PURPOSE

We undertook a trial to test the efficacy of a technology-assisted health coaching intervention for weight management, called Goals for Eating and Moving (GEM), within primary care.

PURPOSE

Currently, 40% of counties in the United States do not have an obstetrician or midwife, and in rural areas the likelihood of childbirth being attended to by a family medicine (FM) physician is increasing. We sought to characterize the effect of the FM presence on unit culture and a key perinatal quality metric in Iowa hospital intrapartum units.

HBO's Casey Bloys was asked about the Game of Thrones author's spicy take on House of the Dragon season two.

Video game workers face challenges from employers in their efforts to unionize in Canada.

The post Dual boss battle: video game workers face-off multiple employers at once appeared first on rabble.ca.

In August, fellow reporter Jason Patinkin and I crossed on foot from northern Uganda into rebel-held South Sudan. Over the course of four days, we walked more than 40 miles through the bush, escorted by rebel soldiers, to shed light on one of the world’s most underreported conflicts.

Reporting on South Sudan’s war, which began in 2013, has always been a challenge due to the risk and logistical hurdles associated with accessing remote areas where fighting takes place. But over the past year, covering the war and its humanitarian fallout has become particularly difficult. Since the beginning of this year, South Sudan’s government has banned at least 20 foreign journalists in an apparent effort to silence reporters who had a track record of critically reporting on the government.

This systematic crackdown on the foreign press (South Sudanese journalists have long risked imprisonment and death for doing their work) coincided with two important developments. In November 2016, the United Nations warned that the violence being committed against civilians in the southern region of Equatoria risked spiraling into genocide. Then, in February, the UN declared a man-made famine, warning that 100,000 people were at risk of starving to death as a result of civil war.

Journalists seeking to cover these events were left with two equally unsavory options: self-censorship or a risky trip to rebel-held parts of the country. Only a handful of journalists have attempted the latter since fighting escalated in July last year. For us, this was our second embed with the rebels this year.

We set off from a town in northern Uganda at five in the morning, bouncing along a bumpy dirt track towards the South Sudan border. Crammed into our four-wheel drive were rebel commander Martin Abucha, a dual American and South Sudanese citizen who we planned to profile for our PBS NewsHour Weekend segment, a couple of guides, and several duffle bags stuffed with our tents, sleeping bags, emergency medical kits and provisions to last us four days.

Just as the sun began to rise above a distant range of hills that we aimed to cross later that day, our car came to a halt in front of a stream. Because of the rainy reason, it carried more water than usual. It was time to disembark and start walking, or “footing,” as South Sudanese tend to call it.

We took off our shoes and waded through the stream’s chilly waters. This was the first of a many rivers we’d have to cross along the way, either on foot or in small flimsy canoes dug out from tree trunks. Each time, we dreaded the idea of falling in with our camera gear.

The first part of our journey in northern Uganda felt very much like a hike through a national park. Passing beautiful landscapes and idyllic farming villages, one could almost forget we were headed into a war zone — but we were about to get a reality check.

We had just crossed into South Sudan when out of nowhere, two dozen armed men popped out of the tall grass and surrounded us at gunpoint.

“Stop! Who are you and where are you going?” a soldier called out in Juba Arabic from his hideout no more than 20 yards away, pointing his AK47 at us. Another one next to him had a rocket-propelled grenade propped on his shoulder, also unequivocally aiming it in our direction.

Instinctively, we threw our hands in the air and exchanged a baffled glance. Had we accidentally bumped into government soldiers? Or perhaps we had come onto the “wrong” rebels? Abucha’s group, called the Sudan People’s Liberation Army In Opposition, is the biggest but not the only armed group in Equatoria, an area rife with rival militia and bandits who exploit the security vacuum left by war.

To our relief, and only after Abucha answered a series of questions, this routine security check quickly gave way to a warm welcome. The platoon would be our escort for the next four days as we trekked to their base and to Loa, Abucha’s hometown.

Keeping up with the rebels was no easy task. Given the country’s pervasive lack of basic infrastructure, South Sudanese grow up walking for dozens of miles just to go about their daily lives. For sedentary Westerners, keeping the target pace of “two meters per second” (around five miles an hour) proved challenging amid 90-degree temperatures, all while filming and plowing our way through dense, itchy elephant grass.

