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  1. Atypical is offline
    05-22-2016, 03:01 PM #211
    Needle Tenderized Steaks Now Come With Warnings

    POSTED BY BILL MARLER ON MAY 21, 2016

    According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Services (FSIS), starting May 17th meat processors are required to disclose on labels whether meat has been through the commonly used process of needle tenderization. The labels also must provide safe cooking instructions that inform consumers that tenderized cuts should be cooked more thoroughly than intact cuts.

    Demands for the label information grew in response to the Christmas Eve 2009 National Steak and Poultry recall of 240,000 pounds of steaks for E. coil O157: H7 contamination. In early 2010 the meat was associated with 19 E. coli illnesses in 16 states.
    National Steak supplied mechanically tenderized steaks to such popular chains as Moe’s Southwest Grill, Carino’s Italian Grill and KRM restaurants.

    Labeling technically tenderized beef products and including cooking instructions on their packaging are important steps in helping consumers to safely prepare these products, said Al Almanza, USDA’s under secretary for food safety. “This common sense change will leaded to safer meats and fewer food borne illnesses.”

    Government officials moved up the effective date of the new regulation to today, up from Jan. 1, 2018, which is the next uniform compliance date for food labeling regulations.

    The FSIS recommends both tenderized and whole cuts of beef be cooked to a minimum internal temperature of 145° fahrenheit (F).

    “These products, like all whole cuts of beef, should be cooked to a minimum internal temperature of 145° F as measured with a food thermometer before removing meat from the heat source,” an FSIS spokeswoman said.

    “For safety and quality, allow meat to rest for at least three minutes after it has been removed from the heat source before carving or consuming. During this rest time, the internal temperature is either constant or slightly rises to destroy pathogens.”

    The mechanically tenderized beef rule is aimed at home cooks, restaurants and other food service operations. Notice is not required on restaurant menus.

    The 2009-10 National Steak E. coli outbreak is one of six outbreaks involving needle or blade tenderized beef, according to CDC data. The FSIS reported such tenderization is a common practice because it improves tenderness of less expensive cuts of meat. Chain restaurants that offer affordable steaks are big users of needle and/or mechanical tenderization.

    http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=Pc3...qip7ijzB6gC1aA

    _________________________

    The title of this thread seems humorous but it's not. It's deadly serious. This is another example of the indifference of business to give a shit about consumers and government to allow it.

    Read the article carefully and notice the dates.

    Here is a comment from a reader of the original story.

    Food Microbiologist • 4 hours ago
    Finally after six outbreaks, pleas for labeling starting in 2001, and a paper in 1978. Johnston,-R-W; Harris,-M-E; Moran,-A-B. The effect of mechanical tenderization on beef rounds inoculated with salmonellae. Journal-of-Food-Safety. 1978; 1(3): 201-209 ; 9 ref. That's science-based regulation?

    PS: Sure wish I could see evidence of the "onerous" regulations that conservatives are always crying about so as to allow business to do whatever it wants to protect profit and screw the public.

    Look up and research "regulatory capture" if you disagree and look into the heads of government agencies and what industries they came from. Obama, the so-called "liberal" is overwhelmingly supportive of Wall Street and business...and WE always pay for it!
    Last edited by Atypical; 05-22-2016 at 03:26 PM.

  2. Atypical is offline
    05-23-2016, 09:34 AM #212
    DeCosters and Jail: three months seem just about right

    POSTED BY BILL MARLER ON MAY 22, 2016

    Jack DeCoster and Peter DeCoster were sentenced April 13, 2015 by U.S. District Court Judge Mark Bennett to three months in prison for introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce. In addition, they were each required to pay $100,000. The DeCosters’s former company, Quality Egg LLC, was fined nearly $6.8 million. Eggs from their Iowa farms were linked to a 2010 Salmonella enteritidis outbreak that sickened nearly 2,000 and caused the recall of 500,000,000 eggs.

    The DeCosters filed an appeal April 27, 2015, asking the U.S. District Court of Appeals 8th Circuit to remove remove the jail time from their sentence.

