To Your Heart's Content: In the news...

Some recent news I thought might be of some interest (a little on the cynical and pessimistic side, I must say):

Accepted by other deans and counselors with astonishment and delight, Harvard university, breaking with a major trend in college admissions, says it will eliminate its early admissions program next year, with university officials arguing that such programs put low-income and minority applicants at a distinct disadvantage in the competition to get into selective universities. --NYT

Over the last decade or so, the FDA has quietly become an agent of organized scientific fraud designed to promote the profits of drug companies at the expense of public health. One of the ways this is accomplished is by rigging drug review panels with industry "experts" who maintain financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. All FDA drug review panels have members with such ties, and the FDA insists it has no obligation to disclose the ties.--NewsTarget

Did you know that school shootings almost always involve children who are taking
antidepressant drugs?--NewsTarget

Halliburton, the notorious U.S. energy company, sold key nuclear-reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions. The story is particularly juicy because Vice President Dick Cheney, who now claims to want to stop Iran from getting nukes, was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s, at which time he may have advocated business dealings with Iran, in violation of U.S. law.--Truthout/Globalresearch.ca

As hunger and homelessness rise in the United States, the Bush administration plans to get rid of a data source that supports this embarrassing reality, a survey that's been used to improve state and federal programs for retired and low-income Americans. In 2003, the Bush Administration tried to whack the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on mass layoffs and in 2004 and 2005 attempted to drop the bureau's questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment data.--New Standard/Oneworld.net

Though record numbers of federal workers have been sounding the alarm on waste, fraud, and other financial abuse since George W. Bush became president, the agency charged with defending government whistleblowers has reportedly been throwing out hundreds of cases - and advancing almost none. Statistics released at the end of 2005 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility led to claims that special counsel Scott Bloch, who was appointed by Bush in 2004, is overseeing the systematic elimination of whistleblower rights.--PEER website

Governments deny global warming is happening as they rush to map the ocean floor in the hopes of claiming rights to oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, zinc and the planet's last pristine fishing grounds. Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 found "the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing warmer," including the discovery "that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as the result of human-induced greenhouse gases."--Mother Jones

The total number of people infected with HIV/AIDS in America is about 1 million with 40,000 people becoming infected each year. In China, the total number of people infected is about 650,000 with about 70,000 becoming infected--Avert.org

To Your Heart's Content