Four years on, media mostly neglect an ongoing disaster
There are plenty of ongoing stories to be told today. The Institute for Southern Studies report also highlighted some startling statistics: In addition to the estimated 1 million people still displaced by Katrina, rents in the New Orleans area have increased by 40 percent since the hurricane, and an estimated 11,000 people are currently homeless there. The report also reveals striking racial disparities in the impacts: Less than 49 percent of households in the largely African-American and working class Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans are actively receiving mail today (compared to 76 percent city-wide), for example, and black children's enrollment in public and private schools dropped from 49 percent of all students to 43 percent.
A helicopter carrying a powerful Indian politician has disappeared during a flight over a Maoist rebel stronghold in the south, officials say.
Even worse is a growing trend to invert this process: to promote diseases to fit existing drugs. In a fascinating New York Review of Books piece, Marcia Angell, M.D., denounced the practice of "disease mongering." As she put it, "The strategy is to convince as many people as possible (along with their doctors, of course) that they have medical conditions that require long-term drug treatment."
Even when there are no Palestinian casualties and fatalities at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces, there is no letup in the everyday bullying by the occupation regime. Many Israelis are complicit in every travel restriction and expropriation order, from the cabinet ministers responsible, to the jurists who legitimize and codify, to the officers who implement and the typists and translators. Every soldier who guards a Jewish settlement, every rabbi who serves it and every kindergarten teacher there is partner to the primal act of the established violence that built it on Palestinian land.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a non-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood.
Pfizer Inc. agreed to plead guilty under a $2.3 billion federal settlement over unlawful prescription-drug promotions.The company in January disclosed it would pay the $2.3 billion over allegations it had marketed the since-withdrawn anti-inflammatory drug Bextra and possibly other products for medical conditions different than their approved use. Details of the settlement weren't available in January, however.
All across Canada and in the United States, there is an organized campaign to suppress criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
Companies eliminated more jobs than forecast in August, a private survey indicated today, signaling that employers have yet to gain confidence about a recovery from the deepest recession since the 1930s.
