Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalFDA urged to relax tissue donation ban for gay and bisexual men
The federal government in 2020 and 2023 changed its rules on organ and blood donation, reducing the restrictions on men who have had sex with another man.
But the Food and Drug Administration’s old restrictions on donated tissue, a catchall term encompassing everything from a person’s eyes to their skin and ligaments, remain in place. Lawmakers and advocates, especially for cornea donation, want to align the guidelines for tissue donated by gay and bisexual men with those that apply to the rest of the human body.
They have been asking the FDA for years to reduce the deferral period from five years to 90 days, meaning a man who has had sex with another man would be able to donate tissue as long as such sex didn’t occur within three months of his death.
And they are frustrated. The FDA has put changes to the tissue guidance on its agenda since 2022 but has yet to act on them.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/05/27/fda-tissue-donation-gay-men-ban/73837429007/
The ban is antiquated and prejudicial.
Florida to allow doctors to perform C-sections outside hospitals
Florida has become the first state to allow doctors to perform cesarean sections outside of hospitals, siding with a private equity-owned physicians group that says the change will lower costs and give pregnant women the homier birthing atmosphere that many desire.
But the hospital industry and the nation’s leading obstetricians’ association say that even though some Florida hospitals have closed their maternity wards in recent years, performing C-sections in doctor-run clinics will increase the risks for women and babies when complications arise.
“A pregnant patient that is considered low-risk in one moment can suddenly need lifesaving care in the next,” Cole Greves, an Orlando perinatologist who chairs the Florida chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in an email to KFF Health News. The new birth clinics, “even with increased regulation, cannot guarantee the level of safety patients would receive within a hospital.”
The Florida Legislature this spring passed a law allowing “advanced birth centers,” where physicians can deliver babies vaginally or by C-section to women deemed at low risk of complications. Women would be able to stay overnight at the clinics.
Women’s Care Enterprises, a private equity-owned physicians group with locations mostly in Florida along with California and Kentucky, lobbied the state legislature to make the change. BC Partners, a London-based investment firm, bought Women’s Care in 2020.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/florida-allow-doctors-perform-c-sections-hospitals-rcna153903
Well, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. A C-section is major surgery,.
It wasn't the endless shrimp that pinched Red Lobster. How private equity rolled the seafood chain.
Angry that your favorite Red Lobster closed down? Wall Street wizardry had a lot to do with it.
Red Lobster was America’s largest casual dining operation, serving 64 million customers a year in almost 600 locations across 44 states and Canada. Its May 19 bankruptcy filing and closing of almost 100 locations across the country has devastated its legion of fans and 36,000 workers. The chain is iconic enough to be featured in a Beyoncé song.
Assigning blame for company failures is tricky. But some analysts say the root of Red Lobster’s woes was not the endless shrimp promotions that some have blamed. Yes, the company lost $11 million from the shrimp escapade, its bankruptcy filing shows, and suffered from inflation and higher labor costs. But a bigger culprit in the company’s problems is a financing technique favored by a powerful force in the financial industry known as private equity.
The technique, colloquially known as asset-stripping, has been a part of retail chain failures such as Sears, Mervyn’s and ShopKo as well as bankruptcies involving hospital and nursing home operations like Steward Healthcare and Manor Care. All had been owned by private equity.
Asset-stripping occurs when an owner or investor in a company sells off some of its assets, taking the benefits for itself and hobbling the company. This practice is favored among some private-equity firms that buy companies, load them with debt to finance the purchases and hope to sell them at a profit in a few years to someone else. A common form of asset-stripping is known as a sale/leaseback and involves selling a company’s real estate; this type of transaction hobbled Red Lobster.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/private-equity-rolled-red-lobster-rcna153397
Disgusting. Not that I love Red Lobster THAT much, but the whole practice is disgusting.
Pronouns and tribal affiliations are now forbidden in South Dakota public university employee emails
A new South Dakota policy to stop the use of gender pronouns by public university faculty and staff in official correspondence is also keeping Native American employees from listing their tribal affiliations in a state with a long and violent history of conflict with tribes.
Two University of South Dakota faculty members, Megan Red Shirt-Shaw and her husband, John Little, have long included their gender pronouns and tribal affiliations in their work email signature blocks. But both received written warnings from the university in March that doing so violated a policy adopted in December by the South Dakota Board of Regents.
