The benefits of paternity leave

The Economist

Despite decades of social progress in the workplace, women still have to contend with the lion’s share of child-care. While most countries allow up to three months of maternity leave, only around half a dozen countries offer fathers more than two weeks paternity leave. In Denmark, 90% of dads take more than a fortnight’s leave.

Research suggests that enabling fathers to look after their newborn children has positive knock-on effects.

What are the benefits of paternity leave?

First, fathers who take paternity leave are more likely to take an active role in child-care tasks. According to a study of four rich countries – America, Australia, Britain and Denmark – fathers who had taken paternity leave were more likely to feed, dress, bathe and play with their child long after the period of leave had ended. Danish men were the most diligent. Seventy-seven per cent of them play with their children. And, in Britain, dads who took time off at birth were almost a third more likely to read books with their toddlers than those who hadn’t.

Second, this early interaction has longer-term benefits for a child’s learning abilities. A study by the University of Oslo found that paternity leave improved children’s performance at secondary school; daughters, especially, seem to flourish if their dads had taken time off. But this tends to benefit children whose dads come from more advantaged backgrounds. Most paternity leave tends to be short and poorly paid so richer dads are more likely to take the time off.
Third, paternity leave is good for women's careers. When childcare responsibilities fall exclusively on the mother, the effect is to depress women’s wages. Time out of the labour force deprives them of experience and promotions. When men shoulder more of the childcare burden, the effect is lessened.

For years the priority for women’s’ rights campaigners has been to increase the provision of maternity leave. These days, more governments are starting to believe that the best way to improve women’s career prospects is instead to turn to the dads.

The History of Birth Control

TIME

Fallece la legendaria Olga Kotelko, veterana trituradora de récords

es una verguenza que los medios de comunicacion canadienses, las autoridades deportivas y tanto entusiasta libelo propulsor de la liberacion del consumo de la marihuana y del world pride de estos dias, no hayan encontrado tiempo para rendir homenaje a quien es un ejemplo para los canadienses de todas las edades. una sola y breve nota a ojo de aguila ha sido ha todo lo que los ocupadisimos misters and mistress le han dedicado, mientras el mundo le rinde homenajes. ashamed of you.
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TodayandForever Videos

EL PAÍS

Alejandro Prado
Olga Kotelko se calzó unas zapatillas de atletismo por primera vez a los 77 años. Competitiva por genética, no se conformó con dar paseos a ritmo ligero como aconsejan los médicos a personas de su edad. Ella quería correr, correr de verdad. Se convirtió en una máquina de ganar medallas y de destrozar récords en atletismo para personas mayores. Compitió hasta que una hemorragia cerebral la derrotó el pasado martes y falleció a los 95 años.
Más de 500 medallas y 26 récords mundiales son cifras que impresionan. Más aún si se sabe que esos triunfos se cosecharon entre los 77 y 95 años. Y más aún cuando la protagonista no había practicado nunca el atletismo. Porque a Olga Kotelko (Vonda, Canadá, 1919) lo que le gustaba era el béisbol. De joven no le importaba recorrerse varios kilómetros para jugar cuando salía de la escuela y luego volver a casa.
Criada en una granja del interior de Canadá, era la séptima de 11 hijos de un matrimonio de origen ucranio. Desde muy pequeña compaginó la escuela con las tareas domésticas y en su tiempo libre jugaba al softball y béisbol. Se graduó en la escuela para profesores en 1941 y comenzó a enseñar en una escuela de Vonda. Su matrimonio se rompió en 1957, cuando estaba embarazada de su segunda hija. Se mudó con su hermana a la Columbia Británica y se sacó un título universitario mientras criaba a sus vástagos.
La carrera en la enseñanza de Olga continuó hasta 1984, el año de su jubilación. Hasta entonces nunca se planteó la práctica regular de deporte, pero una vez que tuvo tiempo libre retomó el softball. Kotelko jugaba con dedicación pero con sus más de 70 años los reflejos y agilidad empezaban a fallarle en el juego.
A los 77 una compañera de equipo le aconsejó el atletismo en pista y Olga se puso a ello. Contrató los servicios de una entrenadora húngara que le apretó las tuercas, cosa que gustó a la casi octogenaria deportista. Se sometió a interminables y agotadoras sesiones de gimnasio y entrenamiento en pista y sus músculos respondieron de forma asombrosa. Entonces decidió competir.
En los campeonatos de atletismo para gente mayor los veteranos deportistas se dividen en franjas de edad. Hay muchos sexagenarios, septuagenarios y octogenarios. A partir de los 90 los participantes escasean. Olga Kotelko arrasó en cada franja en la que compitió. De hecho, sus marcas a menudo eran mejores que las de atletas más jóvenes.
Además de un ejemplo de longevidad, Olga lo fue también de polivalencia. Podía correr, saltar, lanzar… Así arrasó en categorías atléticas tan dispares como los 100 y 200 metros lisos, salto de altura y longitud o lanzamiento de martillo y jabalina. Y en todas ganaba. Cientos de medallas y 26 récords —gran parte de ellos entre los 90 y 95 años— cuantifican su éxito en el deporte.
El fenómeno de Kotelko avivó el debate sobre los efectos del ejercicio de alta intensidad en los mayores. Cualquier galeno aconsejaría hacer deporte a un octogenario o nonagenario, pero Olga machacaba sus músculos y estos se fortalecieron a la vez que se ralentizó su envejecimiento. La atleta fue objeto de estudio y los expertos concluyeron que su caso era excepcional: sus riñones procesaban las enzimas y subproductos necesarios para que su masa muscular se regenerase después de un ejercicio intenso. Olga podía emplearse a fondo en el deporte porque se recuperaba de manera rápida y eficaz.
La veterana atleta canadiense fue rebajando el ritmo de sus entrenamientos en los últimos años, pero sus resultados siguieron siendo espectaculares. Al margen de los estudios a los que fue sometida, los investigadores obtuvieron una conclusión evidente: su tenacidad y competitividad fueron claves en su exitosa carrera deportiva.

