SOURCE: CNN

Actress Lindsay Lohan checked herself into a substance abuse rehab program late Monday, a source close to the actress said.

The source did not reveal which rehab program Lohan had chosen. Lohan’s entry into rehab came three days after a Los Angeles, California, judge ordered her to jail without bail in the wake of a failed drug test. She spent just 14 hours in jail because another judge allowed her to post a bond Friday evening. She spent 23 days in a court-ordered rehab program at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center last month, following 13 days in a Los Angeles County jail.

“Substance abuse is a disease, which unfortunately doesn’t go away over night,” Lohan wrote in a September 17 Twitter message. “I am working hard to overcome it and am taking positive steps.”

Her father, Michael Lohan, has been urging his daughter to go to rehab voluntarily.

“Finally, they listened to me,” he said Sunday.

He said on Friday that he was praying that defense lawyer Shawn Chapman Holley “does the right thing and advises her to go right into rehab now, and show the judge she’s serious, because in 30 days when she goes back before the judge he can do whatever he wants.”

Rehabs to the Stars
Typically Lohan has checked into upscale reabs that are quite good at keeping her residency secret. She does however have to forego many normal outside services, like iPhone repair. And, while these rehabs may be something akin to comfort zone Toronto when it comes to socializing, they are lock-down facilities in most cases. Getting Playstation repair guys in the door is one thing, and having access to house music another.

Lohan posted a $300,000 bail and was released from jail late Friday night, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said. A judge granted Lohan bail Friday night, overturning a decision earlier in the day that sent the actress to jail until a probation revocation hearing four weeks away, a court spokesman said.

The bail terms required Lohan to be fitted with a SCRAM alcohol-detection bracelet, Los Angeles County Superior Court spokesman Allan Parachini said.

Judge Patricia Schnegg granted Lohan’s bail after Holley filed documents just before court closed Friday afternoon, Parachini said.

Judge Eldin Fox ordered the preliminary revocation of Lohan’s probation Friday morning based on a probation report saying she tested positive for controlled-substance use. The probation revocation hearing was set for October 22.

_____________________________________

MY TAKE: Monmouth County municipal court attorney fees couldn’t keep pace with the amount of bail Lohan has paid to date just to get out of jail, rehab costs, DUI fees and fines. Not that there isn’t any Monmouth County DWI lawyer breathing that wouldn’t give his or her right arm to have Lohan as a client. You can’t pay for that kind of publicity as an attorney.

——————————————————

OTHER RESOURCES

Recession Proof Your Career

CEO jobs at most of the major companies out there are not as widely available as they were a few years ago. So many job seekers out there looking for work are throwing the employment situation off tilt, and the economy has companies holding back on big-hire expenses.

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times

A Montana woman reportedly used a piece of zucchini to fend off a charging bear said to have attacked one of her dogs.

The woman was stirred after midnight by a tussle in the backyard of her home near Frenchtown, Missoula County Sheriff’s Lt. Rich Maricelli said. She went to investigate and found a 200-pound black bear attacking one of her two dogs, a 12-year-old collie.

The woman stood at her back door and screamed to divert the bear’s attention from the dog. She told police the bear then charged her.

“The bear growled and was very aggressive and tried to come inside of her back door,” Maricelli said. “She was able to stop the pursuing bear by improvising.”

The bear took a swipe at her with its paw and tore her jeans. The woman jumped back and grasped the nearest object on her kitchen counter inside the doorway — a 12-inch-long zucchini she had harvested earlier from her garden.

She flung the zucchini at the bear from a distance she estimated to be 3 feet. The vegetable bopped the bruin on the top of its head and the animal fled, Maricelli said.

State wildlife officials were searching for the bear on Thursday.

The woman received only minor scratches that did not require medical attention, though she was going to get a tetanus shot on Thursday as a precaution, Maricelli said. Police did not release her name.

The woman also planned to take her collie to the veterinarian. The dog didn’t appear to have any bite wounds, but was a bit shaky on Thursday, Maricelli said.

“I don’t know if it tried to bite him, but it rolled him around a little,” he said.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: Ok, this has to be the most creative use of a zucchini I’ve ever heard of. I would think twice if I were this woman about what kind of doors she’s got on her house. If she’s gone with decorative glass doors and that bear is still out there, I’d be pretty scared. I would start shopping for some solid wood entry doors to keep that bear out.

