If Truth Be Told

Online Dating Offers Many Opportunities to Hook Up -- and to Be Rooked. Here's How to Protect Yourself.

By LAUREN MORASKI

Jan. 12, 2007— Katherine Flansburg met her boyfriend through PlentyOfFish.com, a free online dating site. Several months later, they moved in together. Everything seemed to be going well until one morning when they were woken up by a loud banging on the door.

Flansburg, 26, a real estate agent in Santa Clarita, Calif., was shocked to discover that their unexpected guest was her boyfriend's wife. Moments later, a fuming Flansburg rummaged through her boyfriend's desk drawers and found recently filed paperwork for a legal marriage separation, as well as an IRS earnings statement that showed her boyfriend's salary was only one-quarter as much money as he'd told her.

"He was a piece of work," she recalled.

As long as people have been dating, there have been tales of liars, cheats and thieves. In the Internet age, with the anonymity offered by e-mail, and with people blogging about their bad experiences, it seems like there are more examples of nefarious behavior than ever.

In the pre-Internet days, if a woman wanted to find out about her beau's background, or if a man wanted to make sure his new girlfriend wasn't a gold digger, they would have to hire a private investigator, an expensive and time-consuming process. But 21st century daters have new tools that give them easy, inexpensive access to outlets through which they can run background checks on potential mates by tapping into databases and computerized records.


Digging for the Truth

Flansburg was just one of 16 million Americans who have logged on for love, according to a 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. If she had run a background check on her boyfriend before they moved in together and gotten serious, Flansburg may have found out that he was still married or that he'd lied about his earnings. More and more online daters are doing background checks, and some are discovering lies about their mate's age, education, employment and ownership.

The Los Angeles-based Corra Group, for example, used to specialize in employment background checks. But recently it launched a separate Web site for dating-related searches.

By signing up online for as little as $39, along with the name and birth date of a significant other, you can get information about a person's address history, property ownership, as well as any bankruptcy claims, civil judgments or aliases. For $20 more, the search includes criminal records, and an $89 fee gets you a nationwide federal crime search.

Co-founder Gordon Basichis, 59, has 20 years of investigatiive experience and says that requests for background checks are on the rise, especially around Valentine's Day. While about 75 percent of his clientele is female — largely professionals in their mid-30s to 50s — the Corra Group also receives nearly 25 percent of its dating-related inquiries from men. "If they met someone online, they just want to know — 'who is this person?'" Basichis says. "People want to know if someone's full of it."

Safety tips for Internet dating (according to dating coach Liz Kelly):

Never give out a home phone number.

Use an anonymous e-mail (don't
use your entire name as your e-mail alias).

Always meet in a public place and in a neighborhood you know.

Women, in particular, should always get the man's number first and use caller ID to block (*67) for the first call.

Don't share home addresses. Always give a general area instead.

Dating Red Flags (according to Corra Group's Gordon Basichis):

Listen closely for inconsistencies in stories involving ownership, family
background and living situations.

If he or she asks you to cash a check.

Watch the way the person behaves around your kids.

If the person is telling you about him or herself and can't account for a long stint of time.

If he or she doesn't have any friends or never introduces you to his friends.

If the person says he or she owns property, or a boat, for instance, and you never see it.

Source: abcnews.com

Man Known as Secret Santa Dies in Mo.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. Jan 12, 2007 (AP)— Larry Stewart, a millionaire who became known as Secret Santa for his habit of roaming the streets each December and anonymously handing money to people, died Friday. He was 58.

Stewart died from complications from esophageal cancer, said Jackson County Sheriff Tom Phillips, a longtime friend.

Stewart, who spent 26 years giving a total $1.3 million, gained international attention in November when he revealed himself as Secret Santa. He was diagnosed in April with cancer, and said he wanted to use his celebrity to inspire other people to take random kindness seriously.

"That's what we're here for," Stewart said in a November interview, "to help other people out."

Stewart, from the Kansas City suburb of Lee's Summit, made his millions in cable television and long-distance telephone service.

His private holiday giving started in December 1979 when he was at a drive-in restaurant nursing his wounds from having been fired. It was the second year in a row he had been fired the week before Christmas.

"It was cold and this carhop didn't have on a very big jacket, and I thought to myself, `I think I got it bad. She's out there in this cold making nickels and dimes,'" he said. He gave her $20 and told her to keep the change.

After that, Stewart hit the streets each December, handing out money, often $100 bills, sometimes two and three at a time. He also gave money to community causes in Kansas City and his hometown of Bruce, Miss.

Stewart said he offered the simple gifts of cash every year because it was something people didn't have to "beg for, get in line for, or apply for."

Stewart gave out $100,000 between Chicago and Kansas City in December. Four Secret Santas whom Stewart "trained" gave out another $65,000.

