"After R.I. bishop’s tweet outrages LGBTQ community, a priest pleads with faithful not to leave the church" by Edward Fitzpatrick and Amanda Milkovits Globe Staff, June 2, 2019
PROVIDENCE — A weekend tweet by Providence Bishop Thomas J. Tobin warning his congregants not to support or attend LGBTQ Pride Month events prompted a national outcry and protests on Sunday in this city with a deep, if divided, Catholic tradition.
The reverberations reached into the morning services at St. Raymond’s Roman Catholic Church, where attendees, including Governor Gina Raimondo, passed beneath a wooden sign that reads “All Are Welcome In This Place.’’
There, the Rev. Edward L. Pieroni openly expressed his worry that the latest controversy would push gays and lesbians away from a church already riven with divisions over abortion, clergy sex abuse, and same-sex relationships.
“My concern is that for people who are lesbian or gay — same-sex attraction — that they may leave the church. A lot of people have hung in there, but it’s like, ‘One more slap and we are done.’ I am here to beg you — and I will get on my hands and knees and beg you — not to leave,” Pieroni told the congregation.
The pastor’s impassioned plea underscored the extent of the reaction to Tobin’s tweet a day earlier, a backlash that reached beyond the borders of the smallest state.
The controversy started Saturday, when the bishop tweeted:
“A reminder that Catholics should not support or attend LGBTQ ‘Pride Month’ events held in June. They promote a culture and encourage activities that are contrary to Catholic faith and morals. They are especially harmful for children.”
Um, people in glass houses?
Maybe you guys aren't the best messenger here, huh?
The tone deafness is astonishing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not taking the other side, either. The degenerative moral rot and the path to which it leads is no salvation, either.
The tweet sparked an immediate response on Twitter. By 3 p.m. Sunday, it had elicited 69,000 replies and 16,000 “likes.”
By Sunday afternoon, after statements of support for the LGBTQ community from the governor and mayor and rebukes from entertainment figures, and with plans underway for a protest in Providence, Tobin issued a statement.
Yeah, I wouldn't exactly turn to Hollywood for guidance on this one, either.
“I regret that my comments yesterday about Pride Month have turned out to be so controversial in our community, and offensive to some, especially the gay community. That certainly was not my intention, but I understand why a good number of individuals have taken offense. I also acknowledge and appreciate the widespread support I have received on this matter,” he said. “The Catholic Church has respect and love for members of the gay community, as do I. Individuals with same-sex attraction are beloved children of God and our brothers and sisters.”
He added, “As the gay community gathers for a rally this evening, I hope that the event will be a safe, positive and productive experience for all. As they gather I will be praying for a rebirth of mutual understanding and respect in our very diverse community.”
Providence, like many other cities across the country, is marking Pride Month in June.
Banners are up in the downtown, and a parade and festival is scheduled for later this month.
Sunday evening, protesters gathered outside the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. As the bells called the faithful to Mass, Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” played on a speaker amid waving rainbow flags at the rally.
While about 150 people attended Mass inside the cathedral, nearly double the crowd was outside, carrying signs, waving rainbow flags, and chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, hate has got to go.”
Michael and Billy Reis, who just celebrated their 26th anniversary, were joined outside by their “church family,” members of the Beneficent Congregational Church in Providence.....
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Just stirring things up to make you forget about other things.
Related:
"Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden declared Saturday that the Equality Act would be his top legislative priority, an effort to enshrine LGBTQ protections into the nation’s labor and civil rights laws. The former vice president shared his hopes of signing the legislation as part of a keynote address to hundreds of activists at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Ohio gala on the first day of Pride Month. In a half-hour at the lectern, his remarks ranged from emotional tributes to his audience and their personal endurance to condemnations of President Trump. ‘‘It’s wrong and it is immoral what they’re doing,’’ Biden said of the Trump administration. Among other Trump polices, he cited attempts to bar transgender troops in the US military, allow individuals in the medical field to refuse to treat LGBTQ individuals, and allow homeless shelters to refuse transgender occupants. ‘‘Just like with racial justice and women’s rights, we are seeing pushback against all the progress we’ve made toward equality,’’ Biden said. The Equality Act would address many such discriminatory practices. It recently passed the Democratic-run House, but will not become law under Trump and the Republican Senate. That means LGBTQ residents in dozens of states are still subject to various forms of discrimination that are either specifically allowed or not barred by state law. ‘‘It will be the first thing I ask to be done,’’ Biden said. Biden spoke in Ohio, a political battleground he was visiting for the first time since beginning his bid, on the same day that more than a dozen of his rivals were in San Francisco for the California Democratic Convention and a massive MoveOn.org conference."
Pandering Joe is out of step, and will get him off to a start like Bill Clinton with don't ask, don't tell.
So when is Taylor Swift going to come out of the closet, 'eh?
