When “pro-life” means anti-birth control, thus substantially increasing the number of unwanted pregnancies, the contradictions begin to show – as they did when Mississsippians soundly defeated the “personhood” initiativelast November, which would have outlawed the most prevalent forms of birth control. But last week, things went even further. When “pro-life” comes out and openly means depriving millions of poor women of life-saving breast cancer exams, we have ourselves a moment of clarity – and the world may never be the same again.

February 2 was the day that Planned Parenthood was supposed to crumble into dust. It says right there in the right-wing playbook: “Former allies turn against them, issuing denouncements in horror, disgust, outrage and dismay.” It worked perfectly a couple of years ago with ACORN, the largest low-income advocacy organisation in the United States. Why should Planned Parenthood be any different?

Why indeed? And yet, things turned out as different as night and day: February 2 was the day that the Komen Foundation – which had announced that it was defunding Planned Parenthood -crumbled instead, and it’s still not clear how deep the damage to Komen may be. Komen crumbled on tens of thousands of fronts all day long, as women – and men – who had strongly identified with its mission and work recoiled in horror, and pledged their allegiance to Planned Parenthood instead, via email, Facebook, Twitter, any way they could. By week’s end, more than $3 million had been pledged to Planned Parenthood – enough to make up for more than four years of Komen’s funding.

Komen in the spotlight

While the real damage to Komen was done by countless individual actions taken and/or spurred on via social media, the symbolic climax of Komen’s crumbling was acted out by its wealthy CEO, Nancy Brinker, in a disastrous interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

“Brinker was completely unprepared for this interview. She was placed in a situation that she seemed not to understand,” journalism professor and leading media critic, Jay Rosen wrote. “I mean this literally: Brinker did not know what she was doing there. She thought she was going on air to correct some misbegotten story line that an excitable press, the wounded executives at Planned Parenthood and ideologues in the pro-choice movement had cooked up. In her delusional state, the decision had nothing to do with the politics of abortion. Nothing! The reality was that a board member from her own organisation had told the press that it did.”

Further, Rosen wrote, “The fractured syntax, the thoughts that do not connect, the zombie-like performance, the whole train wreck that this interview became: I think it all originates in a lie the house bought about itself. We don’t do politics.”

But Komen is actually a very politically connected organisation – even before it took on former Secretary of State of Georgia Karen Handel, a sworn enemy of Planned Parenthood, as VP of Public Policy. (It is Handel, according to recent reports, who had been the prime mover in the latest effort to defund Planned Parenthood. Her resignation was announced Tuesday, February 7.)

Brinker and her ex-husband were deeply embedded in Texas Republican politics, where they had fundraised for George Bush. She had even gone on to serve as an ambassador for the Bush administration, and a 2002 report in Southern Exposure magazine, “Running From the Truth”, by Mary Ann Swissler, had examined in detail how Komen had acted to block Democratic, more patient-friendly version of the “Patient’s Bill of Rights”, how Komen’s relationship with the medical industrial complex shaped its policies, and how it resisted making connections between cancer and environmental causes, among other political policy dimensions. In short, Brinker was a highly connected and experienced political actor, which only made her discombobulated performance all the more striking.

And yet, if not for the tidal wave of individual activism interconnected through social media – a rising of the 99 per cent – Brinker’s delusion might still have carried the day. Instead, by that evening, Komen’s top leadership huddled on a conference call, and decided to call it quits, issuing a call to retreat the following morning – although the exact significance of their action still remains murky at best, as there is still no clear commitment to fund Planned Parenthood in the future.

Actually, Brinker and Komen were incredibly lucky. Later that following day, a relatively obscure blog, milowent, called attention to her 2010 memoir, Promise Me, in which Brinker described an earlier confrontation when right-wing forces tried to get Komen to sever its ties with Planned Parenthood, and Komen refused.

The year was 2004, and the pressure came from the Curves workout centre chain, which cut off its funding when Komen refused to go along. “The grants in question supplied breast health counselling, screening and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of colour who were underserved – if served at all – in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available,” Brinker wrote in 2010. “Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women. Somehow this position translated to the utterly false assertion that SGK funds abortions.”

The question of what had changed between then and now would have been an extremely embarrassing question for Brinker on that day of intense crisis for Komen – and it remains so even now, as Komen still hopes to recover a measure of the trust that it has lost. Moreover, this incident’s exposure of the long-standing right-wing pressure campaign against Komen to sever its ties with Planned Parenthood would have even more dramatically altered the way the story was perceived at the time.