Very pregnant Alysia Montano runs at U.S. Championships

nbcsports

Nick Zaccardi

Getty Images

Olympian Alysia Montano entered the 800m at the U.S. Championships about six weeks before her due date on Thursday.

Montano, a five-time U.S. outdoor champion, clocked 2 minutes, 32.13 seconds to finish last in her eight-woman preliminary heat, 24.38 seconds behind her closest competitor. Here’s video of her race.

“I’ve been running through my entire pregnancy, and I felt really, really good during the whole process,” Montano told reporters after her race in Sacramento, Calif. “I definitely was like, OK, I think I can run a pretty decent time. I didn’t have a time on it [that I wanted to run]. I just knew I didn’t want to get lapped, be the first person to ever get lapped in an 800m. More than anything, I wanted to be here, and I’m feeling that fire and that desire to be on the track and to race. What a better avenue than to do it at USA Nationals.”

Montano, the four-time reigning U.S. champion, had a previous qualifying time that allowed her to enter the competition. She said she consulted her doctor and midwife, who encouraged her to race 34 weeks into her pregnancy.

“That took away any fear of what the outside world might think about a woman running in pregnancy or exercise in general,” said Montano, wearing a customary flower in her hair. “What I found out mostly was that exercising and maintaining during pregnancy is actually much better for the mom and the baby.”

She received a standing ovation at Sacramento State’s Hornet Stadium.

“I just felt so supported,” she said. “I didn’t want to be judged or have any ill things said about me. I just wanted to kind of do what my heart and my desire wanted to do.”

Montano said she knew she wouldn’t advance out of the first round. Rather, she viewed her participation as a celebration.

“We see so many people in different avenues in their life start their family, and it looks so different than it does for a professional athlete, especially for a professional athlete woman,” said Montano, whose due date is Aug. 13. “You’ve seen [four-time Olympic middle distance runner] Bernard Lagat have two kids, and we don’t see the other side of it. This is what it looks like to be a professional athlete as a woman.”

Montano, 28, finished fifth in the Olympic 800m and fourth at the 2011 and 2013 World Championships. No American woman has won an Olympic 800m medal since Kim Gallagher‘s bronze in 1988.

Hijab Day: Islam Imposed on Citizens in Minneapolis

breitbart

By Pamela Geller 

The counter-jihad website Creeping Sharia reported Monday that “according to a Facebook post, Somali staffers that work at Minneapolis City Hall declared February 28 ‘Hijab Day’ at City Hall and convinced the police chief and female city council reps to wear hijabs on the job.”

The idea originated with female Muslim City Hall employees, who then cajoled non-Muslim women into participating in Hijab Day as well. One enthusiastic participant was a Muslim woman named Ilhan Omar, who is on the staff of Minneapolis City Council Member Andrew Johnson. Omar recently instigated a brawl at a Democratic caucus meeting in Cedar-Riverside, leading to several injuries and the cancellation of the meeting.

Pictures depicted Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau and several female City Council members, all smiling and wearing hijabs. Why? Is there wear a kippah day? A Sikh turban day? A Christ on the cross day? A Wiccan witch day? What’s next? Slaughter a live animal and let it bleed out for lunch day? Inshallah!

This is imposing Islam in Minneapolis. This is dhimmitude on steroids. A municipality celebrating “Hijab Day” is a violation of the establishment clause. The dhimmi Chief Harteau ought to be fired.

The hijab is a political statement, not a religious mandate. Mark Steyn says in his book America Alone that “there is no evidence that any Muslim woman anywhere ever wore the jilbab before the disco era, when it was taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Arab world. It is no more ancient and traditional than platform shoes, bell bottoms, and cheesecloth shirts.”

And “celebrating” Hijab Day is a political statement.

The Minneapolis officials could have more accurately called it Misogyny Day, as the hijab is a call to women and girls to cover up and hide their femininity. It is offensive, and it is misogynistic. The message to women: Hide who you are, because savages cannot control their carnal appetites! Do it and like it! Embrace the hate! Celebrate the most extreme, brutal and misogynistic ideology on the face of the earth!

More notably, Police Chief Janeé Harteau is a homosexual. “Celebrating” the symbol of a virulently anti-gay ideology is the height of cluelessness and/or self-loathing. Gays under the sharia are persecuted, oppressed and executed. Over at my newsite Atlas Shrugs, I run weekly, sometimes daily, news stories of gays getting beaten, whipped or killed under Islamic law. And Police Chief Janeé Harteau is celebrating this? Why hasn’t Harteau joined us in condemning the Muslim oppression of gays under the Sharia? No, instead she bullies her division into wearing this garment of oppression.

The fault, however, doesn’t lay solely with these Janeé Harteau and her friends. In his submission speech in Cairo in 2009, Barack Obama said: “Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one’s religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state in our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That’s why the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it.”

But the women who really need protection are not Muslimas who are wearing hijabs – who is bothering them? The real problem is the women around the world, including non-Muslims, who have been threatened and even killed for not covering their heads, including Aqsa Parvez who was murdered by her father and brother for not wearing her hijab; Amira Osman Hamid, the Sudanese woman who took off her hijab and was sentenced to be flogged for doing so; and Amira, the young girl in Egypt who killed herself after she refused to wear the hijab and her family beat her.

Arab American News reported that the last recorded dispute between Michigan honor-killing victim Jessica Mokdad and her stepfather Rahim Alfetlawi, who killed her, was over the wearing of the hijab, which he originally forced her to wear. Jessica didn’t want to wear it, thereby bringing shame on him and the family. Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Contaldo said: “He thought she was becoming too Westernized. I think this was a very nice young lady wanting to experiment with Western culture without control and without abuse.” The Detroit Free Press reported: “Mokdad’s mother told police that Alfetlawi felt so shamed by her daughter’s Western ways. He killed her in an honor killing, Warren Police Sgt. Stephen Mills said.”

The Mokdad honor killing was covered up, although I exposed the facts about it at my AFDI/SIOA Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on honor killing and Islamic law on April 29, 2012 in Dearborn, Michigan. Probably Janeé Harteau never heard of Jessica Mokdad. But Hijab Day at the Minneapolis City Hall is monstrous in light of the fate of girls like Jessica and Aqsa Parvez.

And it’s not just a few fanatical fathers: last September, according to AFP, an Al-Qaeda group in Syria said that girls in areas it controlled would not be allowed to attend school unless they wore “Islamic clothing” – that is, the hijab (at least). These things aren’t happening only in Muslim countries: in February 2013, South Australia’s biggest Islamic school warned both Muslim and non-Muslim teachers that they would be fired if they didn’t wear hijab to school functions.

Creeping Sharia adds: “Meanwhile, the sons of hijabis in Minneapolis were busy striking terror at an LA Fitness where police responded to 147 incidents in 2013 and 24 incidents this year.”

When are they having Female Genital Mutilation Day at Minneapolis City Hall?

-----------------------------
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.

Venezuela: Video de la brutal golpiza por la “Guardia del Pueblo” a la costurera Marvinia Jimenez

DolarToday

Vatican says talk of female cardinals ’not remotely realistic’

worldnews

By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

The announcement that Pope Francis will name new cardinals next year sparked some fevered speculation that he could bestow one of the red birettas on a woman.

Guido Montani / EPA file

But the Vatican is doing its best to dispel the rumors, saying that while it's "theologically and theoretically" possible, there won't be a princess joining the princes of the church anytime soon.

"This is just nonsense," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told the Irish Times.

"Being a cardinal is one of those roles in the church for which, theoretically, you do not have to be ordained, but to move from there to suggesting the pope will name women cardinals for the next consistory is not remotely realistic.”

Pope Francis has made it clear he's not averse to breaking with tradition, and he has spoken about promoting the role of women in the male-dominated church.

That fueled talk that he might be open to a female cardinal, and some commentators started circulating candidate wish-lists last week with names like former Irish President Mary McAlese and Congo-born Italian minister Cecile Kyenge.

Current canon law dictates that cardinals must be a priest or a bishop — of which there are no women — but in theory that's a rule that could be changed without violating church teachings.

Based on Lombardi's comments, however, it appears that won't happen — at least not before Francis' first consistory (formal meeting of Cardinals) in February.

Nobel literature prize goes to Canadian writer Alice Munro

today

PETER MUHLY / AFP - Getty Images

A photo taken on June 25, 2009 in Dublin, Ireland 

shows Canadian author Alice Munro who

 has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Literature Prize.

Alice Munro, a Canadian master of the short story revered as a thorough but forgiving chronicler of the human spirit, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. 

Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award from the Swedish Academy since Saul Bellow, who left for the U.S. as a boy and won in 1976. 

Seen as a contemporary Chekhov for her warmth, insight and compassion, she has captured a wide range of lives and personalities without passing judgment on her characters. Unusually for Nobel winners, Munro's work consists almost entirely of short stories. "Lives of Girls and Women" is her only novel. 

"I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," the 82-year-old said by telephone when contacted by The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia. 

Munro is beloved among her peers, from Lorrie Moore and George Saunders to Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen. She is equally admired by critics. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor. 

Atwood — a fellow Canadian who also figured prominently in the Nobel buzz — tweeted, "Hooray! Alice Munro wins 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature." 

Munro's publisher, Penguin Random House, welcomed the award with "jubilation and great pride," and sent "joyous good wishes to our beloved author and to our family of her publishers and editors." Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper congratulated Munro on Twitter "on behalf of all Canadians." 

The award is likely to be the capstone to Munro's career. She told Canada's National Post in June that she was "probably not going to write anymore." 

In announcing the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called her a "master of the contemporary short story." The academy's permanent secretary, Peter Englund, said he had not managed to get hold of her but left a message on her answering machine. 

"She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection," Englund told The Associated Press 

Munro is the 13th female literature laureate in the 112-year history of the Nobel Prizes. 

Her published work often turns on the difference between Munro's youth in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s. 

In an interview with AP in 2003, she described the '60s as "wonderful." 

It was "because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said. 

Munro, the daughter of a fox farmer and a teacher, was born Alice Anne Laidlaw. She was a literary person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a forbidden passion. 

"It was glory I was after ... walking the streets like an exile or a spy," recalls the narrator of Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women," a novel published in 1971. 

She received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism, and was still an undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC radio in Canada. 

She dropped out of college to marry a fellow student, James Munro, had three children and became a full-time housewife. By her early 30s, she was so frightened and depressed she could barely write a full sentence. 

Her good fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband, in 1963. Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults to simply filling out invoices, her narrative talents resurfaced but her marriage collapsed. Her first collection, "Dance of the Happy Shades," came out in 1968 and won the Governor's prize. 

She later married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. 

Her stories are usually set in Ontario, her home province. Among her best known is "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the story of a woman who begins losing her memory and agrees with her husband that she should be placed in a nursing home. 

The narrative begins in a relatively tender, traditional mood. But we soon learn that the husband has been unfaithful in the past and didn't always regret it — "What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being." The wife, meanwhile, has fallen for a man at the nursing home. 

Some have called her "the greatest author in North America and, yes, I tend to agree with that," said the academy's Englund. "We're not saying just that she can say a lot in just 20 pages — more than an average novel writer can — but also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short story that covers decades and it works." 

Last year's Nobel literature award went to Mo Yan of China. 

The 2013 Nobel announcements continue Friday with the Nobel Peace Prize, followed by the economics prize on Monday. The awards will be handed to the winners on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Scarlett Johansson Named Sexiest Woman Alive

90-years-old nurse practices medicine in Florida

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Taylor Morris, An Incredible Love Story Told in 22 Photos

glamour.com

By Ariane Marder
They say every picture tells a story. In this case, times that by 22. I came across this series on Buzzfeed and was moved beyond words. Thanks to photographer Tim Dodd, the world can see what sacrifice and love means to a couple in Iowa. Warning: It's a tearjerker.

Tim Dodd has been chronicling his friend—and war veteran—Taylor Morris's amazing journey on his blog. Here are just some of the photos he has taken of Taylor and his longtime girlfriend Danielle over the course of their inspiring relationship:

To read more about Taylor and donate to his recovery, go to: www.taylormorris.org

How much do you love this? Do you know a couple that inspires you? Share!

Asma and Bashar al-Assad -- a match made in hell

Fox News

www.theguardian.com

By Dr. Keith Ablow

Since their marriage in 2000, Asma al-Assad, stylish wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has stood by his side through thick and thin.  This, despite the fact that  her husband Bashar presides over a government which Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch insist routinely tortures, imprisons and kills its political opponents. Most recently, of course, his government is accused of killing over a thousand Syrian men, women and children using chemical weapons.

Asma, who is pretty and fit, is also smart. She was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan when she met the Syrian president, who was then training in London to be an eye surgeon.  

Now, people around the world wonder how a woman born in the United Kingdom, with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and French literature, could have stood by as her husband amassed a fortune over $1 billion while serving in public office. And how she could post Instagram photographs of her charity work while presumably hearing that her husband’s regime has used chemical gas to asphyxiate children.

The answer is simple:  Being pretty is no antidote to being greedy nor corrupt nor lacking empathy, even though people instinctively think it ought to be.  

Bashar and Asma are a match made in hell because they feed one another’s needs to keep reality at bay.  

Being smart and educated is no antidote to being an accomplice, to being an accessory to organized crime (whether as a mafia don’s wife or a dictator’s wife).  

And having children is no antidote to malignant narcissism.

You can be slim and wear stylish clothes and have an above-average IQ and still have such deep questions about whether you are worth anything at all, presumably because no one ever loved you for real.  

And then you can go about trying to fill yourself up with money, power and the adulation of others, no matter what it takes—including killing people.  

In fact, it is an expected result of running from one’s own self-loathing, cloaked in finery and fakery and fraud, that the real and decent people who interact with you will end up emptied out, of their money or their life force, by being in contact with you -- let alone having you as their “first lady.”

Bashar al-Assad may have turned out to be a decent eye surgeon if he had indulged the healer inside him, instead of being commandeered by his dictator father into dictatorship.  

And Asma al-Assad may have turned out to be a teacher of French literature had she not been raised in an environment that made her famished for finery and fame, such that she traded in her humanity for a palace, which only means she never grew up in anything like a home.

Bashar and Asma are a match made in hell because they feed one another’s needs to keep reality at bay.  

They are a dynamic duo of destruction because they were, at some point, for all intents and purposes, destroyed in their humanness. 

Now they are in league to distance themselves from that reality, whatever it takes—even killing kids, which is only a stark physical representation of what must have happened to them, psychologically.

Add to this the fact that a large segment of the world community has endorsed their brand of tyranny to keep another malignancy at bay -- radical Islam -- and all the ingredients for chemical weapons were stirring in the cauldron for years.  

Because there’s one thing about monsters that is confounding:  They are sometimes ruthless at tearing down other monsters.  

All marriages make psychological sense, even the ones that make for mass murder.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/06/asma-and-bashar-al-assad-match-made-in-hell/#ixzz2e89Hk1JZ

Diana Nyad: ‘I was sick as a dog’ during historic Cuba-US swim

 

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Read on today >>

'Never give up': Diana Nyad, 64, makes history with 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida

worldnews

 

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Video of an exhausted Diana Nyad, surrounded by an adoring crowd in Key West, Fla., after swimming 53 hours from Havana, Cuba.

By Alastair Jamieson and Tracy Connor, NBC News

Long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad made history Monday, becoming the first person to swim the 110 treacherous miles from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage — at the age of 64.

Crowds of fans, cheering and blowing conch shells, waded into the water to greet a sunburned Nyad as she approached the shoreline of Key West just before 2 p.m. with a Coast Guard escort after nearly 53 hours in the Florida Strait.

"I'm beaming with pride," Nyad told NBC News as supporters mobbed her stretcher before she was taken by ambulance to a hospital for evaluation.

"Never give up," she told a well-wisher, according to NBC Miami.

