Later On

Interesting article by Brian Stelter in the NY Times:

Tips for cultivating marijuana. Testimonials by patients about its medical benefits. Cannabis cooking lessons. Even citations for award-winning strains of pot. Viewers here can now watch, every week, what amounts to a pro-weed news program.

Booted off one skittish TV station but quickly picked up by another, the low-budget “Cannabis Planet” show is televised evidence of how entrenched marijuana has become in California’s cultural firmament and a potent example of the way the pot subculture has been edging into the national mainstream.

“We’re trying to show the legitimacy of this plant,” said Brad Lane, the executive producer of the half-hour program.

Mr. Lane pays for the twice-weekly air time on the independent station KJLA — Thursday and Saturday nights at 11:30, sandwiched between “Bikini Beach” and “Jewelry Central” — and says he is now breaking even, almost two months after the show’s premiere. “Cannabis Planet” focuses on medical, agricultural and industrial uses of the hemp plant, purposely ignoring marijuana’s recreational aspects. Viewers, for instance, see very little actual smoking, even though the hosts and producers are known to inhale between takes. “We’re walking on eggshells here, to be honest,” Mr. Lane said.

Still, “Cannabis Planet” remains on the air — with not a single complaint from viewers, according to the station.

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The above is from an excellent post at the Daggatt Blog, which you should read in its entirety. It begins:

President Obama gave a brilliant speech Wednesday night. If you didn’t watch it, do so (you can watch the video here). And it appears to have had a significant impact on public support for health care reform. According to a CBS poll released today, support for President Obama’s approach to health care reform has gone from a net -7 (40/47) to a net + 14 (52/38). That’s an impressive move in the numbers. And it was deserved…

I suspect a big part of the reason for the move in the poll numbers was President Obama’s forceful refutation of some of the more spectacular right-wing lies about what he is, in fact, proposing. It is not a “government takeover of health care.” It would not mandate end-of-life counseling or create “death panels” that would pull the plug on granny. And it would not extend government subsidized health care to illegal immigrants.

As everyone in the world now knows, it was while President Obama was making the latter point that one particularly boorish Republican member of Congress heckled the president like some teabagger at a Town Hall freak show. As Gail Collins noted, “Let me go out on a limb and say that it is not a good plan to heckle the president of the United States when he’s making a speech about replacing acrimony with civility.”

Joe Wilson’s antics were only the most egregious display of disrespect toward the President of the United States Wednesday night…

Continue reading.

Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress:

On the eve of the Senate Finance Committee’s release of its much anticipated health care plan, Wendell Potter — the insurance industry whistle blower and former communications director of health insurance giant Cigna — called the Baucus framework “an absolute gift to the industry.” “And if that is what we see in the legislation, [America’s Health Insurance Plans chief] Karen Ignagni will surely get a huge bonus,” Potter said at a briefing for reporters.

The bill establishes a new regulated health insurance exchange and compels every American to purchase qualified health insurance coverage by 2013. Americans with employer-sponsored insurance can stay in their existing plans, while the uninsured would have to enroll in an expanded Medicaid program, a new plan in the Exchange or the now-regulated individual health insurance market. According to a report released by the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would cover 94% of Americans and cost $880 billion over 10 years.

Potter argued that the lax employer requirements would shift the cost and risk of coverage onto the individual and maintained that the bill’s “network of cooperatives” would be unable to compete in today’s concentrated health insurance markets. “The co-ops won’t stand a chance,” he concluded.

Reform must also do more to regulate insurers, who have agreed to accept applicants with pre-existing conditions but are insisting on benefit and rate flexibility. Potter argued that the benefit package standards in the Exchange and the high deductible option for younger beneficiaries would allow insurers to design almost anything that they can sell in the health market place and push the country towards consumer driven health care.

Under the Baucus legislation, private insurers could also charge older individuals up to five times more for coverage. “You’re just using age as a proxy for health status,” Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton University told the New York Times. Reinhardt estimates that “Senator Baucus’s age-rating plan would allow insurers to cover roughly 70 percent of the additional risk they’d take on by being required to accept all comers, regardless of health.”

Update: Steve Benen has more coverage of the Baucus bill.

From ThinkProgress:

Debora MacKenzie in New Scientist:

Swine flu has still not grown more severe, as many feared it would, but as the pandemic’s second, autumn wave begins in the northern hemisphere, the virus is posing a different threat. While H1N1 mostly causes mild disease, some people – estimates suggest fewer than 1 per cent – become deathly ill, very fast.

At a meeting last week in Winnipeg, Canada, experts warned that these cases could overwhelm hospitals. "These were the sickest people I’ve ever seen," says Anand Kumar, an intensive-care expert at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Kumar helped manage a wave of severe cases in the city in June, mostly in young Canadian aboriginals, who required the most advanced care. "This pandemic is like two diseases. Either you’re off work a few days, or you go to hospital, often to the intensive-care unit. There’s no middle ground."

In the southern hemisphere, 15 to 33 per cent of hospitalised cases went to ICU in the past two months. "That’s very high for flu," says Richard Wenzel of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. "When this flu is bad, it’s very bad."

In these cases the virus rapidly destroys the lungs’ alveoli, where gas transfer occurs, often causing acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which usually kills in half of all cases. Antoine Flahault of the School of Public Health in Rennes, France, found that this past winter in Mauritius and New Caledonia, H1N1 caused ARDS 100 times as often as ordinary flu…

Continue reading.

Tara Parker-Pope in the NY Times:

It sounds so simple as to be innocuous, a throwaway line in public-health warnings about swine flu. But one of the most powerful weapons against the new H1N1 virus is summed up in a three-word phrase you first heard from your mother: wash your hands.

A host of recent studies have highlighted the importance and the scientific underpinning of this most basic hygiene measure. One of the most graphic was done at the University of California, Berkeley, where researchers focused video cameras on 10 college students as they read and typed on their laptops.

The scientists counted the times the students touched their faces, documenting every lip scratch, eye rub and nose pick. On average, the students touched their eyes, noses and lips 47 times during a three-hour period, once every four minutes.

Hand-to-face contact has a surprising impact on health. Germs can enter the body through breaks in the skin or through the membranes of the eyes, mouth and nose.

The eyes appear to be a particularly vulnerable port of entry for viral infections, said Mark Nicas, a professor of environmental health sciences at Berkeley. Using mathematical models, Dr. Nicas and colleagues estimated that in homes, schools and dorms, hand-to-face contact appears to account for about one-third of the risk of flu infection, according to a report this month in the journal Risk Analysis.

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Darrel Bricker writing at McClatchy:

In 1999 "Blame Canada" from the South Park movie was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Song. For many Canadians, this was hilarious. But, the humor of the song was as much irony as it was the lyrical references to hockey and Canadian songstress Anne Murray. Why irony? Because blaming Canada would require Americans to acknowledge that Canada exists.

Be careful what you wish for. This summer a new version of Blame Canada is hitting the US airwaves. But, this time it’s not being sung by cartoon characters in a movie. Instead, those warbling about their northern neighbor are media pundits and elected officials who have decided to include "the Canadian system" in America’s debate over the future of health care.

Along with the UK, France and even Cuba, Canada is held up by many as an object lesson for all those foolish enough to flirt with government-provided health care. And, it’s not just the usual cranks on the political right who are doing this. Even President Obama implied in his address to Congress that Canada has a radical approach to delivering health care to its citizens.

Canadians don’t think of their health care system as radical. To them, it’s just right. Therefore, it’s not surprising that in a recent poll asking Canadians about their greatest accomplishments as a nation, universal health care scored in the top three.

Further on this point, in a poll conducted this summer by the Canadian Medical Association (the lobby group that represents Canada’s doctors), fewer than 10% of those surveyed gave Canada’s health care system a failing grade for overall quality, choice, or their last personal experience with the system.

None of this means that the Canada’s health care system is perfect. Canadians do have problems with wait times and customer service. But, apart from a few radicals, almost nobody in Canada is calling for a major overhaul of the health care system. In fact, …

Continue reading.

I wanted to compare the two Big Grip razors I have, so today I used the first: the Edwin Jagger ivory Georgian, still carrying the same Polsilver blade.

The Omega Pro 48 boar-bristle brush worked up a fine lather—I think this brush is well on its way to being broken it, and so far is my favorite of the boar-bristle crowd. Of course, using D.R. Harris Arlington supported great lather creation: that’s a fine soap.

Three passes to perfection, and then a splash of Arlington aftershave. A very pleasurable shave.

Clare Wilson in the New Scientist:

Far from protecting us and our children, the war on drugs is making the world a much more dangerous place.

SO FAR this year, about 4000 people have died in Mexico’s drugs war – a horrifying toll. If only a good fairy could wave a magic wand and make all illegal drugs disappear, the world would be a better place.

Dream on. Recreational drug use is as old as humanity, and has not been stopped by the most draconian laws. Given that drugs are here to stay, how do we limit the harm they do?

The evidence suggests most of the problems stem not from drugs themselves, but from the fact that they are illegal. The obvious answer, then, is to make them legal.

The argument most often deployed in support of the status quo is that keeping drugs illegal curbs drug use among the law-abiding majority, thereby reducing harm overall. But a closer look reveals that this really doesn’t stand up. In the UK, as in many countries, the real clampdown on drugs started in the late 1960s, yet government statistics show that the number of heroin or cocaine addicts seen by the health service has grown ever since – from around 1000 people per year then, to 100,000 today. It is a pattern that has been repeated the world over.

A second approach to the question is to look at whether fewer people use drugs in countries with stricter drug laws. In 2008, the World Health Organization looked at 17 countries and found  …

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Interesting report by Joe Lambe of McClatchy:

A Kansas City, Kan., girl charged with murder at age 13 faces adult court and many years in prison.

A boy who was 13 when he killed a man last year will stay in the juvenile system and could be released when he is 22½, a Kansas City, Kan., judge ruled early this month.

Both cases illustrate how children who commit heinous crimes are testing the boundaries of the justice system.

After murders committed by juveniles spiked in the early 1990s, states toughened laws, making the United States the harshest nation in world in the legal punishment of children, according to a recent study. However, the number of children who killed declined in the late ’90s and has largely held steady this decade, leading some to question the practice of tougher sentencing.

“Some states are starting to recognize that kids can be treated as kids,” said Michele Deitch, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a study, “From Time Out to Hard Time.”

In 22 states, children as young as 7 still can be tried as adults. There is no age limit in Missouri, but it is 10 in Kansas. As of June, juveniles could not be sentenced to life without parole in seven states, including Kansas. That makes the United States the only nation in the world where juveniles can be sentenced to life without parole, the study reported.

All children who offend at age 12 or younger should be put into juvenile care, the Texas study contends. And it found that when they are put in adult prisons, juvenile offenders are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted and 36 times more likely to commit suicide…

Continue reading.

Sometimes you can see the catastrophe coming from miles away. And yet, nothing will be done and the catastrophe will happen (cf. global warming). Shanta Barley in New Scientist:

Beneath the shimmering surface of Africa’s Lake Kivu, a deadly time bomb awaits. A “gold rush” to extract valuable methane from the lake’s depths might trigger an outburst of gas that could wash a deadly, suffocating blanket over the 2 million people who live around Kivu’s shores.

The lake, which is almost half a kilometre deep in places, is on Rwanda’s north-west border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (see map) and contains a vast reservoir of dissolved methane. Many companies are extracting the gas to burn for electricity production, and the governments of both nations are aggressively courting further investment in extraction plants.

Now a group of biochemists warns that if unregulated extraction continues unabated, it could trigger a catastrophic outgassing of carbon dioxide – another dissolved gas abundant in the lake’s depths. Such a disaster occurred at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986, killing 1700 people. Kivu contains 300 times more CO2 than Nyos did, warns Alfred Wüest, a bio-geochemist based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).