Organisational destruction

Unlike their liberal counterparts, conservative activists have long prioritised the destruction of what they see as opposing organisations. Their efforts to demonise, isolate and undermine progressive organisations have been a key aspect of right-wing political organising for many decades now. (The ideology guiding them goes all the way back to the French Revolution, which right-wing conspiracy theorists blamed on the non-existent Bavarian Illuminati, a powerless discussion forum that had been disbanded for more than a decade before the French Revolution even began.)

The vast majority of right-wing organisation-destroying activities take place in the shadows – and Planned Parenthood has been under repeated attack in the shadows for as long as anyone cares to remember, including efforts to defund it by the Republican House of Representatives as their first order of business in January 2011. Only a small fraction of these sorts of attacks – such as recent overt efforts to undermine public employee unions – take place in daylight out of sheer necessity.

Had more Americans been more aware of the long-term conservative game plan to demonise, isolate and undermine Planned Parenthood – and Komen, too, if it stood in their way – then Komen and those pressuring it from the right would have looked even worse than they already did.

Because I had previously covered the attacks on ACORN, and had been quite familiar with ACORN’s work before the attacks ever began, I found it impossible not to think of ACORN as these events quickly unfolded. Both ACORN and Planned Parenthood served a particularly powerless constituency – although ACORN did so much more exclusively.

Both organisations had been turned into bogeymen of the right – the targets of paranoid fact-free attacks over a period of years. Both organisations were subject to abusive, Joe McCarthy-style attacks through Congress. And both organisations had been attacked via fraudulent, secretly-taped videos attempting to portray them as enablers of commercial under-age sex-crimes, when in reality, both organizations contacted law enforcement in response to the bogus criminal activity they were presented with.

Finally, both were pawns in conservative plans to undermine the power of key Democratic constituencies without the Democrats even realising the stakes. Needless to say, I was deeply and pleasantly surprised at how differently things turned out this time around.

The slayer did it

But precisely because of how differently things turned out, there was yet another framework I couldn’t stop thinking of: Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. Go ahead, laugh – laughter is good for your mental health. But I’m absolutely serious, even though this might seem to be coming out of left field.

Art often illuminates complex social realities, as shown by 19th century novelists from Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad. As with novels then, so too with the best of television today. Buffy embodied five crucial points that struck me as I watched this surprising turn of events unfold. First and foremost, Buffy took the archetypal victim of the 1980s’ slasher movies and reinvented her as the unlikely destroyer of monsters and protector of others just like herself.

Given the vast financial and political resources of the professional right-wing establishment arrayed against them, what saved Planned Partenthood was not a similarly powerful political machine, but rather, the legions of once-might-have-been victims whose lives it had touched and changed forever. Individually, one still might easily mistake them for victims. On February 2, they proved decisively that they were not. What happened in real life on that day happened hundreds of times in rehearsal, as it were, throughout the life of the series.

Second, within its own fictional universe, the character Buffy differed from all previous slayers by defying orders and maintaining her non-superhero relationships. This rule-breaking refusal to relinquish the ordinary proved life-saving in multiple ways. Not least, Buffy’s friends brought her back from the dead – not just once, but twice during the series’ seven seasons.

In routine superhero fiction, superheroes save the world; in Buffy, salvation flows both ways.  And that’s exactly what we saw with Planned Parenthood: It was hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” women whose lives had been saved or significantly improved by Planned Parenthood who collectively returned the favour, and made Planned Parenthood invincible in its hour of need.

Third, Buffy is the story of an epic battle between good and evil that goes on right under the noses of the established authorities, who simply chose to look the other way and pretend that it’s not happening – thus enabling the powers of darkness. But those who are being victimised are well aware of what’s going on – and profoundly grateful to have someone on their side.

Fourth, Buffy has two distinct realms of moral struggle. On the one hand, there’s the life and death, good vs evil battle against vampires, demons and other inhuman forces of evil. This battle realm is morally easy – good vs evil – though physically impossibly hard. The second realm – that of everyday highschool life – is far less deadly, but much more morally difficult, usually involving competing, even conflicting goods or evils.

