Hasta La Gadget!

One of the states with the most restrictive voting rules in the nation will ask the Supreme Court to step in and let it enforce them in time for the presidential election.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) said on Friday he’s ready to ask the justices to block an appeals court ruling issued last week that said the state’s omnibus voting law targeted blacks “with almost surgical precision.”

“Changing our state’s election laws close to the upcoming election, including common sense voter ID, will create confusion for voters and poll workers,” McCrory said in a statement, adding that he expects to file an emergency petition with the Supreme Court “by early next week.”

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit refused to put on hold its earlier ruling, which made waves for decreeing that the state’s legislature had passed “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow” ― and found that lawmakers acted with the intent to disenfranchise African-American voters.

To remedy those violations, the court enjoined the law in full, ordering the restoration of early voting, out-of-precinct voting and same-day registration, as well as non-enforcement of the voter ID provision. In response, the state reassured the appeals court that it had the means to comply with the ruling ahead of the election.

“Because of these assurances, we are confident that North Carolina can conduct the 2016 election in compliance with our injunction,” the appeals court said in its follow-up order on Thursday.

But McCrory didn’t seem convinced, insisting that allowing last week’s ruling to take effect does a disservice to North Carolina.

“The court should have stayed their ruling, which is legally flawed, factually wrong, and disparaging to our state,” he said in his statement.

It is unlikely that McCrory will fare much better at the Supreme Court. Under its rules, he would need to convince five justices that he has a strong enough case to merit an order allowing North Carolina to once again enforce its multiple voting restrictions.

As the 4th Circuit explained on Thursday, the justices themselves may be reluctant to intervene given the conflict contrary orders may cause for poll workers and voters so close to the election.

“Court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,” the court said, quoting from a 2006 Supreme Court case. “As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Take a minute to think about the most valuable things in life. If you are like most people, your list includes things such as family, friends, fitness and finances (money).

Now, how would you rank these things on your list? It might surprise you to discover that many of those who are considered highly successful all rank the same thing at number one: time.

Why do these people consider time to be such a valuable asset? Shouldn’t health be No. 1? Well, think about it: You can be healthy, and then get sick, and then regain your health.

How about money? You can lose all your money, and then you can make it all back.

Friends are important, and yet, how many friends did you have back in college that you no longer keep in touch with? Or even people who were guests at your wedding, and that was the last day you ever saw them? Yes, friends are prized, yet we lose them and make new ones all the time.

Your spouse might mean the world to you. And yet, 50% of married people get a divorce, and many divorced people find a new husband or wife that is suddenly the love of their life.

But time… You can never lose time and get it back again. You can’t spend time and go earn more of it. You can’t buy it, rent it, or borrow it. Use it wisely and enjoy the benefits. Squander it, and it’s gone forever.

The Great Equalizer

Some people are born rich; others born poor. Some have Ivy League degrees, while others are high school dropouts. Some are genetically gifted athletes, others physically challenged. But regardless of our backgrounds and talents, all of us have the same number of minutes in a day. Time is the lowest common denominator.

Think about how much attention you give to your money. Working hard to make money, tracking that money in your bank account, researching the best ways to invest said money, reading about ways to make more money, worrying that somebody might steal your money.

You would never leave your wallet sitting out in the open, would you? You would never give your ATM bank card and password to a bunch of strangers.

And yet we typically think little about our time. We routinely let people steal it away from us, even though it’s our most valuable possession.

So how do we break free? Consider three examples of what I like to call “time-thieves”, and how you can guard yourself from this particular form of grand larceny:

Meetings

Meetings are notorious for killing time. They start late, are poorly run, and often end without any material accomplishment.

Mark Cuban once told me, “Never take a meeting unless someone is writing you a check.” While we might not have the same level of control as Cuban, if you’re sitting in a meeting and discover that you don’t need to be there, just excuse yourself politely and leave. Even better, give thoughtful consideration before the meeting as to whether you should even attend in the first place.

Email

My poll of over 100 CEOs recently revealed that too much email is the No. 1 thing that’s impacting their productivity. Research shows that breaking our concentration to respond to an email takes away more time than you might think. (This study by the University of California-Irvine estimates that it takes upwards of 20 minutes to regain momentum following an interruption.) Further, since we’re constantly connected, we may be tempted to check email every free moment we get–instead of using those free moments to do something more productive.

