U.S. government medical researchers intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala, including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission more than 60 years ago.

Many of those infected were encouraged to pass the infection onto others as part of the study.

About one third of those who were infected never got adequate treatment.

On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are expected to offer extensive apologies for actions taken by the U.S. Public Health Service…

The episode raises inevitable comparisons to the infamous Tuskegee experiment, the Alabama study where hundreds of African-American men were told they were being treated for syphilis, but in fact were denied treatment. That U.S. government study lasted from 1932 until press reports revealed it in 1972.

The Guatemala experiments…were discovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College, and was posted on her website [.pdf].

According to Reverby’s report, the Guatemalan project was co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, the NIH, the Pan-American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government.

What will be exposed, say, in 2070 about what politicians are doing to exploit ordinary folks today?


I wonder if the artist would install duplicates in front of a few choice locations in Washington and New York…

A marble sculpture of a cut-off hand with the middle finger stuck up has gone on display in front of the Milan Stock Exchange, provoking a lively debate in Italy’s financial capital.

The 11-metre high installation, called “L.O.V.E.” and unveiled for the first time in Milan, is part of a retrospective dedicated to the Italian contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose provocative works include a sculpture of Pope John Paul being hit by a meteorite.

“(Cattelan’s works) call our times into question, offering themselves as a mirror, however cracked, of our present,” said Massimiliano Finazzer Flory, Milan’s commissioner for culture, in a statement.


In a shocking indication of a split between the White House and the Pentagon over the war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates believes that the U.S. military will never leave the war-torn country. During a dinner hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Afghan President Hamid Karzai in May, Gates reminded the group that he still feels guilty for his role in the first President Bush’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s Wars.” And to express his commitment to not letting down the country again, he emphasized:

“We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely,” Gates finally said. “In fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.” Woodward notes that the group was shocked by the blunt comment: “At least one stunned participant put down his fork. Another wrote it down, verbatim, in his notes.”

The definitive statement seems to clash with President Obama’s assertion that he does not want to leave the war to his successor. Though he has emphasized that the U.S. will stay in Afghanistan “until the job is done,” he wants almost all the US troops out before the end of his first term in January 2013, leaving in place a small contingency force.

Well, you have to give him credit for being honest about it.


What’s distinctive about the Tea Party is its anarchist streak — its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns,” warns Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek. But why not three cheers for the Tea Party Express?
[…]
Unfortunately they’re tone deaf. Congress cannot see past the election. All that changes in November.

So thanks Tea Party, Vegas odds must favor a Second American Revolution. Actually, the revolution is already roaring, hot, it’s about time. The GOP and the Dems had more than a decade. But America’s worse off. We need a real revolution to restore sanity … or we can kiss democracy and capitalism good-bye, permanently.

Yes, big warning, the Second American Revolution will extract painful austerity, not the “happy days are here again” future touted by tea-baggers. For years it’ll be impossible for most of America’s 95 million investors to develop a successful investment or logical retirement strategy. […] So if you think you’re “mad as hell” now, “you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

Here’s the timeline:
Stage 1: The Dems just put the nail in their coffin by confirming they are wimps, refusing to force the GOP to filibuster the Bush tax cuts for America’s richest.
Stage 2: The GOP takes over the House, expanding its war to destroy Obama with its new policy of “complete gridlock,” even “shutting down government.”
Stage 3: Obama goes lame-duck.
Stage 4: The GOP wins back the White House and Senate in 2012. Health care returns to insurers. Free market financial deregulation returns.
Stage 5: Under the new president, Wall Street’s insatiable greed triggers the catastrophic third meltdown of the 21st century Shiller predicted, with defaults on dollar-denominated debt.
Stage 6: The Second American Revolution explodes into a brutal full-scale class war rebelling against the out-of-touch, out-of-control greedy conspiracy-of-the-rich now running America.
Stage 7: Domestic class warfare is compounded by Pentagon’s prediction that by 2020 “an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge” worldwide and “warfare is defining human life.”

What’s behind our 2010-2020 countdown? It became obvious after reading the brilliant but bleak “Decadence of Election 2010” report by Prof. Peter Morici, former chief economist at the International Trade Commission. He sees no hope from America’s political parties, just a dark scenario ahead.


This could be a setup or something since someone just happened to be recording when this happened, but is there anyone who hasn’t wanted to do this to some asshat’s phone being used at an inappropriate time?


GIZMODO

There’s a massive tropical storm headed to New York, one that may flood the subway. What most people don’t know is that we depend on just 700 fragile water pumps to keep the tunnels dry—some a century old.

In fact, if someone powered down all these pumps tomorrow, the entire subway network would be inundated in just a few hours. To give you an idea of how complex and massive this system is, it pulls 13 million gallons of water out of the subway on any sunny day. No rain. Not even a single drop of water from the sky.

On a rainy day, it is absolute madness. To the point where the MTA—NYC’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority—lives in permanent panic, fearing events like Nicole, the tropical storm system that is approaching the little town blue right now. “At some point, it would be too much to handle,” said the head of the hydraulics team back in 2006, Peter Velasquez Jr., “you’ve got rain plus wind. It basically would shut down the system. You hope not. You pray that it doesn’t.”