Of course, the two realms soon get jumbled together – it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting otherwise. But the fact that there are two entirely different sorts of moral struggle never goes away. That’s how it is for pro-choice activists as well. The battle against letting someone else control a woman’s body is entirely distinct from that woman’s struggle over what to do when facing an unwanted pregnancy of her own. It really is quite possible to be pro-choice and anti-abortion. Millions of women are.

Last, but not least, Buffy is a fighter. Conservatives never shy from a fight, but liberals are always trying to be reasonable – even when it’s a completely unreasonable thing to do. Perhaps that’s why a former conservative saw things so clearly last week. At his Balloon Juice blog, John Cole wrote:

    I’ve been having a ball this week with the Komen shit-show. Not just because it was such a hideous blunder and there was so much hourly incompetence to chronicle, but because GOD DAMNED IT FEELS GOOD TO BE ON THE OFFENSIVE.

Say what you will about all the wingnutty things I said 2001-2005ish, at least I was looking for a fight with the opposition party and going after them. Since I became a Democrat, it seems like the only time we ever get our damned dander up is with other Democrats…

This time, though, was different. It was nice to watch everyone go for blood, and sink their teeth in and get some. That’s what we need in the Democratic Party. We need a killer instinct. We need to stop putting up with this bullshit from these crazy people… We don’t have to stoop to lies and innuendo, we can go after them with the truth, just like we did this time.

They are lying about tax and regulatory burdens. They are lying about social security. They are lying about Obamacare and Medicare and Medicaid. They are lying about the environment and global warming. They are lying about poor people and black people and gay people and immigrants. They are lying about Obama. They are lying about everything.

There is nothing noble or wise about trying to have rational arguments, or acting like the mature people when you are dealing with fanatics. This stuff is important. You should be pissed off and fighting mad…

The ACORN contrast

Those five points together hit the highlights of how things appeared to me on February 2 and 3.  But I also wanted to know how they looked to someone who’d been on the inside of ACORN when they were under similar attack. So I called up Nathan Henderson-Jones, who had been head of ACORN’s online organising when I first interviewed him.

In 2008 and 2009, the main focus of right-wing attacks on ACORN centered around its work on two fronts: first, its role in registering more than a million low-income voters in key states around the country in the previous decade; second, its role in advising low-income families in becoming homeowners over a similar period of time.

Conservatives claimed that the first was evidence of ACORN’s involvement in massive voter fraud. The only problem was, there’s absolutely zero evidence that massive voter fraud exists in the US today. Indeed, there’s zero evidence of any organised voter fraud at all. Conservative fears about voter fraud are simply a cover story to justify laws making it harder for minorities and other Democratic-leaning voter groups to exercise their right to vote.

The second claim was largely driven by McCain’s guilty conscience. In 2006, he had spoken at an ACORN immigration rally, praising them from the podium – a real problem that ACORN highlighted as McCain tried to demonise them as a way of attacking Obama. In response, McCain doubled down, and released a campaign attack ad, saying, “ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.”

But actually, ACORN’s record was exactly the opposite of what McCain claimed: they had been vigorously active in defending low-income homebuyers from predatory lending and other practices financial institutions used to take advantage of them. On October 17, ACORN released a report, “ACORN and John McCain: The Real Story of the Financial Crisis 1999-2008″, which included this chart “ACORN: A Decade of Fighting on the Frontlines” summarising everything ACORN had done.

Although the media remained heavily biased against ACORN, dutifully repeating discredited right-wing attacks on them over and over again, the impact on ACORN was minimal, until the summer of 2009, when two young conservative activists – James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles -purportedly posing as a pimp and prostitute, but actually passing as a prostitute and her boyfriend, attempted to lure ACORN workers in multiple states into offering them assistance in illegal activities.

After highly-edited tapes were released to the media and on YouTube, Congress moved quickly to cut off funding, not even bothering with the formalities of a hearing. Subsequent investigations showed that the videos were highly deceptive. A report from California’s Attorney General Office found that tapes shot at four California ACORN offices had been “severely edited”, that there was no evidence of criminal conduct by ACORN employees, and that three employees tried to derail the couple’s plans.

A fourth employee, who appeared to aid O’Keefe had actually reported his interactions to a Mexican police detective in order to thwart their plan. In short, the entire project was riddled with deception and fraud, yet it was good enough to get Congress – controlled by Democrats at the time – to act rashly and sufficiently damage ACORN’s reputation that the organisation eventually disbanded.

