Last week the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lost another tooth, and the pharmaceutical industry won another battle in its ongoing effort to roll back safety regulations that impinge on its profit margin. The regulatory agency capitulated to drug company Pacira Pharmaceuticals’ demand that it revoke restrictions it had placed on Pacira’s marketing of
Over a period of three days, from December 12 to December 14, military forces of the government of President Muhammadu Buhari slaughtered hundreds of, perhaps more than a thousand, Shia Muslims at three sites in Nigeria’s Kaduna State. According to a report on the World Socialist Web Site, witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch claimed
When I was a kid, we Americans lived in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Sometimes it was just “the war,” although that term has generally been reserved for World War II. But “Vietnam” was synonymous with “war,” and in our minds it anchored all war to that one country in Southeast Asia. Complication crept
There comes to all of us a night when we do not sleep. We lie awake looking at the ceiling and feel ourselves aging. Maybe we found a gray hair that day, or maybe someone younger reminded us of ourselves. But on that night we lie there stunned in the revelation that our bodies are
Getting old is no good. The world gets blurry. Hair grows in your ears. People stop falling in love with you. And that ain’t the half of it. Lately, I’ve been getting older. The skin on my neck is coming loose, and my face is getting lumpy making it hard to shave without cutting myself.
Once again Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned by a school. This time it is the Friends’ Central School in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania where students had complained that the book made them uncomfortable. You can’t blame folks for wanting to be comfortable. When he’s living with the Widow Douglas, wearing starchy
French neo-fascist Marine Le Pen’s National Front party emerged from France’s second round of regional elections without a single regional majority. Newspapers and television networks that had been presenting the elections with a lurid focus on Le Pen and her xenophobic, nationalist politics were quick to gloat over her defeat as a rejection of xenophobia
Trans-Pacific Partnership: Twilight of the Nation-State Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Thursday 12/10 declared that President Obama should not act to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership before his lame-duck session following the 2016 election. Given the massive trade deal’s dependence on Republican support, it seems McConnell will get his way. Opponents of the treaty,
by Jim Caton The most important federal case of our lifetimes had its beginning four years ago this month. It was a case that was never heard by the Supreme Court, a case almost wholly ignored by the media, a case you have probably never heard of. In December of 2011, President Obama signed the
by Jim Caton Predictably, the U.S. security state has begun to exploit the recent terrorist attacks in Paris in order to tighten its grip on the public. Using the Sunday talk shows, the New York Times and other social media accounts, government officials and mouthpiece pundits have fired their first salvo of cynical alarm over