Monday, October 8th, 2012
DENISE GRADY, ANDREW POLLACK, and SABRINA TAVERNISE , - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is the latest sordid story about America's Illness Profit System, and the corruption of regulatory oversight. It is becoming as difficult to know what is in your drugs as it is what is in your food. Think of yourself as an unwilling lab rat in a nationwide study.
Eddie C. Lovelace, a Kentucky judge still on the bench into his late 70s, had a penchant for reciting Shakespeare from memory and telling funny stories in his big, booming voice. But a car accident last spring left him with severe neck pain, and in July and August he sought spinal injections with a steroid medicine for relief.
Instead, Judge Lovelace died in Nashville in September at age 78, one of the first victims in a growing national outbreak of meningitis caused by the very medicine that was supposed to help him. Health officials say they believe it was contaminated with a fungus.
The rising toll - 7 dead, 57 ill and thousands potentially exposed - has cast a harsh light on the loose regulations that legal experts say allowed a company to sell 17,676 vials of an unsafe drug to pain clinics in 23 states. Federal health officials said Friday that all patients injected with the steroid drug made by that company, the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., which has a troubled history, needed to be tracked down immediately and informed of the danger.
‘This wasn’t some obscure procedure being done in some obscure hospital,
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Sunday, October 7th, 2012
STEPHEN LACEY, - Think Progress
Stephan: This report, in my view, is not just about climate change. It is about what has happened to American media as it has been consolidated in fewer and fewer corporate hands. A corrupt Fourth Estate corrupts every aspect of democracy.
America is unique when it comes to giving a platform to climate deniers and skeptics.
According to a new analysis of data released last year, American newspapers are far more likely to publish uncontested claims from climate deniers, many of whom challenge whether the planet is warming at all and are ‘almost exclusively found
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Sunday, October 7th, 2012
LAURA HÖFLINGER, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: Climate change is already causing massive change in the natural order of the species of the earth, as this report describes
The melting Arctic ice has brought polar bears and grizzly bears together and their hybrid offspring, known as ‘pizzlies,’ have been detected on Canadian islands. It is a trend that is happening with other species as well, and scientists are worried because it poses a risk to biodiversity.
The two students from the University of Alberta, flying across the Arctic ice in a helicopter, were startled by what they saw below: a white dot and a brown dot on the ice. The biologists soon realized it was a grizzly bear next to a polar bear. The sighting was on Victoria Island, 500 kilometers (313 miles) from the grizzlies’ normal habitat on the Canadian mainland.
The polar bear also struck them as a little strange. It had a dark stripe on its back, its snout looked dirty, its head was noticeably larger than normal, and there was a hump behind its shoulders, which is normally found only on brown bears. The paws looked as if the animal were wearing socks. The students had discovered a strange hybrid that goes by various names: grolar bear, pizzly or Nanulak, a combination of the two Inuit words for the animals’ parents: polar bear (Nanuk) and grizzly […]
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Sunday, October 7th, 2012
DAVID FERGUSON, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I have been thinking about the deluge of stories like this one, and the one I ran yesterday about the religious fanatic Georgia doctor, and Representative. It has forced me to conclude that this is a trend, and a growing one, with enormous impact our culture. A dark trend from which much evil flows. So, instead of putting these stories aside, I am going to start following this as the trend it is.
These ugly, ignorant clowns, almost all Republicans, are endangering the nature of our national character, and they need to be called out and have the light of scrutiny shined upon their ways. But, ultimately, it is the voters who are responsible for the emergence of such people in our public life.
A Republican member of the Arkansas state senate’s self-published memoir claims that for black people in America, slavery was a ‘blessing in disguise,
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Sunday, October 7th, 2012
DAVID SESSIONS, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: The Founders, because of direct experience, and the experiences of family members, understood in a very visceral way why it was so important to a democracy that there be an absolute firewall between church and state. We seem to be losing our way in this important respect, led by conservatives who mouth the importance of the Founders, while abrogating all that they stood for. We will pay a fearsome price for this selective amnesia.
In my view each of these churches should lose their tax exempt status.
On Oct. 7, approximately one thousand evangelical pastors will urge their congregations to vote, not just for Christian values or ‘life
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