Planned Parenthood

At the time, Henderson-James told me that ACORN had left itself vulnerable to attack, let its guard down, and failed to respond quickly and effectively. “ACORN itself did not do a good job of responding to these things and we did not do a good job of understanding the position we were in, in the first place after a year of attacks,” he said.

“We had a lot of things on our plate” and worrying about a sex-based sting on under-trained staff was not one of them. He also said that the ease with which ACORN was defunded “really points out how the progressive movement is not a movement. It is a bunch of people who share a political vision for the US, but do it from the feet of several independent organisations that do not have an infrastructure that allows them to communicate quickly with each other, and create ways so that they can function much more as if they were part of a unified movement.”

Returning to him now, almost two-and-a-half years later, I asked him what he thought accounted for the very different ways in which the attacks on the two organisations played out. (Planned Parenthood, incidentally, has already been through similar, but far less successful video sting attacks, one of them involving O’Keefe prior to his ACORN escapade, and a second one which it very publicly responded to by calling in the FBI.)

Henderson-James shared two different perspectives in his comments to me, reflecting views from people he’d been in contact with, discussing the story as it unfolded. “For folks where were intimately involved with it [ACORN] on the inside, some of us were impressed and perhaps a bit jealous of the way that Planned Parenthood was able to take this attack and turn it into $3 million and a whole bunch of goodwill from allies who went to bat on its behalf, in addition to whatever else it was doing for them.”

He also described “another set of reactions, mostly for those who were on the outside of the ACORN fight”. For this second group, “Their reaction was this is an example of folks learning from what happened to ACORN, Planned Parenthood being ready to deal with the attacks.” This involved a number of different dimensions, including “crisis communications, fundraising aps, mobilising allies and political cover, as well as the larger [activist] community – women’s rights, feminists, progressives”.

I went on to ask about the differences in the constituencies the two organisations served. “To the extent that Planned Parenthood’s constituency extends far beyond the most disenfranchised women, it makes it easier to reach that constituency and mobilise that constituency… to defend themselves from attack, and to mobilise them and go on the offensive,” he said.

But, “having said that… Planned Parenthood did the hard work of building those networks in the first place. ACORN itself was very reliant on its membership base, which was mostly disenfranchised folks. But it did not do a very good job of reaching out beyond that membership base to build the type of relationships that Planned Parenthood has been able to draw on.”

Two other factors appeared significant to me. First was the peculiar nature of the political moment when the ACORN firestorm broke. At the time, congressional Democrats were intently focused on healthcare legislation, but they were also deeply on the defensive psychologically, following a full month of Tea Party assaults at town hall meetings during August.

Progressive activists of all stripes were feeling particularly disempowered as Congressional Democrats had spent months on end rejecting progressive priorities like single-payer, or at least the public option, engaged in fruitless attempted compromises with conservatives, only to make themselves into punching bags for a fantasy-based movement of petty thugs intent on shouting them down. It was the worst of all possible times for an organisational attack to take place.

In contrast, Planned Parenthood was favoured overwhelmingly by how dramatically things had changed since then, as epitomised by Arab Spring, the way social media’s impact has exploded, and how that has translated into the rise of the Occupy movement, and the sense of mass empowerment of the 99 per cent.

Make no mistake: we are in the midst of a time of enormous flux, and no one can say how long it will last or where it will lead to. But a time of flux is a time of possibilities, a time of empowerment, of imagination and yes, even magic. Which is the sixth and final reason that Planned Parenthood’s resounding triumph still makes the most sense to me in terms of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. The tide has turned… but it’s still up to us which way it will ultimately flow. By Paul Rosenberg, Al Jazeera

Finally, I walked toward him and I asked him who he wished to give this doll to. ‘It’s the doll that my sister loved most and wanted so much for Christmas. She was sure that Santa Claus would bring it to her.’ I replied to him that maybe Santa Claus would bring it to her after all, and not to worry. But he replied to me sadly. ‘No, Santa Claus can’t bring it to her where she is now. I have to give the doll to my mommy so that she can give it to my sister when she goes there.’ His eyes were so sad while saying this, ‘My Sister has gone to be with God. Daddy says that Mommy is going to see God very soon too, so I thought that she could take the doll with her to give it to my sister.” My heart nearly stopped.