The upside of the cumbersome terrain was that it kept us safe. During our four-day trip, we didn’t cross a single road, instead walking along a dizzying network of narrow bush paths the rebels seemed to know like the backs of their hands. An unwanted encounter with government troops, who tended to stick to roads and move around in vehicles as opposed to on foot, was highly unlikely.

The closest we got to government-controlled area was a visit to Loa, located just two kilometers away from a main road frequently patrolled by government soldiers. We couldn’t stay long, but the hour we spent on the ground offered us a glimpse into what villages must look like in many parts of Equatoria: burned mud huts, looted schools and clinics, fallow fields and – most strikingly – no civilians.

The war has had a devastating impact on South Sudanese communities like the one in Loa, but much of it has remained out of the limelight of international media. Our four-day venture into rebel-held South Sudan offered us a rare opportunity to report ground truths, and we are thankful for that.

The post Column: Why reporting from South Sudan is so difficult — and critically needed appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Two thirds of Celtic fans believe the club should have an independently elected Fan Advisory Board according to new research from the University of Glasgow.

3D Scotland are an innovative, Glasgow-based company who specialise in the design and manufacture of unique chess sets. Their sets have proved extremely popular as Christmas gifts, graduation gifts, fathers’ day gifts and everything in between.

What does 2023's Scottish Health Survey tell us about Scotland's population - from smoking rates to obesity, and alcohol consumption?

The podcast trio is not at all ready for the flood of September releases. Anna Marie is kind of sick of the trigger, Chris insists Eclipse is owed an apology, and Kelley wants to know what is this garbage and how she can get more of it.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 599: “Serious Health Issues? No, Just a Cat” appeared first on RPGamer.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is TV’s best soap opera, week after week offering twists more shocking than secret twins and characters returning from the dead. That’s because it’s all real, happening in the most haunted suburb in the continental United States.

Where else do two women connect over knowing the long-lost birth father of one’s child? Is there another city where women squabble over body positivity in a parking lot off the side of a snowy mountain? Surely, there’s no other place on Earth where Lisa Barlow could come across anywhere near a voice of reason.

But that all happens here in Salt Lake City. Five episodes in, Season 5 has continued to evolve into the most captivating season in modern Real Housewives history, carried by the ever-changing bonds between our OGs and a team of wonderfully bizarre newbies.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

One of my favourite satires is the Screwtape Letters, an epistolary novel by Narnia scribe C.S. Lewis. It consists of messages from an oily elder demon to his nephew about how to correctly groom the soul of an unsuspecting human being. It's a claustrophobic send-up of managerial politics and nepotism, with World War 1 unfolding in the background. A real pick-me-up. Sintopia is the Two Point incarnation of that premise - in other words, brighter and breezier and definitely more slapstick than Christian. It puts you in charge of a world divided between Earth and hell, and challenges you to ensure a steady movement of optimally sinful souls between one and the other. Say your prayers and watch the trailer.

Read more

Real gamblers play russian roulette with shotguns. That is the core concept of Buckshot Roulette, the Inscryption-looking game of blinksweat and bulletworry. It's been out for a while now but the developers have just added a fun extra - a 4-person multiplayer mode.

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People have asked me, a Call Of Duty liker, "How's the new COD?" - such is the mass appeal of Call Of Duty that even a lot of my non-industry pals are invested in whether Black Ops 6's shooty really does bang. And every single time my brain clunks into gear and I turn inwards, where I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say. So much so that a fog develops and out of the fog emerges a figure - it's me. I'm holding an M4A1 with an extended barrel and a vertical foregrip. My brain and body perform a pincer movement of physical response: 1) I shrug 2) I say, "It's like Call Of Duty".

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Steam's built-in game recording feature has been usable in beta since the summer, but it has now been properly launched for every user, following a client update to Steam yesterday. It's basically another method of capturing funny ragdoll glitches and posting them on the "lol-games-are-dumb" channel of your friend's Discord. Or for posting that flukey knife throw in Call Of Duty to Twitter, as if you really meant to kill the man from across the map all along. Or saving a clip for your personal records, like the footage of that time you yeeted an innocent citizen off the 50-foot wall of a castle town in Dragon's Dogma 2. We all do that, right? Right?