Like Nyos, Lake Kivu is permanently stratified: a deep layer of dense water laden with CO2, methane, salt and nutrients is locked away beneath a surface layer of fresh water. Methane is generated by lake-bed bacteria that feed on a stream of dead algae sinking from the surface. The CO2 enters through volcanic seeps.

So far, the Rwandan government has established one methane extraction plant on the lake, and two companies – Contour Global and Rwanda Investment Group – are running pilot projects. At least two more plants are in the pipeline, says Eva Paul of Rwanda’s Ministry of Infrastructure…

Continue reading. At the link is a map of the situation.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Watch Matt Taibbi break down his report on the sad state of health care reform in his blog, Taibblog.

Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It’s a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that’s what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad…

Continue reading.

Robert Kaplan at the Atlantic Monthly:

Has anyone watched the English-language version of Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously.

Over just a few days in late May, when I actively monitored Al Jazeera (although I watched it almost every evening during a month in Sri Lanka), I was treated to penetrating portraits of Eritrean and Ethiopian involvement in the Somali war, of the struggle of Niger River rebels against the Nigerian government in the oil-rich south of the country, of the floods in Bangladesh, of problems with the South African economy, of the danger that desertification poses to Bedouin life in northern Sudan, of the environmental devastation around the Aral Sea, of Sikh violence in India after an attack on a temple in Austria, of foreign Islamic fighters in the southern Philippines, of microfinancing programs in Kenya, of rigged elections in South Ossetia, of human-rights demonstrations in Guatemala, and of much more. Al Jazeera covered the election campaigns in Lebanon and Iran in more detail than anyone else, as well as the Somali war and the Pakistani army offensive in the Swat Valley. There was, too, an unbiased one-hour documentary about the Gemayel family of Christian politicians and warlords in Lebanon, and a half-hour-long investigation of the displacement of the poor from India’s new economic zones.

The fact that Doha, Qatar’s capital, is not the headquarters of a great power liberates Al Jazeera to focus equally on the four corners of the Earth rather than on just the flash points of any imperial or post-imperial interest. Outlets such as CNN and the BBC don’t cover foreign news so much as they cover the foreign extensions of Washington’s or London’s collective obsessions. And Al Jazeera, rather than spotlighting people who are loaded with credentials but often have little to say, has the knack of getting people on air who have interesting things to say, like the brilliant, no-name Russian analyst I heard explaining why both Russia and China need the current North Korean regime because it provides a buffer state against free and democratic South Korea.

Al Jazeera is also endearing because it exudes …

Continue reading.

By Joan Melcher for Miller-McCune:

Hard as it is to be a voice in the wilderness, Judy Hoy has been sounding an alarm in southwestern Montana for more than 13 years.

For years she’s been documenting, through autopsies, photos, articles and scientific papers, changes — mutations, really — she’s observed in various ungulate species in the valley. In particular, she’s seen malformed genitalia among male white-tailed deer.

Such observations are not unique. More and more scientists are documenting reproductive changes in male animals ranging from cricket frogs to polar bears. But the response from public health and governmental agencies has been underwhelming.

White-tailed deer came into Hoy’s purview 30 years ago when her husband, Bob Hoy, began collecting road-killed deer as a warden with the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Service, or FWP. Beginning in 1980, Judy Hoy, a former elementary school science teacher, used some of the roadkill to feed wildlife she nursed at her Bitterroot Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

In 1996, the Hoys noticed something strange among the roadkill. "It started with Buck No. 9," Judy said. "We called him that because he was the ninth buck we had seen with malformed genitalia."

Of 54 male deer aged 3 months to 1 year they examined beginning in late 1996 through 1997, only about a third had what the couple, over decades of observation, had come to consider normal scrotum, testes size and placement of genitals. Thirty had a scrotum that was misaligned, with one testes positioned in front of the other, one had no scrotum, one had misplaced organs, and nine had underdeveloped or ectopic (undescended) testes.