Also see:
"Senator Bernie Sanders has long promised to run a different kind of campaign and be a different kind of president. On Saturday night, what was billed as his first “grass-roots fund-raiser” of the 2020 campaign was certainly different, as donor events go. It was at a nightclub, for one thing. The DJ was spinning a mix that included “Eye of the Tiger,” the underdog anthem from the “Rocky” movie series. Tickets were as cheap as $27, for another. There were food trucks out back (tacos and a Taiwanese-Korean blend). The night had the vibe of a Sanders rally, only smaller, darker, and more intimate, and with booze. Disco balls dangled from the ceiling. When the lights flashed briefly during his remarks, Sanders joked about the special effects. “Very sophisticated,” he deadpanned. “Either that or someone was leaning on the light switch.” People laughed. This was, after all, Sanders’ crowd to lose, and he did not lose them, despite some delays before taking the stage. Sanders has made his rejection of big donors and traditional fund-raisers a centerpiece of his message and, in a field of 23 candidates, has begun scheduling in-person events to keep his grip on small donors as his rivals try to make inroads."
I laughed at the joke as the pre$$ pooped on his party.
Let the games begin (what is carbon footprint on that anyway?)!
"The Twin Cities have a beautiful new soccer stadium. Why doesn’t Boston?" by Tim Logan Globe Staff, June 2, 2019
ST. PAUL — It was a raucous demonstration of what many people have long imagined professional soccer could be like in the United States.
The Kraft family, which owns the Revolution, the New England Patriots, and Gillette Stadium itself, has for years said building a soccer stadium in the core of the region is a priority. It has hired architects, put forth designs, and tried to secure sites — and nearly everyone agrees a stadium would boost the Revolution’s profile by helping to grow the club’s fan base and getting the team closer to the spotlight that shines on the Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics, but.....
John Henry's paper with full page of print and pictures.
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"Springfield grapples with surge in overdose deaths" by Felice J. Freyer Globe Staff, June 2, 2019
SPRINGFIELD — It’s a reality that became starkly apparent in Department of Public Health statistics released last month even though opioid-related overdoses are leveling off statewide and have declined markedly in certain communities, such as Brockton.
What’s going on in Springfield? Officials expressed concern and bafflement but could offer no single explanation.
“It is really a very vexing problem,” which persists “through no shortage of effort,” said Anthony Gulluni, the district attorney for Hampden County, which encompasses Springfield.
The city’s location plays a role. The New York-to-Hartford-to-Vermont drug trafficking corridor along Interstate 91 slices through Springfield’s heart and floods the city with exceedingly cheap heroin, so cheap that one observer joked that a bag of heroin costs less than a cup of coffee, and powerful illicit fentanyl is now being made at local mills rather than being imported from abroad, Gulluni said.
I didn't laugh at that one because it is no joke.
Some observers say fentanyl arrived here later than it did in the eastern part of the state, which would account for the more recent spike in deaths.
Once a manufacturing hub that made washers, dryers, and guns, Springfield now relies on health care and social services for employment, and it has pinned hopes for an economic revival on a casino that opened last year.
Well, so far the revenue has been far lower than expected, but it will be a rare opportunity to change lives. What the above paragraph shows you is how America has been completely hollowed out.
Helen R. Caulton-Harris, Springfield’s commissioner of health and human services, has identified the neighborhoods where the most overdoses occurred; they’re the same places stricken with gang violence and high rates of chronic illness.
“It’s not just the opioid overdoses,” she said. “It’s neighborhoods that really have pervasive public health challenges.”
A city of 155,000 surrounded by rural areas, Springfield copes with urban problems but lies far from the resources available in Boston.
Police Sergeant Brian Elliott spends a lot of time applying for grants to help the homeless and addicted people in the neighborhood he patrols. “We don’t have any of the money that Boston has,” he said. “We’d love to have those opportunities and the educational horsepower they have out there.”
Elliott, who has teamed with social workers to reach out to the homeless, has not observed an increase in overdoses of the magnitude suggested by the statistics. He notes that the data go back only a few years. With a longer view, the change might not seem so striking in a city that has always contended with heroin addiction, he said.
Haner Hernández, a consultant and teacher who runs a program that trains Latinos to become alcohol and drug counselors, blames the increase in deaths on what he calls the longstanding neglect of minority communities. Forty-three percent of Springfield residents are Hispanic. With a significant black population as well, Springfield is a “majority minority” city.
“This is called a crisis now because young white kids are dying, affluent kids from the suburbs,” said Hernández, a certified drug counselor who is also in long-term recovery.
He had to turn it into a race issue.
The programs developed in response had that population in mind, neglecting the people who have struggled with addiction for decades, he said.
“Most of the services are not designed by and for Latino people,” and it’s “downright impossible” to find treatment services in Spanish, Hernández said. Yet his training program has a waiting list of Latinos who want to be counselors.
Hernández is heartened by some recent developments, such as the needle exchange that opened in January, the Police Department’s decision to carry overdose-reversing naloxone starting in March, and a recovery center that is scheduled to open soon, but he notes that these changes are happening long after the opioid crisis first made headlines and later than in many other communities.
At the same time, city officials are fighting an effort to move a methadone clinic that needs to expand from its overcrowded, outdated facility.