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Putting aside my natural annoyance at Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater for almost beating out the Twarhammer series in the headline real estate wars, I am more than a little excited to play. Some days, you simply must feast on a tree frog, and while we still don’t have a solid release date, that day doesn’t feel too far away. Good news for stealth fans, and perhaps gooder news for a dozen strapline writers sweating profusely, soiling themselves in anticipation of using “kept you waiting, huh?”.

Until then, I at least have a steady drip feed of new information to keep me sated, the latest of which is the substantial hint that there'll be some new dialogue in the game, as per the video below. Alongside that, the previously pseudonymous Suzetta Miñet - who was credited with voicing EVA in MGS3 and Peace Walker - has revealed herself to be Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Cheers for the spot, Automaton West.

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Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been out for a little while already, what with me giving its multiplayer largely a thumbs up. Still, it's an ever-evolving thing and Activision have announced the game's first seasonal drop. It's a hefty one with a lot of additions, so I'll try my best to break down the good stuff. TLDR: there's some new maps for multiplayer and zombies, new modes, and a few extra bits. I'm mildly excited for more. More in this case is good.

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A 61-year-old San Antonio man pleaded guilty to two federal charges in the human smuggling incident that led to the deaths of 10 undocumented immigrants this summer.

James Matthew Bradley Jr., who appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge Monday, pleaded guilty to “one count of conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in death and one count of transporting aliens resulting in death,” according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.

The office added that Bradley’s “admission of guilt” meant he packed dozens of unauthorized immigrants into a tractor-trailer for financial gain, adding that the suspect confirmed that details from court documents were “factually correct.”

On July 23, San Antonio Police Department officers responded to a call from a Walmart employee shortly past midnight. Once officers arrived, they found 39 immigrants at the scene. Of those carried in the tractor-trailer, eight were found dead in the rear of the trailer, while two died later at nearby hospitals, the statement said.

Survivors of the incident said there was no air conditioning in the overheated trailer and had to take turns to breath through a hole in the back of the truck for air. Bradley also initially told investigators that he was unaware of the immigrants in the trailer until he had stopped at the Walmart in San Antonio for bathroom break.

The attorney’s office also said Bradley faces up to life in prison with the charges and that he is scheduled to be sentenced in January 2018. Immigrants said there were up to 200 people transported on the trailer and that different fees were quoted to them for the ride north from the U.S.-Mexico border, the statement added.

Jason Buch of San Antonio Express-News told the NewsHour earlier this year that Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, reported an uptick of immigrants using tractor-trailers to get pass checkpoints at the border.

“People are usually going on to major metropolitan areas or regions of the country that employ a lot of immigrant laborers, so, areas with large agriculture industries or construction booms,” Buch said.

The NewsHour’s John Yang learned more about the July human smuggling case and immigration politics from Jason Buch of San Antonio Express News.

Shane M. Folden, special agent in charge of homeland security investigations in San Antonio, said in the statement that the proceeding “helps to close the door on one of the conspirators responsible for causing the tragic loss of life and wreaking havoc on those who survived this horrific incident.”

“This case is a glaring reminder that alien smugglers are driven by greed and have little regard for the health and well-being of their human cargo, which can prove to be a deadly combination,” he added.

Bradley’s co-defendant Pedro Silva Segura was also indicted last month with faces two counts of conspiracy and two counts of transporting undocumented immigrants resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy.

Segura, 47, is an undocumented immigrant who resides in Laredo, Texas.

The post San Antonio truck driver pleads guilty in fatal human smuggling case appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

In America, there’s a significant kind of public insistence that one’s “freedom” is fundamentally tied to one’s wealth.

Much of the country views America through an aspirational and transformative lens, a colorblind and bias-free utopia, wherein wealth conveys equality and acts as a panacea for social and racial ills. Once an individual achieves massive financial success, or so the message goes, he or she will “transcend” the scourge of economic and racial inequality, truly becoming “free.”

