Forums: Head Gasket

The Democratic chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee lambasted the Obama administration over its handling of an incident at a St. Louis VA center in which more than 1,800 veterans were told they may have been exposed to HIV. “It's outrageous, one, that this happens, but even worse is this secretive, almost cover-up mode that they go into when something like this happens,” Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.) said on CNN Monday. The Department of Veterans Affairs last month sent a letter to 1,812 patients informing them that could have been exposed to HIV and other deadly viruses because of...

Actors in blackface makeup are used during coverage of the World Cup. The broadcasting company says it's just a harmless spoof, but commentators say Mexico as a whole is in denial about racism. Reporting from Mexico City — Every morning during television coverage of the World Cup, on the Mexican equivalent of the "Today" show, co-hosts chat, trade barbs and yuck it up. Behind them, actors in blackface makeup, dressed in fake animal skins and wild "Afro" wigs, gyrate, wave spears and pretend to represent a cartoonish version of South Africa. Yes, in the 21st century, blackface characters on a...

CLEVELAND - An Ohio murderer who spit on a jury returned to court, this time, with a plastic diaper on his face! Neil Simpson appeared in an Elyria court wearing mosquito netting along with the diaper around his head. The convicted murderer told the judge he'd rather be executed then spend the rest of his life in jail. "I have two ways that I prefer to be murdered, one is to be crucified in front of the courthouse for all to see it, for all the convicts throughout the world, and the other way would be to be stoned to...

DES MOINES, Iowa – The siblings of a man who died more than a year ago must exhume his body so his head can be cut off and cryogenically frozen, the Iowa Court of Appeals has ruled. The court sided this week with Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which sought to dig up the remains of 81-year-old Orville Richardson of Burlington. Richardson had signed a contract with Alcor in 2004 and paid $53,500 to have his head placed in cryonic suspension after his death. When he died in February 2009, Richardson's brother and sister buried him instead, having told him earlier...

Education Spending Increases and Broken Promises [Dan Lips] Whoever was working on the Department of Education’s budget for 2011 in the White House apparently missed the memo about the president’s new commitment to fiscal discipline. The 2011 budget proposal includes a whopping $173 billion in spending on college student aid programs, a $3 billion increase for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (a.k.a. “No Child Left Behind”), and a proposal to create the federal government’s 70th preschool and child-care program (at a cost of $9.3 billion over ten years). But experience has shown that federal spending increases have delivered few...

May 30 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc.’s head of global public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, is leaving the company to become deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration, a person familiar with the matter said.

... Head said she will not post e-mails subject to various kinds of legal privilege, or "e-mails that are strictly person including those relating to my small children, parents and church." She said she "will continue to post batches of e-mails every few days." Head has said her posting is an effort to put an end to the "political games" of Tracie Washington, a civil-rights lawyer who obtained tens of thousands of council e-mails through irregular channels and recently published messages that Head wrote on a Web site, seemingly to cause the councilwoman maximum political damage and personal embarrassment. The...