LADY BRACKNELL: May I ask if it is in this house that your invalid friend Mr. Bunbury resides? ALGERNON (stammering): Oh! No! Bunbury doesn’t live here. Bunbury is somewhere else at present. In fact, Bunbury is dead. LADY BRACKNELL: Dead! . . . What did he die of? ALGERNON: Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded. LADY BRACKNELL: Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity. -’The Importance of Being Earnest. Oscar Wilde was obviously fond of Lady Bracknell-he gave her some of his best lines. But his affectionate satire had a serious point: like many in the class for which she was a stand-in, the haughty dowager saw little difference between subversive radicalism and ameliorative reform. Observers of the current brawl over health care will have noticed that some leaders of today’s Republican Party labor under a similar confusion. But a certain resonance between ‘social legislation, on the one hand, and all sorts of figurative outrage and explosions, on the other, is metaphorically apt-particularly in Washington. In other free countries, legislation, social and otherwise, gets made […]
SACRAMENTO — In a decision that could dramatically reshape California’s criminal justice system, a panel of federal judges Tuesday ordered Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators to find ways to cut the prison population by 40,000, or about one-quarter of all inmates. The ruling was a stark milestone in the years-long saga of two lawsuits charging that California allows inhumane conditions to fester in its prisons because of severe overcrowding. Law-and-order advocates say such cuts would result in inmates being returned to the streets early or being turned over to cash-strapped counties to jail. The Schwarzenegger administration signaled that it would likely appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The three-judge panel gave the governor and lawmakers 45 days to present a plan to cut the inmate population from about 150,000 to 110,000 over two years. The judges delivered a stern message about conditions that are so poor in some prisons that they violate inmates’ constitutional rights. ‘The medical and mental health care available to inmates in the California prison system is woefully and constitutionally inadequate, and has been for more than a decade,’ the judges wrote in a 184-page ruling. ‘Tragically, California’s inmates have long […]
LOS ANGELES — Marine scientists from California are venturing this week to the middle of the North Pacific for a study of plastic debris accumulating across hundreds of miles (km) of open sea dubbed the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ A research vessel carrying a team of about 30 researchers, technicians and crew members embarked on Sunday on a three-week voyage from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, based at the University of California at San Diego. The expedition will study how much debris — mostly tiny plastic fragments — is collecting in an expanse of sea known as the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, how that material is distributed and how it affects marine life. The debris ends up concentrated by circular, clockwise ocean currents within an oblong-shaped ‘convergence zone’ hundreds of miles (km) across from end to end near the Hawaiian Islands, about midway between Japan and the West Coast of the United States. The focus of the study will be on plankton, other microorganisms, small fish and birds. ‘The concern is what kind of impact those plastic bits are having on the small critters on the low end of the ocean food chain,’ Bob Knox, […]
WASHINGTON — Use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday. About 6 percent of people were prescribed an antidepressant in 1996 — 13 million people. This rose to more than 10 percent or 27 million people by 2005, the researchers found. ‘Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans,’ Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry. ‘Not only are more U.S. residents being treated with antidepressants, but also those who are being treated are receiving more antidepressant prescriptions,’ they added. More than 164 million prescriptions were written in 2008 for antidepressants, totaling $9.6 billion in U.S. sales, according to IMS Health. Drugs that affect the brain chemical serotonin like GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, known generically as paroxetine, and Eli Lilly and Co’s Prozac, known generically as fluoxetine, are the most commonly prescribed class of antidepressant. But the study found the effect in all classes of the drugs. Olfson and Marcus looked at […]
Gorillas have been found, for the first time, to be a source of HIV. Previous research had shown the HIV-1 strain, the main source of human infections, with 33m cases worldwide, originated from a virus in chimpanzees. But researchers have now discovered an HIV infection in a Cameroonian woman which is clearly linked to a gorilla strain, Nature Medicine reports. A researcher told the BBC that, though it was a new type of HIV, current drugs might still help combat its effects. HIV originated from a similar virus in chimpanzees called Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV). ‘ There’s no reason to believe this virus will present any new problems, as it were, that we don’t already face Dr David Robertson researcher Although HIV/Aids was first recognised by scientists in the 1980s, it is thought to have first entered the human population early in the 20th Century in the region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The virus probably originally jumped into humans after people came into contact with infected bush meat. SIV viruses have been reported in other primates, including gorillas. Unusual case French doctors treating the 62-year-old Cameroonian woman […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