The little boy looked up at me and said, ‘I told daddy to tell mommy not to go yet. I need her to wait until I come back from the mall.’ Then he showed me a very nice photo of himself. He was laughing. He then told me ‘I want mommy to take my picture with her so she won’t forget me.’ ‘I love my mommy and I wish she didn’t have to leave me, but daddy says that she has to go to be with my little sister.’ Then he looked again at the doll with sad eyes, very quietly. I quickly reached for my wallet and said to the boy. ‘Suppose we check again, just in case you do have enough money for the doll!” OK’ he said, ‘I hope I do have enough.’

I added some of my money to his without him seeing and we started to count it. There was enough for the doll and even some spare money. The little boy said, ‘Thank you God for giving me enough money!’ Then he looked at me and added, ‘I asked last night before I went to sleep for God to make sure I had enough money to buy this doll, so that mommy could give it to my sister. He heard me!” ‘I also wanted to have enough money to buy a white rose for my mommy, but I didn’t dare to ask God for too much. But He gave me enough to buy the doll and a white rose.” ‘My mommy loves white roses.’

A few minutes later, the old lady returned and I left with my basket. I finished my shopping in a totally different state of mind from when I started. I couldn’t get the little boy out of my mind. Then I remembered a local newspaper article two days ago, which mentioned a drunk man in a truck, who hit a car occupied by a young woman and a little girl. The little girl died right away and the mother was left in a critical state. The family had to decide whether to pull the plug on the life-sustaining machine because the young woman would not be able to recover from the coma.

Was this the family of the little boy? Two days after this encounter with the little boy I read in the newspaper that the young woman had passed away. I couldn’t stop myself as I bought a bunch of white roses and I went to the funeral home where the body of the young woman was for people to see and make last wishes before her burial. She was there, in her coffin, holding a beautiful white rose in her hand with the photo of the little boy and the doll placed over her chest. I left the place, teary-eyed, feeling that my life had been changed forever. The love that the little boy had for his mother and his sister is still, to this day, hard to imagine, and in a fraction of a second, a drunk driver had taken all this away from him.” Now you have 2 choices: (1) Copy & Paste this on your wall (2) Ignore it as if it never touched your heart…

Nevertheless, it may seem like the difference between is only about a few pennies, but those pennies adds up when you think about how much energy is consumed each year. For more information, visit an energy supply website to estimate the savings you’ll receive when you change your supplier. With this onset of personal choice for consumers, which is a great thing, comes a great personal responsibility, as well. Choose the fastest growing retail energy provider in the market today and make sure to communicate only with honest and helpful people who want you to switch to a cheaper brand of energy.

Sure they are. Kids these days spend all their time playing video games or texting and sexting and cyber-bullying instead of reading and going to movies. And when they do go to the movies, it’s to see the dumb action blockbusters. Instead of going steady, they “hook up.” What kind of music are they listening to? What kind of jobs are they going to be able to find? Where did we go wrong?

The difficult relations between parents and semi-independent, no-longer-cute-and-precocious offspring have caught the eye of filmmakers lately. The parents in The Kids Are All Right are Nic and Jules, a lesbian couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. With their Volvo and lovely-but-not-fancy house, Nic and Jules is a picture of middle-class contentment.

Their two kids, Joni, 18 and brother, Laser, 15, lead complicated lives. Joni, a stellar student and dutiful daughter is put off by the way her best friend, Sasha, “sexualizes everything” and is also attracted to Jai, a cute, nerdy buddy. Laser, under the sway of an obnoxious and anti-social friend named Clay, seems to be tumbling into the male identity crisis.

Her brother’s desire to know where he came from — and perhaps also to find some connection with an adult male — leads Joni to contact the anonymous sperm donor who is at least technically their father, played by Mark Ruffalo.

The Kids Are All Right is, to a large extent, about the unstable, comical and sometimes appalling parental triangle that emerges among the three adults. Teenagers who see this movie may wonder why Mom and Dad (or Dad and Dad, or Mom and Mom, or just Mom or just Dad) are crying at the end, when Joni, as we always knew she would, steps out of the nest and into her own story.

Many more children will already have asked themselves the same question about Toy Story 3 and Up. In Up, the handkerchief moment came as the long, loving marriage of Carl and Ellie Fredricksen was chronicled in a montage that located the film’s emotional heart in the boyhood. In Toy Story 3 the equivalent moment comes when Andy’s mother looks around his empty room and wonders where the time went.