    Pro-business groups, including the Cato Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and Chamber of Commerce, and the Washington Legal Foundation filed briefs in support of the DeCosters, arguing executives shouldn’t serve jail time for this type of crime. In part, the arguments for no jail time were the same:
    “If executives can be imprisoned for criminal violations of strict liability laws by virtue of the position they hold within a company, the United States economy would suffer.”
    “Executive business decisions would be motivated less by good business principles and more by fear of possible future prison sentences.”

    The 8th Circuit heard oral arguments in the appeal March 17, 2016 and the parties are now waiting for a decision.

    I am not sure if Judges of the 8th Circuit have read Bill Neuman’s New York Times article from September 2010 entitled, “An Iowa Egg Farmer and a History of Salmonella.” However, they should. Here are some of the highlights/lowlights.

    DeCoster’s frequent run-ins with regulators over labor, environmental and immigration violations have been well cataloged. But the close connections between DeCoster’s egg empire and the spread of Salmonella enteritidis in the United States have received far less scrutiny.

    Farms tied to DeCoster were a primary source of Salmonella enteritidis in the U.S. in the 1980s, when some of the first major outbreaks of human illness from the bacteria in eggs occurred, according to health officials and public records. At one point, New York and Maryland regulators believed DeCoster eggs were such a threat that they banned sales of the eggs in their states.

    “When we were in the thick of it, the name that came up again and again was DeCoster Egg Farms,” said Paul A. Blake, who was head of the Enteric Diseases Division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s, when investigators began to tackle the emerging problem of Salmonella enteritidis and eggs.

    Records released by Congressional investigators suggest that tougher oversight of Mr. DeCoster’s Iowa operations might have prevented the 2010 outbreak, which federal officials say is the largest of its type in the nation’s history, with nearly 2,000 reported illnesses and probably tens of thousands more that have gone unreported.

    According to the records, Mr. DeCoster’s farms in Iowa conducted tests from 2008 to 2010 that repeatedly showed strong indicators of possible toxic Salmonella enteritidis contamination in his barns. Such environmental contamination does not always spread to the eggs, and it is unclear what actions Mr. DeCoster took in response. However, when the Food and Drug Administration inspected the farms after the recalls, officials found insanitary conditions and the presence of Salmonella enteritidis in barns and feed.

    The first Salmonella enteritidis outbreak recognized by public health officials came in July 1982, when about three dozen people fell ill and one person died at the Edgewood Manor nursing home in Portsmouth, N.H. Investigators concluded that runny scrambled eggs served at a Saturday breakfast were to blame. They traced the eggs to what the Centers for Disease Control reports referred to as a large producer in Maine; interviews with investigators confirmed that it was Mr. DeCoster’s former operation. Eggs from the same farms were also suspected in a simultaneous outbreak that sickened some 400 people in Massachusetts.

    In 1987, the deadly outbreak at Coler Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island occurred. Investigators determined that mayonnaise made from raw eggs had caused the outbreak. They traced the eggs to Mr. DeCoster’s Maryland farms. On a July night in 1987, scores of elderly and chronically ill patients at Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital in New York City began to fall violently sick with food poisoning from eggs tainted with Salmonella enteritidis. “It was like a war zone,” said Dr. Philippe Tassy, the doctor on call as the sickness started to rage through the hospital. By the time the outbreak ended more than two weeks later, nine people had died and about 500 people had become sick. It remains the deadliest outbreak in this country attributed to eggs infected with the bacteria known as Salmonella enteritidis.

    After two more outbreaks were linked to DeCoster eggs the following year, New York banned Mr. DeCoster from selling eggs in the state. He was forced to agree to a rigorous program of Salmonella enteritidis testing on his farms in Maine and Maryland. Michael Opitz, a poultry expert retired from the University of Maine, said that the testing found that a Maine breeder flock owned by Mr. DeCoster was infected, meaning that hens there could be passing the bacteria to their chicks, which might grow up to lay tainted eggs. Widespread contamination was also found in laying barns.

    In 1991, tests revealed more Salmonella enteritidis contamination at one of Mr. DeCoster’s farms in Maryland. The state quarantined the eggs, allowing them to be sold only to a plant where they could be pasteurized to kill bacteria. Mr. DeCoster challenged the order and a federal judge ruled that Maryland could not block him from shipping eggs to other states. He was still barred from selling the eggs in Maryland, and in 1992, a state judge found that he had violated the quarantine by selling eggs to a local store; Mr. DeCoster was given a suspended sentence of probation and a token fine.

