Thursday, Oct 23rd
Last update07:12:32 AM GMT
Over a decade ago a young woman approached me on the California Senate floor with a petition against the Taliban. Women are being repressed, tortured and killed by religious fundamentalists, she said. I signed on.
But I had no idea then that I was joining The Feminist Majority in a coalition with the Pentagon to invade and occupy Afghanistan.
People with mental illness are increasingly ending up being imprisoned, rather than in the mental health care system where many of them belong. With the down economy, states and counties — who are primarily responsible for the health of the indigent — cut social services first. And with most public psychiatric hospitals long-since closed, people who have a mental disorder end up being warehoused not in hospitals, but in prisons.
This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, released a stunning new report detailing significant barriers that many female veterans face in accessing healthcare at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Not just for policy wonks, this report should be required reading for every American. Some of the critical findings include:
U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, actively helped Chinese interrogators question members of China's Uighur minority, including physically restraining them so they could be photographed against their will, according to testimony presented Thursday to a congressional subcommittee.
"Permitting an inquiry into what fragments of information various government agents knew, or should have known, and at what time, but did not tell the defendants, threatens thoroughly to confuse and prejudice the jury, distract from the major issues of the case, and add to the trial substantial expense and delay," the judge wrote.
A motion to admit the 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004 and ordered by Congress, was denied except for a chronology of the report.
The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.
NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.
The FDA is reviewing a possible link between the asthma drug Xolair and an increased risk of heart and cerebrovascular disorders.
As CIA director in 2004, George Tenet terminated a secret program to develop hit teams to kill al-Qaida leaders, but his successors resurrected the plan, according to former intelligence officials.
Tenet ended the program because the agency could not work out its practical details, the officials told The Associated Press. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.
We're on the map, but the wrong map: In 2008 Israel ranked eighth in the world's counterfeit pharmaceuticals trade, with 78 reported cases of fake drugs worth up to NIS 100 million. And those were only the cases that were caught.
The figures, based on data from the World Health Organization, Health Ministry and drug safety watchdogs, were released at a conference on drug counterfeiting last week, sponsored by the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Pharma Israel. But clearly, the figures reveal only part of the problem, as they reflect only fake drugs that were caught.
Page 911 of 1152
