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With great sadness we must report that veteran actor Don S. Davis passed away on June 29, 2008. He was 65 years old.

Don co-starred on Stargate SG-1 for the show's first seven years, helping to launch the enduring science fiction franchise. Davis played Major General George Hammond, base commander and a father figure to many of the show's characters.

He is also well-known for his portrayal of Major Garland Briggs in Twin Peaks.

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research ("Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids," read one), which isn't surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we've been raised to believe is true. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents' happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable?

Parents may openly lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing. "If you admit that kids and parenthood aren't making you happy, it's basically blasphemy," says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. "From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you're supposed to feel like a kid because you're there with your kids, we've made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it's disappointing when you find out it's not."

Soldiers risk ruin while awaiting benefit checks

By MICHELLE ROBERTS – Jun 16, 2008

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — His lifelong dream of becoming a soldier had, in the end, come to this for Isaac Stevens: 28, penniless, in a wheelchair, fending off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

Stevens' descent from Army private first-class, 3rd Infantry Division, 11 Bravo Company, began in 2005 — not in battle, since he was never sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan, but with a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. He suffered a head injury and spinal damage.

The injury alone didn't put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy — specifically, the way injured soldiers are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow.

"When I got out, I hate to say it, but man, that was it. Everybody just kind of washed their hands of me, and it was like, `OK, you're on your own,'" said Stevens, who was discharged in November and was in a shelter by February. He has since moved into a temporary San Antonio apartment with help from Operation Homefront, a nonprofit organization.

Nearly 20,000 disabled soldiers were discharged in the past two fiscal years, and lawmakers, veterans' advocates and others say thousands could be facing financial ruin while they wait for their claims to be processed and their benefits to come through.

An Honor That Bush Is Unlikely to Embrace

By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — Reagan has his highways. Lincoln has his memorial. Washington has the capital (and a state, too). But President Bush may soon be the sole president to have a memorial named after him that you can contribute to from the bathroom.

From the Department of Damned-With-Faint-Praise, a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

The plan, naturally hatched in a bar, would place a vote on the November ballot to provide “an appropriate honor for a truly unique president.”

"The teacher looked and me and said: 'We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of "V." And she said 'yes, I do.' And she said, 'well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'"

..."But things got worse when school officials used the "evidence" and accepted the completely unsubstantiated word of the seer by reporting the case to Children's Aid, which promptly opened a file on the family.

"They reported me to Children's Aid," Leduc declares, still disbelieving. "Based on a psychic!"...

...under the Child and Family Services Act, anyone who works with children and has reasonable grounds to suspect a youngster is being harmed, must report it immediately - and the CAS has an obligation to follow up.

And so a case worker came to the Leduc home to discuss the allegations of sexual misconduct, only to admit there wasn't a shred of evidence that anything had ever happened at all. They labelled Leduc a "diligent" mother doing the best she could for her child under difficult circumstances, closed the file and left, calling the report "ridiculous."

"It is highly unusual, I will admit, to have a case called in based upon what a psychic might say," concedes Sue Dale of the Simcoe County CAS.

June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Turning dozens of hungry children away from a free meals program wasn't how Vince Harper wanted to start the summer.

Harper oversees a program in Santa Rosa, California, that provides food to kids during schools' summer recess. More than 90 lined up at a community center on June 9, the first day of the service. Only 50 meals were available.

"It's a terrible feeling," said Harper, 41, director of youth and neighborhood services for the Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County. "You have to tell them to come back tomorrow, and hopefully they will."

As California schools let out this month, food banks in the state face record demand for free meals from families pressed by food price inflation and economic hardship.

Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties has requested extra donations, saying 115,000 children may go hungry in the region. The San Francisco Food Bank has been forced to find new sources to distribute enough food for 66,000 meals a day, a 16 percent increase from last year.

"There are some kids this summer that might not have enough food because they're not getting meals at school," said Marguerite Nowak, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Food Bank.

NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the "dark triad" persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

But being just slightly evil could have an upside: a prolific sex life, says Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "We have some evidence that the three traits are really the same thing and may represent a successful evolutionary strategy."

Jonason and his colleagues subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them for each of the dark triad traits. They also asked about their attitudes to sexual relationships and about their sex lives, including how many partners they'd had and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

The study found that those who scored higher on the dark triad personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, Jonason reported at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Kyoto, Japan, earlier this month. But the correlation only held in males....

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

That's because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John's and a Kmart, will be a "pro-life pharmacy" -- meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.

The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients' rights against those of health-care workers who assert a "right of conscience" to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.

"The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience -- that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral," said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. "Every pharmacist has the right to do the same thing," Brejcha said.

But critics say the stores could create dangerous obstacles for women seeking legal, safe and widely used birth control methods.

"I'm very, very troubled by this," said Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center, a Washington advocacy group. "Contraception is essential for women's health. A pharmacy like this is walling off an essential part of health care. That could endanger women's health."