On the Web:

http://secretsantausa.com/

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Source: abcnews.com

Lung Cancer Prevention

By Steve Valentino

Circumstances and life style factors that increase a person's chances of developing a disease are known as risk factors. On the contrary things that prevent disease from developing are called protective factors. Prevention involves increasing protective factors and decreases risk factors. There are various risk factors for lung cancer. Smoking is considered to be a factor that adds to the risk of lung cancer. The risk is also increased for passive smokers who are exposed to tobacco smoke indirectly.

It is possible to prevent lung cancer if it is not hereditary. In case there is history of lung cancer in the family, it may not be possible to totally eliminate chances of developing the disease. It is however possible to reduce chances by following an active lifestyle. Regular exercise lowers risks. Additionally, chances of developing lung cancer may reduce if a person consumes low fat diet that is high in fiber content.

Treatment of cancer is a painful process for the patient. Treatment ranges from radiotherapy, chemotherapy to surgery. The course of treatment depends upon the stage of disease. Sometimes a combination of treatment procedures may have to be administered simultaneously. Cancer in the third and fourth stage qualifies the extent of life span. Lung cancer treatment is not a guarantee that the disease will not recur. Surgery, in case of malignant tumors spreading to other parts of the body becomes quite difficult. Such delicate and complicated surgery often poses a risk to heart and windpipe.

Prevention is always better than cure. People may take advice and suggestions from their own doctor about risk factors faced by them. It is also necessary for people to be aware of various symptoms of lung cancer. Timely action can be taken to abate its development. There is plenty of information available online about preventive measures. Cancer institutes also organize seminars to educate on importance of prevention of lung cancer.

Lung Cancer provides detailed information on Asbestos Lung Cancer, Lung Cancer, Lung Cancer Stages, Lung Cancer Survival Rate and more. Lung Cancer is affiliated with Asbestos Exposure.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Valentino

Alcohol May Be Protective from Head Injury

It's still not safe to drink and drive but a few drinks (and only a few) might protect the brain against serious injuries, says new research. (Getty)

Light Drinking Helps Some Patients Survive Serious Injury: Study

By SIRI NILSSON
ABC NEWS Medical Unit

Dec. 19, 2006— Alcohol is to blame in many car crashes and other accidents but a few drinks might improve your chances of surviving a serious head injury says new research, even though too many drinks makes survival less likely.

About one-third to one-half of all patients hospitalized with traumatic injuries are intoxicated at the time of injury, but a study published in today's issue of the Archives of Surgery from the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that alcohol can keep a head injury from getting worse.

This doesn't mean that it's suddenly safe to drink and operate heavy machinery, but the study does suggest that alcohol could somehow play a role in future treatments for serious head injuries.

"A poignant result, if true," said Dr. David Goldman, Chief of the Section of Human Neurogenetics at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health. "Alcohol makes it dramatically more likely to experience head injury but moderates the effects," said Goldman.

Canadian researchers studied more than 1,158 consecutive patients who came into a level 1 trauma center with severe brain injuries caused by blunt trauma — like a car accident or fall — between 1988 and 2003. Doctors tested each patient's blood alcohol concentration (BAC) and compared that measurement to the seriousness of the injury, the length of hospital stay and whether the patient died or left the hospital. Moderate alcohol consumption seemed to be key to some patients' survival.

Those patients who were alcohol-free — or heavily intoxicated — were more likely to die in the hospital than those patients with some alcohol in their blood.

740 of the patients studied had a BAC of zero, and the rest were a little (or a lot) less than sober. 315 had low to moderate BAC — blood levels up to 0.23 percent, or nearly three times the legal limit — and 103 had even higher alcohol levels in their blood. Of the patients who came into the hospital with a low to moderate BAC, almost 28 percent died in the hospital, compared to more than 36 percent of the patients who came in stone-cold-sober.

But patients with even higher alcohol levels in their blood were 73 percent more likely to die than those with none, the study also found.

(Read More...)

Source: abcnews.com

Vista vs. Mac OS X (InformationWeek review)

John Welch of InformationWeek has a great article today comparing Microsoft's Vista with Apple's Mac OS X. Given that I'm covering it here, you can already tell which OS he finds superior. :-) In his words...

While Vista is indeed a major update to Windows, there's a lot of it that is, quite frankly, just Microsoft making up for lost time. The last non-server release of Windows was in 2001 with Windows XP, with only a single major interim update in service pack 2. In the same time, Apple has been steadily releasing updates to Mac OS X on what was a yearly schedule, now around every 18 months....

Microsoft had two serious issues. First, they had to make this update of Windows revolutionary enough that it came close to justifying the delay. Second, they had to come up with something that would stand up well with its main competitor in the desktop OS market, Mac OS X. Have they succeeded at both? I'd argue that the former's almost a non-issue: Vista will sell well, because the world won't have a choice. As far as the latter, well, probably, but you'd be hard-pressed to say Vista's better than Mac OS X.