The film Cyrus Draws has an oedipal triangle involving Cyrus; his single mother, Molly and her new boyfriend, John. But the resolution is sweet and affirmative: Cyrus grows up and moves on, helped by the older man.

The family has been the subject of culture-war skirmishing for a long time. There has always been lots of sex in movies and lots of traditionalism as well.

But reality finds interesting reflections on screen, where even simple stories can be full of ambiguity. Take the Twilight series. Here, Bella Swan’s parents are conventionally divorced, loving, lonely people who mostly hover around the margins of her life.

The alternative to this fractured family is not so much the vampire Edward Cullen as membership in one of two non-nuclear groups: the undead Cullen clan, and Jacob’s werewolf tribe. Both of these networks offer a way of life that seems emotionally richer — if also more dangerous — than small-town existence. Bella is different, and the great paradox of American life is that everyone else believes they are too. Their parents will not stop worrying. But there are movies that offer us a measure of comfort. Like Nic and Jules and Andy’s Cyrus’s moms, we try our best and mess things up anyway. And the kids are all right. They can’t help it. Indian Express

However, your baby is able to fully enjoy the nutritional benefits breast milk provides as his digestive system is mature enough to digest it at the time of his birth.

Gut development

When a foetus is formed in his mother’s womb, three layers of cells gradually develop to become the three main components of his body. The first layer forms the nervous system and sensory organs while the second layer forms his muscular, circulatory, and skeletal systems. The third layer of cells forms the digestive system. Your baby’s intestines start to develop as early as week five of pregnancy.

During the third month of foetal development, the foetus’ stomach cells start to secrete fluid. Waste that forms from the foetus goes through the placenta and into mother’s blood. This means that the digestive system has already started functioning even during the foetal stage.

At birth, your baby’s digestive system is still developing and maturing. At this point, he is not ready to accept other types of food except breast milk.

At about six months, your baby’s digestive system is mature enough to digest more complex and solid food substances, like starch, protein, and fat in a non-milk diet. At this stage, he’s ready to be introduced to solid foods (complementary food). It is recommended that you continue giving your child breast milk as he gradually gets used to eating solid food.

In his early childhood, your child’s digestive system continues to mature. The first two years are the most critical. The gut microflora established during this period can greatly influence your child’s long-term immunity. If your child’s digestive health is poor and he is malnourished at this point, his growth and development will be jeopardised.

Within your baby’s gut

At birth, your baby’s gut is sterile. As soon as you start breastfeeding, bacteria are introduced into your baby’s gut. Mother’s breast milk gas several beneficial bacteria, e.g. bifidobacteria and lactobacillus, which are crucial for your baby’s gut health. The number of bacteria, both the good and bad bacteria, increases rapidly in the baby’s first few days of life.

As your baby grows, his gut microflora established during his first two years stabilises, and it usually maintains a balance until he reaches adulthood.

A healthy gut microflora ecosystem is essential to your baby’s overall health. Babies that don’t have the right balance of gut bacteria are likely to be more prone to colic (gas and pain in the abdomen), and are believed to be at greater risk of developing allergy (e.g. eczema) and asthma when they grow up.

Breastfed vs. bottle-fed

Breastfeeding can help your child achieve optimal growth, development, and health. Studies have suggested that children who are breastfed have significantly fewer gastrointestinal, ear, urinary, and respiratory infections. Breast milk is rich in antibodies and it can better protect your child against infections. Breast milk will also encourage the colonisation of good bacteria in the newborn’s gastrointestinal tract.

Formula fed babies’ gut microflora have been found to be different from breastfed babies. Formula-fed infants tend to have far less bifidobacteria, a bacteria that contributes towards the development of healthy gut microflora. Some studies suggest that there is increased risk of atopic eczema in infants who are given formula milk compared to those who are exclusively breastfed.

Moreover, bifidogenic factors that are found in breast milk help to boost the growth of beneficial bacteria in the gut, which lessens the risk of diarrhoea and other intestinal illnesses. In other words, breast milk keeps the digestive system in good condition.

It is therefore essential to breastfeed babies, especially during the first few days of life. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that mothers breastfeed their children exclusively for at least the first six months and continue breastfeeding their child up till the age of two years. In fact, both UNICEF and WHO encourage mother’s to breastfeed up to two years, if possible. This is because children’s immune systems are not as strong yet, so they need more protection, which breast milk can provide.

