Free Republic

TUESDAY, July 12, 2022 (HealthDay News) – More than 80% of Americans have a widely used herbicide lurking in their urine, a new government study suggests. The chemical, known as glyphosate, is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has said. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, a well-known weed killer. The U.S. National Nutrition Examination Survey found the herbicide in 1,885 of 2,310 urine samples that were representative of the U.S. population. Nearly a third of the samples came from children ages 6 to 18. “Glyphosate is the most widely used...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) stated that he doesn’t wish he could redo his coronavirus nursing home policy and that “it was wholly non-consequential.” Host Anderson Cooper asked, “You have gotten criticism for, there were more than 6,000 people who died in nursing homes in New York from COVID, some of your critics have pointed to a directive back in March releasing COVID patients into nursing homes as the root cause of the high death toll. Given what we now know, is that something that you wish you would go — could go...

  Rebecca Solnit wrote in Salon.com that “The Age of Capitalism is over”.  Oh my, where to start? At the beginning seems a good place as any.  Solnit was thrilled to hold a land auction notice from post-Jacobin France—Thermidorian France for the historically-minded.  Thermidorian France was no more compassionate to live (mostly, to die) in than the Jacobin version which oversaw the execution of tens of thousand civilians, and the wanton destruction of anything associated with Christianity.  This short period in France’s mottled past, from 1795 to 1799, abolished everything other than the whims of its leaders.  And this sent...

Manufacturers of consumer goods in the United States have a lot to fear from the government, and becoming the target of a class action lawsuit is right up there in the first tier of those concerns. An astounding 52 percent of major corporations are engaged in class action litigation right now. Federal judges have complete discretion about whether to certify a class action lawsuit, and then whether to approve large attorney fee requests. Once certified as a federal class action, an otherwise small lawsuit turns into a massive cash drain for the target company and a money machine for the...

Sensing public outrage over business corruption in America is waning, some in the corporate community are seizing on the shift in mood to try to roll back reforms, say top U.S. officials and academics. "There's clearly a rearguard action going on," said Maryland Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes in an interview three years after the Enron debacle that led to his co-authoring of landmark corporate governance and accounting reforms in 2002. Business scandals are now daily fare for Americans, from the prison sentencing on Friday of a former top Boeing Co. executive to revelations of abusive trading in the mutual fund...

Tom Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has made a public vow: If John Edwards is chosen as John Kerry's running mate, the chamber will abandon its traditional stance of neutrality in the presidential race and work feverishly to defeat the Democratic ticket. "We'd get the best people and the greatest assets we can rally" to the cause, he says. Other business leaders in Washington have been less public and less precise, but no less passionate. Reviewing the candidates in the Democratic primaries earlier this year, a Fortune 100 chief executive who is active in Washington told me...

A Kansas City pharmacist pleaded guilty recently to tampering, adulterating and misbranding two well-known cancer drugs, Gemzar and Taxol. More than 300 lawsuits have been filed, including more than 100 wrongful-death claims. Which would raise no eyebrows except that two-thirds of the suits target Eli Lilly & Co., maker of the chemotherapy drug Gemzar, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, maker of Taxol. Kansas City trial lawyer Michael Ketchum, who represents more than 170 of the plaintiffs, claims that the pharmaceutical companies somehow failed to alert authorities that the pharmacist was diluting their drugs. Yet, it was Lilly that dropped the dime...