 |
 |
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|||
Patriot Ledger: Teens are unemployed and summer-jobless
The nation's sluggish economy is leaving high school students with slim pickings for part-time jobs and recent high school graduates with few options for full-time employment. The outlook for summer, normally a boom time for seasonal positions for teens, looks just as bleak, reports the April 3 Patriot Ledger. Experts say the lack of jobs for teens is felt across the country and attribute the shortage to factors ranging from immigration to job displacement by older workers. In Massachusetts, the number of younger workers has dropped from 163,000 in 2000 to about 130,000 today. Peter Doeringer, a CAS professor of economics, says there may be one bright spot on the horizon for the youth labor force in Massachusetts: the Democratic National Convention, which Boston will host in July. “It's a small window of opportunity,” he says, “but a small window is better than no window at all.”
New York Times: Jesus as warrior
The new apocalyptic novel Glorious Appearing interprets Jesus at the Second Coming not as a gentle pacifist but as an aggressive warrior, one with a “conviction like a flame of fire” in his eyes, able to eviscerate nonbelievers merely by speaking. David Kirkpatrick writes in an April 4 New York Times article that the shift in the image of Jesus in American culture “corresponds to a widespread sense among many conservative Christians that their values are under assault in a culture war with the secular society around them,” and coincides with the growing interest in Biblical prophecies of the apocalypse around the turn of the millennium, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and two wars with Iraq. It is the warrior image of Jesus that is portrayed in Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, says Stephen Prothero, a CAS professor, chairman of the religion department, and author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. “When you see him stand up at the end of the movie, he reminds you of Schwarzenegger,” he says. “I think that movie shows more of a macho Jesus, who, in this case, is brutalized instead of brutalizing. I definitely think the pendulum is swinging toward a darker, more martial, macho concept of the Messiah.”
The Western Producer (Saskatoon, Canada): Go canola!
A 1960s study of men in seven countries found that those from Crete, Greece, rarely died from a heart attack despite consuming more fat than their counterparts. “There was something that the men were doing different in Crete that was protecting them,” says R. Curtis Ellison, a MED professor of medicine and public health and chief of the section of preventive medicine and epidemiology at Boston Medical Center, at an address before the Canola Council of Canada, reports the April 1 Western Producer. The study's researchers, he says, discovered that the Cretan diet of large quantities of snails and purslane, a wild green plant used in salads, contained a lot of alpha-linolenic acid, an omega 3 fatty acid also found in canola oil. Ellison is using the results of the 1960 study and the omega 3 research that followed it to promote the Mediterranean diet, which recommends canola and canola-based margarine rather than butter and vegetable oils high in linoleic acids. “This diet happens to have a little past,” he says, saying it goes back to the time of Homer. Ellison adds that while fish oil is a good source of omega 3 fatty acids, many people don't like eating fish or prefer it fried, which removes the omega 3 content. His diet includes red meat a few times a month, poultry and fish a few times a week, and olive or canola oil daily, along with cheese, fruit, vegetables, legumes, and grains.
9
April 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations