Political Play: Obama dances for Ellen DeGeneres

MIAMI: They really will do anything to get elected. At the end of a long campaign day Tuesday in Florida, Democrat Barack Obama had one more stop: "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

DeGeneres got right down to business.

"Let's talk about dancing," she said. "Your wife, Michelle, was on the show and she was talking some smack about your moves."

DeGeneres played music and gave Obama 20 seconds to prove his spouse wrong. He complied, albeit in a decidedly awkward set of circumstances — standing alone on a patch of concrete and looking into cameras that were to beam him into the studio, as supporters and reporters watched.

He gamely grooved a little, though mostly with his arms, before calling off the operation with a smile.

"Michelle may be a better dancer, but I am convinced I am a better dancer than John McCain," Obama said of his Republican rival.

During the brief appearance, Obama revealed the Halloween costumes his two daughters have planned. Ten-year-old Malia will be a fairy and 7-year-old Sasha has chosen to go trick-or-treating as a "corpse bride," he said.

Obama also offered to help DeGeneres with her campaign to lure George Clooney onto her show, agreeing it would be one of the new president's most important priorities. If elected, he said he would appoint Clooney "ambassador to the Ellen show."

"We would have you and him sit down without preconditions and solve any differences that you may have," Obama said. "Just don't talk about my dancing anymore."

The interview is scheduled to air Wednesday

Princess Victoria invites Aamir Khan for dinner

MUMBAI: So much is happening around Aamir Khan these days. The stupendous success of his critically-acclaimed film Taare Zameen Par has made him popular all the more. Now, Princess Victoria of Sweden has invited him for a dinner with her.

It is said that the 31-year-old princess is aware of Aamir's works and very appreciative of his latest film Taare Zameen Par, India’s official entry to the Oscars this year.

She along with the Swedish ambassador will meet Aamir on Tuesday. It is said that she would call on him during her visit to Mumbai and congratulate him on his second entry to the Oscars. Aamir is all set to meet the princess. He said that it's a privilege to receive such special invitation.

Princess Victoria, the eldest daughter of Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf, is on a 10-day state visit to India for The Sweden India Nobel Memorial Week 2008 celebrations.

US suicide rate increases due to spike in Whites

WASHINGTON: The suicide rate in the United States has risen for the first in a decade largely due to an increase in the number of middle-aged white people taking their lives, according to a study published Tuesday.

The annual suicide rate rose by 0.7 percent between 1999 and 2005, but among white Americans between the ages of 40 to 64 it rose 2.7 percent, according to the study.

For middle-aged white women the suicide rate rose 3.9 percent, the study reported.

By contrast, the suicide rate among African-Americans decreased during the same period, and remained unchanged among Asian Americans and Native Americans, said the study, published in the online edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"The results underscore a change in the epidemiology of suicide, with middle-aged whites emerging as a new high-risk group," said co-author of the study Susan Baker, a professor with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School's Center for Injury Research and Policy.

"Historically, suicide prevention programs have focused on groups considered to be at highest risk -- teens and young adults of both genders as well as elderly white men," sh said.

The research, said Baker, "tells us we need to refocus our resources to develop prevention programs for men and women in their middle years."

Researchers found that firearms remain the predominant method for suicides, but that the rate of firearm suicides decreased during the study period. Suicide by hanging or suffocation soared among men, the study found, with a 6.3 percent annual increase.

Hanging or suffocation accounted for 22 percent of all suicides by 2005, coming in second place behind firearms. Poisoning took third with 18 percent.

Reasons behind the spike in the suicide rate remain unclear, the study said.

"While it would be straightforward to attribute the results to a rise in so-called mid-life crises, recent studies find that middle age is mostly a time of relative security and emotional well being," said Baker.

"Further research is warranted to explore societal changes that may be disproportionately affecting the middle-aged in this country," she said.

Obama and McCain cats in championship

NEW YORK: Barack Obama and John McCain will attend a New York cat show this weekend — Obama the Bombay cat and McCain the American Shorthair, that is.

The two felines are vying for the title of "Purr-fect President" at the Cat Fanciers' Association-IAMS 2008 championship that opens Saturday at Madison Square Garden.

More than 40 breeds are represented among the several hundred competing animals. The top title goes for "Best in Show."

In addition, hundreds of other kittens and cats will be available for adoption.

This year's show also features a rescued New Jersey shelter cat and member of the Iams Trained Cats that perform Olympic-style tricks.

NASA satellite to scan solar system outer limits

WASHINGTON: NASA is preparing to launch a satellite that will study in unprecedented detail the distant regions where the outermost reaches of our solar system collide with the cold expanse of interstellar space.