On the other hand, she’s lucky she wasn’t hurt. I know of a story of a woman who was attacked by a bear on a camping trip and had to have Fort Walton FL cosmetic surgery. She flew from her trip in New York state to see a Panama City FL plastic surgeon after the attack and they were able to help her reconstruct the left side of her arm where she’d been attacked by the bear. She was lucky too.

These things don’t necessarily happen that often. You’re more likely to encounter a great white out on a Florida Keys fishing charter than be attacked by a bear. In fact, many Key West Florida sport fishing trips typically are more dangerous, but if you do live near a wooded area where bears are sighted, keep in mind: water is scarce right now and so is food supply.

————————————————————

Other Resources

Laying Tile Down On a Garage Floor

If you are considering replacing your existing garage floor tile but not sure whether you have the skills and experience to do it yourself, watch this video. It shows how to handle garage flooring installation the professional way, step by step. Click here.

The Car Polisher Company

Since its beginning in the garage plant, the company has designed and manufactured the most innovative specialty care and accessory products available for the marine, RV and auto industries. As the original creator of the “One Handle Does It All” dual action polisher design, the company continues to maintain the highest standard of quality and service. Innovative designs, combined with top quality materials and meticulous workmanship make each and every boat or car polisher product a premium item. Customers worldwide search out and use Shurhold products in the care and maintenance of their most precious possessions. For them, Shurhold is “Clean-N-Simple!”

SOURCE: Associated Press

According to new data, the economic downturn has prompted a rise in the number of pleas for food stamps and spurred more troubled marriages as the gap between rich and poor has grown to its widest ever.

The long recession technically ended in mid-2009, economists say, but U.S. Census data released Tuesday show the painful, lingering effects. The annual survey covers all of last year, when unemployment skyrocketed to 10 percent, and the jobless rate is still a stubbornly high 9.6%.

The figures also show that Americans on average have been spending about 36 fewer minutes in the office per week and are stuck in traffic a bit less than they had been. But that is hardly good news, either. The reason is largely that people have lost jobs or are scraping by with part-time work.

“Millions of people are stuck at home because they can’t find a job. Poverty increased in a majority of states, and children have been hit especially hard,” said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau.

Economic indicators “say we’re in recovery, but the impact on families and children will linger on for years,” he said.

Take marriage
In America, marriages fell to a record low in 2009, with just 52% of adults 18 and over saying they were joined in wedlock, compared to 57% in 2000.

The never-married included 46.3% of young adults 25-34, with sharp increases in single people in cities in the Midwest and Southwest, including Cleveland, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Albuquerque, N.M. It was the first time the share of unmarried young adults exceeded those who were married.

Marriages have been declining for years due to rising divorce, more unmarried couples living together and increased job prospects for women. But sociologists say younger people are also now increasingly choosing to delay marriage as they struggle to find work and resist making long-term commitments.

In dollar terms, the rich are still getting richer, and the poor are falling further behind them.

The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year by the largest margin ever, a stark divide as Democrats and Republicans spar over whether to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy.

The top-earning 20% of Americans (those making more than $100,000 each year) received 49.4% of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4% earned by the bottom 20 percent of earners, those who fell below the poverty line, according to the new figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.

At the top, the wealthiest 5% of Americans, who earn more than $180,000, added slightly to their annual incomes last year, the data show. Families at the $50,000 median level slipped lower.

Three states — New York, Connecticut and Texas — and the District of Columbia had the largest gaps between rich and poor. Big gaps were also evident in large cities such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta, home to both highly paid financial and high-tech jobs as well as clusters of poorer immigrant and minority residents.

Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Hawaii had the smallest income gaps.

“Income inequality is rising, and if we took into account tax data, it would be even more,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in poverty. “More than other countries, we have a very unequal income distribution where compensation goes to the top in a winner-takes-all economy.”

Lower-skilled adults ages 18 to 34 had the largest jumps in poverty last year as employers kept or hired older workers for the dwindling jobs available. The declining economic fortunes have caused many unemployed young Americans to double-up in housing with parents, friends and loved ones, with potential problems for the labor market if they don’t get needed training for future jobs, he said.

Homeownership declined for the third year in a row, to 65.9%, after hitting a peak of 67.3% in 2006. Residents in crowded housing held steady at 1 percent, the highest since 2004, a sign that people continued to “double up” to save money.