“I was told that I had 5 days to remove my tribal affiliation and pronouns,” Little said in an email to The Associated Press. “I believe the exact wording was that I had ‘5 days to correct the behavior.’ If my tribal affiliation and pronouns were not removed after the 5 days, then administrators would meet and make a decision whether I would be suspended (with or without pay) and/or immediately terminated.”
The policy is billed by the board as a simple branding and communications policy. It came only months after Republican Gov. Kristi Noem sent a letter to the regents that railed against “liberal ideologies” on college campuses and called for the board to ban drag shows on campus and “remove all references to preferred pronouns in school materials,” among other things.
All nine voting members of the board were appointed by Noem, whose remarks in March accusing tribal leaders of benefitting from illegal drug cartels and not properly caring for children has prompted most South Dakota tribes to ban her from their land.
https://apnews.com/article/pronouns-tribal-affiliation-south-dakota-66efb8c6a3c57a6a02da0bf4ed575a5f
I think Kristi baby is PO'd because she can't go on 20% of "her" state's land and she's retaliating any way she can.
Ranked-choice voting has challenged the status quo. Its popularity will be tested in November
Alaska’s new election system — with open primaries and ranked voting — has been a model for those in other states who are frustrated by political polarization and a sense that voters lack real choice at the ballot box.
Used for the first time in 2022, the changes helped propel the first Alaska Native to a seat in Congress. They could be short-lived.
Opponents of ranked voting want to repeal it and are entangled in a legal fight over whether their initiative will be able to remain on Alaska’s November ballot. It’s just one example this year of an intensifying fight over a more expansive way for voters to choose candidates, driven in part by deep dissatisfaction with the status quo and opposition from political parties and partisan groups that fear losing power.
Voters in at least two states — Democratic-leaning Oregon and Nevada — will decide this fall whether to institute new election processes that include ranked voting. In deeply conservative Idaho, groups are pushing for a November ballot initiative that would overturn a ban on ranked voting passed last year by the Republican-led legislature. Measures proposing ranked voting, also referred to as ranked-choice voting, also are being pursued in Colorado and the District of Columbia.
In Missouri, a measure advanced by the GOP-controlled legislature will ask voters in November whether to ban ranked voting. This follows an unsuccessful citizen attempt in 2022 to get an Alaska-style system before voters. At least nine states have banned ranked voting, and the Louisiana legislature also passed a ban this past week.
https://apnews.com/article/ranked-choice-voting-ballot-initiatives-alaska-7c5197e993ba8c5dcb6f176e34de44a6
Note the states banning it---all RED states. What are they afraid of?
New rules are in the works about abortion bans in Texas. Almost nobody's happy
The stakes are high for doctors in Texas when it comes to abortion.
With three overlapping laws, Texas bans nearly all abortions and has some of the strictest penalties for doctors in the country, including thousands of dollars in fines, the loss of a medical license and even life in prison.
That’s the backdrop for a process happening now to give doctors more clarity about when abortions can be performed and considered in compliance with the narrow medical exception in Texas abortion law.
The state’s Supreme Court asked – and an official petition required – the Texas Medical Board to clarify how doctors should interpret the exception, which says abortion is allowed to save a woman’s life or “major bodily function.”
The board has drafted those clarifying rules but at a public meeting on Monday, the board heard repeatedly that they’d missed the mark.
The rules say doctors need to document in significant detail efforts that were made to save the pregnancy. And it says, if time allows, they should transfer patients “by any means available” to hospitals with a higher level of expertise to try to save a fetus. If there isn’t enough time for a transfer, doctors have to document that.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/05/25/g-s1-550/abortion-bans-proposed-rules-texas-medical-board
Read on. This is CRAZY. Why any sane person would want to live in Texas is beyond my comprehension, especially if she is a female of childbearing age.
Follow up--American Airlines fires lawyers after blaming child for being filmed in bathroom
American Airlines has disavowed a response from its lawyers that blamed a 9-year-old girl for using an airplane bathroom with an active recording device, allegedly placed there by a former employee.
The airline said that what it described as “outside legal counsel retained with our insurance company” made an error in filing a legal argument Monday responding to a lawsuit filed by the girl’s family. American has fired that law firm and replaced it on the case, the company confirmed.
The girl is one of several children whom Estes Carter Thompson III allegedly filmed in lavatories while working as a flight attendant. He was arrested earlier this year and has a court appearance scheduled for July 1.