    Soon after interstate shipments resumed in 1992, eggs from the Maryland farm caused a Salmonella enteritidis outbreak in Connecticut, according to a 1992 memo from the Maryland attorney general’s office. Federal regulators insisted that Mr. DeCoster decontaminate his barns. Dr. Roger Olson, the former state veterinarian of Maryland, said that Mr. DeCoster complained about the cost of testing and the quarantine and insisted there was little risk associated with his eggs.

    Perhaps the Pro-business groups arguing for the DeCosters remain free are unaware of the DeCoster history? The Business arguments aside, personally, I think Jack and Peter need some time away to think about this history – three months seem just about right.

    For a little background on the law – Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in 1938 in reaction to growing public safety demands. The primary goal of the Act was to protect the health and safety of the public by preventing deleterious, adulterated or misbranded articles from entering interstate commerce.

    Cont'd Below

  3. Atypical is offline
    05-23-2016, 09:35 AM #213
    Cont'd

    Under section 402(a)(4) of the Act, a food product is deemed “adulterated” if the food was “prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with filth, or whereby it may have been rendered injurious to health.” A food product is also considered “adulterated” if it bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance, which may render it injurious to health. Chapter III of the Act addresses prohibited acts, subjecting violators to both civil and criminal liability.

    Felony violations include adulterating or misbranding a food, drug, or device, and putting an adulterated or misbranded food, drug, or device into interstate commerce. Any person who commits a prohibited act violates the FDCA. A person committing a prohibited act “with the intent to defraud or mislead” is guilty of a felony punishable by years in jail and millions in fines or both. The key here is an intentional act.

    A misdemeanor conviction under the FDCA, unlike a felony conviction, does not require proof of fraudulent intent, or even of knowing or willful conduct. Rather, a person may be convicted if he or she held a position of responsibility or authority in a firm such that the person could have prevented the violation. Convictions under the misdemeanor provisions are punishable by not more than one year or fined not more than $250,000, or both.

    Seems evident that the DeCosters more than fit this definition. Like I said, three months seem just about right.

    http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=Pc3...jIeCjD0RARuUMw

    _______________________________

    Notice how the business groups defend the owners saying they shouldn't be punished with jail time.
    Last edited by Atypical; 09-13-2016 at 04:21 PM.

  4. Atypical is offline
    06-15-2016, 03:56 PM #214
    New Book: “The Business of America Isn’t Business Anymore.” It’s Tricked Up Financial Engineering.

    By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 15, 2016

    Makers and Takers by Rana ForooharRana Foroohar has written the equivalent of a public guide to why Americans remain mad as hell at Wall Street and Washington and why a lot worse than a political revolution may ensue if the plutocrats don’t wake up soon. Foroohar is an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and its economics columnist. In “Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business,” the author lays out a number of undeniable truths, which she backs up with footnotes and facts, such as: “the business of America isn’t business anymore.” That’s given way to financial engineering tricks like loading up a company’s balance sheet with billions of dollars of debt in order to prop up the share price with buybacks of the company’s own stock.

    Foroohar, who has been a financial journalist for 23 years, correctly concludes that Wall Street has come to “rule” rather than to “fuel” the real economy. This has created a “dysfunctional financial system” that is doomed to another collapse, “taking us all down with it,” unless critical repairs are made soon. Foroohar maps out exactly what those repairs must be in her last chapter.

    The author gives a litany of examples to show how “finance has transitioned from an industry that encourages healthy risk-taking, to one that simply creates debt and spreads unproductive risk in the market system as a whole.”

    One case study Foroohar examines is the technology company, Apple, and its use of share buybacks built on borrowed money. Unfortunately, Apple is part of a mushrooming trend in such financial engineering. Foroohar writes:

    “…Apple’s behavior is no aberration. Stock buybacks and dividend payments of the kind being made by Apple – moves that enrich mainly a firm’s top management and its largest shareholders but often stifle its capacity for innovation, depress job creation, and erode its competitive position over the longer haul – have become commonplace. The S&P 500 companies as a whole have spent more than $6 trillion on such payments between 2005 and 2014, bolstering share prices and the markets even as they were cutting jobs and investment.”