Average commute times edged lower to 25.1 minutes, the lowest since 2006, as fewer people headed to the office in the morning. The share of people who carpooled also declined, from 10.7% to 10%, while commuters who took public transportation were unchanged at 5%.

The number of U.S. households receiving food stamps surged by 2 million last year to 11.7 million, the highest level on record, meaning that 1 in 10 families was receiving the government aid. In all, 46 states and the District of Columbia had increases in food stamps, with the largest jumps in Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin.

Other findings:

The foreign-born population edged higher to 38.5 million, or 4.5%, following a dip in the previous year, due mostly to increases in naturalized citizens. The share of U.S. residents speaking a language other than English at home also rose, from 19.7% to 20%, mostly in California, New Mexico and Texas.

The poorest poor hit record highs. More than two dozen states had increases in the share of people below $10,977 in income, half the poverty line for a family of four. The highest shares were in the District of Columbia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Arkansas. Nationally, the poorest poor rose to 6.3%.

Women’s average pay still lags men’s, but the gap is narrowing. Women with full-time jobs made 78.2% of men’s pay, up from 77.7% in 2008 and about 64% in 2000, as men took bigger hits in the recession.

More older people are working. About 27.1%of Americans 60 and over were in the work force. That’s up from 26.7% in 2008.

The census figures come weeks before the pivotal Nov. 2 congressional elections, when voters anxious about rising deficits and the slow pace of the economic recovery will decide whether to keep Democrats in control of Congress.

The 2009 tabulations, which are based on pretax income and exclude capital gains, are adjusted for household size where data are available. Prior analyses of after-tax income made by the wealthiest 1 percent compared to middle- and low-income Americans have also pointed to a widening inequality gap, but only reflect U.S. data as of 2007.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: These census results are always pretty shocking for some to hear. The fact that women still make less than men for doing the same job, whether it’s marketing e cigarettes or running a licensed daycare center, is beyond. Not the selling electronic cigarettes and childcare share anything in common with one another as jobs or careers, but that the fact women can’t yet be seen as equal players in roles at companies everywhere, no matter what the product is no matter whether you believe in it or not.

———————————————————————

Other Resources

Elements of a Great Reception

Not only do many couples require planning for their wedding ceremony, but often couples also need to see about the wedding reception as well. And there is usually a standard reception program followed for most occasions. Once the wedding reception venue has been finalized, the timing of elements such as the arrival of the bride and groom, the meal, the music, and the cake will be planned. If the reception is a small one, there might not be an official arrival for the bride and groom as the reception might be in the same general location as the actual wedding.

Be Web Smart

Dedicated hosting reviews provide an excellent way to choose a hosting company without the risks. When you review the top web hosting company reviews on line you get first-hand information from other people about the pros and cons of a particular company and, if the site is on par with the best of the best, it will provide contact information for you to talk to the reviewers personally or by e-mail so you can verify the reviews as legitimate.

SOURCE: Associated Press

In a time when racial tensions over Muslim rights to religious expression and other issues are coming to a boiling point, we have yet another angle: work uniforms at the Happiest Place On Earth.

Disney is allowing a Muslim employee at its Southern California park to wear a specially designed headscarf after initially objecting to her religious head covering.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said Monday that 22-year-old Noor Abdallah was told she couldn’t wear the hijab while working as a vacation planner at a Disneyland Resort Esplanade ticket booth. She declined to take another job away from the public.

There are lines to be drawn over when religious garments are appropriate and when they are not. The workplace has long-served as testing ground for acceptable public attire. In this case, the influence of one culture on another seems likely to blend in with Disney’s “small world” philosophy. If Abdallah were working as a hostess or entertaining for a Las Vegas limo party or a model selling Carhartt jackets, there could be precedent for banning the hijab while on the job. But in this case we are talking about serving as a cultural worker on top of a paid worker: Abdallah is not selling Las Vegas bachelor parties. She’s working for a multi-cultural, multi-nation icon of one-world joy, so there should be no issue.

Disneyland spokeswoman Suzi Brown says the park worked with Abdallah to design a covering to match her costume and meet her religious needs. She’s been wearing a blue scarf topped with a beret since early this month.

