A traditional Chinese banquet dish is shark fin soup and it is believed to bring good luck and numerous health benefits. Today, it is mostly served at weddings and other celebrations.
But now, that tradition is slowly being legislated off menus and market shelves across parts of the United States.

Legislators in New York State announced a bill on Tuesday that, following Western states example, would ban the sale, trading, possession and distribution of shark fins, possibly as of 2013. California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington are enacting similar bans that were passed last year, while Florida, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia have legislation pending.

Scientists estimate that up to 73 million sharks are killed annually to satisfy the appetite for shark fin soup, leading some species to the brink of extinction and depleting oceans of a key ecosystem predator. Although many governments ban the practice , Fishermen often slice it off and push the still-writhing shark back into the sea to die, since the fin is so much more valuable than the rest of the shark.

At the same time, younger generations of Chinese diners, have displayed far less devotion to a high-end dish that they view as environmentally unsound. The Chinese basketball star ,Yao Ming , has campaigned against the consumption of shark fin soup with the conservation group Wild Aid in both Asia and North America.

While many restaurants in Chinatown said that a ban would hurt their business, managers predicted that most clients would be only too happy to have it off the menu.

Grand Harmony and many other Chinatown banquet halls are already developing high-end substitutes for shark fin soup, using other kinds of fish, abalone or tofu.

In New York City there are dozens of large banquet halls, still serving the equivalent of 1,000 fins each month.

Dr. Michael Hirschfield, chief scientist of the conservation groups Oceana, said adding New York to the list of states banning shark fins would have an outsize effect, potentially quashing the American trade of fins once the West Coast bans take effect this year, because New York is the major East Coast importer.

Businesses in Chinatown are preparing for a shark fin phase-out. Nancy Ng, the manager at Po Wing Hong Food Market on Elizabeth Street, said that when she saw California had passed a ban last fall, she stopped ordering new shark fins, reasoning that New York would probably follow its example.

Anyway, the price went up about $50 a pound in the last six months for many of the fins in store, whose prices vary depending on size, color and quality due to much less of a market.

Singapore Accounting Services Redesigns Website

Raffles Corporate, is a Singapore based Accounting services company providing  Corporate Secretarial, Company Registration, Tax Planning Services and Business Loan Application Services to business in Singapore, announces about launching its renewed website.

The website has saved all the information useful for the customer of its  Singapore Accounting Services, but at the same time became more comfortable and user-friendly.

The first thing to say is a new design. Developed by the professional specialists, this new Singapore Accounting Services website design attracts with its stylish temper while keeping traditional color pallet habitual to customers.
Besides the website becomes more user-friendly due to the improved navigation, rich and interesting content that describes company’s services in the best possible way. The website has been moved to a new platform that allows it to work quickly in any browser.
If you are interested in some company’s services you, of course, would like to know about its projects and clients. This Singapore Accounting Services company website presents its renewed portfolio that is also available at the new website. The new version of portfolio includes all the outstanding projects from the old achievements to the recent works.

Generally speaking, the Raffles Corporate’s new website (http://www.RafflesCorporate.com) is a great work that represents the company’s style and working spirit.

With things such as keyword analysis and optimization, tags, calculating SEO scores, testing and rating posts, image analysis and other features, SEOPressor keeps constant tabs on the website and checks how it’s going. Also, how certain tweaks can be made on the website ,it provides suggestions on this, so that its prospects can be further improved. All these things help in building traffic to the website, which is what every webmaster is eventually looking for.

Online marketers will find SEOPressor the most useful ,for the following types:-

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It is predicted that SEOPressor will be incorporated as a mandatory plug-in into Wordpress. But, until then, they visit the website and download this highly beneficial product.

The elegant pedestrian esplanade, which opened in December spent six years for making, and it will soon have 17 restaurants and 7 retail shops is a sign of the downtown coastline’s revival.
A nearby section of Mediterranean coastline during the 15-year Lebanese civil war , it served as a notorious dumping ground and now there’s a stunning teak boardwalk, ample terrace seating and gray basalt walkways.