This was Nyad’s fifth try since 1978 — and she had a few strokes of luck: favorable currents and fewer of the poisonous jellyfish that helped doom an earlier attempt, according to updates from her website and Twitter feeds.

The swim was not without extreme challenges, however.

Nyad was so cold on Sunday night that her handlers didn’t stop to feed her, figuring she would stay warmer if she kept going.

Her tongue and lips were swollen by sun and seawater, and she had abrasions in her mouth from a special silicone mask meant to keep the jellyfish at bay.

At two miles out, Nyad seemed to realize that she was on the cusp of success and she paused to thank assistants gathered on 10 boats.

"I am about to swim my last two miles in the ocean," she told her handlers as she closed in on Key West, according to the blog.

"This is a lifelong dream of mine and I'm very very glad to be with you," she added, praising her team. "So let's get going so we can have a whopping party."

Even President Obama, via Twitter, congratulated Nyad. 

Andrew Innerarity / Reuters

U.S. long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, 64, completes her swim from Cuba as she arrives in Key West, Florida, September 2, 2013. Nyad has become the first person to swim from Cuba without a shark cage.

"Congratulations to @DianaNyad. Never give up on your dreams," the president's account posted, although it was not signed "-BO," which means he did not personally write it.

According to Nyad's Twitter, she officially spent 52 hours, 54 minutes, and 18.6 seconds swimming.

The Florida Strait has been conquered only once, by Australian Susie Maroney, who used a protective cage during a 1997 swim.

Just this past June, Australian Chloe McCardel abandoned an attempt after 11 hours when she was badly stung by a jellyfish.

Nyad — who swam around the island of Manhattan in 1975 and a from the Bahamas to Florida in 1979 — departed on Saturday morning and arrived a day earlier than original estimates.

NBC News' Christopher Nelson, David Wyllie of BreakingNews.com and Reuters contributed to this report.

Endurance swimmer Nyad sets off from Cuba to Florida

Diana Nyad - The Swim

simpatico que cubadebate reproduzca el reporte de prensa latina que a su vez lo toma textual de reuters sin citar la fuente. no tienen un plumifero a mano para cubrir el evento?
Update from Navigator John Bartlett: 6pm

Diana has swum 11.85 statute miles and is currently stroking at 50 strokes per minute.

------------------ 

Reuters

By Marc Frank

(Reuters) - U.S. endurance swimmer Diana Nyad jumped into the calm turquoise waters of Cuba on Saturday and began making her way toward home, Key West, Florida, in pursuit of a dream that she says nearly took her life in an attempt last year.
"I've learned that if you see a beautiful calm sea like this you don't say that is the way it is going to be forever ... I admit I'm scared, I know what's out there," Nyad, 64, said, as she prepared to enter the water at Havana's Hemingway Marina, just west of the capital.

Her biggest challenges during the 103 mile (166-km) swim, apart from fatigue, will be the poisonous jelly fish that float through the Florida Straits, the sharks, the man o'wars, storms, waves and the powerful and unpredictable Gulf Stream, the mighty ocean current that flows west to east between Cuba and Florida.

If she succeeds, Nyad, who has failed on four attempts to make the crossing, would become the world record holder for the longest unassisted open ocean swim, meaning no shark cage or body suit to protect her. She was not using flippers.

Nyad said on Friday that jelly fish stings were one reason for her undoing on an attempt last year, but this time she would be wearing a protective silicone mask to ward off their paralyzing stings.

She said the custom-made mask slows her and makes it more difficult to breathe, so it may take up to three days to complete the swim.

Nyad will have a small fleet of five support boats and a crew of 35 to keep her on course through the strong Gulf Stream current, provide food and water and keep away sharks.

She told reporters on Saturday this would be her last attempt.

"This is the last time, this is the end of the journey as they say, 100 percent," she said.

The treacherous body of water known as the Florida Straits is the holy grail for marathon swimmers. It has been conquered only once, by Australian Susie Maroney, who used a protective cage at age 22 during her 1997 swim. The cage glided on ocean currents and enabled her to make the journey in just 25 hours.

A native New Yorker, Nyad was raised in south Florida by a French mother and Greek-Egyptian stepfather.

She is an advocate of improved U.S.-Cuba relations and says she repeatedly sings the Cuban song "Guantanamera" as she strokes her way toward Florida.

"I want to be a little part in the relations between Cuba and the United States," she said on Friday.

Her long-distance accomplishments include swimming around Manhattan island and a swim from the Bahamas to Florida in 1979.

(Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta; Editing by Vicki Allen)