The number of clients who came to the Springfield Comprehensive Treatment Center, which is part of Habit Opco, has increased by more than 40 percent since 2017. The clinic now serves about 1,240 people, 64 percent of them Springfield residents, Habit Opco officials said.
Taking the side of neighbors who don’t want such a clinic nearby, Mayor Domenic J. Sarno (who declined a request for an interview) has urged the state Department of Public Health to reject the facility’s license.
Gulluni, the district attorney, rebuffs assertions that the region has been slow to respond to the opioid crisis.
“We’ve devoted an immense amount of time and resources,” he said, mentioning his countywide addiction task force, the establishment of drug courts, and a partnership among his office and local hospitals that provides naloxone to first responders.
That naloxone program started in October, and BayState Health, the city’s largest hospital, is still getting up to speed on coping with addiction in emergency patients.
The hospital is working to get all doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants authorized to prescribe buprenorphine, a drug to treat opioid addiction, and so far about a quarter of them have obtained the necessary credentials, said Dr. Gerald Beltran, chief of pre-hospital and disaster medicine.
The clinicians can prescribe the medication to people brought to the emergency department after an overdose who are interested in treatment, but a key component of that effort, Beltran said, is still in the works: coordinating with a community agency that can continue treating patients afterwards.
Meanwhile, the Tapestry Health syringe exchange program has opened after years of efforts to locate such a program in the city. Labeled “Harm Reduction Services,” the program occupies a storefront in a strip mall, next to other Tapestry health services.
On a whiteboard near the entrance, clients write down the name of the drugs they took — in this region, drugs are sold in bags stamped with a name — and rate their quality with notes such as “No good!! Danger” or “Good—strong” or “Garbage.”
On a recent morning, Alexander Nuñez wrote on the board that bags labeled “Pride” contain fentanyl. Nuñez, 29, said he’s not quite ready to go back into treatment, but he wants to soon. Meanwhile, he said, “being safe is the main thing.” He has avoided getting HIV, hepatitis C, and skin infections by traveling to another needle exchange, in Holyoke, and he is happy he can now find the service closer to his Springfield home.
I'm just wondering where he gets the money to buy the drugs as the state not only enables the behavior, but encourages it.
“We work with the person to try to improve their health,” explained Liz Whynott, Tapestry’s director of harm reduction. “Abstinence is one goal. There are many people that may not be ready for that. So we work with them within their drug use and figure out ways alongside them to improve health.”
At Tapestry, Nuñez gets not just a needle, but a “safe-injection kit” that includes bleach, water, alcohol pads, cookers, cotton, Band-Aids, and naloxone. He also gets to chat with the staff and knows they will help him find a bed in detox when he’s ready.
Nuñez is still shaken by the death of a high school friend a few months ago. He administered naloxone and frantically performed CPR for eight minutes, but when the ambulance arrived he could tell by the demeanor of the EMTs that his friend was already dead. Now he makes sure not to use too much and to never use alone.....
How about stopping?
I mean, if someone dying in front of you can't do it, I suppose nothing can.
Now hug the addict.
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Also see: Women of color team up for Boston City Council run
That's what she said as they gang up on you.
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"Virginia Beach attacker notified boss of plans to leave job" by Ben Finley and Michael Kunzelman Associated Press, June 2, 2019
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — The gunman who attacked his colleagues at a Virginia Beach government office building resigned by e-mail hours before the shooting, a city official said Sunday as authorities sought a motive in the assault that killed 12 people.
Officials gave no indication why DeWayne Craddock, 40, had notified a superior of his intention to leave his job as a civil engineer in the utilities department. He was an employee ‘‘in good standing’’ and showed ‘‘satisfactory’’ job performance, City Manager Dave Hansen said.
Well, yesterday I was told he was acting funny and facing a disciplinary hearing.
Police Chief James Cervera described a chaotic scene as officers entered the building and pursued the assailant through a tightly packed warren of offices that the chief likened to a maze or a honeycomb. Cervera said investigators are retracing the gunman’s activities on the day of the attack, using his electronic keycard to track his movements through secure areas of the building. They are also reviewing his personal and professional lives trying to find a motive.
‘‘Right now we do not have anything glaring,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s nothing that hits you right between the eyes. But we are working on it.’’
Craddock appeared to have had no felony record, making him eligible to purchase guns. Neighbors said he was into cars and bodybuilding. Co-workers described him as quiet and polite.
Terry Inman, an account clerk with the city, said he turned around and saw Craddock holding a gun.
‘‘He turned and looked straight at me, but he didn’t see me. He looked straight in my face, and he did not see me standing there because he didn’t raise the gun. He didn’t even make an indication that he saw anyone there,’’ Inman said. ‘‘To me, that was the Holy Spirit inflecting something on that man to the point where he didn’t see Terry Inman standing there.’’
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The article mention other shootings (Newtown, Charleston, Pittsburgh ) that must now be considered as part a psyop campaign over the years, one of them being the Sikh shooting in Wisconsin and whose anniversary is coming up (a shooting also allegedly carried out by a former Army intel man).
Related:
"The attacks have changed how America talks, prays, and prepares for trouble. Today, the phrase ‘‘active shooter’’ needs no explanation. Schools hold ‘‘lockdown drills’’ to prepare students for the possibility of a shooter....."