The ambitious 215,000-square-foot development, designed by the architect Steven Holl, literally grew out of the stabilized landfill. Pointing about 2,000 feet inland,the seafront used to be in front of that church.

The offerings at Zaitunay Bay are distinctly high-end. There is a Champagne bar, a yacht club and a jeweler. But this is not just another glittery attraction out of reach to average Lebanese. In December the esplanade hosted an open-air Christmas market, with a lighted olive tree. For the public , there are also free concerts and “cultural flea markets” planned, which includes a flower market for Mother’s Day and a music festival on the summer solstice.

Karim Haidar, a chef who runs three restaurants in Paris, returned to Lebanon after 25 years to open the creative Lebanese kitchen Zabad. A recent nine-course tasting menu began with a chickpea and tahini espuma, featured a tiger prawn kibbeh with figs and dates, and wrapped up with a dessert pancake of pistachio and blackberry caramel.

Starting March 1, visitors will be able to rent a boat to sail around the inviting, aquamarine-hued Mediterranean at Water Nation Sports Center. Water Nation also offers scuba courses, 12-hour sailing courses ($400), or 12 sessions of water skiing ($400).

Amarres Bistro & Cafe Francais channels the South of France with well-executed standbys like duck confit and steak tartare with truffles and an interesting French and Lebanese wine list.

A different aesthetic reigns at the Cro Magnon Steakhouse & Bar. The restaurant serves dry-aged U.S.D.A. prime beef cuts. The bone-in filet mignon special ($48) added a caveman touch to a normally dainty cut of meat. There’s a cigar cabinet, leather banquettes and a vaulted brass ceiling.

Mr. Ghazal’s other offering at Zaitunay Bay is the nautical St. Elmo’s Brasserie , and he described as Boston fisherman style.It should be a place where sailors would go and have a drink and meet girls.

The Canadian-born Mr. Ghazal was working in the restaurant business in Montreal when the chance to move to his family’s native Lebanon arose. It was as much a mission as a business opportunity. It’s kind of humbling, said Mr. Ghazal. You’re coming back to your roots and doing something that advances your country.

This hints at a more consumer-level (rather than professional) user who manages images for personal use.

With this in mind, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements differ in three main areas: price, ease of use, and features. Let’s us see one by one.

Price :

Adobe Photoshop costs is $699, while Photoshop Elements is $99, but some professionals use Elements even for their work. They use workarounds such as add-ons and other tools to get Elements to do what they need to accomplish.

Ease of Use :

You can expect it to be more difficult to use when Photoshop geared towards professional image users. Elements has a more intuitive, more user-friendly interface.

However, this won’t be much of an issue , if you’re already familiar with photo editing software, such as earlier versions of Photoshop.

Features :

As you might have guessed, the differences in price and ease of use stem from differences in features. Photoshop has functionalities which Elements doesn’t have… and vice versa.

Photoshop has more robust features for manipulating the finer details of a digital image. Here are just some features in Photoshop, which aren’t in Elements:

- CMYK and LAB color modes
- ability to work with 16-bit and 32-bit images
- Layer masks and layer comps
- Adjustment layers for color balance, curves and selective color
- Advanced text formatting, including putting text on a path

But don’t ditch Elements yet. It also has features you won’t find in Photoshop, such as:

- Automatic red-eye removal
- Cookie cutter tool, background templates and artwork
- Photo Organizer, which lets you tag photos and later find them quickly through tags. Photo Organizer also lets you share your photos by creating online galleries, slideshows, photo books and more.

Many Elements users find they can do with Elements a lot of the things Photoshop can do. Some of the functionalities are there but need to be “unlocked.”

Add-ons and tools for Photoshop Elements are developed by users of both software. Some are free, while others you need to pay for. These will enhance Elements to be able to do more of the things Photoshop can do.