The U.S. space agency said that the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, satellite is scheduled to be launched into high-Earth orbit on Sunday for its two-year mission from a site at Kwajalein Atoll in the south Pacific.

While interstellar space often is thought of as a vacuum, it actually contains traces of gas and dust.

The solar wind, a stream of electrically conducting gas continuously moving outward from the sun at 1 million mph (1.6 million kph), blows against this interstellar material and forms a humongous protective bubble around the solar system. This bubble is called the heliosphere.

As the solar wind reaches far beyond the planets to the solar system's outer limits, it encounters the edge of the heliosphere and collides with interstellar space. A shock wave is present at this boundary.

"These boundaries really protect us from the fairly harsh galactic environment," Boston University astronomer Nathan Schwadron, who heads science operations for the IBEX mission, said during a conference call with reporters.

NASA said IBEX will map the boundary region, which is important because it shields the solar system from dangerous galactic cosmic rays. IBEX is designed to detect atoms that are heated and thrown off from the boundary.

"Every six months, we will make global sky maps of where these atoms come from and how fast they are traveling. From this information, we will be able to discover what the edge of our bubble looks like and learn about the properties of the interstellar cloud that lies beyond the bubble," physicist Herb Funsten of the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, who is part of the mission, said in a statement.

Speak two languages and save your brain

ISLAMABAD: People who can speak two or more languages are said to be more imaginative, flexible and get distracted less.

"Speaking two languages save one's brain" is the formula of human life and the brain of bilingual and multilingual work fast as compared to the people who know single language.

Competency in more than one or two languages also saves the brain from getting weaker with age.

According to a recent research of Canadian University, the brain of a person who is frequent in speaking two languages work quickly and soundly for long period as compared to those who know single language.

The researchers of Canadian university have performed an experiment on 104 people between the age of 30 to 88 which proved that those people who are proficient in speaking two languages, their brains work more fast comparatively.

The research of Psychology and Over-aging tells that the mental condition of people who are proficient in speaking two languages is not affected with growing age factors as of others.

The research also revealed that the people who spend their time in playing musical instruments, study and dancing, their mental health decline passively as compared to others.

Solving queries and playing board games like chess also help sustaining mental health for a long time.

This modern research verifies the previous concept that language proficiency has the ability to protect the brain from decaying.

Last Titanic survivor sells mementos

LONDON: Millvina Dean was just two months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from the deck of the sinking RMS Titanic.

Now, more than 95 years later, Dean, the last living survivor of the disaster, is hoping to help pay her nursing home fees by selling artifacts of her rescue — a suitcase and other mementos expected to auction for about $5,200.

Rescued from the bitterly cold Atlantic night by the steamship Carpathia, Dean, her brother and her mother were taken to New York with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Before returning home to England, they were given a small wicker suitcase of clothing, a gift from New Yorkers, to help them rebuild their lives.

The suitcase and other mementos are to be sold Saturday at an auction organized by Henry Aldridge and Son, which specializes in Titanic memorabilia.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said the key item was the suitcase that was filled with clothes and donated to Dean's surviving family members after the disaster.

"They would have carried their little world in this suitcase," Aldridge said Thursday.

Dean also is selling letters from the Titanic Relief Fund offering her mother one pound, seven shillings and sixpence a week in compensation.

Dean, 96, has lived in a nursing home in the southern English city of Southampton — Titanic's home port — since she broke her hip two years ago.

"I am not able to live in my home anymore," Dean was quoted as telling the Southern Daily Echo newspaper. "I am selling it all now because I have to pay these nursing home fees and am selling anything that I think might fetch some money."

In 1912, baby Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean and her family were steerage passengers emigrating to Kansas City, Missouri, aboard the giant cruise liner.

Four days out of port, on the night of April 14, it hit an iceberg and sank. Billed as "practically unsinkable" by the publicity magazines of the period, the Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for all of 2,200 passengers and crew.

Dean, her mother and 2-year-old brother were among 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among more than 1,500 who died.

Aldridge said the "massive interest" in Titanic memorabilia shows no signs of abating. Last year, a collection of items belonging to Lillian Asplund, the last American survivor of the disaster, sold for more than $175,000. Asplund died in 2006 at the age of 99.

"It's the people, the human angle," Aldridge said. "You had over 2,200 men, women and children on that ship, from John Jacob Astor, the richest person in the world at the time, to a poor Scandinavian family emigrating to the States to start a new life. There were 2,200 stories."