In a nutshell, Vista vs. Mac OS X is Revolution vs. Evolution. It's about a massive, long-delayed upgrade that has to account for almost 6 years of progress by its competitors, versus a well-executed strategy of regular updates. While updating an operating system is never something that can be called easy, Apple's strategy has been the better one for keeping their OS on top of things, something Microsoft has admitted to in a roundabout way.

This is critical, and often overlooked (outside the Apple camp, anyway). Microsoft's release late and not-so-often mentality means that its users are half a decade behind the Mac world (and Linux, in some areas). Microsoft, because of its massive installed base, arguably has a harder time moving to a "perpetual beta" release mentality. But others, like Google, have shown that this objection is more perceived than real.

Here are some of my favorite snippets from Welch's article:

Mac OS X...[is] the classic English butler. This OS is designed to make the times you have to interact with it as quick and efficient as possible. It expects that things will work correctly, and therefore sees no reason to bother you with correct operation confirmations....

Windows is...well, Windows is very eager to tell you what's going on. Constantly. Plug something in, and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you're on a network that's having problems staying up, you'll get tons of messages telling you this. It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout...who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans. This gets particularly bad when you factor in things like the user-level implementation of Microsoft's new security features.

An OS should just work, not tell you that it's working. An OS is largely infrastructure - Windows tries to be more than that. It wants to be furniture that walks around and chats with you, but really it just needs to be happy with being valuable furniture, and let its applications (and others') chat with the customer.

Welch also talks up the consistency of the OS X user interface:

This consistency that has been a centerpiece of the Mac OS is something that, even with Vista, Microsoft still can't manage to pull off. Although there are many different UI styles available in Mac OS X, even within those different styles, there is a consistency that Windows just can't seem to hit.

Even with Microsoft applications, there's a feeling that, by and large, the only UI guidelines that Windows applications adhere to is "what we feel like." (I know Microsoft has a lot of UI guideline information, but since no one seems to follow any of it, I'm not sure what the point of it is.)

Welch has other complaints on the Vista UI (it's harder to find some information you need, like network connection details, for example, and the name changes that seem to have been made only for the sake of showing that things have changed), but his complaints about the new security feature, User Account Control, seem more weighty. UAC doesn't offer real security enhancement, in his view, and (in his view) is...
...going to be called "User Annoyance Control." You get what is essentially an "Okay/Cancel" dialog that most users will hit "okay" for without thinking, you may or may not get useful information as to what is going on, and you get locked out of your system until you deal with this. I have a problem with seeing how annoying people is enhancing security. When I say "annoyance" I really mean "infuriate," because you get UAC dialogs all over the place, and you're never sure when or why you're going to get them.
That said, it's a tough problem to solve. How do you give users control over security settings that they won't necessarily understand? I'm not sure how Microsoft could have done it differently, but I do know that I don't have this same problem with my Mac. Not at all.

However, as Welch concedes, it doesn't really matter if Vista is better than OS X. Microsoft only really needs to worry about whether it's better than XP, so as to convince its user base to upgrade. Welch thinks it is (and I do, too, from what I've seen - that said, I hated XP, but liked Windows 2000 quite a bit). As for how it compares to OS X?

However, is it significantly, or even slightly better than Mac OS X? Maybe in a couple of low-level ways, like the randomizing memory address usage function, or being able to use USB memory sticks as additional RAM, but at the human level? Not even close.

I've yet to see anything in Vista that blows away the Mac OS, even a version of the Mac OS that's over a year old. Microsoft still can't manage to make something simple and easy to use. Vista reeks of committee and design by massive consensus, while OS X shines from an intense focus on doing things in a simple, clear fashion and design for the user, not the programmer.

Which, I think, is why I've managed to convert nearly 10 people to the Mac in the last two years alone. Now if the rest of you Mac people would just do your jobs, we'd have world domination within the next few years.

Source: infoworld.com

Microsoft fixes Office, Outlook, Windows flaws

Top-priority patches address issues in Office and Windows VPL security

Microsoft Corp. has patched critical vulnerabilities in its Office, Outlook, and Windows software.

The software vendor released three sets of critical patches Tuesday, fixing nine security bugs. A fourth update fixes a flaw in Office 2003's Brazilian Portuguese Grammar Checker. Microsoft gives this flaw a less-serious rating of "important."

Hackers have been paying close attention to Microsoft's Office products over the past few months, taking advantage of unpatched bugs in PowerPoint, Word and Excel to conduct extremely targeted attacks. Typically, the attacker will send the victim an e-mail that includes a malicious Office attachment and try to entice the victim into opening the message.