Photoshop or Photoshop Elements? Both are powerful software for perfecting your digital images. Choose the one that best meets your needs within the resources you have.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that participants waking up repeatedly during the night were more likely to show Alzheimer’s disease-related signs than sound sleepers. The researchers, led by neurologist Dr. Yo-El Ju, announced their results at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
Among 100 participants aged 45 to 80, half of whom had family histories of Alzheimer’s. The researchers monitored their sleep for two weeks and found that on average people spent a full 8 hours in bed each night, but only 6.5 hours sleeping, as they wake up continously during the night.

Based on tests of participants’ spinal fluid and brain scans using PET and MRI imaging, Ju found that those who awoke more than five times per hour at night were more likely to have amyloid plaques in the brain, the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, and the participants with worse “sleep efficiency” , less than 85% of the time in bed asleep — were more likely to have preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.

The ongoing studies, says it’s not clear yet how the relationship works — whether amyloid starts to build up in the brain and then leads to poor sleep, or whether disrupted sleep triggers biological processes that contribute to amyloid deposits.

Ju theorizes that deep sleep may slow the production of amyloid, leaving less for the brain to clear away during waking hours. That could explain why poor sleepers, who spend less time in deep sleep, tend to accumulate more of the nerve-damaging protein than those who sleep longer.

The results of comprehensive analysis of how the brain’s sleep-wake cycle may interact with the Alzheimer’s process. Ju and her team are in the process of recruiting more study volunteers and teasing apart whether risk factors such as family history or genes connected to Alzheimer’s could account for the relationship between sleep and memory problems.

Ju is hopeful that sleep modifying sleep patterns may be a useful way to lower patients’ risk of progressing from mild to more advances stages of the degenerative disease.Once Again, studies in mice support the possibility: animals that were bred to develop amyloid did not accumulate the protein when they were allowed to sleep more than they normally do.

Animation has come a long way from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie cartoon animations in the 1920’s. Animation films, such as Toy Story and Jurassic Park and even in television shows like Babylon 5, where classic animation has jumped to new animations at warp speed by computer.

The computer can speed up both the creative process of animating characters as well as the time for the show to the screen. Even Julie Andrews came out with the quote “Movie animation has come a long way since we frolicked with cartoon penguins, sheep and carousel ponies in Mary Poppins” when she was doing voice work on Shrek 2.

Without a skilled artist at the drawing board or moving the mouse, nothing can be created. And, artists need proven solutions and programs that they can depend on in order to produce the wonderful images they do.

Computer animation software helps teach the skills needed to be a successful animator. Computer animation has been called a healthy marriage between art and science.

The computer graphics and animation field is in the area of computer games is one of the largest and fastest growing areas. Computer animation programs and software are constantly being improved to keep up with the animations and graphics that are becoming more complex, even as the technology in the hardware simplifies.

Various creators of software applications have designed numerous programs for young children. They can learn to create animations, as well as several other skills specifically designed for their level. Many of the features of educational computer programs, such as interactivity, are completely in-line with educational principals, which is a huge advantage for everyone.

Your children may be interested in learning about computer animation programs that are available for them. Through fun games, animated tutorials and even vocabulary sections, children learn the essential computer skills they will need when using other computer animation software, even on the preschool level.

The people were scaling back by opting for cheaper cosmetic surgeries instead of pricier procedures. Last year, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) statistics reveal that there was a 5% increase in overall cosmetic procedures, including a 2% rise in surgeries and a 6% rise in minimally -invasive procedures such as Botox, compared to 2010.

The ASPS’s press release welcomed the news, but at the same time the organization’s president, Dr. Malcolm Z. Roth, admitted that the overall growth in cosmetic procedures is being primarily driven by a substantial rise in minimally-invasive procedures.

The cosmetic procedures are rising in a way, then, may be an indication of continued economic struggle, with consumers electing to go with cheaper procedures partly because they don’t have the money for invasive, big-ticket surgeries like rhinoplasty, a.k.a., nose jobs, which were actually down 3% last year.

For that matter, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, facelift, liposuction, nose reshaping of these five most popular cosmetic surgeries for 2011 grew significantly for the year, experiencing increases in numbers of 5% or less. Nose reshaping, Eyelid surgery were most surgeries in 2010 than there were last year.