Care for your child’s digestive health

You might think the digestive system is merely to help us digest food, but the truth is, it plays a much bigger role. Without a healthy digestive system, your child can’t get all the nutrients he needs to grow properly and stay healthy. A problematic gut can affect your child in several ways, including his body weight, nutritional status, immune system, and even his emotions.

Your child’s digestive system is his “food processing machine”. Food must first be adequately broken down and properly absorbed before it can be utilised by his body. If any part of the process goes wrong, your child’s nutritional status is at risk, and when this happens, it may affect his physical as well as cognitive development.

Your child’s digestion affects his metabolic rate, which in turn affects his overall weight. Good digestion helps optimise metabolism. When your child is not properly nourished, it interferes with nutrient breakdown, absorption, and metabolism, which leads to accumulation of toxins in the body.

Your child’s digestive tract lining is also his body’s first line of defence as it acts as a barrier that stops invaders from entering the body. Studies have indicated that a large proportion of the body’s immune cells lies within the gastrointestinal wall.

This makes sense as your digestive tract makes up the largest surface area in your body and is exposed to an enormous amount of food during a lifetime.

So, if you want your child to grow and stay healthy for many years to come, start taking good care of his little tummy now. By Prof Dr Christopher Boy Chiong Meng, The Star

Nevertheless, it takes courage to really love without expecting anything in return.  There is deep meaning in those yearnings if we take time to really listen to them, and not just rush to cover them up, numb ourselves out, or avoid the hard work and feelings. There is no rushing personal growth in marriage counseling. Time tempers the pain, but sometimes how awful that sounds when you are just coming to grip with the news that your beloved is no longer yours to love. It really hurts, but love just is and you cannot will it away or toward you. It meanders on its own accord and takes it sweet time, or rushes in with heady abandon despite your best intentions and self-protection.

Sometimes no matter how much it hurts to love, there is no letting go of those feelings, because there is nothing to let go of and at least nothing tangible. Now, if you have asked yourself the question “how do I save my marriage from divorce” you have come to the right place. You need to have the best marriage counselor at your fingertips, if your marriage is struggling, unhappy, or on the verge of divorce. You need to know what factors could be working against your marriage right now, even if you see nothing wrong. Many people believe that their marriage is working fine until their spouse gives them the wake-up call.

Nevertheless, if you’re finding yourself overwhelmed due to demands for your time and relationships with love ones are being negatively affected, then reconnecting with your family and friends is something everyone needs to have. And that was what transpired during our recent travel at my in-laws place. Upon arrival, we were greeted by some of their old time friends, and relatives. Since almost fifteen years had passed that we were not able to visit back this place, probably the reason why dozens of their in-laws gather around us for some pleasantries.

The instant influx and gathering of my in-laws really amazed us. Yet, I know that the best way to accommodate and pleased these people is through their stomach. So without much ado, we immediately initiated a recipe search for the purpose which turns out also to be more challenging and exciting. I really thank my better half in setting up priorities and having a long time perspective which is fantastic. Towards it, investing time in health and happiness of your family is a very valuable high-priority use of time. After all, and in the end, it was really an excellent family vacation.

Nevertheless, you need to know what factors could be working against your marriage right now, even if you see nothing wrong. Many people believe that their marriage is working fine until their spouse gives them the wake-up call. It takes courage to really love without expecting anything in return.  There is deep meaning in those yearnings if we take time to really listen to them, and not just rush to cover them up, numb ourselves out, or avoid the hard work and feelings. Sometimes no matter how much it hurts to love, there is no letting go of those feelings, because there is nothing to let go of, and at least nothing tangible. Hence, most importantly, try to undergo Marriage Counseling before anything comes too late.

In a nutshell, how you can love someone, and they just can’t show up in return. These were the words of a friend grieving the loss of a lover who turned for comfort. There is no rushing personal growth. Time tempers the pain, but we all know how awful that sounds when you are just coming to grips with the news that your beloved is no longer yours to love. You’ll feel better, just give it some time, are some default words of comfort, except, they don’t really comfort the right person. Love just is, you cannot will it away or toward you. It meanders on its own accord and takes it sweet time, or rushes in with heady abandon despite your best intentions and self-protection.