In early December, these attacks occurred on a very limited scale, exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word.

Microsoft didn't issue patches for Word on Tuesday, but it did patch five flaws in Excel, which has also been a point of attack over the past few months.

The Office flaws should be a top priority for system administrators, said Chris Andrew, vice president of security technology with Patchlink Corp.

The Windows update, which fixes a critical flaw in Windows' VML (Vector Markup Language) language is also one to watch, he said.

Last September, Microsoft was forced to rush an early patch for a similar VML bug after attackers began exploiting the flaw on the Internet. By tricking victims into visiting specially crafted Web pages, criminals could use this VML flaw to run unauthorized software on a victim's computer, Microsoft said.

Tuesday's VML update replaces the MS06-055 VML bug-fix that Microsoft published last September, the company said.

The SANS Internet Storm Center rates all four updates as critical , but it is singling out the VML bug in particular, saying that there is an "immediate danger" of attackers exploiting this flaw.

SANS says there are known exploits for bugs in all of the updates released Tuesday, except the Excel patches.

Microsoft had been planning to release eight sets of patches Tuesday, but late last week, it abruptly pulled four of these updates out of the pipeline. No reason was given for this sudden decision.

Source: infoworld.com

New Video of Saddam's Corpse on Internet

Iraqi students protest while holding a picture of the executed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in Tikrit, 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Jan. 7, 2007. About 1,500 students gathered in the Sunni stronghold town of Tikrit to protest Saddam's hurried execution. (AP Photo/Bassim Daham)

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA

BAGHDAD, Iraq Jan 9, 2007 (AP)— The second clandestine video from Saddam Hussein's execution appeared on the Internet Tuesday, showing the deposed Iraqi leader's corpse, with a gaping neck wound, after his hanging.

The video appeared to have been taken with a camera phone, like the graphic video of the hanging which showed guards taunting Saddam in the final moments of his life.

The footage pans up the shrouded body of the former leader from the feet. It apparently was taken shortly after Saddam was executed and placed on a gurney. He was hanged shortly before dawn on Dec. 30.

As the panning shot reaches the head region, the white shroud is pulled back and reveals Saddam's head and neck.

His head is unnaturally twisted at a 90 degree angle to his right. It shows a gaping bloody wound, circular in shape, about an inch below his jaw line on the left side of his neck. His left cheek is marked with red blotches, and there is blood on the shroud where it covered his head.

The newest video leak was likely to increase the angry reaction over the way the execution was carried out. There already has been a global outcry about the undignified manner in which the Shiite-dominated government hanged Saddam, a Sunni.

The 27-second video was posted on an Iraqi news Web site that is known to support Saddam's outlawed Baath Party.

"A new film of the late immortal martyr, President Saddam Hussein," the web site said in a headline over a link to the video.

Voices could be heard on the video. As the shroud is pulled back, one voice says, "Hurry up, hurry up. I'm going to count from one to four. One, two … . Hurry up you're going to get us into a catastrophe."

Then another voice, apparently the man taking the pictures, says, "Just one second, just one second, Abu Ali. I'm about finished."

Then a third voice says, "Abu Ali, you take care of this."

It was the second clandestine video to have leaked, the first showing Saddam being taunted in his final moments. That clandestine video showed the former leader dropping through the gallows floor as he offered chanted prayers. It ends with his dead body swinging at the end of a rope.

(Read More...)

Source: abcnews.com

Man Fights to Take Wife's Name in Marriage

ACLU Joins Effort to Change California Law

By MICHELLE RITTNER


Jan. 8, 2007 — What's in a name?

Before Michael Buday married his fiancée, Diana Bijon, he decided to honor her family by bucking tradition and taking her last name. But, it wasn't so easy.

Under California state law, he needed to pay more than $300, go to court, file a petition, and publicly advertise his name change for four weeks in a local newspaper. If he had simply gone along with tradition, it would have cost only $50 to $80.

So Buday, 29, went to court, along with the ACLU, to change the law. They recently announced their plans to sue the California Department of Health Services, which oversees marriage licenses and name changes.

After years of fighting for women's rights, the ACLU is now battling for equal rights for men.

California is one of 44 states with unequal name change laws for people getting married. Right now, only six states — Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North Dakota — explicitly allow a man to change his name through marriage with the same ease as a woman can.

California is not the only state with a high price tag for a groom's name change. In Illinois, a man wishing to take his wife's surname must fork over $246 for a petition and another $150 to publish the change in a newspaper. Connecticut's price is slightly lower, at only $150 for a court petition.

According to the ACLU, the obstacles facing a husband who wishes to adopt his wife's last name violate the equal protection clause provided by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. "California has the perfect marriage application for the 17th century," said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California. "The laws reflect a mind-set that the wife is to be subordinate to the husband."

(Read More...)

Source: abcnews.com