Having a baby in some Alabama hospitals can mean getting tested for drugs without a woman’s consent—and winding up in jail for a positive result. Alabama’s chemical endangerment law, in effect for nine years, spurred an investigation by ProPublica and AL.com into hospital drug-testing policies due to the law’s strict penalties. A woman who tests positive for drugs in a […]
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Overdoses of prescription painkillers have become one of the leading causes of death among women. More women now die from overdoses of prescription pills like OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet than from cervical cancer, homicide, or street drugs such as heroin and cocaine, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. “We need to better understand how […]
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A Canadian spring break trip turned out to be pretty expensive for one Michigan family. As the parents drove over the Ambassador Bridge into Canada, their 11 year old son was unknowingly racking up thousands of dollars in roaming data charges while watching videos on his iPad. “It was an innocent trip,” said Mike Domzalski. “We had never been to […]
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Budapest Power grab: In the face of mass protests and international condemnation, the Hungarian parliament has overwhelmingly passed 15 pages of amendments to the country’s 1-year-old constitution that practically abolish all judicial checks on the government. The amendments retroactively restore a number of controversial laws that were passed by the right-wing Fidesz government but subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the courts. […]
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Is “Helicopter Parenting” stunting children’s growth? Parents want to always know that their kids are safe. However, is too much hovering a bad thing? Helicopter parenting may actually be depriving your child of learning how to manage situations on their own. Parents that hover over their kids and manage what they do and not do may be stunting their growth […]
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Agent Orange Is Still Killing Veterans Slowly This is a true story told to me recently by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous. It explains his experience with the legacy of Monsanto and Dow and the ongoing effects of its product, Agent Orange, the lethal spray used in Vietnam during the war. My friend’s brother died a […]
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One violent movie does not a mass killer make, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. But the pornographic violence that now fills popular films has “the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize” impressionable minds. Disturbed young men like James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colo., killer, may be unable to process the nihilistic, sadistically violent world of movies like […]
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■ An Iowa State University professor has developed a virtual reality headset for chickens that will fool factory-farmed hens into thinking they’re free-range. The gadget uses a special headset that lets caged chickens pad around a virtual farmyard, pecking at virtual bugs. “I did a lot of work to get the technology right,” said inventor Austin Stewart. He admits that […]
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When the Liberal Party of Norway asked Gylve Nagell to run for the position of Backup Town Councilor for a suburb of Oslo he was very hesitant because he is not a politician. He is a member of the black metal band Darkthrone where his lyrics and music are about murder and mayhem. As the election got closer, he sensed […]
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Prison Sentences – Loosening The Shackles U.S. Prison Population The U.S. prison population is the highest in the world. A quarter of the world’s inmates reside in U.S. prisons, despite being only 5% of the world population. Since the 1980’s the U.S. prison population has increased 8-fold to over 2.4 million people. More than $80 billion of taxpayer money […]
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