Nevertheless, one of the basics of good marriage is dealing effectively between yourself and your spouse the problems that will arise along the way and this is both applicable principles to old timers and newlyweds. There are different known best methods to Save Marriage so minor problems won’t escalate to heated arguments and hassle confrontations. Whether these are long term rooted problems or some rare situations in your married lives or merely time, it has brought this failures in marriages, you don’t need to tolerate such sufferings, and does not need to conclude in failed marriages. Sometimes it is just time to move on. Sometimes, to save your soul you have to free yourself of all that is oppressive.

Sometimes, you must remove the albatross around your neck if you have any hope of living out your life with happiness, hope, self-respect, and meaningfulness. Tell your spouse that they are appreciated. How To Save Your Marriage takes positive acts of appreciation, love and respect to counter every one negative occurrence.  It is probably easy to remember the last time you stated a criticism, but when was the last time you gave your spouse compliments? When you are engaged in disagreement, make attempts to turn the fight around. Use humor, empathy, interest, and affection to say something appreciative, to make an attempt to repair the interaction. Consider what is good for the relationship rather than listening only to your own thoughts and feelings.

evolutiongems.pdf) briefly describes 15 examples published in the journal Nature over the past decade that offer powerful evidence for the theory. I will describe three examples.

1 The origin of feathers

The fossil record is one of the main pillars of evidence on which the theory of evolution stands. But critics claim the fossil record is fatally flawed because of the lack of “transitional forms” that illustrate intermediates in the transition of one major group of animals to another. The critics are wrong, and the first two cases I will cite describe examples of transitional forms.

Evolutionists tell us that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs. A famous fossil that provides evidence for this was discovered in Bavaria in 1861. The fossil is called Archaeopteryx . The creature displays reptilian features, such as teeth and a long, bony tail, but it also has wings and flight feathers like a bird. It is commonly interpreted as a fossil of the earliest known bird. But has the fossil record thrown up any dinosaurs with feathers – unambiguous transitional forms?

Yes. Fossils found in China in the 1980s showed a variety of dinosaurs with feathers and feathery plumage. Many of these feathered dinosaurs could not have flown, which means that feathers evolved for reasons other than flight (heat insulation, for example). Flight was an extra opportunity that was exploited by creatures already carrying feathers.

2 Land-living ancestors of whales

Whales are mammals, like ourselves, but they have lived in the water for millions of years. There is good evidence that mammals originated on land, which means that, originally, the ancestors of whales forsook the land for the water. The fossil record now provides good evidence for this.

There is no shortage of fossils from the first 10 million years of whale evolution of creatures showing whale features (anatomy of the ear, for example) and limbs like those of land-living animals from which they descended. But until 2007, there was no report of a good fossil of the land-living creature from which whales eventually evolved. Work by Hans Thewissen and others described now-extinct creatures called raoellids that looked like small dogs but were more closely related to even-toed ungulates (a group that includes cows, sheep, deer, pigs and hippos). Molecular evidence had already hinted at a deep evolutionary connection between whales and even-toed ungulates.

Thewissen’s work shows that one raeollid, Indohyus (oictured), is similar to whales but unlike other even-toed ungulates in various ways (for example, ear and teeth structure) that indicate the creature spent much of its time in the water. The raeollid diet is very unlike the whale diet, suggesting that the impetus to take to the water might have been dietary change. Indohyus is definitely a good candidate for a transitional form.

3 The molecular basis for Darwin’s finches

All living processes and behaviours are underpinned by molecular mechanisms. Evolution works through molecular mechanisms, and these mechanisms are being elucidated by elegant research.

Darwin described several species of finches in the Galapagos Islands that all looked similar except for their beaks. Ground finches had broad, deep beaks, warbler finches had slender, pointed beaks, and so on. Beak size and shape reflected differences in diet. Darwin speculated that all the finches had a common ancestor that originally migrated to the islands, and that natural selection had then evolved a variety of forms from this common ancestor suited to different ecological niches on the island.

Arhat Abzhanov and others have studied the genes that are switched on and off in the developing beaks of finch chicks. They found that differences in beak shape coincided with variations in the expression of the gene for calmodulin, a molecule that regulates the signalling effected by calcium on metabolism and development. For example, calmodulin is expressed stronger in species with long pointed beaks than in species with more robust beaks.

Biologists are advancing from the documentation of evolution at whole animal level to identification of the underlying molecular mechanisms. By William Reville, Irish Times