The next year, 25 of 49 males had anomalies in their genitals. Between 1998 and 2000, two-thirds of the bucks examined had abnormalities. Hoy took notes, kept data, shot photos and began calling Montana’s FWP.

She tried to interest them, or wildlife scientists in the University of Montana’s Wildlife Biology program, in further study. At first, FWP personnel and others seemed interested, but it wasn’t long before Hoy felt the door close in her face.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Donny Shaw at OpenCongress:

On Wednesday night, Rep. Joe Wilson [R, SC-2], shouted “You lie!” at President Obama when he said that the healthcare bill would not cover illegal immigrants. “The supporters of the government takeover of healthcare and liberals who want to give healthcare to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan,” Wilson said the next day in a campaign fundraising video.

However, in 2003, Wilson voted to provide federal funds for illegal immigrants’ healthcare. The vote came on the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which contained Sec. 1011 authorizing $250,000 annually between 2003 and 2008 for government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. The program has been extended through 2009 and there is currently a bipartisan bill in Congress to make it permanent.

Hospitals have a legal obligation to treat everyone who comes in seeking care, regardless of citizenship status, insurance or other characteristics. This means that hospitals treat millions of people every year who don’t have the means to pay. Obviously, this drives up the nation’s healthcare costs overall. Section 1011 helps cushion the costs for hospitals, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the actual costs in most areas.

To be fair, Section 1011 is just a small part of a much larger bill that contained many Republican priorities. Still, Wilson’s protest against the current healthcare reform proposal giving coverage to illegal immigrants (which is false), is in direct contradiction to his 2003 vote. Allowing illegal immigrants to purchase unsubsidized healthcare through the Exchange that would be set up under the current proposal wouldn’t cost taxpayers a cent, and it would be a step towards fixing the problem that Section 1011 was designed to throw federal money at.

Here are a few more links on Wilson and the healthcare reform bill:

• Wilson’s OpenCongress profile
• Wilson’s OpenCongress Wiki page
• The House healthcare bill
• The line in the bill blocking subsidies for illegal immigrants
• The healthcare bill’s tax increases
• 5 major lies about the healthcare bill debunked

Avi Feller and Chad Stone have an interesting post at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.[1]

During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.

The last economic expansion began in November 2001 and ended in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which means the Piketty-Saez data essentially cover that expansion. The last time such a large share of the income gain during an expansion went to the top 1 percent of households — and such a small share went to the bottom 90 percent of households — was in the 1920s (see Figure 1). [2]

Piketty and Saez’s unique data series on income inequality, based on IRS files, is particularly valuable because it provides detailed information on income gains at the top of the income scale and extends back to 1913.

The new data show:

• 2007 marked the fifth straight year in which income gains at the top outpaced those among the rest of the population. From 2002 to 2007, the average inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households rose 62 percent, compared to 4 percent for the bottom 90 percent of households (see Table 1).

Note : In 2007, the bottom 90 percent of households were those with incomes below about $110,000. The next 9 percent were those with incomes between $110,000 and about $400,000, and the top 0.1 percent were those with incomes above about $2,000,000. Calculations are in current 2007 dollars.

• The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent of households increased sharply, from 16.9 percent in 2002 to 23.5 percent in 2007 — a larger share than at any point since 1928 (see Figure 2). In 2000, at the peak of the 1990s boom, the top 1 percent received 21.5 percent of total income.[3]

Continue reading.

Sobering article by Seema Jilani, MD, in McClatchy:

Seven months after his release from Guantanamo Bay, Mustafa Ait Idr cautiously sips coffee in a Sarajevo cafe. His face is still partially paralyzed and numb from when guards pinned him onto gravel and jumped on him. He is nursing a broken finger — punishment for refusing to strip naked in his cell. On another occasion, his head was held in a toilet for prolonged periods of time.

Now a free man, Ait Idr proudly displays his Bosnian ID Card, which was only recently reinstated. He is still unable to find employment or access his bank accounts, which were frozen shortly after his arrest in 2001. He has seen his wife twice in the past seven years; upon his release, he met his youngest son for the first time.

