I was in lower Manhattan today, for the first time in months, with Barbara.  She said, you'll get to see the Freedom Tower.  Nope, rainy and foggy.  Could only see up to about 35 stories.  

The study of 400,000 people is the largest ever done on the issue, and the results should reassure any coffee lovers who think it's a guilty pleasure that may do harm.

"Our study suggests that's really not the case," said lead researcher Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute. "There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking."

No one knows why. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer. The most widely studied ingredient - caffeine - didn't play a role in the new study's results.

It's not that earlier studies were wrong. There is evidence that coffee can raise LDL, or bad cholesterol, and blood pressure at least short-term, and those in turn can raise the risk of heart disease.

Even in the new study, it first seemed that coffee drinkers were more likely to die at any given time. But they also tended to smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers. Once researchers took those things into account, a clear pattern emerged: Each cup of coffee per day nudged up the chances of living longer.

The study was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. The results are published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Careful, though - this doesn't prove that coffee makes people live longer, only that the two seem related. Like most studies on diet and health, this one was based strictly on observing people's habits and resulting health. So it can't prove cause and effect.

“Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced they would reject efforts by Canada’s right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.  Canada’s Radio Act requires that ‘a licenser may not broadcast….any false or misleading news.’ The provision has kept Fox ‘news’ and right wing talk radio out of Canada”   -Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – Huffington Post

I lived in Vancouver, BC for about 2 years myself around 2005-7,  and was astonished at the fact they actually got real world news.  Something I was not used to coming from the U.S. and I commented on all the time. People there were shocked to hear when I told them what a traditional U.S. news broadcast entailed..