McCaffrey and his lieutenants once more firing on unarmed civilians.

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Family friend swiped girl’s life preserver to save himself, Mississippi police say. The seven-year-old girl drowned. Her body was recovered three days later. The survivor will stand trial for murder if he doesn’t succeed in evading his suicide watch in the county jail.

BBC: Children ‘losing sleep over internet’: “Excessive net-surfing and television is leaving

12-year-olds suffering the symptoms of

chronic sleep deprivation, say experts…Many children now have television and

computers even in their bedrooms, and are

allowed to stay up late using the internet.”

Guide climbs Everest in record 16 hours. Congratulations to 34-year-old Babu Chhiri, who in his tenth successful assault of Mt. Everest, climbed the peak in less than 16 hours! Last year, he also established a record for duration spent at the summit.

NIH knew drug could cause fatal brain disease, newspaper reports. Before there was synthetic growth hormone, human growth hormone extracted from the pituitaries of cadavers was used to treat growth hormone deficiency from 1963 and 1985. The program was ended because of accumulating deaths from Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), one of several gruesome incurable fatal diseases with long incubation periods (kuru, sheep scrapie and “mad cow disease”, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE] are others) thought to be caused by mysterious, minute transmissible agents called prions. A new report alleges that, despite warnings, the NIH for seven years ignored signs that a more costly extraction technique with more intensive filtering was necessary to insure the safety of the cadaveric hormone.

The editor of the Washington Times objects to the characterization that his paper is under the editorial control of owner Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church. The Washington Post had made the attribution in covering Rev. Moon’s purchase of the UPI wire service earlier this week.

Atlantic piece takes swipe at Harvard prof. Christina Hoff Sommers, who set herself up in the early ’90’s as the conservative counter to “liberal hijacking” of gender studies, defames renowned Harvard gender identity psychological theorist Carol Gilligan in the latest Atlantic. She claims the research materials for Gilligan’s prizewinning and paradigm-changing 1982 book In A Different Voice were either flawed or faked. But neither Sommers nor the Atlantic ever contacted Gilligan to check this claim, and it apparently just isn’t true, reports Alex Beam of the Boston Globe. “Didn’t the Atlantic find it strange that Gilligan isn’t quoted

defending herself against Sommers’s dramatic accusation? ‘Sommers said to me that she tried unsuccessfully to reach

Gilligan,’ reports story editor Michael Curtis. He says Sommers’s

article wasn’t subjected to the usual fact-checking scrutiny

because it was a book excerpt, not an assigned article. Gilligan

will have to defend herself in a letter to the editor, which

won’t attract quite as much attention as Sommers’s cover story.”