    The flip slide of this financial trickery (she calls it “financialization’) says Foroohar is that “our economy limps along in a ‘recovery’ that is tremendously bifurcated. Wage growth is flat. Six out of the top ten fastest-growing job categories pay $15 an hour and workforce participation is as low as it’s been since the late 1970s. It used to be that as the fortunes of American companies improved, the fortunes of the average American rose, too. But now something has broken that relationship.”

    In a word, that “something” is insatiable Wall Street greed where the people’s savings deposits that President Bill Clinton allowed Wall Street to manage through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act are being used for speculative trading and financial engineering instead of loans to help businesses thrive. Foroohar explains:

    “Lending to small business has fallen particularly sharply, as has the number of start-up firms themselves. In the early 1980s, new companies made up half of all US businesses. By 2011, they were just a third, a trend that numerous academics and even many investors and businesspeople have linked to the financial industry’s change in focus from lending to speculation. The wane in entrepreneurship means less economic vibrancy, given that new businesses are the nation’s foremost source of job creation and GDP growth.”

    If the majority of Americans don’t catch on quickly to the fact that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation has failed to meaningfully correct America’s systemically dysfunctional financial system, the author worries that an ugly revolution may result. She writes:

    “Research proves that more inequality leads to poorer health outcomes, lower levels of trust, more violent crime, and less social mobility – all of the things that can make a society unstable. As [Thomas] Piketty told me during an interview in 2014, there’s ‘no algorithm’ to predict when revolutions happen, but if current trends continue, the consequences for society in terms of social unrest and economic upheaval could be ‘terrifying.’ ”

    Foroohar offers outstanding ideas for getting at the core of the problems. One notable idea is to create for finance what the National Transportation Safety Board became for the airlines – an independent examiner of crashes. Some Americans are not clamoring for change on Wall Street because the details of the corruption and dysfunction on Wall Street have been drowned out by a chorus of Wall Street’s sycophants peddling their own narrative and Republicans in Congress looking to score points with conservatives by promising to gut financial regulations.

    Dodd-Frank created the Office of Financial Research (OFR), which has done outstanding work but is currently part of the U.S. Treasury Department which is headed by a political appointee made by whatever President and party is in office. Moving OFR out of the Treasury Department and making it function more like the National Transportation Safety Board is one of many fine examples offered by Foroohar to ward off the next, potentially seismic, crash of our financial system.

    We highly recommend this book for summer reading as the dangerous stakes in the upcoming November election for choosing the President and members of Congress come in to ever sharper focus.

    http://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-con...rch-proves.jpg

    http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/0...l-engineering/

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    Don't forget the corporate slogan folks..."Privatize the profits and socialize the losses."

    We're the "socializers."
    Last edited by Atypical; 06-15-2016 at 04:05 PM.

  5. Atypical is offline
    08-06-2016, 11:49 AM #215
    Most of us will, at some time, need medication that can make our lives better or even prolong life. How the system of creating and providing pharmaceuticals is then, obviously, important to each of us.

    The article linked below is a must-read for anyone interested in the subject of healthcare. It exposes the indifference of our government to provide its citizens protection against the grotesque greed of this industry. Unfortunately, the government has effectively been captured by almost all industries in some way. This is only one of the worst.

    Some of us will pay for this "relationship" with our lives.

    The $100,000-Per-Year Pill: How US Health Agencies Choose Pharma Over Patients

    Friday, 05 August 2016 00:00
    By Fran Quigley, Truthout | News Analysis

    http://org2.salsalabs.com/dia/track....KnuWN3lq3KpXbY
    Last edited by Atypical; 08-06-2016 at 11:53 AM.

  6. Atypical is offline
    09-13-2016, 04:18 PM #216
    Wall Street Today: Fake Accounts, Fake Money, Fake Courts, Fake Regulators

    By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2016

    Last Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced that Wells Fargo was paying $185 million in fines and penalties for allowing its employees to open “more than two million deposit and credit card accounts” that were not authorized by its customers. The employees were attempting to “hit sales targets and receive bonuses.” In one of the most audacious forms of bank fraud, according to the CFPB, employees actually “transferred funds from consumers’ authorized accounts to temporarily fund the new, unauthorized accounts.” This resulted in untold numbers of customers being charged for insufficient funds in their legitimate accounts or paying overdraft fees.