Brown says the case is separate from that of another Muslim Disney worker who refused to accept a costume headpiece and filed a federal discrimination complaint.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: Exactly. We’re not talking about whether this woman can or cannot wear flame resistant clothing to work. This isn’t an infomercial for some drug to lose belly fat for women. And, if women did want to get rid of belly fat, it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. This is a job where multi-cultural themes have always played out as a backdrop: Disney himself was a world traveler and he also loved humankind. Why ban a worker from wearing their culture proudly.

—————————————————————-

OTHER RESOURCES

Light Up Your Life
Looking for an inexpensive way to change out your retail lighting fixtures? You can purchase top-quality energy efficient lighting on line. This is a great way to showcase jewelry and other retail products while saving on energy bills. Green is good for business too.

Tech Support New Jersey Style

New Jersey IT consultants are standing by to assist you with a wide range of communications and IT networking issues. From call centers to off-site data storage, Web site design and Internet set up, any NJ IT consulting company can help you help your business thrive. Go outside the office and find out how much you can turn over to an IT company.

SOURCE: Daily Health Reporter

The number of deaths related to driving and cell phone use and texting soared in the space of three years, according to new U.S. government research.

Texting alone caused more than 16,000 deaths in car accidents from 2001 to 2007, the researchers estimated. But auto deaths involving cell phones and texting while driving rose 28 percent in just three years, from 4,572 in 2005 to 5,870 in 2008.

“The increases in distracted driving seem to be largely driven by increased use of cell phones to text,” said lead researcher Fernando Wilson, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth.

“Overall use of cell phones have been pretty steady, but texting volumes have increased dramatically in the last few years,” he added.

Distracted driving and its deadly toll was the focus of a government summit this week in Washington, D.C., at which officials called for tougher laws to counter the growing trend. They reported that more than 5,000 people were killed last year in distracted driving crashes.

In January, the government banned truck and bus drivers who travel interstate roadways from using a handheld device to send text messages.

The latest report, published online Sept. 23 in the American Journal of Public Health, uses data from the National Center for Statistics and Analysis’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which recorded all fatalities that occurred on public roads in the United States from 1999 to 2008.

Wilson’s team found that drunk drivers are less inhibited about using cell phones as they drive. And there were also increased crashes into light poles, trees and other objects, with men involved in growing numbers.

“All this is consistent with people not paying attention while they are driving,” Wilson said.

Distracted by Life
In many cases the use of cell phones while driving, whether on calls or texting, involves issues that could wait. Teens are texting each other with non critical information like how to get concert tickets or who has the best sorority clothing. These are things they could send later from their PC or laptops.

Solving the problem is complex, Wilson noted. He has no ready answers, but he suggested that “we need technologies that inhibit cell phone use while driving” and that more effective law enforcement of cell phone bans would also help.

Frank Drews, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Utah, said that “this is a timely study that adds another piece to the literature on driver distraction.”

Drews added: “With work like this, it will be a little bit harder to deny that cell phone use while driving has a significant negative impact on public safety. I think at this point, once again, the question comes to mind, how much more scientific evidence will politicians need to put laws in place that protect the public from the dangers associated with cell phone use while driving?”

Jennifer Smith, a board member of FocusDriven, which advocates against cell phone use while driving, put it more bluntly.

The more than 5,000 traffic deaths each year from cell phone use is “equivalent to a major airliner going down every week in this country,” she said. “If that was happening, they would ground all flights until they figured out what the problem was and they solved it. But because everyone likes their cell phones, we have to debate this.”

Smith noted that all cell phone use when driving — including hands-free cell phone use — is dangerous. “All we need to be doing in our cars is driving. No phone call is that important that you can’t wait until you stop,” she said.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: I would imagine the Los Angeles court reports have a laundry list of excuses for accidents involving cell phones. And, if I were among the ranks of Los Angeles criminal attorneys I’d be looking into expanding my services to deal with these cases, as they are sure to rise before they go down. Los Angeles injury attorneys have got to be looking into this too, as there is a lot of money to be made on these cases.

I agree, rock concert tickets and good buys on Greek clothes are not critical issues and teens should hold on these conversations until they get to a stop or their computers.

