Vatican's Financial Coverup Scandal | Kids Need Play | Social Networks & Altruism Among Hadza | Please, No Nagging

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Anne of Carversville

Anne is reading …

Dominic Bugatto for WSJMore than one ‘honey-do’ list has broken up a marriage, writes the Wall Street Journal. And it’s a scientifically confirmed fact of life that women do more nagging. Perhaps it’s that lack of real power resentment that seeps into everyday lives, even among the happy homemakers.

When women reflect on more clever ways to get what they want — like the appliances fixed — a wife can learn a few tips from motivational speaker Janet Pfeiffer succeed. Deciding to soften her approach before that stoney male silence took her to divorce court, Pfeiffer took to writing clever post-it notes.

Ms. Pfeiffer sometimes writes notes to him from the appliances that need to be fixed. “I really need your help,” a recent plea began. “I am really backed up and in a lot of discomfort.” It was signed “your faithful bathtub drain.” “As long as I am not putting pressure on him, he seems to respond better,” Ms. Pfeiffer says. Mr. Mac Dougall (her husband) agrees. “The notes distract me from the face-to-face interaction,” he says. “There’s no annoying tone of voice or body posture. It’s all out of the equation.”

Vatican Corruption Scandal

A respected Italian show ‘The Untouchables’ aired on La 7 Wednesday night a series of letters about corruption at The Vatican. Pope Benedict was among the recipients of copies of letters that Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was then deputy-governor of Vatican City, sent to superiors about financial irregularities and mismanagement of investments. Archbishop Vigano was under fire and the victim of a smear campaign, he wrote. 

“Holy Father, my transfer right now would provoke much disorientation and discouragement in those who have believed it was possible to clean up so many situations of corruption and abuse of power that have been rooted in the management of so many departments,” Vigano wrote to the pope on March 27, 2011, in response to a campaign to have him removed from his post. Vigano is now the Vatican’s ambassador to Washington. via Reuters

Navy Seal Rescue in Somalia

Young American journalist Michael Scott Moore, who was kidnapped in Somalia last Saturday, may bear the brunt of the Navy SEAL’s daring rescue of Jessica Buchanan, 32, a former fourth grade teacher from Virginia, and Paul Thisted, 60, of Denmark, both employees of the Danish Demining Group (DDG), who were abducted there in October and being held for a ransom of $10 million, writes The Daily Beast.

According to Somalia Report, a Nairobi-based online news service, 11 to 12 aircraft arrived at that airport right about midnight Tuesday, local time. U.S. Special Operations forces secured the airport, with plans to launch the raid between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. local time. Residents near the site of the attack reported that around 3:30 a.m, U.S. helicopters began engaging the pirates in a gun battle.

The SEALS captures six pirates and killed nine more. The leading pirate commander wasn’t captured and no US casualities were reported.

More DFR

Photo: Tony Avelar/TCSM Illustration: John Kehe/StaffHow About Some Horsing Around?

On the one hand schools have abolished recess and in many cases, physical education even though doctors insist that kids should get good exercise an hour each day. Call it time for playing around, that exhuberant, sometimes unpredictable event when kids let loose.

Alternatively, when kids do have relaxation time, they’re most often in front of a computer. Concerned parents, child psychologists and Fortune 500 companies who are worried about a future group of zombie American workers are all expressing concerns about the end of childhood and expecially time for play. Read on in this excellent in-depth article at The Christian Science Monitor.

Young Girls Online

In a New York Times story with a big headline Does Technology Affect Happiness? we learn that the Stanford University study is focused on girls 8 to 12, a group of 3,400 who may not be representative of the larger population or even same-age peers.

Within this disclaimer, the facts are that girls who say they spend considerable amounts of time online appear to be less socially comfortable than same-age girls who say they spend less time online. Cause and effect haven’t been established, but researchers stress that “on a basic, even primitive level, girls need to experience the full pantheon of communication that comes from face-to-face contact, such as learning to read body language, and subtle facial and verbal cues.”

Dawn of Social Networks

“If you can get cooperators to cluster together in social space, cooperation can evolve,” said Coren Apicella, a post-doctoral research fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and first author on a paper studying social networking among a rare hunting and gathering society in Tanzania called The Hadza. “Social networks allow this to happen.”

The natural world, red in tooth and claw, has a gentle side. While individuals compete fiercely to ensure the proliferation of their progeny, a few animals, including humans, also cooperate and act altruistically. Researchers have wondered if human social networks are a product of modern lifestyles, or if they could have emerged under the kind of conditions that our distant ancestors faced. This question has been challenging for classic evolutionary theory to explain neatly. via Science Daily