    If anyone ever doubted Senator Bernie Sanders when he repeatedly said during campaign stops that fraud has become a business model on Wall Street, that debate is over. According to the CFPB, this conduct at Wells Fargo went on for five years. Yesterday, Fortune’s Stephen Gandel reported that the woman who headed up this division at Wells Fargo, Carrie Tolstedt, will be “walking away with $124.6 million in stock, options, and restricted Wells Fargo shares.” Fraud is not only a business model but a road to riches for the overlords on Wall Street. Just ask John Paulson, Sandy Weill, Robert Rubin, John Reed, and Jamie Dimon.

    Fake accounts are just the latest alchemy on Wall Street. Let’s not forget that Bernard Madoff was generating fake statements to thousands of clients showing that $65 billion in fake money was in their accounts as the industry’s top watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), ignored the repeated warnings from whistleblower Harry Markopolos for years. But Ponzi schemers are not the only source of fake money on Wall Street. Just consider how the Federal Reserve secretly funneled $13 trillion in cumulative, below-market-rate loans to some of the most hubristic banks on Wall Street and on foreign shores during the 2007 to 2010 financial crisis. How did the Fed create that money without any appropriation from Congress? It simply pressed a button.

    Wall Street is able to sustain its business model of fraud because it has fake courts to hear cases brought by its customers and employees. Wall Street is the only industry in America which universally requires by written contract that its customers and employees agree to use its private justice system prior to opening an account or getting a job. That system, called mandatory arbitration, is overseen by Wall Street’s crony self-regulator, Finra, and offers none of the protections of the nation’s taxpayer-funded courts where juries are randomly selected from a broad base of the population, decisions are based on case law, and higher courts can hear appeals. Gloria Steinem once called the system “McJustice.”

    Then there are the fake regulators of Wall Street who seamlessly move from their multi-million dollar pay packages at corporate law firms to head the SEC and Justice Department. On June 2 of last year, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a 13-page letter to the SEC Chair, Mary Jo White, listing her abysmal failures and conflicts of interest in doing the job of a tough cop on the beat. Wall Street On Parade has also repeatedly pointed out the impossible conflicts of Mary Jo White and her husband, John White, who between them have represented every major Wall Street firm. Last year, the New York Times reported that in a span of two years as head of the SEC, Mary Jo White had recused herself from more than four dozen enforcement investigations as a result of her conflicts or those of her husband. And yet the Obama administration ignores this untenable situation as serial crimes continue to pile up on Wall Street.

    The U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder, who served from February 2009 until the spring of 2015, was also a casebook study of conflicts of interest. Both Holder and his head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, hailed from the corporate law firm, Covington & Burling, which regularly represented the biggest Wall Street banks. This is how the PBS program, Frontline, reported on the Holder/Breuer pursuit of justice on Wall Street following the largest financial crash and crime spree since the Great Depression. (The program was brilliantly titled “The Untouchables.”)

    NARRATOR: Frontline spoke to two former high-level Justice Department prosecutors who served in the Criminal Division under Lanny Breuer. In their opinion, Breuer was overly fearful of losing.

    MARTIN SMITH (Frontline Producer and Moderator): We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.

    LANNY BREUER: Well, I don’t know who you spoke with because we have looked hard at the very types of matters that you’re talking about.

    MARTIN SMITH: These sources said that at the weekly indictment approval meetings that there was no case ever mentioned that was even close to indicting Wall Street for financial crimes.

    Both Holder and Breuer returned to their high paying jobs at Covington & Burling after leaving the Justice Department. The law firm kept a corner office awaiting Holder’s return. During their tenure at the Justice Department, not one criminal case was brought against a major Wall Street bank or its top executives for crimes related to the 2008 crash that toppled the U.S. economy.

    http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/0...ke-regulators/
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    It never ends because Wall Street, et al, will do everything in their power to protect their thievery. And we let them.
    Last edited by Atypical; 09-13-2016 at 04:25 PM.

  7. Atypical is offline
    10-07-2016, 10:43 AM #217
    How Big Pharma's Shadow Regulation Censors the Internet

    Electronic Frontier Foundation

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/0...nsors-internet

    ____________________________________

    I am only referencing the story because there are many supporting links in the article that should be read and they would disappear here if posted.