The growth areas for plastic surgery, are for pectoral implants, buttock implants, buttock lifts, cheek implants, lip augmentation, and chin augmentation. All of these surgeries experienced an increase of 38% or more in 2011.

Overall, though, the plastic surgery business is down quite a bit compared its booming, pre-recession heyday. In 2005, a record of 2.1 million cosmetic surgeries were performed in the U.S. Last year, there were about 1.58 million such surgeries, a rise of 2% from the year before—but down by about half a million from six years prior.

I guess that’s one way we’ll all be able to tell when the economy is faring better: We’ll be able to see it directly on the non-expressive faces of people all around us.

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Telling the group ,Mr. Perry asked his top financial rainmakers to raise money for Mr. Gingrich, that he fully supported the former House speaker.
But it seems unlikely that Mr. Gingrich will reap a financial windfall from wealthy donors for his cash-starved campaign.

The detour to a state that is rich in Republican donors but does not hold its primary until June comes during a third week in which Mr. Gingrich will make limited public appearances.

He will be largely out of sight for part of this week, just as he was in the days before last week’s contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, which Rick Santorum won, and before the Feb. 4 caucuses in Nevada, which Mitt Romney won. Even as he sacrifices time in front of voters, his prospects of raising the cash he needs are uncertain.

Roy Bailey, who was a national finance co-chairman for Mr. Perry, said most of the Texas governor’s wealthy supporters would hesitate to back Mr. Gingrich. “The problem is you want to feel the person you’re supporting has a really good chance of succeeding,” Mr. Bailey said.

In California, Mr. Gingrich will attend small-scale events in homes, restaurants and country clubs, where he will seek checks of $500 to $2,500.

For $500, supporters can attend breakfast with Mr. Gingrich on Tuesday morning at a country club outside San Diego. On Valentine’s Day, he will attend a cocktail reception at a private home in Fresno, Calif., where a $2,500 donation includes “a little Champagne, a photo op,” said Wendy Turner, the host.

Fund-raising experts say such supporters are midtier donors who seek to rub elbows and pose for a picture in exchange for checks. They have Mr. Gingrich’s attention just now because he has had little success with the top-tier bundlers who gather the maximum legal donations of $2,500 from networks of friends and business associates.

These are the “access” fund-raisers who want a connection to the candidate once he is in the White House, and they commit only to someone whose odds of becoming the nominee are good, Mr. Nehring said. “Everybody wants to be an ambassador,” he said.

In a memorandum on Jan. 30, Martin Baker, Mr. Gingrich’s national political director, wrote that because of “overwhelming support” after South Carolina, “the Gingrich campaign is now in a position where we will be able to respond to Romney’s ads in every state moving forward.”

But that promise appears to have quickly faded. The campaign did not run any advertisements after the Florida primary — in Nevada or elsewhere — according to Kantar Media.

Much of Mr. Gingrich’s four days in Nevada ahead of the caucuses there were spent seeking donors. About 30 top fund-raisers from around the country gathered in Las Vegas and pledged to raise $2 million, said Eric Beach, a national finance chairman for Mr. Gingrich’s campaign.

The group met in a conference room at the Venetian hotel, which is owned by Sheldon Adelson, a casino mogul who with his wife and other family members has contributed a reported $11 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Gingrich. It has largely financed Mr. Gingrich’s anti-Romney advertisements.

Mr. Adelson addressed the fund-raisers from around the country, said people who were there, but his remarks were confined to his life story and he did not commit more money to the Gingrich campaign. Mr. Adelson has signaled to Mr. Romney’s supporters that he will back him if he becomes the nominee.

At the Venetian meeting, the fund-raisers heard Mr. Gingrich’s political aides lay out their strategy to capture as many delegates as Mr. Romney in the next months: winning in the Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday — Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma — while remaining competitive in Ohio and then winning Texas in April with Mr. Perry’s support.

But all that was before Mr. Santorum’s victories last week, which won him few delegates but something more valuable , the aura of a victor.