Now kids are playing “active shooter drill” the way children once played cops and robbers.
What a loss of innocence as they are trained for the total $urveillance $ociety.
"T.M. Landry College Preparatory School, a private school in Louisiana that garnered national attention for helping underprivileged and minority students attend elite colleges, is under federal investigation over its college admissions practices after disclosures that it cut corners and doctored applications, according to multiple people contacted by the FBI. The FBI opened the inquiry after a Times investigation detailed instances of transcript fraud and physical and emotional abuse at the school. In the fall, dozens of former students and teachers told the Times that T.M. Landry’s founders, Michael and Tracey Landry, doctored school transcripts with fake grades, nonexistent school clubs, and fictitious classes. They said the couple embroidered their college application recommendation letters with fabricated stories of hardship that played on negative racial stereotypes....."
"A former University of Illinois graduate student is set to stand trial in the 2017 disappearance and suspected killing of a scholar from China — a case in which the death penalty is possible, though the body hasn’t been found. Jury selection in the federal trial of Brendt Christensen begins Monday in Peoria, where Yingying Zhang, 26, was studying at the university’s flagship campus and where she was last seen. Zhang went missing June 9, 2017. She had just missed a bus when Christensen tricked or forced her into his car, prosecutors say. Christensen told the FBI he dropped Zhang off after a few blocks. Christensen, who earned a master’s degree in physics at the university, was charged with kidnapping resulting in death. He has pleaded not guilty....."
Related:
"A star prosecution witness will be Christensen’s former girlfriend, who secretly recorded him for the FBI before his arrest. Complicating the task of prosecutors is that no body was found. They’ll point to Zhang’s blood in Christensen’s apartment and that a cadaver-sniffing dog indicated a dead body had been there. Zhang, described as conscientious and fun-loving by friends, got her master’s in environmental engineering in China. The daughter of a part-time truck driver later used her meager savings to buy her family a cellphone, air conditioner, and microwave oven, the family has said. Zhang’s father, mother and brother flew in from China for the trial, which they will watch remotely via closed-circuit video....."
I wonder how much coverage it will get up north.
"Mariah Martinez was 9 when she got bad news: A doctor said she had epilepsy. For four years, she took anti-seizure medicine that made her sluggish. She was told to avoid activities that would rouse her heart, but a different doctor had astonishing news in 2007: Mariah didn’t have epilepsy. Martinez, now 26, is the first of what may be many former patients to go to trial accusing Dr. Yasser Awaad and his former employer, Oakwood Healthcare, of malpractice and negligence. Jury selection starts Monday. Awaad ordered tests on hundreds of children and intentionally misread results, Martinez’s lawyers say, alleging Oakwood ran an electroencephalogram “mill,” testing brain activity only to make money. Oakwood and Beaumont Health merged in 2014; it denies any mistreatment."
I made a doctor's appointment for you at the end of this post.
Also see: Floodwaters in Arkansas, Oklahoma begin receding, easing the danger
Guess I won't have to kill myself then.
"A Florida congressman who frequently appears on television supporting President Trump was struck by a thrown drink as he left a town hall. US Representative Matt Gaetz wasn’t injured Saturday when he was struck by a plastic cup lobbed by a protester in Pensacola, Fla. Video posted online shows the second-term Republican leaving a coffee house while about 20 protesters chant their opposition. The cup struck him in the back. Amanda Kondrat’yev was charged with misdemeanor battery and released on $1,000 bond. She briefly ran against Gaetz in 2016 before dropping out. Gaetz tweeted about the incident saying, ‘‘Clearly it takes more than a drink to slow down our great team.’’
A waste of water by left-wing thugs.
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"ACA linked to reduced racial disparities, earlier diagnosis, and treatment in cancer care" by Laurie McGinley Washington Post, June 2, 2019
Proponents of the embattled Affordable Care Act got additional ammunition Sunday: New research links the law to a reduction in racial disparities in the care of cancer patients and to earlier diagnoses and treatment of ovarian cancer, one of the most dangerous malignancies.
The findings, coming as health care emerges as an increasingly important issue in the 2020 presidential campaign, were released Sunday as abstracts at the annual meeting in Chicago of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
That explains why the articles focus turns to identity politics based on race and gender.
Health policy specialists who were not involved in the studies said the findings are consistent with previous data showing that the Affordable Care Act is associated with improved access to health insurance and medical care.
‘‘What’s new here are findings that the ACA and Medicaid expansions have had specific impacts on patients with cancer, and that’s great,’’ said Justin Bekelman, a radiation oncologist and health policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, but, Bekelman said, the studies did not address whether the ACA lengthened survival or improved quality of life — the two things that matter most to patients. ‘‘It’s logical’’ that the law has had those effects, but ‘‘we need the evidence,’’ he said.
Other specialists noted that the racial-disparities study, while good news, highlighted the emergence of a different kind of inequality. ‘‘There’s increasing concern about greater disparities’’ between states that chose to expand Medicaid and those that did not, said Robin Yabroff, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society.