American’s lawyers wrote that the child’s alleged harm had been caused by her own “fault and negligence” because of her “use of the compromised lavatory, which she knew or should have known contained a visible and illuminated recording device,” according to documents provided to The Washington Post by the law firm representing her family. American’s attorneys also argued that the airline cannot be held liable or responsible for Thompson’s alleged actions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/05/23/american-airlines-flight-attendant-bathroom-camera/
Damn nice of them, trying to save face like that! /s
Putin Admits Prigozhin Was Right With Wild New Purge
More than two years after the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine and an endless string of reports about dysfunction and chaos within the Russian military, the Kremlin is now openly admitting its army is a complete mess.
The latest indication came with the arrest of Russia’s fourth high-ranking military official in a month on Thursday: The army chief’s deputy, Lieutenant-General Vadim Shamarin, is being held in pre-trial detention and faces up to 15 years behind bars on corruption charges. The Investigative Committee says Shamarin accepted a bribe on an “especially large scale” while awarding state contracts.
Bizarrely, his arrest came just days after Vladimir Putin told a meeting of defense officials the General Staff was in great shape—running “rhythmically” and operating “successfully.” He said no changes were planned there.
The downfall of Shamarin, who was in charge of the military’s communications in Ukraine, was welcomed by Russian troops who blamed the general’s dreadful work performance for thousands of deaths on the battlefield.
It also seemed like posthumous greetings from Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose rageful demands for the ouster of top military leadership during his short-lived mutiny last year seem to increasingly be coming to fruition. He got his wish earlier this month to see Sergei Shoigu removed as defense minister, and now the Kremlin’s purge of military leaders has inched closer to Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wild-new-kremlin-purge-proves-prigozhin-was-right-all-along
Nothing like having your dead coup leader be RIGHT, is there, Volodya?
Justice Alito's Jan. 6 Flags Are a Desperate Wake-Up Call for the DOJ
There is no better example of the current skewed state of checks and balances in American government than Justice Samuel Alito’s penchant for displaying insurrectionist symbols at his homes. That Alito can do this freely is but the tip of the iceberg that has already sunk the high court’s legitimacy. Let’s not forget about the rest of the iceberg: the lack of ethics policing for Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas, who’ve accepted enormously valuable benefits in luxury vacations, vehicles, tuition payments for family members (all undisclosed by the justices), and the adoption of a toothless code of ethics after decades of refusing to adopt any code of ethics.
But what still lies beneath the surface is the failure of all three branches of our government to do anything about the ethics disaster that has befallen the Supreme Court. And while all three branches are to blame—it is the Executive Branch, via the U.S. Department of Justice—that seems particularly paralyzed.
As first reported by The New York Times, an upside-down American flag—the symbol adopted by supporters of former President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election having been stolen—was flown at Alito’s house on Jan. 17, 2021, three days before President Biden’s inauguration and weeks after Jan. 6 rioters carried that symbol into the Capitol as they stormed it in an effort to stop the peaceful transition of power. On Jan. 17, the United States Supreme Court was still considering whether to hear a case about the 2020 election.
Alito excused the flying of the flag by blaming his wife, telling the Times he had nothing to do with it but that she had flown it in response to a neighbor who had put up an anti-Trump sign. He later expanded on this excuse, telling Fox News that a person who lived at the property with the anti-Trump sign had gotten into a verbal argument with Alito and his wife, calling her names, “including the C-word.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/justice-alitos-jan-6-flags-are-a-desperate-wake-up-call-for-the-doj
Yeah, right, Slimy Sammy. WAKE THE HELL UP, MERRICK!
American Airlines claims 9-year-old 'should have known' she was being recorded in airplane bathroom
American Airlines is trying to distance itself from a controversial statement in a legal document responding to a civil lawsuit against the company and one of its flight attendants, who is accused of secretly recording five girls in airplane bathrooms.
Estes Carter Thompson III, 36, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was indicted last month in connection with an incident that happened on a Boston-bound American Airlines flight late last summer.
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Federal prosecutors said that on Sept. 2, 2023, Thompson video-recorded or attempted to surreptitiously video-record a 14-year-old female passenger with a cellphone as she used the aircraft lavatory while he was working as a flight attendant onboard American Airlines Flight 1441 from Charlotte Douglas International Airport to Boston Logan International Airport.
As a result of an investigation into that incident, prosecutors said videos of four additional girls using aircraft lavatories were found on Thompson's iCloud account that were recorded between January 2023 and August 2023. Authorities said those four girls were 7, 9, 11 and 14 years old.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/american-airlines-claims-9-year-old-at-fault-secret-recording/60863951
And the Shithouse of the Skies award this week goes to....
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