    This is ANOTHER example of how corporations will hurt us any way they can to GET THE MONEY. It also proves again, as anyone who is not an ideologue knows, that the "free market" is a myth. Business never wants a free market. It wants total control and ideally monopoly if it can get it. This post shows how Pharma does it WITH THE HELP OF GOVERNMENT.

    This is a very important article for many reasons and is a must-read.

  8. Atypical is offline
    10-26-2016, 11:20 AM #218
    Documents show AT&T secretly sells customer data to law enforcement

    According to company documents revealed by the Daily Beast, data from Hemisphere program is sold to police departments for $100,000 to $1m a year.

    Telecommunications giant AT&T is selling access to customer data to local law enforcement in secret, new documents released on Monday reveal.

    The program, called Hemisphere, was previously known only as a “partnership” between the company and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for the purposes of counter-narcotics operations.

    It accesses the trove of telephone metadata available to AT&T, who control a large proportion of America’s landline and cellphone infrastructure. Unlike other providers, who delete their stored metadata after a certain time, AT&T keeps information like call time, duration, and even location data on file for years, with records dating back to 2008.

    But according to internal company documents revealed Monday by the Daily Beast, Hemisphere is being sold to local police departments and used to investigate everything from murder to Medicaid fraud, costing US taxpayers millions of dollars every year even while riding roughshod over privacy concerns.

    Access to Hemisphere costs local police between $100,000 and more than $1m a year, the documents reveal, and its use requires just an administrative subpoena – a much lower judicial bar than a search warrant because it does not need to be issued by a judge.

    Until Monday, Hemisphere’s use was kept secret from the public – and even from judges, defense attorneys and lawmakers – by an agreement between law enforcement and AT&T which means police must not risk disclosing its use in public or even in court.

    This means that police take leads from Hemisphere, but then construct cases around that lead so that the program can be protected from scrutiny, a practice known as “parallel construction”, according to the Beast.

    The revelations come as AT&T prepares for its controversial $85bn acquisition of Time Warner, a deal which has been widely attacked as being bad for consumers, with both presidential candidates speaking out against the merger.

    Contacted for comment, Fletcher Cook, a spokesperson for AT&T, sent the Guardian the same statement they provided the Beast:

    Like other communications companies, if a government agency seeks customer call records through a subpoena, court order or other mandatory legal process, we are required by law to provide this non-content information, such as the phone numbers and the date and time of calls.

    Asked for further details, Cook did not respond.

    The secrecy of Hemisphere echoes that which surrounds the use of the sophisticated surveillance devices known as Stingrays, or cell-site simulators, which are suitcase-sized devices which work by pretending to be cellphone towers in order to strip metadata and content from phones which connect to them.

    In 2015, a Guardian investigation revealed that police departments had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the FBI in order to use Stingray devices which said that police must hide the program’s use from defense lawyers and the public, even mandating that they abandon a case if they fear the program’s use might be revealed in court.

    Nate Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy and technology project, said that, as with the Stingray agreement, “what is so disturbing about these documents is the lengths to which the company and law enforcement have gone to keep this secret”.

    “The longer these kind of surveillance programs are kept from the public, the harder it is to ensure there are appropriate checks and balances in place,” Wessler said.

    For Wessler, an instructive part of what the documents reveal is that while the program was apparently instigated as part of the war on drugs, “this data is being used for run-of-the-mill criminal investigation at a local level”.

    “Once law enforcement has access to this kind of data it becomes a tremendously attractive tool for everything they do.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/business...ent-hemisphere

    __________________________

    Just a bit of (secret) news about your friendly communications company. Other corporations have hidden practices too and none of them in your favor. That's why they're confidential.
    Last edited by Atypical; 10-26-2016 at 02:50 PM.

  9. Atypical is offline
    11-05-2016, 11:32 AM #219
    Proposal To Allow First-Year Resident Physicians To Work 28 Hours In A Row Puts Residents, Patients, Public At Risk Of Serious Injury, Death

    Nov. 4, 2016

    Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose ACGME Work-Hour Proposal

    WASHINGTON, D.C. − A proposal to allow first-year medical residents to work 28 hours in a row without sleep is a dangerous step backward and, if implemented, would expose residents, their patients and the general public to the risk of serious injury and death, Public Citizen said today.