The most successful people know that the temptation to check and respond to messages is strong. So, they shut off their notifications and only check messages at specific times during the day.

Helping Others

You want to be approachable and helpful. But you only have 1,440 minutes in each day. How can you help others while ensuring that you achieve your priorities?

Instead of having an open door policy, have designated times for communication–similar to “office hours”–when team members are free to ask questions and discuss issues. Doing so will keep them from becoming dependent on you and allows you to use your time more wisely. Another strategy is to pre-allocate the amount of time you’ll spend each week or month helping others not on your team. How many “cup-of-coffee” or “pick-your-brain” meetings do you typically do? You can still say “yes,” but if your allotted time for next month is up, you just say “yes” but schedule the meeting for the following month.

Of course, time-thieves are everywhere. The key is to identify which ones are robbing you blind, then develop your own strategy to combat them.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Regular medicine is awakening to the dumbfounding reality that clinical care accounts for just 10%-20% of the factors contributing to health. But if research recently presented by a leader in the revitalization of the naturopathic medical profession – and of the movements for functional and integrative medicine – is correct, even the most aggressive adopters of the new thinking are still missing the boat.

The new thinking argues that if we want to create health, we need to address things like poverty, education, genetics and healthy behaviors. The figure describes these.

Yet according to best-selling author and researcher Joseph Pizzorno, ND, even these new adopters are grossly understating the most significant factor. In a recent presentation at Snowbird, Utah at the annual conference of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians, Pizzorno presented compelling evidence that – if his calculations hold up – “toxicity is the primary driver of disease.”

Pizzorno, the co-author of the Textbook of Natural Medicine – the first major textbook detailing the evidence behind natural therapeutics – is the leading figure in the re-emergence of the naturopathic medical profession over the past 40 years. The founding president of what is now Bastyr University is presently the editor of the peer-reviewed and PubMed-indexed scientific publication, Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal.

Since leaving the Bastyr presidency, Pizzorno led a multi-year employee health project with a significant Canadian employer. Through it, he opened his eyes further to what he now believes is the most important yet grossly under-respected target for remedial action if health is our goal.

Pizzorno and colleagues first shared well-known data showing that our present chronic disease epidemics – including obesity, diabetes, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and kidney disease – are temporally associated with a parallel rise in environmental pollutants. The worst are what are called POPS – “persistent organic pollutants.” These are chemical compounds that are defined as “resistant to environmental degradation through chemical, biological, and photolytic processes.” They have long half-lives and hang around in our soils and tissues.

The parallel arcs of increase – see the graph below — in each from 1960s to the present are startling. In his presentation, Pizzorno showed that, in contradistinction, the sugar-and-diabetes relationship is not nearly as compelling.

In his presentation, Pizzorno then described a mathematical model he and his team built for predicting the “attributable fraction” of a disease that can be linked to specific chemical exposures. The team worked out data for high profile POPS: DDT, glyphosates, arsenic, lead, vinyl chloride and a dozen more.

The conclusions are ugly. Reported Pizzorno: “Greater than 50% of ADHD is due to just 3 toxins. Over 50% of diabetes is due to phthalates, arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.” His team found direct correlations between specific POPs and IQ decreases in children. Individual toxins were found to have profound impacts on numerous serious diseases. “Nearly 45% of Alzheimer’s,” reported Pizzorno, “is linked to DDT alone.” The calculations put the attributable fraction of arsenic to prostate cancer at 31.5%. Over 40% of gout in women is arsenic related. PCBs had a high association with heart attacks. And on and on.

The POPS are everywhere. Pizzorno presented a slide that denoted the following proportional sources: food (70%), water (10%), house and yard chemicals (10%), air (5%) and health and beauty aids (5%).

I asked Pizzorno after the talk if the formula has been vetted. He responded that he’d had it reviewed by multiple scientists and the method is under discussion. He added that “the results are so surprising that all possible critiques need to be thoroughly considered.” That process continues.