A coalition of Mexican mayors has asked the United States to stop deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S. to Mexican border cities, saying the deportations are contributing to Mexican border violence.

The request was made at a recent San Diego conference in which the mayors of four Mexican border cities and one U.S. mayor, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, gathered to discuss cross-border issues.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes blamed U.S. deportation policy for contributing to his city’s violence, saying that of the 80,000 people deported to Juarez in the past three years, 28,000 had U.S. criminal records — including 7,000 convicted rapists and 2,000 convicted murderers. Those criminal deportees, he said, have contributed to the violence in Juarez, which has reported more than 2,200 murders this year. Reyes and the other Mexican mayors said that when the U.S. deports criminals back to Mexico, it should fly them to their hometowns, not just bus them to the border.

But critics in America say the Mexican lawmakers are simply trying to pass the buck to the U.S. and its taxpayers. They say the Mexicans should take responsibility for their criminals, who are putting both Mexican and American lives in danger. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transports a majority of Mexican criminal aliens back to Mexico on buses. Since they’re often held in U.S. detention centers near the border prior to deportation, busing them to Mexican border cities is much less expensive than flying them to the interior of the country.

We do the work of rounding them up, present them as a neat little package on Mexico’s doorstep….and they still complain.



  • Techcrunch Disrupt ends.
  • HP dumps Android OS.
  • Lucas to bring out Star Wars in 3D.
  • Meanwhile 3DS will not be out in time for Christmas.
  • Should Facebook buy Skype?
  • Net Neutrality bill is dead.
  • Next year’s Apple iPad sounds like the winner. Details within.
  • Blackberry going to QNX and the company proud of its low number of apps.
  • Texting makes people drive safer? Horsecrap.
  • Amazon doing an Android app store.
  • Hulu Plus on Roku and Tivo.
  • E-books get children to read more.

click to listen:

 

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No, this incredible image is not a Photoshop montage and that’s not Batman’s plane. It’s a Qantas Dash 8 Q 400, a twin propeller passenger airplane passing in front of the Moon in Australia. This is how it was taken.



Thomas Dunlap

CNet News

This man may soon know your name.

Thomas Dunlap is the attorney representing at least a dozen independent movie studios, including the makers of the Oscar-winning film, “The Hurt Locker.” If you illegally shared any of his clients films online then Dunlap, a founder of the law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver may have collected your Internet protocol address. He may at this minute be requesting a subpoena that compels your Internet service provider to turn over your identity.

Dunlap and his firm, which also operates as U.S. Copyright Group, will then likely file a copyright complaint against you in federal court. But before that, he will give you an opportunity to settle the case for maybe as much as $2,900. This has already happened to many of the 5,000 people Dunlap has accused of pirating “The Hurt Locker.”

Dunlap appears to be the Gung ho kind and well suited for the copyright wars. Educated in Switzerland, fluent in French, the former U.S. Army Captain has a license to drive a tank. He has a Master’s degree in biotechnology in addition to his law degree and enjoys kickboxing and piloting aircraft. He has almost single handedly revived the practice of suing individual file sharers for copyright violations, which appeared to die when the music industry dropped their five-year litigation campaign nearly two years ago. Now, even the adult-film industry is trying to adopt a similar antipiracy strategy.


CNet News

A group of programmers has forked OpenOffice.org, the open-source rival to Microsoft Office that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems.

The group, called the Document Foundation, published beta versions of its software, called LibreOffice for download on Tuesday. And although the group invited Oracle to offer its OpenOffice trademark, they made it clear they’re willing to proceed without the software and now hardware company.

“Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software,” the group said in a statement.


A Toronto judge has struck down Canada’s prostitution laws, saying provisions meant to protect women and residential neighbourhoods are endangering sex workers’ lives. If Justice Susan Himel’s decision stands, prostitutes will be able to communicate freely with customers on the street, conduct business in their homes or brothels and hire bodyguards and accountants without exposing them to the risk of criminal sanctions.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said the federal government is “very concerned” and is seriously considering an appeal of the 131-page ruling.

Alan Young, a lawyer at the forefront of the landmark legal challenge, said it is too early to say whether Tuesday’s decision could open the door to Canada going “the way of Germany with five-story brothels.”

But to his client, Terri-Jean Bedford, a dominatrix who was convicted in 1998 of keeping a common bawdy house, it was “emancipation day.” “How am I going to celebrate? I’m going to spank some ass,” Bedford, cracking a riding whip, told reporters.

Let the discourse begin anew!

Found by John Martinez.


Here is the latest conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. A broad range of things on this week’s show.
Click here for non-Flash version.

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Contribute to the future of the show here.


  • Techcrunch goes to AOL. That should be interesting.
  • Rim Playbook released.
  • Texting while driving not as harmful as they say.
  • Apple TV analysis going on.
  • Twitter finding ways to make money.
  • Is Google building a Serendipity engine? Sounds like a scam.
  • UFO’s apparently saving the world. Cripes.
  • New Sony-Ericsson phone makes promises.
  • Open Office forks.
  • Microsoft gives up on blogging. And guess what?

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