The murder suspect. MSNBC's Rita Crosby did a great job with this subject just an hour ago.
Van Seats Tested In Grad Student Murder
Detectives investigating the murder of Manhattan graduate student Imette St. Guillen are now focusing on a van parked near the home of the man being questioned in the case.
Police removed minivan seats Tuesday from the basement of 41-year-old Darryl Littlejohn's Queens home. The seats will be tested for DNA evidence.
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=57636
I have no comment. I think the police are doing a good job. It's a tragic reality women still face. Women don't have the luxury of being completely liberated to have a good time without the threat of WACKO obsession.
1008
This just came into an e-mail. It isn't going away.
EX-CNN ANCHOR BROWN: "THE NEWS IN THIS COUNTRY IS A BUSINESS"
Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown has suggested that television viewers are responsible for the deterioration of broadcast news as much as the TV networks themselves. "In the perfect democracy that I believe TV news is, it's not enough to say you want serious news, you have to watch it," he told an audience in Medford, OR this week. As reported by the Medford Mail Tribune, Brown, speaking to a First Amendment forum, noted that while CNN was spending a fortune covering the 2004 tsunami, Fox News was channeling its resources into the missing teenager Natalee Holloway. The contest, he noted, was won hands down by Fox. The result, he suggested, was not lost on his former employer, CNN. "The news in this country is a business," he said. "You might not like to think of it that way, but it is." He suggested that television, instead of being diverted by scores of late-breaking trivial stories, ought to focus on the 6-10 "really important stories" that occur each day.
1014
commercials
1016
Birth control plan will cut welfare costs
Governor's program will try to prevent unplanned pregnancies
G ov. Jennifer Granholm's plan to spend $183 million to prevent unwanted pregnancies among low-income women is a good investment in reducing Michigan's burgeoning welfare burden.
The plan, approved last week by the federal government, would use federal dollars to teach birth control and provide contraceptives to women who can't afford them.
It's drawing fire from religious groups, who raise concerns about the state promoting sexual promiscuity and absolving women of responsible behavior.
But that horse is already out of the barn. Michigan pays for 52,000 Medicaid births each year. If that number could be cut by one-third, the savings would be roughly $274 million.
That's just the start of the obligation for taxpayers. Most of the Medicaid babies are born to single mothers and will go immediately on the welfare rolls, where they'll often remain until adulthood and beyond.
The state has a stake in cutting these costs. Education and prevention offer the best opportunities for reducing the number of children born into poverty and thus the burden on taxpayers.
Michigan's Medicaid burden is already consuming nearly 20 percent of the state budget and is growing every year.
That growth must be slowed if Michigan hopes to improve its education system and rebuild its crumbling infrastructure. The governor's plan is one answer.
THE CADAVOR DOGS
Kalib - Promises made to officers about living accommodations while they seek out bodies as volunteers are pulled. The Bush White House is playing politics with the findings of more dead bodies. Bush wants the dead buried forever. He wants to build over top of the evidence of his negligence. He could be tried for the crimes he committed against the people of this country. Other countries are watching him. If he was an MD and ignored evidence of impending death, he could be charged with malicious negligence, manslaughter or worse. He made his way to the Gulf Coast today and clamped down on this effort. He invited volunteers to commit fraud by filling out long term assistance forms. He doesn't want the 'bad press.' I find it interesting this segment was on the aire and then he turns up at The Gulf Coast after visiting India. It's a very odd coincidence. The statement to FEMA probably went like this, "You all are handing out the government money like candy to every sap that wants to make the Democrats dream come true. You are the problem, Brownie never was. Unless these are people needing long term assistance while living in New Orleans then they don't get free housing."
1023
commercials
Failing to prevent unwanted pregnancies
It’s no surprise to Hoosier health care providers that more than half of Indiana’s low-income women have little or no access to family planning services. But it should anger every single Indiana citizen to learn that just 41 percent of low-income women and teenagers receive birth-control services they need at publicly financed health clinics.
A study released Tuesday by the non-profit Guttmacher Institute ranks Indiana 49th in access to contraceptive services. Just under half of Indiana counties have a family planning clinic within their borders.
The reasons behind Indiana’s statistics are complex.
The cost of birth control is a factor – even for women with private insurance, which frequently doesn’t cover contraception. An estimated 16 percent of Hoosiers have no health insurance at all.
At the same time, the state has been stingy in allotting its own funds and leveraging federal funds for family planning. Thirty-four states do a better job.
Distance is another factor, especially for low-income women. Because most clinics that dispense birth control are in cities, they are often inaccessible to women who have neither time nor access to transportation in rural areas or small towns.
Many women also have too little knowledge about how their bodies work, which makes it easier for an unintended pregnancy to occur. Indiana schools take the path of least resistance and focus sex-education classes on abstinence and AIDS prevention. Many abstinence-only advocates argue that parents should teach their children about sexuality, but a teen pregnancy rate of 16,000 a year suggests that parents alone aren’t doing the job.