Ait Idr is one of “The Algerian Six,” a group of Bosnian citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay for seven years, and recently released with all charges dropped. Their story is another in a long list of stories from Guantanamo of wrongful imprisonment on unproven charges.

The Algerian men came to Bosnia in the 1990s. At the request of U.S. officials, the men were arrested in October 2001 on allegations that they were planning an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. According to documents filed by the detainee’s American lawyers in their U.S. federal court habeas action, Christopher Hoh, then the U.S. chargé d’affaires, told then Bosnian Prime Minister Alija Behmen that the U.S. would cut all diplomatic relations if the men were not arrested.

"If we leave Bosnia, God save your country," Hoh said, according to the documents. The U.S. Embassy temporarily closed during this time. Behmen, leader of a fragile, post-conflict country, acquiesced to the demand. He noted in an interview with the Washington Post, "The only way out was to deliver them" to the Americans … We were not interested in introducing a new period of instability in Bosnia."

Within a week, Bosnian police detained “The Algerian Six”: Hajj Boudella, Lakhdar Boumediene, Mustafa Ait Idr, Mohammad Nechle, Saber Lahmar and Bensayah Belkacem.

After a three-month Bosnian investigation found no evidence linking the men to terrorist activities or justifying their detention, the Bosnian Supreme Court ordered their release. High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch, the international community’s top official in Bosnia at the time, said, "the US put a tremendous amount of pressure” on Bosnia to deport the men. Vijay Padmanabhan, a lawyer for the State Department, denied the charge, claiming, "The US does not threaten or intimidate." Hoh did not respond to requests for comment.

On Jan. 17, 2002, Bosnian officials drove the men from the courthouse. More than 150 people had gathered outside the courthouse to protest their surrender to American officials. It would be the last time that Boudella’s wife, Nadja Dizdarevic, would see her husband for seven years…

Continue reading. "Worst of the worst," eh?

Sounds like a good recipe. Perhaps add some crisp bacon?

Phil Galewitz for McClatchy:

When Columbus, Ohio, health care lobbyist Rick Colby writes his monthly check of $2,556 for his family’s health insurance, his hand trembles.

"It’s a staggering amount of money, and there’s nothing I can do about it," the 49-year-old Colby says. His insurance rates soared over the past decade after his daughter, Lauren, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and his wife, Trish, developed breast cancer.

After his daughter died at age 8 in 2007, his rates dropped by a few hundred dollars a month, but then shot up by 20 percent the following year, he said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who met Colby last month in Columbus, told his story in a speech this week in Washington to illustrate the flaws of the nation’s health care system.

However, while Colby said he supported President Barack Obama’s efforts to overhaul health care, he’d like the president to do a few things differently.

A registered Republican, Colby told Kaiser Health News that he strongly backs the administration’s attempt to ban insurers from using pre-existing conditions to reject applicants or charge them higher rates. He also favors injecting more competition into the insurance market, but would like to do so by using existing government programs, not creating new ones.

He said, for example, that he thought that the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, under which members of Congress and federal employees receive coverage, should be opened to the general public. He also said he’d like to see Medicare and Medicaid expanded…

Continue reading. I think this man’s life would be quite different if he lived in a more advanced country (e.g., France, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, …).

As a companion to the post below, here’s this by Deanna Boyd of McClatchy:

A 29-year-old prison inmate has been linked through DNA evidence to the slaying of a Fort Worth woman found dead in a field by churchgoers as they left a Sunday service seven years ago.

Johnny Green Jr., who was due to be released from prison in March 2013 on a conviction for injury to a child, now faces a murder charge in connection with the slaying of Carolyn Yvonne Ray Roberson, 44, homicide Sgt. J.D. Thornton said.

Members of Sweet Home Baptist Church found Roberson’s body July 7, 2002, in a vacant field across the street from the church in the 5200 block of Ramey Avenue…

Continue reading.