Working in parallel with this reverence for this colorblind version of the “American Dream” is the belief that economic privilege mandates patriotic gratitude. Across industries and disciplines, Americans are told to love their nation uncritically, be thankful that they are exceptional enough to live in a country that allows citizens the opportunity to reach astronomical heights of economic prosperity.

For the nation’s black citizens, there’s often an additional racialized presumption lurking under the surface of these concepts: the notion that black success and wealth demands public silence on systemic issues of inequality and oppression.

These are durable and fragile ideologies that prop up the concept of the American Dream – durable because they are encoded in the very fabric of American culture (most Americans, including African Americans, have readily embraced these ideologies as assumed facts); yet fragile because it’s all too easy to see that one’s economic privilege is a lousy barrier against both individual and systemic discrimination and oppression.

Consequently, black people have also been among the most vocal challengers of these ideologies, as we’ve seen most recently with the Colin Kaepernick and the NFL #TakeAKnee demonstrations. In a show of solidary with the free agent quarterback, professional football players – the vast majority of whom are black – have been kneeling during the National Anthem as a means of protesting racial injustice and police brutality.

WATCH: NFL players team up in defiance and solidarity

Over the past few weeks, the president of the United States has brought renewed attention to the inherent tensions that define the ideologies of the “American Dream” through his repeated public criticisms of these kneeling NFL players.

“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues,” Trump recently tweeted, he or she should not be allowed to kneel. Labeling the protestors actions “disrespectful” to the country, flag and anthem, President Donald Trump has called for players to be fired, encouraged a boycott of the NFL, insisted that the league pass a rule mandating that players stand for the anthem and derided the protestors as “sons of bitches.”

In a dramatic ploy more befitting of a scripted reality television show, the president gloated that he had instructed Vice President Mike Pence to walk out of an Indianapolis Colts game the moment any player kneeled. This was an orchestrated show of power and outrage, designed to send a flamboyant political message given that Trump and Pence knew in advance that on that particular day, the Colts were playing the San Francisco 49ers – the team that currently has the most protestors. The NFL’s announcement this week that the league has no plans to penalize protesting players is the most recent event to provoke the president’s fury; taking to social media during the early morning, he once again equated kneeling with “total disrespect” for our country.

As many have pointed out, the president’s moralizing outrage toward the NFL players is selective and deeply flawed – his apparent patriotic loyalty hasn’t stopped the billionaire politician from criticizing the removal of Confederate statues, or attacking a Gold Star family, or mocking Sen. John McCain’s military service.

The NFL players and their defenders have repeatedly stated that the protests are intended to highlight racial inequality and oppression. They’ve also explained that their decision to kneel emerged from a desire to protest peacefully and respectfully after a sustained conversation with military veterans.

Trump has chosen to ignore these rationales and the structural issues of inequality that motivate the protests and instead, advance a narrative exclusively concerned with overt displays of American patriotism and the “privilege” of the NFL players. As one of president’s advisors explained, by aggressively targeting the NFL players, Trump believes that he is “winning the cultural war,” having made black “millionaire sport athletes his new [Hillary Clinton].”

READ MORE: As ‘America’s sport,’ the NFL cannot escape politics

It’s a cynical statement, revealing the president’s perception of the jingoism of his base of supporters who envision him as a crusader for American values and symbols.

In casting the black protestors as the antithesis of all of this, Trump has marked the players as unpatriotic elites and enemies of the nation. For a president who has consistently fumbled his way through domestic and foreign policy since he was elected, a culture war between “hard-working” and “virtuous” working-class and middle-class white Americans and rich, ungrateful black football players is a welcome public distraction.

Trump’s attacks on the NFL protestors are rooted in those competing tensions inherent to the American Dream: that wealth equals freedom; that economic privilege demands patriotic gratitude; and most importantly, that black people’s individual economic prosperity invalidates their concerns about systemic injustice and requires their silence on racial oppression.

Among the protestors’ detractors, this has become a common line of attack, a means of disparaging the black NFL players’ activism by pointing to their apparent wealth. The fact that systemic racism is demonstrably real and that individual prosperity does not make one immune to racial discrimination appears to be lost on the protestors’ critics.