The new research was released amid intensifying legal and political battles over the health law. The Trump administration joined Republican-led states last month in asking a federal appeals court to strike down the entire law as unconstitutional — a decision that could end health insurance for millions of Americans. Democrats have largely defended the law and pushed plans to shore it up and expand it, but some want to move more quickly toward a single-payer system.....
I was for it at first, then against it because of who would be administering it, and now am open to it again -- although I don't believe we will ever see it. Too much lobbying power again$t it.
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So who will pay for the abortion?
"7 arrested at anti-abortion rally on Boston Common" by Aimee Ortiz Globe Staff, June 2, 2019
Anti-abortion activists rallying on Boston Common clashed with counterprotesters Sunday afternoon, resulting in seven arrests.
Chanting and carrying signs opposing new restrictive abortion laws in several states, about 100 counterprotesters booed and jeered at the more than 100 anti-abortion activists as they gathered.
Aren't they the same ones who preach tolerance and inclusion and against hate?
At the Parkman Bandstand, anti-abortion activists played music, including Christian rock and church hymns, to drown out the opposition and tensions flared during the rally, which went on from about 1 to 4 p.m., with police breaking up several skirmishes that broke out between opposing sides. A red ice-slush drink was thrown, hitting at least one man, staining his shirt. Police reacted quickly, bringing several protesters to the ground before detaining them.
C.J. Williams, an anti-abortion organizer, said urine was thrown on one member of her group.
At least five uniformed police officers could be seen near the bandstand and in the crowd during the protest.
Themed “Love in Action,” organizers of the march said their actions focused on fund-raising against and building opposition to the R.O.E. Act, a bill filed by Democratic state Senator Harriette L. Chandler, 81, of Worcester that would expand abortion access in the state, including allowing for later abortions in cases of fatal fetal anomalies. It would also remove age and parental or judicial consent requirements for abortions.
Basically an abortion on demand bill (but not extreme, right?), with the added absurdity that the kid still has to get a signed permission slip to go on a field trip!
Abortion-rights activists planned a rally at the same location at noon, according to a Facebook event posted by Boston Feminists for Liberation, to demonstrate against “the disastrous anti-abortion legislation recently passed in Georgia, Alabama and Missouri.” The event said “[a]nti-choice extremists will be marching on Boston Common to celebrate.”
Myrna Maloney Flynn, the vice president of Mass. Citizens for Life, insisted that Sunday’s action was not to celebrate the new laws in those states, but rather to “convey our fears about this bill to those who might not traditionally share our pro-life stance.”
Both Flynn and Williams said they invited abortion-rights activists, including official representatives from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, to come together with the anti-abortion group in an “open dialogue.”
“The dialogue wasn’t as constructive as it really could have been,” Flynn said in a statement released Sunday afternoon. “We were hoping to understand their reasoning — it got lost in anti-racism, anti-police language.”
I hate to say it, but you just can't talk to some people.
Despite the group’s best efforts, anti-abortion speakers were hard to hear over the boos and chanting from the counterprotesters.
A counterprotester who asked to be identified as Anna M., 29, said she moved to Boston from London five years ago. She said Sunday’s protest was her first and she did it because she’s feeling scared.
“They really seem to be actually succeeding in forcing people to give birth to babies that they don’t want,” she said. “That’s terrifying to me.”
Carrying a bullhorn and leading many of the counterprotest’s chants, another activist who declined to give her name said she was on the Common because “this is another move to reduce rights.”
“This is something that will disproportionately affect women of color, low-income women of every background, the trans community. It’s another attack from the right-wing” she said.
Speaking from the bandstand, Flynn listed examples of what she called “love in action.” An older couple who adopted a little girl, the story of a single father, an anecdote about a couple who chose not to have an abortion.....
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In what can only be described as an odd juxtaposition, the Globe features this right next to the article above:
It's in addition to the in perpetuity advertisement for her podcast that took up a quarter of page A4 in the same edition.
It sure looks like some could use her advice.
"They met at Barnstable High School during the Jimmy Carter administration. He was a tall outsider with long hair. She was a Cape Cod cheerleader whose teacher darkly warned her to stay away from him. “It’s a place to slow down. It’s a place to recharge,’’ said Anita Kunz, a well-known cover artist for The New Yorker and Rolling Stone....."
His mom helped him prepare for the wedding.
"Companies that refuse to digitally alter the skin tone and body size of advertising models would get a financial boost under a bill filed by Massachusetts lawmakers. Backers say the bill is meant to encourage the promotion of mental health through realistic advertising images. It would create a tax credit of up to $10,000 for cosmetic, personal care and apparel companies that do not digitally alter models’ skin tone, skin texture including wrinkles, body size or body shape in ads. Supporters say it’s the first bill of its kind in the country. Democratic state Rep. Kay Khan sponsored the bill. She said young people are bombarded by digitally altered images of models. She said the altered images are unrealistic and are damaging to vulnerable youth, especially girls and young women."
Can you believe anything you see the days?
How is that foster care system, btw?
