Today a special on “kids for cash,” the shocking story of how thousands of children in Pennsylvania were jailed by two corrupt judges who received $2.6 million in kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities. We hear from two of the youth: Charlie Balasavage was sent to juvenile detention after his parents unknowingly bought him a stolen scooter; Hillary Transue was detained for creating a MySpace page mocking her assistant high school principal. They were both 14 years old and were sentenced by the same judge, Judge Mark Ciavarella, who is now in jail himself – serving a 28-year sentence. Balasavage and Transue are featured in the new documentary, “Kids for Cash,” by filmmaker Robert May, who also joins us. In addition, we speak to two mothers: Sandy Fonzo, whose son Ed Kenzakoski committed suicide after being imprisoned for years by Judge Ciavarella, and Hillary’s mother, Laurene Transue. Putting their stories into context of the larger scandal is attorney Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center. The story is still developing: In October, the private juvenile-detention companies in the scandal settled a civil lawsuit for $2.5 million.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be […]

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The rapid increase in obesity prevalence in the United States in the last 20 years is unprecedented and not well explained. Here, we explore a hypothesis that the obesity epidemic may be driven by population-wide chronic exposures to low-residue antibiotics that have increasingly entered the American food chain over the same time period.

We propose this hypothesis based on two recent bodies of published reports – (1) those that provide evidence for the spread of antibiotics into the American food chain, and (2) those that examine the relationship between the gut microbiota and body physiology. The livestock use of antimicrobial agents has sharply increased in the US over the same 20-year period of the obesity epidemic, especially with the expansion of intensified livestock production, such as the concentrated animal feeding operations. Observational and experimental studies support the idea that changes in the intestinal microbiota exert a profound effect on body physiology.

We propose that chronic exposures to low-residue antimicrobial drugs in food could disrupt the equilibrium state of intestinal microbiota and cause dysbiosis that can contribute to changes in body physiology. The obesity epidemic in the United States may be partly driven by the mass exposure of Americans to food […]

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A ten-year survey of millennials reveals that almost one in four (22.6%) 26-year-olds are still living with their parents.

The U.S. Department of Education report confirmed that, if you are tired of living with Mom and Dad, then do your homework and stay in school. According to the survey titled ‘Where Are They Now,” education makes a difference: generally those with more schooling were less likely to be living at home. The study shed some light on how older millennials have been faring during the Great Recession.

According to a Pew Research analysis of the 2012 data, lower levels of employment, an increase in college enrollment, and a decrease in young people getting married are major factors in the increase of millennials living at home.

The survey followed 13,000 high school students who were sophomores in 2002, and checked in with them in 2012 to see where are they now. Some of the results are:

10% living with roommate(s), prompting fellow millennial Katy Waldman to write an embarrassing Slate article bearing the headline, “More 27-Year-Olds Live With Parents Than Roommates”
53.8 percent made less than $25,000 from employment in 2011
[…]

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A pipe at the bottom of a 27-acre pond in North Carolina has sprung a leak, spewing tons of coal ash into the Dan River – a source of drinking water for Danville, Va., a town 20 miles upstream.

Since the leak was spotted by a security guard on Sunday, more than 82,000 tons of ash have mixed into the pond, creating a toxic sludge among the 27 million gallons of water that have poured into the Dan River, according to an Associated Press report.

The AP also reported there is no timetable for when the leak will be fully contained, but since the pond has since been emptied, the flow is much lighter than before.

(MORE: The Alarming Change of Our World’s Oceans in 2013)

Still, Danville residents are worried as they wait for test results that will determine the hazards to their drinking water or surrounding wildlife.

Canoe guide Brian Williams told the AP he is scared about the future of the waterway.

“How do you clean this up?” he asked. “Dredge the whole river bottom for miles? You can’t clean this up. It’s going to go up the food chain, from the filter feeders, to the fish, to the otters and birds and […]

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Christian conservatives feel aggrieved and they want to be heard. The problem is that their specific grievance—that everyone else hurts their feelings by not admitting we’re inferior—kind of sounds, well, hard to sympathize with. They need something snappier, a reason to claim that they are being oppressed by ‘anti-Christian bigotry”. The only problem with that is that in a majority Christian nation, most people are actually pretty accepting and even admiring of Christianity. Even if they disagree with right wing Christianity, they don’t do so because it’s Christian but because it’s conservative. Being a Christian is a privileged position in American society; that makes it really hard to claim you’re being oppressed.

Inevitably, then, the temptation to fudge starts to seep in, to exaggerate slights or invent paranoid conspiracy theories about how not getting enough praise and accolades for being Christian is an attempt to shove them out. But when that doesn’t work, well, sometimes it helps to deliberately provoke a situation where someone pretty much has to confront you, so that you can lie and say it’s because you’re a Christian. Indeed, it’s starting to become a pattern that goes something like this:

1) Enter into a community that is, by […]

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