Both stories had the added benefit (for TV) of an endless stream of distraught relatives: teary or weeping or stoic or angry faces in desperately tight close-ups making heartfelt pleas for more information. For the media, it was like the weather before climate change came along.

In response, just about anything else that could pass for news was swept aside. Given a media that normally rushes heedlessly from one potential 24/7 story to another, this was striking. In the case of Flight 370, for instance, on the 21st day after its disappearance, it still led NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams (with the mudslide, one week after it happened, the number two story).

In those weeks, only one other story broke their stranglehold on the news. It was the seemingly critical question of what in the world was going on in Ukraine. There was the Russian military move into the Crimea, the referendum on that peninsula, its annexation, the alarm of the U.S. and the European Union, the imposition of (modest) sanctions, and various warnings of a Russian military build-up and possible invasion of eastern Ukraine. Unlike the other two stories, it seemed consequential enough. […]

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Following last week’s Tea Party Unity summit in Texas, TPU head Rick Scarborough convened a conference call today with Howard Kaloogian of the Tea Party Express.

Kaloogian, a former Republican state lawmaker from California, told the Tea Party activists that God is on their side and opposes the work of progressives to reduce income inequality:

I think it’s very important that churches get involved and that Christians follow the dictates of biblical principles in casting their vote. I think it’s clear that God has a position on many of the things we deem political today, from life to theft to the doctrine of covetousness, which by the way seems to be the promotion of the left. You know, they talk about “income inequality,’ well what is that but covetousness? So how could somebody support that cause if they’re biblical believing Christians?

Scarborough later claimed that God will ‘intervene” on behalf of the Tea Party in order to save America from ‘collapse,” arguing that the 1929 economic crash and the Civil War were both God’s judgment on the nation.

If we do our part then I’m confident that the God of Heaven will intervene. This country has […]

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TUNICA, MISSISSIPPI. – Marie Barnard was delighted when, after decades of silence on the topic, Mississippi passed a law requiring school districts to teach sex education. But the lesson involving the Peppermint Pattie wasn’t what she had in mind for her sons.

The curricula adopted by the school district in Oxford called on students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became.

“They’re using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she’s had sex – that she’s been used,” said Barnard, who works in public health. “That shouldn’t be the lesson we send kids about sex.”

Teen pregnancy declining, but 7.3 million a year still give birth Teen pregnancy declining, but 7.3 million a year still give birth

Millennial generation less religious, more liberal than older ones

She and other parents lobbied the district to teach about contraception, not just abstinence. After all, as she and other parents noted, 76% of Mississippi teenagers report having sex before the end of high school.

Mississippi has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, with 50 births per 1,000 females aged […]

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Most researchers think the disease is caused by the build-up of beta amyloid. But over 100 drugs targeting it have failed. Have they been focusing on the wrong protein all this time?

If Claude Wischik is right, almost 20 years of drug development for Alzheimer’s disease have been a costly mistake. Wischik, a chair in mental health at the University of Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland, is a founder of TauRx, a Singapore-based pharmaceutical company. He’s also one of several scientists loudly questioning the focus of most Alzheimer’s research.

Dominating the research field is a protein called beta amyloid, identified by Alois Alzheimer in 1906. Most researchers believe Alzheimer’s disease to be the caused by the accumulation of beta amyloid in the brain. Beta amyloid is sticky and forms plaque, which then strangles healthy cells, according to the amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s disease development. More than 100 drugs targeting beta amyloid have failed. Perhaps the drugs weren’t good, or perhaps the drugs were administered too late to be helpful. Or, if Wischik is right, beta amyloid has been the wrong focus all along.

‘It’s extraordinary that in the face of these failed trials, the claims for amyloid remain exactly the same as though there […]

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The share of Americans who consider themselves middle class is now the minority. According to a Pew Research Center survey, just 44% of Americans believe they are part of the middle class. That is the lowest level ever, down from 54% as recently as 2008. 40% identified themselves as lower-middle class or lower class in the January survey, compared to 25% in 2008.

According to the definition offered up by the White House’s ‘Middle Class Task Force”, the middle class in America is a thing of the past. How can that be? It is precisely because there is no empirical definition of what the middle class is or even a middle income range that defines the class. The fundamental principal that defines the American middle class is aspiration. The task force determined that: ‘middle class families are defined more by their aspirations than their income.”

Based on that definition, the middle class is eroding simply because aspiration is eroding – and quickly. According to a Washington Post/Miller Center poll, just 39% of Americans believe their children will have a better standard of living than they do. A similar poll conducted by Gallup found the share of Americans who believe today’s youth will […]

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