    The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) today proposed a new set of requirements for the number of hours worked by resident physicians. The proposal removes the five-year-old 16 consecutive-hour limit on first-year resident work shifts and allows them to work up to 28 hours straight without sleep, while caring for patients. The proposal comes amid intense pressure from dozens of physician groups to do away with the limit.

    ''Study after study shows that sleep-deprived resident physicians are a danger to themselves, their patients and the public,' said Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group. 'It's disheartening to see the ACGME cave to pressure from organized medicine and let their misguided wishes trump public health.'

    The ACGME instituted the 16-hour limit for first-year residents in 2011, in response to a 2009 report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) that, based on an exhaustive review of the evidence on the harms of long work shifts, recommended that all residents be restricted to 16 consecutive-hour shifts. The IOM's report pointed out that tired residents are more likely to injure themselves and their patients, in addition to being at increased risk of a motor vehicle accident when driving home while sleep-deprived. The ACGME itself acknowledged at that time that interns 'make more errors when working longer consecutive hours.' Five years later, although this statement still holds true, the new ACGME proposal now rejects this highest-quality evidence.

    In addition to being at odds with the medical evidence, the new proposal is fundamentally opposed to the will of the American people. A public opinion poll commissioned by Public Citizen and conducted by Lake Research Partners, released in September, revealed that more than four out of five Americans oppose any resident physician working more than 16 hours in a row without sleep. The results were overwhelmingly bipartisan and shared by all demographic groups. Thus, this is not a partisan political issue, but one of public safety.

    Public Citizen and the American Medical Student Association, along with the Service Employees International Union's Committee on Interns and Residents, the National Physicians Alliance, Consumers Union, and dozens of patient groups and advocates have urged the ACGME to maintain the 16-hour limit for first-year residents. Public Citizen plans to mobilize these and other groups to continue to pressure the ACGME to keep the 16-hour limit in place for first-year residents - and to extend the same limit to all residents in order to protect them and their patients from further harm. This will include various actions intended to persuade the ACGME board to reject this dangerous proposal, including submitting comments during the comment period, which ends on Dec. 19. Members of the public can submit their own comments to the ACGME before the deadline.

    Additional resources from Public Citizen:

    Read Public Citizen's report, 'Bipartisan Consensus: The Public Wants Well-Rested Medical Residents to Help Ensure Safe Patient Care,' detailing the results of last summer's public opinion poll regarding resident duty hours and summarizing the evidence on the harms of long work shifts.

    Read the letter from Public Citizen and the American Medical Student Association to the ACGME transmitting the report.

    See the action alert to Public Citizen's members and supporters urging them to email ACGME CEO Dr. Thomas Nasca expressing support for maintaining the 16-hour limit for first-year residents. To date, more than 10,000 emails have been sent to Nasca.

    Read testimonials from physicians describing personal experiences related to sleep-deprivation that occurred during their residency training.

    Read related letters, statements and news/blog posts from other organizations expressing similar concerns regarding long resident work hours.

    http://www.publicnow.com/view/CDA622...+00:00-xxx9233

    _______________________________________

    WTF????

    They are now OPENLY trying to kill us.

    And, btw, try to stay away from hospitals in July (to a bit later). It's when the new shift comes in.
    Last edited by Atypical; 11-05-2016 at 03:40 PM.

  10. Atypical is offline
    12-01-2016, 04:16 PM #220
    Recently, the Washington Post, in the past a somewhat well-regarded newspaper, ran a story about 200 sites that were alleged supporters of Russian propaganda. The "evidence" for this claim was supplied to the WP without substantiation. Their reporter wrote about it anyway.

    This is obviously an attempt to discredit alternate sources of information that those who want in-depth information not provided by establishment corporate media turn to.

    This event is important and alarming. Here is a good article to understand what many are calling a new "McCarthyism." Six companies control more than 80% of all media. All of us will be adversely affected by any restriction in what we can read, hear or see.

    Washington Post Reporter Spreads Blacklist of Independent Journalist Sites


    Craig Timberg, a Washington Post reporter with an interesting history (which
    we’ll get to shortly), doubled down last night with a new article suggesting
    that Congressional legislation may be coming to further crack down on
    independent journalists not properly adhering to the dogma of Washington.
    Timberg has [...]

    http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/1...rnalist-sites/

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