I think one option is for every CDL driving school and motorcycle driving course in the country to make it mandatory that all new drives undergo about 20 hours of cell phone safety education before they get their permits and drivers’ licenses. We need to change the “must talk now” mentality of drivers into a “lets focus on the road” mentality, and one way to do it is to increase fines, toss in potential jail time and run a massive ad campaign using graphic videos like the one used in Great Britain recently demonstrating exactly what a crash looks like when three teens are texting and driving.

———————————————————–

OTHER RESOURCES

L.A. California court reporting service skills are in critical demand. If you’ve been considering a career move click here for information on how to train to work in the courts as court reporter.

SOURCE: New York Times

The economic slump has created market growth for discount “dollar” stores and big retailers with price cut offers for low-income workers and those on unemployment.

Dollar stores have shown the biggest gain in shopper visits over the last year out of all the retailers that sell basic consumer goods, according to market research data. Manufacturers are racing to package more affordable versions of products common at those stores, and other budget retailers, feeling the loss of customers, are trying to duplicate their success.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, is adding thousands of items to its shelves, including inexpensive ones, and is asking dollar-store suppliers to create small, under-a-dollar packages for its stores, too. In areas with high unemployment, Wal-Mart is grouping together its less than $1 items in a clear challenge to the dollar stores.

What are they buying?
Discounters offer more than just cheap plastic gift bags!

The impetus for the downmarket trend is the continued tightening of household budgets, retailers and analysts said.

Some customers at Wal-Mart and the major dollar chains — Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree — have such modest budgets that the retailers report upticks in spending at the beginning of the month, when government benefit checks and many paychecks come through. Late in the month, sales drop as even multiroll packs of paper towels are ditched for a single roll.

“People are literally running out of cash on hand as the month goes on and they’re looking for smaller package sizes,” said Craig Johnson, president of the retail consulting and research firm Customer Growth Partners. “They may have $10, $20, $30 to spend getting toward the end of the month, and they have to be able to still feed the family and get diapers and so forth.”

At about a quarter of Wal-Mart’s stores, the company is beginning to offer items for under $1, like a four-pack of toilet paper, boxes containing just a few garbage bags and single rolls of paper towels.

But the dollar stores have best been able to capitalize on the downmarket trend because of strategies they embraced during the recession, when the stores kept things cheap and expanded their merchandise, analysts said.

Realizing that their shoppers often could not afford regular-size detergent, for example, the stores worked with manufacturers to create smaller packages that cost less.

“Just because of their cash flow, they’re buying the smaller packs,” said Sam Paul, chief executive of Nextep, which makes trash bags.

To keep up with the demand for smaller quantities Wal-Mart began stocking the company’s five-pack of outdoor garbage bags a couple of months ago and Nextep recently opened a factory that specializes in small packaging.

In the last year, dollar stores “have not only shown growth among their heaviest shoppers, but also that they are stealing heavy shoppers” from stores like Wal-Mart, said Susan Viamari, editor of Times and Trends, a publication from the market research and consulting firm SymphonyIRI Group, in an e-mail. SymphonyIRI tracks what consumers are buying.

According to the company, the number of visits to dollar stores increased 2.6% from June 2009 to June 2010 compared with the same period a year earlier, the most recent figures available. Over the same period, visits to large stores like Wal-Mart declined 7%.

The dollar stores are pulling in shoppers like Mellissa Hayden. A pizza deliverer, she is the kind of price-sensitive shopper who knows that a bottle of ibuprofen from the Dollar General near her home in Rockford, Tenn., costs just $2.50 and has 100 pills, but at Wal-Mart, she will get fewer pills for about $5.

So lately, she has been heading to dollar stores instead of Wal-Mart. “You don’t have the big crowds and it’s cheaper,” she said.

Same-store sales, which measure revenue at stores open at least a year, at the three major dollar chains have increased for at least 10 consecutive quarters. At Wal-Mart, same-store sales in the United States have declined for the last five quarters.

During the recession, Wal-Mart pulled back on very inexpensive products, suppliers said, to make the stores look less cluttered and to appeal to shoppers who might be testing out that retailer instead of, say, Target. That decision has it now playing catch-up.

“They just abandoned that lowest price point,” said Mr. Paul of Nextep.

In the last couple of quarters, Wal-Mart tried aggressive discounts on items like milk, but the price cuts did not attract huge traffic, said Thomas M. Schoewe, Wal-Mart’s chief financial officer, in a conference call with reporters last month.

He said that dollar stores were part of the challenge.