Theirs is a grievance that suggests that black athletes should be grateful to live in this country; that racism can’t exist in America since black professional athletes are allowed to play and sign contracts for considerable sums of money; that black players owe the nation their silence since America “gave” them opportunity and access; that black athletes have no moral authority on issues of race and inequality because of their individual success; and that black athletes’ success was never theirs to earn, but instead, was given to them and can just as easily be taken away.

This culture war being waged over black athletes is not new. Black athletes – and entertainers – have long been hyper-aware of their peculiar place in American society as individuals beloved for their athletic and artistic talents, yet reviled the moment they use their public platform to protest systemic racial inequality. The parallels between the #TakeAKnee protests and the protests of Muhammad Ali or John Carlos and Tommie Smith are readily apparent; so too are there important similarities to the case of Paul Robeson.

An outspoken civil rights activist, collegiate and professional football player, lawyer, opera singer and actor, Robeson had his passport revoked in 1950 because of his political activism and speech – actions that all but destroyed his career. The star athlete and entertainer, “who had exemplified American upward mobility” quickly “became public enemy number one” as institutions cancelled his concerts, the public called for his death and anti-Robeson mobs burned effigies of him.

During a 1956 congressional hearing, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities beat a familiar refrain with Robeson, challenging the entertainer’s accusations of American racism and racial oppression. He saw no sign of prejudice, he argued, since Robeson was privileged, having gone to elite universities and playing collegiate and professional football.

READ MORE: Poll: Americans divided on NFL protests

Black athletes, even the silent ones, largely understand that their economic privilege doesn’t insulate them from the realities of racial discrimination. They also understand that their wealth and success is precarious and is often dependent not only upon their athletic performance, but also upon them remaining silent on issues of racial injustice, especially those that appear to question the “American Dream” or implicate the American public by association.

It should come as no surprise then that Colin Kaepernick, whose protests turned him into a national pariah despite his on-the-field talents, has filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing the league and its teams of blackballing him because of his political beliefs. “Principled and peaceful political protest,” Kaepernick’s lawyers argued in a statement, “should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government.” Whether the ostracized Kaepernick will win his grievance is unknown, but it is certainly telling that he and his lawyers have rooted their claims in contested definitions of freedom and the precarious economic privilege of outspoken NFL players.

For the loudest and most vocal critics of black protestors, in particular, outspokenness is tantamount to treason, grounds for the harshest of punishments. Perhaps they would benefit from a close reading of James Baldwin, who once argued: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

The post Column: For black athletes, wealth doesn’t equal freedom appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

The first ever full-scale demonstration of a nuclear reactor designed to passively cool itself in an emergency was a success, showing that it should be possible to build nuclear plants without the risk of dangerous meltdown

A new procedure turns an alloy of nickel and titanium into a material as strong as steel but 20 times stretchier – and one application could be building planes with shape-shifting wings

Smart TVs from Samsung and LG monitor what you are watching even when you are using the screens to display a feed from a connected laptop or video game console

It has become trivially easy to use artificial intelligence to edit images or generate video to remove unwanted objects or beautify scenes, but doing so leads to people misremembering what they have seen

Google’s NotebookLM tool is billed as an AI-powered research assistant and can even turn your text history into a jovial fake podcast. But it could also tempt you into narcissism and nostalgia, says Jacob Aron

Treat yourself to a Becky Lynch book signing, games with the Dropout stars, Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and so much more!

Although I am loath to use the phrase, I don't think it's remiss to call Donald Trump's victory last week a vibeshift.

Other Democrats lambasted him. The Tufts political science department spurned him. But Moulton is raising concerns the left needs to take seriously.

EA FC 25 players can snag some big freebies this week, with EA Sports celebrating the Ballon d'Or in style for all Ultimate Team players with some of the best players around.

Local officials are beginning to certify the results of this year's presidential election in a process that, so far, has been playing out quietly, in stark contrast to the tumultuous certification period four years ago that followed then-President Donald Trump's loss.

Ransomeware attacks against health care organizations are happening at an alarmingly high rate in 2024, putting patient health at risk.

Adam Peaty roared back at those writing him off after cruising through his 50 metres breaststroke semi-final – but was later accused of being disrespectful towards Commonwealth Games competitors.