NPR has put together a ‘just-the-facts’ timeline of what is known about the disappeared Malaysian airliner. Given all the wild speculation that has been bandied around, it was good to read about just the things that we know.
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Tom O’Donnell imagines what it would look like if Ayn Rand and her devotees ran the country according to their ideas. It begins:
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
Prostate cancer generally affects older men and since that group is a powerful and influential one, a lot of attention is paid to the diagnosis and treatment of that condition. Now there is a new study that provides promise of a better early detection system than the PSA blood test in which elevated levels leads to biopsies to see if there really is a tumor. The PSA test is not a very good one and the biopsies that are often triggered by it have problems.
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You may recall the case of the New Mexico company named Elane Photographers that I wrote about in December that was sued because they refused to provide their services to a same-sex wedding because of religious objections. Their case went all the way up to the New Mexico Supreme Court that ruled against them, saying that as they were a public accommodation offering their services to all, they did not have the right to arbitrarily deny service to people without good grounds and that denying them to same-sex couples violated the New Mexico Human Rights Act that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.
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The spat between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA about what to do with the 6,300-page report on torture headed towards some kind of partial resolution with the committee voting 11-3 to declassify and release only about 500 pages, not the full report. This consists of just the Executive Summary and conclusions but the CIA opposes even this limited release and while president Obama has said in general terms that he supports declassification and release, in typical shifty fashion he has not yet made it clear what exactly he proposes to do and in fact has withheld documents in his possession that the committee wanted.
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The Daily Show looks at how bizarre have become the policies and attitudes in the US about guns where safety measures concerning real that would seem so commonsensical are viewed as unthinkable impositions on gun ownership, while children merely pretending to play with guns are seem as a terrible threat.
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One of the signs that a nation has reached an oligarchic state in which control over major decisions has become vested in a super-wealthy class working through its puppets is that the normal institutions of governance by elected representatives start to sink into irrelevance and become almost clownish in their operations.
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One of the common misconceptions heavily promoted by successive Israeli governments and their lobby in the US is that Israel keeps making generous offers of peace towards the Palestinians but keeps getting rebuffed, and that this is the main hindrance to achieving peace. That this goes against all the facts has been repeatedly pointed out but it has become one of those zombie lies that is trotted out routinely and is reinforced by the western media to justify Israeli excesses, apartheid policies, and the steady and continuous encroachment of Palestinian lands by the expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories.
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While modern computer technology enables special effects artists to produce remarkable results, we should not forget that it is not just technology but also human ingenuity that is the foundation for good effects. Gifted people with lots of patience but very little else can do amazing things , while those without imagination will produce pedestrian stuff even with all the technology at their disposal.
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