“Many times it is convenient to walk into a dollar store and even though the price per unit, if you will, may be a little bit higher at the dollar store, if they can find that product and still live from paycheck to paycheck, that’s how they’re solving that problem,” Mr. Schoewe said.

The dollar stores have found creative ways to keep their prices low. When commodity costs rose for suppliers, for example, the dollar stores asked them to decrease the number of sandwich bags in a box or pushed them to come up with a cheaper version of the products.

Other options for low wager earners in the slump have included selling their damaged cars and opting for public transportation. Selling cars for cash may not replace an annual salary but it can put food on the table for months with the help of low- and discount retailers.

To increase their attractiveness to the low-income customer, the dollar stores have also switched out merchandise like trinkets for necessities like food and detergent.

At Family Dollar, most customers have incomes under $40,000 and have “really curtailed discretionary spending out of necessity,” said Kiley Rawlins, a spokeswoman. But customers are shopping more frequently, she said, and buying a greater variety of items, a reflection of the items like cleaning products that the store now carries.

Some of the stores have even managed to reach some middle-income shoppers, by increasing products from well-known brands like Hanes, Quaker Oats and Nabisco.

“This is a break from historical trends, where dollar stores really catered almost entirely to lower income shoppers,” Ms. Viamari of SymphonyIRI said.

Many manufacturers have been hurrying to get dollar shoppers’ attention. Tracy VanBibber, senior vice president for sales at the Dial Corporation, a division of Henkel that makes products like Dial soap and Soft Scrub, said there were now enough low-end customers — known in the industry as value shoppers — to justify the investment.

“We’re really trying to get better at thinking of the value shopper earlier in our innovation pipeline,” Ms. VanBibber said. “The retailers that service value shoppers have enough scale that manufacturers can customize and it pays off now.”

________________________________

MY TAKE: I don’t really like shopping at the 99 Cents Only store anymore, but I know people who used to have jobs that are now on unemployment are shopping there regularly. I know the dollar isn’t going very far at the grocery store anymore. I used to bring home about 10 plastic bags or paper ones full of groceries for my $100. Now, that money gets me about four or five bags of groceries.

I have friends on the East coast who have cancelled their cleaning services DC and given up their cars too. They shop sale racks for everything from the cute little baby headband items for their children to shoes. No more fancy flower hats from GAP kids. This recession is serious.

——————————————————–

OTHER RESOURCES

Weddings San Diego Style

If you are in the San Diego area and are looking for San Diego flowers for wedding venues, you can try the flower mart. San Diego CA wedding decorations, including flowers, are expensive. You can buy your flowers wholesale and decorate your venue on the cheap. Click here for more info.

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times

Two years ago, Maria de Lourdes Gonzalez didn’t own a cellphone, but today the 62-year-old housekeeper carries a tape recorder and a video camera and regularly snaps photos and sends text messages.

Her interviews end up on her blog on vozmob, a new site launched by USC and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, which works to organize and educate immigrant communities.

The idea is to give immigrants, mainly day laborers, an online space to speak their minds and share their stories. They are also encouraged to document their work as a form of self-protection.

Organizers rolled out the program last month with a mix of grants from various foundations, including $40,000 worth of cellphones to train laborers. They fanned out to local job centers to teach workers how to upload text, photos and videos. So far about half a dozen laborers have launched their own blogs. Others are experimenting, transferring bits of broken audio and blurry images onto the Web.

The contributions to vozmob.net are varied. In one post, a worker named Adolfo features a video clip of day laborers at a Hollywood center singing with an accordion player and guitarist as they wait for work. In another, a Long Beach laborer named Ranferi displays a photo of a cream-colored snake he found on the sidewalk and warns others to be cautious. A man named Marcos likes to upload samples of his handiwork: light fixtures he has installed, bathtubs he has tiled and water-thrifty gardens he has planted.

Politics often takes center stage, with posts featuring photos of immigrants rights marches and short, heated paragraphs blasting Arizona’s new immigration law.

A grandmother of seven, Gonzalez prefers to be called a housekeeper, never a domestic worker “because domestic is for domesticated animals.” She says she likes to hit the streets and record personal stories. When her subjects shy away from the camera — and many do — she records their hands, “the hands that do the work,” she says.