About 12 percent of the estimated 121,890 pregnancies that occur in Indiana each year end in abortion. Many of those abortions could be prevented if every woman of child-bearing age had ready access to safe contraception.
It’s irresponsible head-in-the-sand politics to decry the abortion rate when many families have no ready access to birth control.
The federal government has established a national public health goal of reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies 40 percent by 2010.
That’s a goal worth pursuing, and the state should vow to make family planning services accessible and affordable for every woman in Indiana. They can start by going after available funds more aggressively and then using them in the state’s most underserved areas.
Mixed response to $51m pregnancy hotline
THE Federal Government's $51 million pregnancy support counselling scheme has been hailed by anti-abortion groups, but has drawn a cool response from doctors and others caring for women with unwanted pregnancies and abused children.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, yesterday announced a new Medicare payment for pregnancy support counselling and a 24-hour hotline to give help to those wishing to "explore pregnancy options". Mr Howard, flanked by the Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, who has pushed for the scheme as a way of reducing Australia's 90,000 abortions a year, said there was a clear national consensus that the abortion rate was too high.
"I think the chances of it reducing the number of abortions is probably pretty minimal," Dr Haikerwal said. Everybody agreed that there were too many abortions, he said, but the new measure, by identifying the Medicare service specifically for pregnancy counselling, might be seen by patients as too easily identifying them as having an unwanted pregnancy.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/mixed-response-to-51m-pregnancy-hotline/2006/03/02/1141191796992.html
1026
THE INTERNET AND CHAT ROOMS. She ran away with someone she thought she could trust until she couldn't anymore. She's probably still alive. There was that young girl not long ago who was stolen from her home with her brother with relatives killed at the house. It's probably a pedophile similar to that man, from ???????? Utah? No, it wasn't Utah. Nevada maybe.
Police say mom, friends getting text messages from missing girl
JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- Since 13-year-old Natasha Brown vanished on her way to school Monday, police say she's text messaged her mother saying that someone followed her and that she woke up in a dark basement.
One of the messages Brown sent her mother shortly after disappearing said: "Someone has me, she'll take my phone," Jersey City Police Chief Robert Troy said Wednesday.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--missinggirl0308mar08,0,3985243.story?coll=ny-region-apnewjersey
1033
Commercials AGAIN.
1035
Rusty Dornan and the good police work regarding the church fires.
Catholic Democrats outline beliefs on church, state, abortion rights
By Robert Marus
Published March 2, 2006
WASHINGTON (ABP) -- In an apparent attempt to address a controversy that has swirled since the 2004 general election, a group of Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives issued a document Feb. 28 explaining how they reconcile their faith with their politics.
The document, signed by 55 of the chamber's 72 Democratic Catholics, outlines how the signatories believe they should balance their roles as individual people of faith and as public servants representing people of all faiths.
"We are committed to making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching: helping the poor and disadvantaged, protecting the most vulnerable among us, and ensuring that all Americans of every faith are given meaningful opportunities to share in the blessings of this great country," it read. "That commitment is fulfilled in different ways by legislators but includes: reducing the rising rates of poverty, increasing access to education for all, pressing for increased access to health care, and taking seriously the decision to go to war."
Both relatively liberal Catholics who support abortion rights, such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and moderate, anti-abortion Democrats, such as Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), signed the document. It addressed abortion directly only by noting that all the signers agreed that it is a practice that should be reduced.
"We envision a world in which every child belongs to a loving family and [we] agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life and the undesirability of abortion -- we do not
http://www.abpnews.com/862.article
1039
Commercials AGAIN
Commercials AGAIN
Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents Are Told
By ANDREW LEHREN and
Published: March 6, 2006
For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an
The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.
For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.
Since the
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/national/06abortion.html?ex=1142312400&en=ff533d9870b1db54&ei=5070&emc=eta1
1043
The News Secretary
Independent study
Nebraska Is Last In Preventing Unwanted Pregnancy
March 01, 2006
Nebraska scored another “last in the country” this week, finishing at the bottom of the heap when it comes to preventing unintended pregnancies.
The independent, non-profit
Nebraska ranked:
– 51st in service availability.
– 34th in laws and policies.
– 49th in public funding.
– 51st overall.
While some states aggressively pursue programs intended to avoid unwanted pregnancies, the study said, “officials in other states, including bottom-ranking Nebraska, North Dakota, Indiana, Ohio and Utah, are failing the women who live there.”
"We try to be very creative to get the services across to women across the state," Dr. Joann Schaeffer, director of regulation and licensure for the state Health and Human Services, told the Associated Press.