The week after the presentation, I opened my email to a document from the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences entitled “The Interplay Between Environmental Chemical Exposures and Obesity: Proceedings of a Workshop.” The workshop was a world removed from the gathering of naturopathic physicians to whom Pizzorno presented his findings. Yet they had similar conclusions.

Instead of naturopathic doctors whose whole system world views dispose them toward anticipating health problems from toxins, the report sponsors included Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell and Colgate Palmolive. Yet here, too, according to the introduction to the report, “the speakers at the workshop discussed evidence from both studies with animal models and human epidemiological studies that exposure to environmental chemicals is linked both to weight gain and to glucose tolerance, insulin sensitivity, inflammation, and other aspects of the metabolic syndrome.”

Their content was neither as wide-ranging or causality-specific as that presented by Pizzorno. Yet the agreement that addressing diet and lifestyle alone are not going to get to the bottom of the huge and costly obesity epidemic is strong. And it should not surprise that the naturopathic and integrative medicine communities remain a few steps ahead of regular medicine in respecting the damage of these agents in human health.

The implications of Pizzorno’s research and analysis are profound. The piece of the pie chart above on determinants of health would need to vastly expand from the 10% share attributed to the “physical environment” to reflect the corrosive, disruptive forces of toxins on our tissues and life processes.

Presidential candidates vie over whether we need $1-trillion or $500-billion or $250-billion to begin to get our nation’s infrastructure in order. But what is the budget needed for economic conversion from POPS-riddled industry, agriculture, energy production, food processing, housing and consumer goods to methods in each of these arenas that co-habit with human health? Isn’t this an infrastructure we need to address?

Pizzorno’s data suggest that unless we wake to more sustainable living, we should prepare ourselves for a paradoxical future. Our highways and bridges and schools and water systems seem to have bipartisan support for renovation. Yet these fresh environs will be inhabited by human beings crippled by diseases of toxicity.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

American TV viewers used social media on Friday to vent their anger at U.S. broadcaster NBC for delaying the screening of the opening ceremony of the Rio Games by an hour and then going to repeated commercial breaks during the show.

NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp, has the U.S. media rights for South America’s first Olympic Games and said it decided not to show the ceremony live because its producers and commentators wanted time to put it into context for Americans.

“It’s not a sports competition,” a NBC Sports spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Reuters during the ceremony.

“It’s a cultural ceremony that requires deep levels of understanding, with numerous camera angles and our commentary laid over it. We think it’s important to give it the proper context. And primetime is still when the most people are available to watch.”

But many viewers were upset at waiting to see a global event while audiences and news media in the rest of the world were already sharing pictures of it on the Web.

“The rest of the world has been watching it LIVE for a half hour now,” said one tweet before the NBC telecast started.

Another chimed in: “Great idea NBC. Don’t air what should be a global cultural event live. Why would everyone want to watch and enjoy together?”

Some journalists also showed their frustration, including Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker.

“Just staggeringly irritating that – 20 years after the birth of the web – NBC still shows the Olympics with a time delay,” Baker tweeted.

Others were annoyed at repeated ad breaks, including one who tweeted: “Can NBC slip in a bit of the Olympic opening ceremony between the commercials?!”

On commercial breaks, the NBC spokesperson said the delay enabled it to insert ads into the broadcast without depriving viewers of much of the ceremony.

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker and Leela de Kretser in Rio De Janeiro; Writing by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Andrew Hay)

For more Olympics coverage:

• Olympic Opening Ceremony To Scrap Allegedly Racist Skit With Gisele
• Meet The 2016 Olympics Refugee Team
• Vintage Photos Of The First Modern Olympics Show That Sports Are Timeless

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Nothing embodies the aloha spirit more than Hawaii’s most recognizable gesture: the shaka.

The popular sign, sometimes known as “hang loose” in other parts of the world, is made by making a fist and then extending the thumb and pinky outward. The gesture has many meanings in the islands, including saying “hello,” “goodbye” and “thank you.” Most importantly, it represents pride in the Aloha State and its local culture.

Our readers have been putting their Hawaii pride on full display in their #AlohaHuffPost pics. Here are some of our favorites, because there’s nothing better than a solid shaka and a hefty dose of aloha spirit.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.