Tennessee Dem apologizes for Obama remarks

NASHVILLE, June 18 (UPI) -- A prominent Tennessee Democratic leader has apologized for comments connecting Barack Obama to terrorists.

Fred Hobbs has apologized for recent comments in which he said Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, "may be terrorist-connected," The Nashville Tennessean reported Wednesday.

Hobbs, a member of the Tennessee Democratic Party's executive committee, said in a brief statement posted on the party Web site that he wasn't "as well prepared as I should have been when speaking with reporters" and that his remarks were based on "what I had seen reported on Fox News. . . I should have taken some time to check the accuracy of what I saw on television before speaking publicly."

SAN FRANCISCO - Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin fell in love at a time when lesbians risked being arrested, fired from their jobs and sent to electroshock treatment.

On Monday afternoon, more than a half-century after they became a couple, Lyon and Martin plan to become the first same-sex couples to legally exchange marriage vows in San Francisco and among the first in the state.

"It was something you wanted to know, 'Is it really going to happen?' And now it's happened, and maybe it can continue to happen," Lyon said.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom plans to officiate at the private ceremony in his City Hall office before 50 invited guests. He picked Martin, 87, and Lyon, 84, for the front of the line in recognition of their long relationship and their status as pioneers of the gay rights movement....

Judge tosses school official's lawsuit against Fox News

A federal judge has thrown out a school superintendent's lawsuit against Fox News, saying the cable news channel acted unprofessionally but without malice when anchors on "Fox and Friends" reported a parody story about ham as fact last year.

The case was an outgrowth of an April 2007 prank in which a middle school student tossed a slab of leftover Easter ham onto a table surrounded by Somali Muslim youngsters, knowing the Muslims would be offended. Muslims consider pork unclean.

A few days later, a parody story spoofing the ham controversy was posted online. The story attributed numerous made-up quotes to Superintendent Leon Levesque, including the need to teach kids that "ham is not a toy" and references to developing an "anti-ham response plan." The joke story, written by freelancer Nicholas Plagman, falsely listed the Associated Press as the source of the information.

The spoof was reported as fact on "Fox and Friends" on April 23. After Levesque contacted Fox, the network aired a retraction.

Among other things, the anchors had quoted Levesque as saying, "All our students should feel welcome in our schools, knowing that they are safe from attacks with ham, bacon, pork chops or any other delicious meat that comes from pigs."

The anchors also told viewers several times, "We are not making this up."

In his slander suit, Levesque who sought $75,000 in damages, said he was ridiculed and overwhelmed for days with phone calls and hate mail, including threatening calls to his home.

U.S. District Judge D. Brock Hornby, who sits in Portland, concluded Tuesday that Fox News was unprofessional in reporting false and "outrageous quotations" without confirming their accuracy, but did not act out of malice.

Named as defendants in the suit were Fox News Network, and "Fox and Friends" co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade.

The Fox co-hosts "were certainly gullible," Hornby wrote, adding that portions of the fake story were "so absurd that they should have raised the defendants' truth-seeking antennae and caused them to question the accuracy of the article."

But failure to investigate before publishing, "even when a reasonably prudent person would have done so, is not sufficient to establish reckless disregard," the judge concluded. "The First Amendment protects journalists even when they are gullible."

Which brain trust thought this up? From UPI:

Report: PTSD barracks near firing range

FORT BENNING, Ga.,  June 3 (UPI) -- A newly built Army barracks designed to help soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder is located near a firing range, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The location of the barracks on the grounds of Fort Benning (Ga.) is producing additional stress and anxiety attacks among patients who are within earshot of constant barrages of rifle and machine gun fire from training exercises, the newspaper said.

The barracks for the Warrior Transition Battalion, part of the Martin Army Community Hospital at Fort Benning, were established as part of an effort to ease the growing number of soldiers with PTSD back into normal life. But in interviews with the Post, barracks residents said the proximity to the firing range is counterproductive.

"You hear a lot of shots, it puts you in a defensive mode," Sgt. Jonathan Strickland, a diagnosed PTSD sufferer, told the newspaper. "My heart starts racing and I get all excited and irritable."

Army officials said they were unaware of problems with the barracks' location.

"No soldier has talked with me about the ranges," Lt. Col. Sean Mulcahey, commander of the Warrior Transition Battalion, told the Post. "If it is an issue, "we will address it."

Rock pioneer Bo Diddley dies at age 79

A spokeswoman says rock pioneer Bo Diddley has died. He was 79.

The spokeswoman says Diddley died of heart failure Monday. He had suffered a heart attack in August 2007, three months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.

Doctors said the stroke affected his ability to speak, and he had returned to Florida to continue rehabilitation.

Diddley was known for his homemade square guitar, dark glasses and black hat.

His first single, "Bo Diddley," introduced record buyers in 1955 to his signature rhythm: bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp, often summarized as "shave and a haircut, two bits." The B side, "I'm a Man," with its slightly humorous take on macho pride, also became a rock standard.