Noteworthy News

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Merck: More Agony from Its Painkiller

Business Week

by Amy Barrett

August 22, 2005

The costly Vioxx verdict makes its plan to take on each claim individually more difficult. But a big settlement is no easy cure, either

Unfortunately for Merck, the Aug. 19 decision by a Texas jury raises big questions about how the company can fend off the mountain of Vioxx suits it faces. It has two possible routes: Strike a big settlement to resolve most of these cases, or take on each case individually. But both approaches are fraught with risk for the drugmaker.

Putting the family to work - Pleasant Hill cafe doubles as homeschool classroom

San Francisco Chronicle

by Ilana DeBare

August 21, 2005

Many small family-run businesses rely on help from a child or two, but Sweet Sisters takes this a step further. Cafe owner Deborah Lyse Quenneville- Clairmont is homeschooling her six children and conceived of the restaurant as a part of their education.

Her teenagers spend 25 hours each week at the cafe and 25 hours each week on academics, while the younger children accompany their mother to the cafe and help out more informally. "This gives our children more of a real-life experience rather than a book experience," Quenneville-Clairmont said. "It gives them the opportunity to meet so many different people. And it gives them a sense of belonging to something -- they feel the restaurant is theirs."

Once Woeful, Alabama Is Model in Child Welfare

The New York Times

by Erik Eckholm

August 20, 2005

As a mother, Stephanie Harris seemed hopeless. She was 29 and a determined crack addict back in 1993, when she was sent to prison for neglecting her six children, including infant twins.

The authorities had little choice, she now agrees, but to give custody of her children to relatives. If history were the guide, in Alabama or perhaps any other state, Ms. Harris might never have regained her children, child welfare officials here say. More likely, the children would have been shuffled among relatives and foster homes.

Psychiatric Drugs: An Assault on the Human Condition

Street Spirit

by Terry Messman with Robert Whitaker

August 19, 2005

Robert Whitaker, author of the Mad In America, is now pursuing a line of research into how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry is endangering the American public by covering up the effect antidepressants and antipsychotic medications.

Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted the Food and Drug Administration's drug review process, and co-opted research trials in order to spin the results of drug tests and conceal the serious hazards and even deadly side-effects of brand-name drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Zyprexa.

Higher Gas Tax? Smart Move

Business Week

by Christopher Farrell

August 19, 2005

Raising it to 50 cents or $1 per gallon would push conservation and send a signal to America's enemies. It's the surest way to cut oil dependence

What sort of action should government take in response to high energy prices? How about hiking the federal tax on gasoline? Yes, you read that right. Washington should raise the federal tax on gasoline from its current 18.4 cents a gallon to 50 cents -- or even $1.

Lions and Cheetahs and Elephants, Oh My! - Let them run wild. In North America.

slate.com

by C. Josh Donlan

August 18, 2005

As the first Americans strolled onto their open real estate 13,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, their continent quickly lost much of its grandeur.

Elephants: not just for zoos, anymore "Rewilding" - bringing elephants, cheetahs, and lions out of captivity to run free in parts of North America -could help save these megafauna from global extinction. More important, it would restore to the continent biological functions lost millenniums ago. The big guys would help stop the march of the pests and weeds-rats and dandelions-that will otherwise take over the landscape. And they would promote the natural processes that generate biodiversity.

Did fiery essay get author fired?

Chicago Tribune [Free Subscription Required]

by Michael Higgins

August 18, 2005

J. Matt Barber, a born-again Christian from Villa Park, hoped to get some reaction in December when he wrote a fiery online essay denouncing same-sex marriage and the "destructive nature ... of the homosexual lifestyle."

But the strongest response, Barber said, came from his employers at Allstate Corp. He said two supervisors slapped the article down in front of him, told him he was suspended without pay and had him escorted from the company grounds in Northbrook.

Study Ranks America's Most Liberal and Conservative Cities

americancityandcounty.com

August 16, 2005

A new nationwide study released by the nonpartisan Bay Area Center for Voting Research (BACVR) ranks the political leanings of every American city and finds that Detroit, Michigan is the most liberal and Provo, Utah the most conservative.

In all, the BACVR researchers examined voting patterns of 237 American cities with populations of over 100,000 and ranked them each on liberal and conservative scales. The list of Americas most liberal cities is dominated by cities with large African American populations that are concentrated in the Northeast, Midwest and California. Conversely, the study found that the staunchest conservative cities are clustered in the South and interior West and have extremely low numbers of African American residents.

Giant Waterfall Discovered in Calif. Park

The Washington Times (CA)

by Kathleen Hennessey

August 13, 2005

Dick McDermott knows these parts as well as any man can. But McDermott says he's never laid eyes on the nearly 400-foot waterfall that park officials recently discovered in a remote corner of the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area.

The 92-year-old used to earn a meager living mining the creeks that meander through the deeply wooded hills. He has slogged through the brush and hiked overgrown logging roads, hunting deer and gathering wood for his homemade fiddles. "Sure, I was surprised," he said from his home in the park, where he's lived for more than 70 years. "I've been all around that place, I never seen 'em."

Scientists find errors in global warming data

USA Today

by Dan Vergano

August 11, 2005

Research released Friday removes a last bastion of scientific doubt about global warming. Areas in the tropics had shown little atmospheric heating. But scientists found satellites tracking the tropics were increasingly reporting nighttime...

Surface temperatures have shown small but steady increases since the 1970s, but the tropics had shown little atmospheric heating - and even some cooling. Now, after sleuthing reported in three papers released by the journal Science, revisions have been made to that atmospheric data. Climate expert Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, lead author of one of the papers, says that those fairly steady measurements in the tropics have been a key argument "among people asking, 'Why should I believe this global warming hocus-pocus''"

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