Boy says in court that family dog did rape him. In 1994, the then-7-y.o. boy’s mother was jailed for allegedly ramming an object into his rectum after he was incontinent of feces. She insisted that she didn’t do it and that her son had been raped by the family’s pit bull. Now, seven years later, the victim, who is now 14, says that that’s exactly what happened [via Romanesko’s Obscure Store].

Doctors back ‘controversial’ operation. Reports indicate that some severely emphysematous patients may benefit, counterintuitively, from surgery removing part of their lungs. BBC

Herbal supplement warning issued. A Maryland dermatologist, in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, warns that the lack of regulation of “natural” herbal remedies means they could contain a number of animal tissues that could spread BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), or “mad cow disease.”

West Nile virus found in Massachusetts, where I live. I logged below the news about the likely spread of the virus this summer, and I’d just been thinking aobut this when I got a mosquito bite earlier this week. Nando Times

Engaged. A new publicly accessible Well conference on weblogs and weblogging.

Lego Cthulu

Web Site Posts Secret CIA Briefing Papers “A secret CIA overview of the U.S. intelligence community prepared for visiting Japanese intelligence officials has been posted on an Internet site frequented by activists opposed to government secrecy, prompting security concerns among intelligence officials and their overseers on Capitol Hill. The CIA briefing, containing some sensitive information about budget trends and so-called “hard” intelligence target countries, appeared a week ago on Cryptome, an Internet site maintained by John Young.” Washington Post

Medicine Merchants: How Companies Stall Generics and Keep Themselves Healthy. “That is not what Congress envisioned in 1984 when it passed

a law intended to keep drug prices down by speeding up the

entry of generic drugs. The Drug Price Competition and

Patent Term Restoration Act was intended to foster

competition between brand and generic companies, and it

has. It was not supposed to prompt rivals to join hands in

keeping drugs off the market. ” New York Times