Related:
Ann Landers’ daughter reboots mother’s famous column
In a nutshell, the advice is watch what you eat, get married, and have kids:
"Missing Conn. mom’s estranged husband and his girlfriend arrested" by Dave Collins Associated Press, June 2, 2019
HARTFORD — Police investigating the disappearance of a Connecticut mother of five have arrested her estranged husband and his girlfriend on charges of evidence tampering and hindering prosecution, authorities announced Sunday.
Police in the wealthy New York City suburb of New Canaan said Fotis Dulos, 51, and Michelle Troconis, 44, were taken into custody in Avon, Conn., late Saturday. Both were detained on $500,000 bail and are scheduled to be arraigned Monday in Norwalk Superior Court.
Details of the allegations were not released.
Jennifer Dulos, 50, of New Canaan, went missing May 24 after dropping her kids off at school and missing appointments that day. She has not been found.
New Canaan police say they are investigating her disappearance both as a missing-person case and a criminal matter. Officials said more criminal charges are expected, but did not elaborate.
Jennifer and Fotis Dulos have been embroiled in a contentious divorce and child custody case for the past two years. She and the children left the Farmington home, about 60 miles north of New Canaan near Hartford, around the time Jennifer Dulos filed for divorce in June 2017.
Court documents filed in the divorce case say the mother of five feared Fotis Dulos would harm her in some way in retaliation for her filing for divorce. Jennifer Dulos had primary custody of the children, with their father getting to see them every other weekend.
Hundreds of people attended a prayer vigil Thursday for Jennifer Dulos.....
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Kids
"A trial is set to begin for a Massachusetts woman charged with murder after the bodies of three infants she had given birth to were found in her squalid home. Erika Murray’s trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday in Worcester Superior Court. Murray is charged in the deaths of two of the three dead babies found in the trash-strewn and insect-infested Blackstone home in 2014. Four living children were removed from the home. Murray’s attorney has said his client is ‘‘mentally ill’’ and plans to raise her mental health as part of her defense. A neighbor called authorities after a 10-year-old boy who lived there asked for helping in getting a baby to stop crying."
Related: Black Mark For Blackstone
She is mad, and it is sad because the babies were as cute as a button.
Also see:
Suspect in fatal hit-and-run heads back to court
He fled after hitting her and she died a week later.
18-year-old man drowns in Vermont river
Teen, man arrested on gun charges in separate incidents in Boston
Man killed in officer-involved shooting outside Burger King
He was a white man so there is no outrage.
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"Lyndra Therapeutics’ incoming CEO is used to running tough races" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, June 3, 2019
If running a biotech startup takes an appetite for risk and an ability to get up after a bad fall, then Lyndra Therapeutics of Watertown has just picked a new CEO with both of those attributes.
Patricia Hurter, who retired six weeks ago as a high-ranking executive at Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals, has competed in English-style equestrian show jumping for 25 years. In 2013, she was warming up on a chestnut-colored horse in upstate New York when he stopped short before a hurdle and threw her over his head.
The 5-foot-3-inch pharmaceutical executive landed on her back on the wooden fence and broke three vertebrae and a rib, not to mention the fence, but Hurter, a native of South Africa with a doctorate in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says she returned to work at Vertex about two weeks later and was back on a horse two weeks after that.
“Growing up in South Africa, you’re sort of more risk-tolerant than maybe in some other countries because you knew the chances of there being a war and revolution were very high, and the chances of having to leave the country were very high,” said Hurter, 55. “A lot of people, if they broke a few vertebrae, they probably wouldn’t get back into riding again. I got back as fast as I could.”
Hurter will become CEO of Lyndra on Sept. 3, the company announced Monday. She will replace Amy Schulman, a managing partner at the Boston venture capital firm Polaris Partners and cofounder of Lyndra. Schulman will become executive chairwoman of Lyndra’s board.....
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I'm glad they didn't have to amputate:
"The surgeon had a dilemma only a Nazi medical text could resolve. Was it ethical to use it?" by Sharon Begley STAT, May 30, 2019
The surgeon needed to call a time-out. She had already cut into the patient’s knee for what she thought would be a technically challenging but straightforward operation: freeing a nerve that had gotten so badly pinched after several knee replacements that it was causing unbearable pain. If the surgery didn’t work, the 50-year-old patient told Dr. Susan Mackinnon of Washington University in St. Louis, she wanted her leg amputated, but now Mackinnon, one of the country’s most renowned nerve surgeons, was stumped. She couldn’t trace the saphenous nerve and its branches. To figure out where the nerve wends its way between and around and under muscle and connective tissue and free it, she needed to consult the best anatomical maps of peripheral nerves ever created. So she asked her colleague, Andrew Yee, to dash into her office, grab the Pernkopf Topographic Anatomy of Man, photograph the right illustration with his iPhone, and email it to her in the OR.
Yee did. Mackinnon projected the image on a screen, figured out where the nerve was, and successfully completed the surgery, but soon after this 2014 operation, she began worrying whether she had done the right thing. The meticulous, four-color paintings in the Pernkopf book, which she had received as a gift upon graduating from medical school in 1982, were created by Viennese medical illustrators who were such ardent Nazis they included swastikas and lightning-bolt SS symbols in their signatures. The drawings were compiled by an Austrian medical school dean who fired all his Jewish professors after the Anschluss (Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938), and were based in part on the bodies of people executed by the Nazis. The first of the two volumes was published in 1937, the second in 1941.
