Sunday, January 27th, 2013
BOB SMIETANA, - USA TODAY
Stephan: Three of you sent me this with comments about hypocrisy. I could not agree more. These personhood bills being introduced, and the public statements in support of them belong in some conservative reality on Fox News, not the real world. When real world interests intrude this is what happens.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A Catholic hospital in Colorado has argued in court documents that it is not liable for the deaths of two 7-month-old fetuses because those fetuses are not people.
So far, courts have side with the hospital.
But that defense contradicts church teaching that human life is sacred from the moment of conception. At least one prominent abortion foe called the hospital’s claims morally untenable.
The issue of whether a fetus is a person was raised in a lawsuit filed by Jeremy Stodghill, whose 31-year-old wife, Lori, died in 2006 at St. Thomas More Hospital in Canon City, Colo.
Lori Stodghill was 7 months pregnant with twins at the time. The suit claims the hospital failed to perform an emergency cesarean section to save the fetuses.
According to published reports, a brief filed by the hospital, owned by Englewood, Colo.-based Catholic Health Initiatives, said that the fetuses are not covered by state’s Wrongful Death Act.
‘Under Colorado law, a fetus is not a ‘person’ and plaintiff’s claims for wrongful death must therefore be dismissed,’ the hospital argued.
A state district court and an appeals court agreed with the hospital. The case, originally filed in 2007, is currently on appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court.
Southern Baptist […]
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Sunday, January 27th, 2013
Stephan: If you have been reading SR for long you know my belief that water is destiny, and its corollary that there is going to be inadequate water to sustain many of the cities in the Southwest. The result is going to be a migration out of those drought stricken states. But, of course, before that happens, all manner of short-term stupidities and struggles will be tried in order to protect the status quo. Here is a perfect example of what I mean. Massive change is coming.
Las Vegas exudes an all-you-can-eat mentality. People walk between casinos carrying giant cups of slushy liquor; advertisements blare from speakers on the streets pitching the best shows, best food and best deals; escalators take you across streets and directly into malls. You spend your time buying something, eating something, or watching something. Either way, it’s consume, consume, consume.
But this hunger is hard to satiate and it takes its toll, revealing the city’s central dichotomy – it is a destination of both the high-brow and the down and out, the high rolling and the thrifty, a megaphone of riches and poverty. And nowhere is this more apparent then in one of Las Vegas’ most contentious relationships – with water. If you walk the Strip, you’ll see gondolas floating on canals of aqua pool water, misters spraying overheated tourists in the hot sun, pirate ships docked in rocky coves, and fountains everywhere you look.
The abundant water is a mirage, although it wasn’t always. Las Vegas got its name, meaning ‘the meadows,
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Saturday, January 26th, 2013
BILL MOYERS and MICHAEL WINSHIP, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is an example of the bipartisan corruption destroying American democracy. America is being sold, piece by piece to an uber-class. That's what the whole privatization push is about. We are becoming, some would say have already become, except for the vote which introduces a measure of randomness, a Fascist state. Nothing but the vote is going to save us from this. And you can already see in the Republican RedMap plan a concerted push to grievously degrade one citizen, one vote. We are mostly sitting around sucking our thumbs while are country is being stolen from us.
The inauguration of a president is one of those spectacles of democracy that can make us remember we’re part of something big and enduring. So for a few hours this past Monday the pomp and circumstance inspired us to think that government of, by, and for the people really is just that, despite the predatory threats that stalk it.
But the mood didn’t last. Every now and then, as the cameras panned upward, the Capitol dome towering over the ceremony was a reminder of something the good feeling of the moment couldn’t erase. It’s the journalist’s curse to have a good time spoiled by the reality beyond the pageantry. Just a couple of days before the inaugural festivities, The New York Times published some superb investigative reporting by the team of Eric Lipton and Kevin Sack, and their revelations were hard to forget, even at a time of celebration.
The story told us of a pharmaceutical giant called Amgen and three senators so close to it they might as well be entries on its balance sheet: Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY), Democratic Senator Max Baucus (MT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and that powerful committee’s ranking Republican, Orrin Hatch (UT). […]
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Saturday, January 26th, 2013
, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: Johnny Mnemonic come to life. The movie can be seen as an example of precognition expressed in art.
Scientists have stored audio and text on fragments of DNA and then retrieved them with near-perfect fidelity-a technique that eventually may provide a way to handle the overwhelming data of the digital age.
The scientists encoded in DNA-the recipe of life-an audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, a photograph, a copy of Francis Crick and James Watson’s famous ‘double helix’ scientific paper on DNA from 1953 and Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. They later were able to retrieve them with 99.99% accuracy.
The experiment was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A copy of Crick and Watson’s famous ‘double helix’ scientific paper from 1953 was among items scientists successfully encoded. Above, a DNA model.
‘All we’re doing is adapting what nature has hit upon-a very good way of storing information,’ said Nick Goldman, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, and lead author of the Nature paper.
Companies, governments and universities face an enormous challenge storing the ever-growing flood of digitized information, the videos, books, movies and songs sent over the Internet.
Some experts have looked for answers in biology. In recent years, they have found ways to encode trademarks in cells and poetry in bacteria, as well […]
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Saturday, January 26th, 2013
Stephan: This is potentially very good news. Let us hope that it develops as this report suggests.
But I hope we also have learned what something like a new virus introduced into society can do. This is why GMOs are so scary. They are not a virus, of course, but they present a probability of injury that, if it is negative, could cost billions and take decades to fix, just as HIV has done.
STANFORD — Stanford researchers have developed T-cells capable in a laboratory setting of resisting HIV, a breakthrough that could pave the way for a possible gene therapy which would be able to stop the virus that causes AIDS.
The discovery, reported in Tuesday’s issue of Molecular Therapy, suggests it could be possible to strength any cell that HIV attacks, making it impossible for the virus to infect any part of the immune system.
‘HIV is a very nefarious and devious virus that likes to mutate and escape all the roadblocks we put in its way. So what we’re trying to do is not just simply make one roadblock, but instead create several roadblocks,
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