She talks to pupusa vendors, men driving tractors, gardeners and seamstresses, and she films hands dry and calloused, covered with dirt or paint, bruised black beneath the nails.

On one morning bus ride, she spoke to Jacqueline Rivera, an undocumented worker who was about to lose her job. Rivera told Gonzalez she slept in a closet to save money for her children. The housekeeper’s face in a grainy photo shows her lips turned up in a shy smile.

“The idea is to let those voices be heard,” Gonzalez said, “to bring out of us what’s already inside.”

Amanda Garces, who is coordinating the project for the institute, said no one expects most participants to be so active. The hope is that some day laborers at least will become more comfortable with technology.

Until now, she said, anti-immigrant voices have ruled the online debate, spreading negative images.

On a recent morning, Garces gathered about 20 laborers at a center southwest of downtown. She demonstrated how to take photos and video of employers’ homes and car license plates — documentation that could prove useful if they are not paid or are mistreated. She then encouraged the workers to practice what they’d learned.

Most came ready with their own cellphones, basic models that until now they had used only for calls.

Alfonso Sanchez, 43, listened closely as Natalie Arellano, a community organizer, showed him how to shoot a video clip of a fellow laborer.

He could use the videos to send home as personalized custom gifts for his family. These would allow him to let them know how he’s doing and keep closer ties with them while here.

“Is it recording yet?” he asked, squinting a few inches from the tiny screen.

“Yes, yes,” Arellano told him. “You’re ready. Now just do it over and over again until you remember the steps.”

Like many, Sanchez has little intention to start a blog. He said he’s mostly curious to see how much can be done with just a phone.

All around him, day laborers with muddy boots grinned as they held their phones in their weathered hands, recording one another.

“This gives you the tools to tell your own story and not let others tell it for you,” Garces told the men.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: If giving undocumented workers an opportunity to document their lives is going to make them happy I say I’m all for it. A lot of these guys and girls come over to the U.S. hoping for a better life, for themselves and their kids. They work to send home personalized kids gifts and money for their kids’ education. That’s all they want. They aren’t here to take away work from us. They do the jobs we don’t really want: House cleaning, and I mean cleaning services DC and all over the country. I’m sure every Fairfax VA cleaning company and those in Los Angeles as well have undocumented workers. It’s not that hard to get a fake visa or work card.

I have a lot of friends who say that we should hire California private security services teams to stand at the border and keep immigrants out. But what a waste of money not to mention the fact that California private security companies don’t have the right to enforce immigration laws.

—————————————————–

OTHER RESOURCES

Employee Management

Payroll service outsourcing firms offer affordable options for managing your workers’ payroll issues. Not only will they provide electronic time and attendance software that gives you and your employees more time to spend on other things, they will track and manage other issues like vacation requests, sick days, and more.

SOURCE: Associated Press

Russian bailiffs have threatened to take three Shar Pei pedigree puppies from a Russian pensioner who has failed to pay her debts.

The pensioner, who bailiffs did not name, owes 350,000 rubles ($11,330) to an individual in her home town in Russia’s volcanic Kamchatka region in the Far East.

“If she does not fulfill her obligations (to pay back the debt) within 10 days, the puppies will be sold by the Federal Agency for State Property Management,” bailiffs said in a statement on their site fssprus.ru.

In Kamchatka, Shar Pei puppies fetch 15,000 rubles ($482.6) each, media reported. But bailiffs said they will try sell them for 5,000 rubles to attract more potential buyers.

They added that the famously wrinkled Shar Pei puppies have been allowed for the time being to remain with the pensioner, who breeds them as her sole source of income as she has no property.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: If this woman is a pensioner, she’s probably alone and these dogs are all she has. They are her pets, not family protection dogs. They aren’t attack dogs either, so there’s not risk of them hurting anyone. This woman obviously uses the dogs for income, which many would not agree with. But she isn’t rich. She has no Costa del Sol real estate or expensive evening dresses to offer up as collateral.

If she did have a pair of seaside villas in Marbella, or a closet full of expensive Escape dresses, I could see the justification for taking things away from her. But I don’t think taking her dogs is a humane way to collect a debt.

—————————————————————-

OTHER RESOURCES

Use Your Networking Skills

Searching for the right New York accounting services doesn’t have to be complicated. Get great advice online from referral companies and social networking sites on New York income tax accountants before you hire one.

