Friday, January 11th, 2013
Stephan: I don't know. Maybe it is because today is my birthday, and I woke up this morning and realized I was now 71 years old. Maybe it is because this afternoon, Ronlyn and I, as part of a small group, met with our Representative Rick Larsen, who admitted to us that with 85 teabaggers in the House committed to blocking government it was very possible the 113th Congress would be as bad as the 112th. Or maybe it was those Catholic stories people sent me. Whatever the reason this story left me outraged. How is it possible that 25 per cent of American children stand teetering on the edge of hunger? What has happened to us as a people? And why does almost none of this get covered in the corporate media? Why did I find an account of an American report featured only in a British newspaper? And how can any politician defend trying to cut these food programs?
One in four children in the U.S. are on food stamps as participation in the program continues to rise, according to 2011 data from the United States Department of Agriculture and U.S. Census Bureau.
A total of 19.9 million children benefited from the food supplement out of a population of 73.9 million Americans under the age of 18, the Census Bureau estimates in a new report released this week.
The rise in the number of recipients has come under fire by Republicans who have suggested U.S. President Barack Obama is more firmly establishing himself as ‘the Food Stamp President.’
Participation in the program, which is still referred to as food stamps in the American vernacular though the supplement is now loaded to a debit card, has increased by leaps and bounds during Mr Obama’s tenure.
The president, who was labeled the ‘Food Stamp President’ by former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, has thrown his support behind the USDA’s outreach efforts to enroll more people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
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Friday, January 11th, 2013
, - Agence France-Presse (France)/The Raw Story
Stephan: Given the rampant spread of diabetes -- possibly because of Fructose which is in virtually every prepared food -- this can only be seen as good news.
Breakthrough Australian research mapping how insulin works at a molecular level could open the door to novel new diabetes treatments, ending daily needle jabs for millions, scientists have announced.
A Melbourne team have been able to lay out for the first time how the insulin hormone binds to the surface of cells, triggering the passage of glucose from the bloodstream to be stored as energy.
Lead researcher Mike Lawrence on Thursday said the discovery, more than 20 years in the making, would make new and more effective kinds of diabetes medication possible.
‘Until now we have not been able to see how these molecules interact with cells,
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Friday, January 11th, 2013
LAURA BASSETT, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: If you think the last election has had any impact on the Theocratic Right let me disabuse you of that assumption. The drive to control women has not slowed. What is truly disgusting is that Ryan, who is co-sponsoring this bill, also has urged the House to cut food support programs. Did you know that one out of four children in the U.S. depend on those food programs in order to have anything to eat? The hypocrisy is breath-taking.
Despite the deep unpopularity of fetal personhood bills in 2012, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has again decided to cosponsor the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a bill that gives full legal rights to human zygotes from the moment of fertilization.
Ryan, who reportedly has 2016 presidential ambitions, had to de-emphasize his opposition to abortion without exceptions during the 2012 election to align his position with presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But this year, Ryan has been tapped as a keynote speaker for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List’s sixth annual Campaign for Life Gala, and he is re-upping his support for the most extreme anti-abortion legislation in the country.
The personhood bill, first introduced in 2011 by Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) and reintroduced by Broun last week, specifies that a ‘one-celled human embryo,’ even before it implants in the uterus to create a pregnancy, should be granted ‘all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.’ Similar legislation has been rejected by voters in multiple states, including the socially conservative Mississippi, because legal experts have pointed out that it could outlaw some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization as well as criminalize abortion at all stages.
Broun said in a […]
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Friday, January 11th, 2013
RUXANDRA GUIDI, - KPCC (Southern California Public Radio)
Stephan: This is the California version of the story.
The news that a court has ordered LA’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese to release thousands of records identifying the names of priests accused of child abuse is stirring discussions among Southland Catholics-especially those who’ve waited years for the ruling.
Some documents the Archdiocese must release are memos between top church officials and their attorneys, medical and psychological records, complaints from parents, and even correspondence with the Vatican about accused priests.
Once that evidence goes public, it will include a file about Esther Miller. When she was a 16-year-old in Van Nuys, a priest singled her out. Today, she’s in her forties.
‘I still had this box, and I didn’t even know that was evidence,’ Miller says. ‘The love letters, the cards, the gifts, the jewelry, money he gave me out of the collection basket.
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Friday, January 11th, 2013
BARBARA HANS, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: I hate this story, and the trend it represents, and it never seems to end. Readers sent me three different stories today about their local version of the same thing, and I have decided to run them all to give a sense of my reaction to these emails.
How the believing community of Catholics, who are the living church, tolerate this I cannot comprehend. It must be extraordinarily painful for them. It is certainly painful for me to read these stories, and to think about the tens of thousands of children whose sexual abuse by the hierarchy lies at the core of these stories.
An independent inquiry into sex abuse in the German Catholic Church was supposed to restore faith in the embattled institution. But now the Church has called it off, citing a breakdown in trust with the researchers.
It was a major promise after a major disaster: In summer 2011, the Catholic Church in Germany pledged full transparency. One year earlier, an abuse scandal had shaken the country’s faithful, as an increasing number of cases surfaced in which priests had sexually abused children and then hidden behind a wall of silence.
The Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute (KFN) was given the job of investigating the cases in 2011. The personnel files from churches in all 27 dioceses were to be examined for cases of abuse in an attempt to win back some of the Church’s depleted credibility.
But now the Church has called off the study, citing a breakdown in trust. ‘The relationship of mutual trust between the bishops and the head of the institute has been destroyed,’ said the Bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, on Wednesday morning.
The director of the KFN, Christian Pfeiffer, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the Church had refused to cooperate. At the end of last year, he contacted the dioceses twice […]
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