surrealism. Throughout his art he clearly elaborates on juxtaposition (putting similar images near each other), the disposition (changing the shape of an object), and morphing of objects, ranging from melted objects dripping, to crutches holding distorted figures, to women with heads of bouquets of flowers.

The French, as usual, insist on being different. As independent bookstores crash and burn in the United States and Britain, the book market in France is doing just fine. France boasts 2,500 bookstores, and for every neighborhood bookstore that closes, another seems to open. From 2003 to 2011 book sales in France increased by 6.5 percent.

E-books account for only 1.8 percent of the general consumer publishing market here, compared with 6.4 percent in the United States. The French have a centuries-old reverence for the printed page.

“There are two things you don’t throw out in France — bread and books,” said Bernard Fixot, owner and publisher of XO, a small publishing house dedicated to churning out best sellers. “In Germany the most important creative social status is given to the musician. In Italy it’s the painter. Who’s the most important creator in France? It’s the writer.”

Coffee may taste good and get you going in the morning, but what will it do for your health?

A growing body of research shows that coffee drinkers, compared to nondrinkers, are:

less likely to have type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and dementia
have fewer cases of certain cancers, heart rhythm problems, and strokes
“There is certainly much more good news than bad news, in terms of coffee and health,” says Frank Hu, MD, MPH, PhD, nutrition and epidemiology professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The health benefits of vitamin D are almost becoming too numerous to count, with yet another new study presented at the recent American Association for Cancer Research Pancreatic Cancer Conference in Lake Tahoe, Nev., shedding light on the hormone's specific anti-cancer benefits. According to the groundbreaking research, individuals exposed to natural sunlight, which is the most abundant source of natural vitamin D, are nearly 50 percent less likely to develop pancreatic cancer than others who are not exposed.

Do not think of what you do not have;
Instead, appreciate what you have and can still have.

Do not think of things lost;
Instead, value what you still have and may yet find.

Do not cry over spilled milk;
Instead, rejoice in what was left.

1) Understand that no experience comes labeled. You are the labeler. 

The power to choose is yours! As William Shakespeare said, "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so". You and only you are the labeler of your experiences. Do you complain that roses have thorns or do you rejoice that thorns have roses? You have the ability to choose your reactions. All too often, these decisions to label are not done consciously and your internal dialog will slap on a negative label. You must be aware of this and change it immediately. Realizing your ability to label is an awesome power and a great step towards success. Upon taking control, you can select empowering labels in place of the negative ones. You are in control of the experience.

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The grand sound effects for Ridley Scott's sweeping epic Prometheus often came from odd, unlikely sources -- including Pop Rocks, Xerox machines, and a 35-year-old parrot named Skipper.

In the clip, sound designers and mixers for Prometheus explain how they derived sounds for the blockbuster movie from an array of inventive sources.

"When we first discover that something is unique in the cave, and we see these ampules, we see this glistening ice forming on it that kind of pops," says Mark Stoeckinger, one of Prometheus' supervising sound editors. "On the foley stage [we said], 'Remember those things from back in the '70s, Pop Rocks?' John Cucci, the foley artist, said, 'You know something, I actually happen to have some of those.'

Leonardo Da Vinci discovered that the human brain cannot deliberately concentrate on separate objects or ideas, no matter how dissimilar, without eventually forming  connections between them. Try an experiment. Pick eight random words and give the list to someone or to a small group (for example: flower pot, baby, glass, grasshopper, coffee pot, box, toast and garage). Ask them to divide the words into two groups without giving them any rationale for the division. You will discover that people will come up with some very creative classifications. They will group them according to "words with the letter o," "things that touch water," "objects made in factories" and so on. No one ever says there is no connection, they invent them.

We are all special in some way but those individuals
Who live each day handicapped
Are the true special people,
I can say.

Overcoming trials and tribulations
Of doubt and despair
Of ever becoming good enough or accepted
In society today.

Wanting to become one of the accepted
Instead of one of the lesser few.
Not to be left out but let in as if saying
"I can feel too".

Dark, lowering financial and economic clouds are, it seems, rolling in from every direction: the eurozone, the United States, China, and elsewhere. Indeed, the global economy in 2013 could be a very difficult environment in which to find shelter.