While people in the US struggle with health care costs, Brazil is giving away drugs for blood pressure and diabetes free to those who need them.
Brazil already gave AIDS drugs free. It can afford to do that since it is a single payer system that gives it the clout to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices.
All of us have likely had bad experiences with call centers where, after navigating through the menus, one gets transferred amongst various people, with the calls sometimes abruptly cut, and have to repeat your problem over and over again. In Belgium, exasperation with a particularly notorious outfit called Mobistar drove a group of people on a comedy show into playing a prank on them to have them experience the frustration their customers felt. (Note: The symbols that appear such as 05u22 refer to the time, in this case 5:22 am.)
(via Sadly No.)
As I wrote yesterday, my latest bone density scan, when compared with two previous scan results taken years before showed that my bone density was not only above the cut off for a diagnosis for osteoporosis but also was actually increasing with time, so there really was no cause for alarm.
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Frank Wisner was the emissary sent by president Obama to Hosni Mubarak to, we were told, encourage him to leave office quickly. He was supposedly chosen because he had a personal relationship with him developed while earlier serving in Egypt as US ambassador. But Wisner seems to have gone rogue, saying publicly that Mubarak should not leave immediately. The administration has tried to distance themselves from those remarks but suspicions exist that (surprise!) the US government is not being honest in what it tells us and is trying to have it both ways in Egypt, trying to appease its long-standing ally Mubarak and the pro-democracy protesters.
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Some tea party Republicans shocked their party leadership by joining with many Democrats to deny the 2/3 vote necessary to pass an extension of some parts of the odious USA PATRIOT Act that violates many of our privacy rights.
The Patriot Act measure would have extended through the end of the year three provisions that are set to expire Feb. 28. One authorizes the FBI to use roving wiretaps on surveillance targets; the second allows the government to access “any tangible items,” such as library records, in the course of surveillance; and the third allows for the surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified terrorist group.
These measures will undoubtedly pass later under different rules that require only a simple majority, but this is the kind of issue-focused coalition that I was urging that we need to work towards.
You may be familiar with the story about Raymond Davis who is being held on a murder charge in Lahore, Pakistan after shooting dead two people in a crowded part of the city. From the very beginning there was something very fishy about his story that the two people he killed were robbers and he acted in self-defense. The story had a lot of inconsistencies and made no sense and the US government kept changing it.
David Lindorff ‘s investigation turns up very different facts from what the US government is asserting. The mainstream US media is seemingly not interested in investigating this further beyond reporting what the US government says and the political implications of the case, which is always their preferred option.
Lindorff’s article is a fascinating read.
UPDATE: It looks like the US government is raising the stakes in its efforts to get Davis out of Pakistan.
I have written before of the absurd levels of bureaucratic waste that runs through the US health care system. Here I would like to continue a report on one personal experience that illustrates this. I do this not because my medical history is interesting (it isn’t in the slightest) but to document the appalling inefficiency of the system.
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This long article by Lawrence Wright goes into great detail on the abusive practices of this creepy organization, using the defection after thirty-five years of Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis as a focus.
One of the best things about working at Case Western Reserve University is that it has been very forward-looking and supportive in providing technology to serve the needs of its students, employees, and the community.
In the early days of the internet CWRU, with its Freenet system, was the first in the nation to provide free internet access to anyone who had a dial-up modem. It later was the first university campus to have an entirely fiber-optic network going to every office, classroom, and dorm room on the campus.
In partnerships with other local non-profit groups, CWRU has been expanding access to free broadband access to city dwellers. This video (admittedly also a plug for the university) shows a new initiative to provide free gigabit broadband fiber-optic network access to the campus community and an adjacent neighborhood to research what kinds of new uses might emerge, with an eye to expanding the reach of the network.