So what are they saying, the doctor shouldn't have saved the leg?
Knowing the book’s history, which came to light in the mid-1980s, Mackinnon and Yee wondered, is it ethical to use the Pernkopf illustrations? They reached out to some of the nation’s leading historians of Nazi medicine, bioethicists, and experts on Jewish law to discuss whether Mackinnon acted ethically, as they describe in the May issue of the journal Surgery.
Why did they need consulting?
The book’s horrific provenance “has been known for a while,” said Yee, who films Mackinnon’s surgeries and founded an online program so others can learn expert techniques. “The publisher stopped reprinting it in 1994,” soon after the University of Vienna (where Nazi Eduard Pernkopf became rector in 1943) traced many of its images to people executed by the Nazis. Investigators were unable to identify the specific people used by Pernkopf’s artists, however, or even determine how he procured most of the bodies, but the investigators found no evidence that any came from concentration camps, and concluded that many were people executed in the city for resistance to the Nazis.
The moral dilemma for surgeons is that, even now, the Pernkopf illustrations are unsurpassed in their accuracy and detail, especially their depiction of peripheral nerves. “I hate to say it, but the illustrations are beyond spectacular,” said bioethicist and Rabbi Joseph Polak of Boston University, whom the Washington University team consulted. “They are really world-class.”
Other anatomy atlases pale by comparison, Yee said, and although a few journal papers may have an equally good, single illustration, finding the right paper takes time that Mackinnon did not have as she stood over her patient. The surgical team had no doubts at the time that they were doing the right thing, but after a visiting scholar gave a talk about the Pernkopf atlas, she and Yee “wanted counsel from respected experts” on the proper way to use it in both education and clinical practice, he recalled.
Scholars and physicians have long debated the use of Nazi medical data, in particular from experiments on hypothermia and phosgene gas (data collected by exposing Jewish prisoners to freezing and poisoning). The U.S. military even redesigned Army flak jackets based on Nazi data so downed airmen had a better chance of surviving the cold, said Dr. Michael Grodin of Boston University School of Public Health, an expert on Nazi medicine and co-author of the Surgery paper.
Ever hear of Operation Paperclip or the Org?
Much of those data are considered scientifically unreliable (“they’re not worth anything,” Grodin said) and therefore easier to reject 75 years after the Holocaust. Not so with the Pernkopf. Even in 2019, it is considered unsurpassed in comprehensiveness and precision, said Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt, an anatomy lecturer at Harvard Medical School whom the Washington University surgeons also consulted. In part, that’s because anatomy is viewed as 19th-century medicine, and no one has an incentive to put much effort into trying to improve on the classic texts.
Maybe now they do.
Hildebrandt does not use the book in her anatomy lectures, she said, and asks that colleagues who do explain its horrific origins and acknowledge the sacrifice and suffering of the people whose bodies it is based on, but that didn’t provide much guidance to Mackinnon. When she posed the dilemma to Grodin and Polak, they produced what has become a definitive work on when it is morally acceptable to use the Pernkopf and other knowledge rooted in Nazi medicine. “It relates to the old question, can you derive good from evil?” Grodin said.
The highest value in Jewish law is life. If the illustrations in Pernkopf can save a life or alleviate suffering, Grodin said, “most rabbis would not just permit using it but say it was mandatory” — as long as physicians and educators remember its origins and pay respect to those who were killed to create it. “Every time someone uses one of these pictures, they need to say where it came from,” said Polak, who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a child.
Tell that to Palestinians, many whom have had a limb amputated over the past year due to Israeli snipers firing from behind sand berms.
The fact that everything has to be approved by them in some way only further boggles the mind.
Scholars not involved in Mackinnon’s case agree. “Not every utilization of Nazi-generated data or information is morally out of bounds,” bioethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University wrote in a commentary on the Surgery paper. “This case makes clear that at least a narrow use of tertiary information — paintings of bodies — is morally defensible. If direct, immediate, and substantial patient benefit is being sought from the use of existing information, and if there is no better resource available, then the demands of beneficence create a presumption of use.”
Got a saw handy?
I would say it is a cut off your nose despite your face situation, but that's an Asian schtick.
That does not settle the debate over the Pernkopf atlas, however. After a series of corporate takeovers, the plates now belong to scientific publisher Elsevier. When Hildebrandt visited its Munich headquarters in March, and was shown many of the originals, she asked the company to let the Medical University of Vienna display them as part of an exhibition on the Nazi horrors and their lasting influence in medicine. Elsevier is still considering that request, but “lawyers are involved,” Polak said. Elsevier spokesman Tom Reller told STAT, however, that “we’ve decided the pictures should not be published further or lent or donated.”
You can forget about saving that leg.