[Nebraska’s last place finish in the Guttmacher study came in the wake of another recent report – one that showed the state was last in economic development, too.]
States can be especially helpful to low-income women who are more likely than others to have unintended pregnancies, and to rely on publicly supported services for contraceptive care, the analysis said.
The report covered 1994-2001. It was based on the Guttmacher Institute’s independent research and data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Studies. The study took a state-by-state look at programs to serve women who need contraceptive services, money provided for family planning and laws and policies promoting access to contraceptive information and services.
Some findings on Nebraska
In Nebraska, 33,890 of the 366,310 women of childbearing age become pregnant each year. The report said 73% result in live births, and 12% result in abortions; the remainder end in miscarriage.
Nebraska has the 10th lowest teenage pregnancy rate of any state. Of the 3,860 teenage pregnancies each year in Nebraska, 64% result in live births and 21% result in abortions.
Nebraska’s teenage pregnancy rate declined by 17% between 1992 and 2000.
Need for Publicly Supported Services
In Nebraska, 198,160 women are in need of contraceptive services and supplies. Of these, 105,090 need publicly supported contraceptive services because they have incomes below 250% of the federal poverty level (74,380) or are sexually active teenagers (30,710).
In Nebraska, 11% of women aged 15–44 have incomes below the federal poverty level, and 15% of all women in this age-group are uninsured (i.e., do not have private health insurance or Medicaid coverage).
In Nebraska, 10% of women aged 15–44 are enrolled in Medicaid.
Service Availability
In Nebraska, 39 publicly funded family planning clinics provide contraceptive care to 35,170 women—including 9,280 sexually active teenagers.
Family planning clinics in Nebraska serve 33% of all women in need of publicly supported contraceptive services and 30% of teenagers in need.
Only 25% of counties in Nebraska have at least one family planning clinic.
Funding for Publicly Supported Services
In 2001, the federal and state governments together spent $3,173,000 in Nebraska on contraceptive services and supplies. Of this amount, 3% was allocated to contraceptive services at the state’s discretion. (The funds came from either state revenues or federal dollars under the state’s control.) The remainder came from the federal government.
In Nebraska, $33 was spent on contraceptive services and supplies per woman in need (adjusted for the cost of health care in the state).
Impact of Publicly Supported Services
Publicly funded family planning clinics in Nebraska are estimated to help women prevent 6,500 unintended pregnancies each year.
Every public dollar spent on family planning services saves the federal and state governments three dollars in Medicaid costs for prenatal and newborn care.
The Key Role of Title X
Title X of the Public Health Service Act, the only federal program devoted solely to the provision of publicly supported family planning services, supports 32 family planning clinics in Nebraska. These clinics serve 33,550 women, including 8,880 teenagers.
Title X–supported clinics in Nebraska help women avert 6,300 unintended pregnancies each year.
http://nebraska.statepaper.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/03/01/4405d6329193d
THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY and the exploitation of human health. If you smoke cigarettes chronically you get sick and die prematurely. I met a 81 year old man who was admitted to the hospital. It was the first time he was ever hospitalized. When asked if he smoked he stated, 'Yes.' When asked how long he smoked, he stated "About 40 years." Then asked how much he smoked per day, he stated, "One cigarette everyday." That was an extraordinary answer. He took a habit of having a cordial and a cigarette in his smoking jacket after dinner. He then asked a question. "You don't think that has contributed to my illness now do you?" The reply simply was, "Perhaps." The fatality factor of cigarette smoking is measured in 'cigarette years.' The number of cigarettes per day by the length of time smoking. See, when cigarettes were once introduced to 'society' it was a luxury. An expensive luxury based on tabacco quality. Tobacco type. Then Industry Tobacco started and all kinds of additives and 'junk' was added to it and people became hooked on it against their will. Tobacco smoked to 'cope with stress' is an illness no different than alchoholism. It's just that with the wealth of big advertising dollars, cigarettes have lost their sophistication and has become a from of drunkenness. The strange thing about allowing cigarettes to be a luxuty and an occassional indulgence is that, considering the reaction of an appropriate 81 year old who expected longevity to treat him well, it would have been abandoned as a 'bad habit.'
1048
A minority still photo segement. You know Anderson, I realize you get 'sucked' in the vacuum of supposed equity in issues of discrimination. You probably get sucked into justifying party issues as well that are basically bad for this country. But, when do you stop being a sucker for false and dangerous priorities? Huh? When? When it's convenient or when you are vigilant everyday to the "W"rongful priorities of the current administration and their cronies. GEt over it. DO THE RIGHT ALL THE TIME, not when the just the 'heat' is on.
1055
commercials
1059
Frannksetin had insulted me enough.
It's the "Reform Los Angeles" second 60 mintues. It's always about violence and law enforcement.
It is about discriminatory views of minoriites because they are poor.
Enough.
