“The board of The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) has voted unanimously to not endorse an earlier decision to give a Conscience in Media award to jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller, E&P has learned.

The group’s First Amendment committee had narrowly voted to give Miller the prize for her dedication to protecting sources, but the full board has now voted to not accept that decision, based on its opinion that her entire career, and even her current actions in the Plame/CIA leak case, cast doubt on her credentials for this award. ” (Editor and Publisher)

“When your source is the government, and the government is attempting to use you to target a whistleblower, the notion of shielding a source must be reconsidered. To apply standard practices regarding sources to hiding wrongdoing at the highest levels of government perverts the intent of the First Amendment.” [via rebecca blood via walker]

“The president departed Tuesday for his longest stretch yet away from the White House, arriving at his Crawford ranch in the evening for a stretch of clearing brush, visiting with family and friends, and tending to some outside-the-Beltway politics. By historical standards, it is the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years.

The August getaway is Bush’s 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford — nearly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president’s travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents’ compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush’s time away from Washington even further.

Bush’s long vacations are more than a curiosity: They play into diametrically opposite arguments about this leadership style. To critics and late-night comics, they symbolize a lackadaisical approach to the world’s most important day job, an impression bolstered by Bush’s two-hour midday exercise sessions and his disinclination to work nights or weekends. The more vociferous among Bush’s foes have noted that he spent a month at the ranch shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when critics assert he should have been more attentive to warning signs.” (Washington Post)

“At a time of heightened national concern about the need to track sex offenders, the Catholic Church in America has begun cutting loose dozens – perhaps hundreds – of priests who have molested children.

The church had already suspended the clerics after finding the child-abuse allegations against them to be credible. Now, as it defrocks them, expelling them from the priesthood, the men are quietly reentering civilian life with only the barest notice to the public, and no ongoing oversight by the church.

Nor is law enforcement certain to be watching them.

In most instances, the statute of limitations in their cases expired years ago. This means they face no prospect of prosecution for past sex offenses.” (beliefnet via walker)

‘It is already being insinuated, by those who want this thorny question de-thorned, that there is an element of discrimination involved. Why should this question be asked only of Catholics? Well, that’s easy. The Roman Catholic Church claims the right to legislate on morals for all its members and to excommunicate them if they don’t conform. The church is also a foreign state, which has diplomatic relations with Washington. In the very recent past, this church and this state gave asylum to Cardinal Bernard Law, who should have been indicted for his role in the systematic rape and torture of thousands of American children. (Not that child abuse is condemned in the Ten Commandments, any more than slavery or genocide or rape.) More recently still, the newly installed Pope Benedict XVI (who will always be Ratzinger to me) has ruled that Catholic politicians who endorse the right to abortion should be denied the sacraments: no light matter for believers of the sincerity that Judge Roberts and his wife are said to exhibit. And just last month, one of Ratzinger’s closest allies, Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna, wrote an essay in which he announced that evolution was “ideology, not science.”‘

Verily, I sell unto you: “Increasing numbers of evangelical business owners are hanging out their shingles with the word ‘Christian’ prominently displayed. Are they bringing godliness to Main Street — or making hay on holiness?” (Salon)

“Last December, Sepracor, a company in Marlborough, Massachusetts, whose core business is concocting slight variations of the world’s best-selling drugs, got the go-ahead from the Food and Drug Administration to sell Lunesta, a new sleeping pill that could be used for months without losing its effectiveness. To prime Wall Street for the drug’s potential profitability, Sepracor’s chief executive officer, Timothy Barberich, told analysts that insomnia is “one of the most prevalent and growing medical needs in our society,” while David Southwell, the company’s chief financial officer, described insomnia to the media as “underrecognized” and “undertreated,” and estimated the U.S. market for sleep aids at $3.5 billion a year and growing. Following the industry’s modern marketing script (create a need, then a drug to fill it) Sepracor soon began selling Lunesta to the public — with the help of the press.

As with most launches of drugs, Sepracor and one of the academic medical centers involved in testing the drug (in this case, Duke University) offered journalists sources they could call, including those with financial links to Sepracor. And the company got results. For example, some of the nation’s most respected newspapers peppered their stories with quotes from Dr. Andrew Krystal, who conducted the Duke clinical trial of Lunesta and was the lead author of the study that reported the results. Krystal had designed and conducted other studies for Sepracor, and had also served on a company advisory board. Most of the news stories did not disclose his financial ties to the drugmaker.”

“A new theory that explains why the language of our genes is more complex than it needs to be also suggests that the primordial soup where life began on earth was hot and not cold, as many scientists believe.

…As the DNA ‘alphabet’ contains four letters – called bases – there are as many as 64 three-letter words available in the DNA dictionary. This is because it is mathematically possible to produce 64 three-letter words from any combination of four letters.

But why there should be 64 words in the DNA dictionary which translate into just 20 amino acids, and why a process that is more complex than it needs to be should have evolved in the first place, has puzzled scientists for the last 40 years.” (University of Bath.UK)

Huey Newton’s widow resurrects militants’ memory with ‘Burn Baby Burn’ barbecue sauce.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today’s high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?

It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.

Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that ‘use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided.’ Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.

…Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.

…Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.

I have no objections to people drinking bottled water in the developing world; it is often the only safe supply. But it would surely be better if they had access to safe tap water instead. The logical response, for those of us in the developed world, is to stop spending money on bottled water and to give the money to water charities.

If you don’t believe me about the taste, then set up a tasting, and see if you really can tell the difference. A water tasting is fun, and you may be surprised by the results. There is no danger of a hangover. But you may well conclude, as I have, that bottled water has an unacceptably bitter taste.” — Tom Standage, author of A History of the World in Six Glasses and technology editor of The Economist (New York Times op-ed)

“Whatever your age, your body is many years younger. In fact, even if you’re middle aged, most of you may be just 10 years old or less.” (New York Times )

“In America even a vitamin can become an instant celebrity with its own die-hard fan base and publicity machine. Vitamin E shot to fame in the early 1990’s, after two large survey studies noted that male and female health professionals who said they took a supplement of up to 400 international units of the vitamin every day seemed to go on to develop fewer cases of heart disease or cancer than their peers who were not taking the supplement.

The number of Americans, cardiologists included, who gulped daily capsules of vitamin E suddenly surged, from relatively few in 1990 to an estimated 23 million by 2000, according to an analysis published last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But in a flurry of strong follow-up studies published in the last few years, vitamin E has emerged as a sort of middle-aged, B-list actor not fulfilling its early promise. Increasingly, even many scientists and health advisory groups who say they still have high hopes for the vitamin as it occurs naturally in vegetable oils, nuts and leafy greens have begun to pan the pills, except for use by subgroups of patients with particular medical conditions.” (New York Times )