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times

The nation’s unemployment worsened slightly in July, edging up to 9.6% from 9.5% and reports suggest protracted recovery well into 2012.

Overall, the American economy lost 54,000 net jobs in August as another 114,000 temporary census workers were dismissed from the federal government’s payrolls. Aside from the staffing changes at the Census Bureau, which has been trimming jobs added earlier in the year for the decennial population count, private-sector employers added a modest 67,000 jobs over the month.

The nation’s manufacturers, which had been growing all year and leading the weak jobs recovery, fell back in August, cutting 27,000 from their payrolls. Budget-strapped state governments shed another 14,000 jobs.

The healthcare sector added 28,000 jobs in August, and construction employment was up 19,000, although about half of that was due to the return of workers on strike in July. The temporary-help industry, considered a precursor to broader hiring, also rebounded, increasing staffing by 17,000 last month.

The Labor Department also revised up the private-sector hiring in June and July, saying businesses added 168,000 in those two months instead of 102,000 estimated earlier. Even so, by any measure, those numbers are small and not nearly enough to begin to bring down the unemployment rate, which is expected to climb in the coming months.

Nearly 15 million workers were counted as jobless last month. Including people too discouraged to look for work and the nearly 9 million workers who have little choice but to work part-time, the rate of the nation’s unemployed and underemployed stood at 16.7% last month, up from 16.5% in July.

“The small amount of job gains during the past few months not only reflects the response to slow output growth, but also a lack of confidence going forward,” said Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business research group based in New York. “The economy as a whole has been weakened by a dismal housing market and slow consumption, which especially hamper small- and medium-sized enterprises.”

William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, said that his group’s monthly survey of small employers showed that most firms made little change to employment in August. He said 11% of the respondents reported that they had increased employment by an average of 2.3 employees, but 13% reduced their workforces by an average of 3.5 workers.

“Job creation still has not crossed the zero line in the small-business sector,” he said.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: The nation’s unemployment rate is not moving down at the pace economists had predicted last spring. Small companies, including the makers of imprinted school T shirts , pet sitting, restaurants, etc., will all have a difficult time going forward and I suspect we’ll see a lot more companies applying for a small business loan to get their payrolls met and basic needs. Say goodbye to corporate gifts this year. No one is going to be sending out “extras. With small business financing and micro loans for little guys, it’s going to take a lot of belt-tightening to get through the next few quarters.

———————————————-

OTHER RESOURCES

Business services

New York business transcription services companies can help your firm save money by providing safe, secure and reliable off-site medical transcription services. Click here for an online listing of New York transcription company options.

SOURCE: Associated Press

Can cockroach brains cure bacterial infections? Researches say why not?

Tissues from cockroach and locust brains and nervous systems killed off 90% of E. coli and MRSA bacteria without harming the human cells they were attacking, according to researchers from the University of Nottingham.

The findings, released Saturday, are being presented this week at the autumn meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Nottingham, Great Britain.

The researchers suspect it’s the proteins in the insect brains that so effectively kill the bacteria.

And it’s a property that seems to come only from tissues in the brain and nervous system — muscle, fat and circulatory fluid had no effect on the bacteria. They’re currently studying the properties of as many as nine antimicrobial molecules, trying to figure out how they work and why.

The research gives credence to the idea that scientists will be able to discover new treatments in the natural world for these increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Not sure what these might be but supporters suggest they could include everything from specialty foods natural aromatherapy products, to how to wean people off of tobacco and replace some ingredients in the e-cig.

All in all, pretty impressive — for a bug brain.

______________________________________

MY TAKE: I’m hoping all those e-cigarette starter kits in the future will at least list “cockroach” brains in their ingredients, and not call them some mysterious name we can’t understand. I’m a skeptic, what can I say. The next thing you know we’ll be buying double shots of cockroach brains and whey protein at the juice bar or it will be ground up and used to manufacture our favorite natural skin care products. I’m not sure I’m ready to go this organic.

————————————

OTHER RESOURCES

Off Site Data Deals

Off site data center services are in business to provide you with piece of mind. Their highly secured collocation facilities are designed to provide a safe alternative location for you to store you backup files and data, manage web site services and more. One highly reputable company is Calpop.com. They are based in downtown Los Angeles and handle off-site data management for all sizes of companies. Click here to get a list of their pricing and contact information.