As for Mackinnon’s patient, she recovered fully and was pain-free for the first time in years. During the usual preoperative discussions about the risks of surgery, Mackinnon didn’t think to ask how the patient would feel if her surgeons consulted a work of Nazi medicine to help them, nor did the surgeon tell the patient afterward that she had consulted Pernkopf. The outside scholars weren’t asked whether it is morally imperative to do so.
Oh, yeah, the patient. Forgot about her amidst all the debate.
“We never thought about it,” said Grodin, who has studied survivors of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz, but informing patients, he said, is a logical next step as scholars continue to grapple with the Nazis’ medical legacy.
Who is going to care about Nazis when your limb is at stake?
I don't care how, save the damn thing!
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What is interesting was the article was on front page, but not found anywhere in web version!
Wouldn't be the first time the Globe missed an operation.
"Tainted money and the timeless twisted morality of noblesse oblige" by Alice Lloyd June 3, 2019
Alice Lloyd is a writer in Washington, D.C., and was previously a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
It sounded like a scene from a darkly comic novel, but the subtle sort of scene that would offend more readers than it would probably amuse in our highly sensitive age.
At its center was Nan Goldin, the fine art photographer and a leading opponent of the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical fortune — Sackler-owned Purdue Pharma produced, to immense profit, the dangerously addictive and widely prescribed painkiller OxyContin — funds fine arts exhibitions, like Goldin’s. That is, until she has her say. She refused to participate in a retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery over a £1 million Sackler grant the gallery then declined. The Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have since followed suit. Each has cut ties with the family, rejecting further funding from them, but, anyway, here’s the scene: Goldin’s work was featured in a well-received photography exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums last summer amid rising protests of Harvard’s use of the Sackler name. (President Lawrence Bacow recently said that the university wouldn’t scrub the Sackler name from the half-dozen halls and buildings that bear it, or give back any oxy-tainted blood money.) She led a protest in the museums’ atrium that summer, shortly after the show opened. While dozens of members of her group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and medical students sympathetic with their cause chanted “Shame on Sackler!,” held up signs that said the same, threw pill bottles on the floor, and passed out pamphlets, her work hung in a nearby gallery for all to enjoy.
This scene stuck with me — it cuts to the black heart of what everyone knows but few feel comfortable saying above a whisper in mixed company: For anyone in the arts, academia, and even in print media these days, there’s no avoiding the shadow of whatever capitalist sin actually impels your billionaire benefactor’s noblesse oblige.
Nan Goldin is much more hero than hypocrite here. Shaming the Sacklers is worthy work: They made billions while hundreds of thousands died from a drug they’d been misled to believe was safe. Thanks in part to Goldin and the anti-Sacklerites she leads, philanthropic efforts to elevate and separate the family from its fortune’s ugly origins have failed.
Goldin’s protests, and the scale of their success, add something new to a very old story: A family amasses a fortune by luck, hard work, and unconscionable greed, leaving its inheritors sapped of any deeper drive or sense of purpose, and then seeks salvation from moral vacuity and the vague torment that comes with it — as a prelude to eternal damnation, perhaps — by trying, and probably failing, to make meaning of all that money. Or, as the late patriarch Arthur Sackler told his children before he died, “Leave the world a better place than when you entered it.” Plutocrats with guilty consciences and their imperfect attempts at redemption have been funding the arts and education for as long as there have been men — some women, but mostly men — making way too much money.
The great American capitalists prove this pattern particularly well. About a century before Laurene Powell Jobs (widow of Apple founder Steve) set up her altruistic LLC, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s unmatched wealth was such a burden that he dedicated the last two decades of his life to giving it all away: He funded education, research, and the arts, and remarked in 1914, at the opening of a public library, “When I go for a trial for the things done on earth, I think I’ll get a verdict of ‘not guilty’ through my efforts to make the earth a little better than I found it.” He was hardly the first to think this way. Likewise, there might not have been any Botticellis for J.P. Morgan to buy if the Medicis — that corrupt clan of Renaissance bankers and popes — hadn’t made it their business to commission paintings from Florence’s finest artists.
In light of which history, refusing or returning the Sacklers’ money on moral grounds seems too small a gesture. Do relish, if it helps you, the fact that they’ll always be remembered for the opioid epidemic, not the museum wing. Take heart that their noblesse oblige definitely isn’t paying out, in other words, but, one wonders — and only God knows — has noblesse oblige ever actually saved a much-too-rich person’s soul? And since when should its beneficiaries be the ones to make that measurement?
A museum or university’s responsibility requires that the institution survive: Museums, libraries, and schools have to outlast the passing demands of our highly sensitive age, for instance, so that the beauty and wisdom they hold will remain for the benefit of whoever follows. What are museums for if not the witness and preservation of human culture, what with its dense tangle of unpayable debts, decadent ironies, and those darkly comic complications? The protesters have made their mark, but the museums might as well take the money. It only takes a quick look through world history to realize that the final judgment won’t come from us. Nor will it come from Nan Goldin, for that matter.....
Just don't look at a book to save a leg.
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Maybe you kids should stay off the beaten path and go to the movies instead (the public didn't go for Rocketman despite the flood of advertising?).
