- The new year has not been kind to Christina Aguilera. To be fair, she’s brought almost all of her recent troubles on herself, but the past month-plus has won the battle against the popster in a resounding knockout. First, she butchers the national anthem on one of the grandest stages in all of sports and starts the Super Bowl off in spectacular style by omitting a line from the song. For most of us, that would be the worst thing to happen in our lives and it would take something fairly significant to top it. Embarrassing yourself on a worldwide television broadcast just doesn’t happen every day for anyone, even a prominent recording artist. Yet on the heels of that bump in the road, Aguilera managed to find a way to get everyone to forget about her screwing up the one song that nearly everyone knows the words to: with an arrest for public intoxication. The pint-sized pop singer was detained in West Hollywood early Tuesday for public intoxication, and her boyfriend was arrested on suspicion of DUI. Aguilera was a passenger in a car that was pulled over in the 1100 block of Clark Street in West Hollywood around 2:45 a.m., proving once more that nothing good happens when you’re out at 2:45 in the morning and you’re fall-down drunk riding shotgun in the car of someone even drunker than you are. That drunker individual would be Aguilera’s boyfriend, Matthew Rutler. He was arrested on suspicion of DUI after police pulled him over because his car was "burning rubber" and speeding according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. At some point during the traffic stop, officers determined a) Rutler was drunk and b) Aguilera was also intoxicated and was not able to care for her own safety. She was then taken into custody and booked for misdemeanor public intoxication, spending a few hours in jail before being released. The good news is that the sheriff's department says it doesn't plan to seek criminal charges against her, so the case will go on her record, but it will not be forwarded to prosecutors. Criminal charges or not, it’s safe to say that Aguilera might do well to lay low for a while, stay away from microphones, major sporting events, the vehicles of drunk drivers and anything else that might keep her year going in a decidedly negative direction……….
- If there is a worse place for a large explosion to take place than an ammunition plant (other than a nuclear plant, I suppose), it’s not coming to mind right now. So in truth, the fact that an explosion occurred at the ATK Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Mo. and no one was killed is something of a minor miracle. While six people were injured in the blast and one person had to be taken by air ambulance to a hospital, it could have been far worse. According to an official company statement, the incident happened in a construction area where plant employees load the powder into the bullets. In the aftermath of the explosion, the plant was closed and remained so through the end of Wednesday’s day shift. For those not up on their weapons and ammunition, ATK Armament Systems is the world's largest manufacturer of military ammunition and integrated medium-caliber gun systems. Another of the company’s plants in Radford, Va. produces rocket and gun propellants and other energetics materials, so ATK is into some fairly heavy duty manufacturing. In fact, the explosion in Independence is now under investigation by the United States Army, ATK safety teams and local authorities. You know it’s serious if a company is shutting down an entire plant for more than a day, given that the plant has the capacity to produce 1.4 billion rounds of small-caliber ammunition annually. But before production fires back up, I’d say it’s a good idea to do a safety check or two and ensure that when the production lines begin moving once more, no major explosions are going to happen in a place where billions of round of ammunition are churned out on an annual basis……….
- Class warfare has broken out in Major League Baseball and the haves are sick and tired of having to provide welfare for the have nots. Late last month, New York Yankees co-owner Hank Steinbrenner hit MLB’s luxury tax and revenue-sharing systems with a nice communism blast. "We've got to do a little something about that, and I know Bud wants to correct it in some way," Steinbrenner said. "Obviously, we're very much allies with the Red Sox and the Mets, the Dodgers, the Cubs, whoever in that area. At some point, if you don't want to worry about teams in minor markets, don't put teams in minor markets, or don't leave teams in minor markets if they're truly minor. Socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is never the answer." Those were the first pointed remarks in some time from an owner about baseball’s current economic system as it relates to higher-revenue, big-market teams being forced to share some of their wealth with small-market teams – or so we thought. According to Boston Red Sox owner John Henry, Hank Steinbrenner was not the first owner to take MLB to task for its economic policies. In a radio interview Tuesday, Henry revealed that Major League Baseball fined him $500,000 for comments he made to The Boston Globe in 2009 about the league's revenue-sharing system. His specific criticism was that seven "chronically uncompetitive teams" received over $1 billion. "Who except these teams, can think this is a good idea?" he asked. "The large markets aren't allowed to give their opinions." When the subject came up during an interview on WEEI in Boston on Tuesday, Henry didn’t shy away from detailing what happened in the aftermath of his harsh words, nor did he attempt to back away from them. "I made statements which turned out to be true, or at least there were various documents that were leaked after that. But anyway, the large clubs are not allowed to talk about it," Henry stated. Knowing the sort of penalty commissioner Bud Selig dispensed for those comments, it seems safe to say that after Selig and executive vice president Rob Manfred spoke by telephone with Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner and president Randy Levine telling them team officials should not comment publicly on labor matters after Hank – Hal’s brother – made his remarks, a fine of some sort will be forthcoming for the Yankees. For the record, the Yankees’ 2010 payments for baseball's revenue sharing and luxury tax programs is estimated to be in the vicinity of $130 million, so it’s not difficult to see why an owner might be perturbed to be forced to fork over that amount of money just because his or her team plays in a major market and makes more money from television deals and other sources of income not available to small market teams. And just think, MLB is the only one of this country’s three major professional sports leagues that isn't currently locked into a major collective bargaining/financial battle between the owners and the players………..
- Cold medicines are something that should probably be policed in fairly strict fashion. Given how many people are downing Nyquil and Dayquil as if they were candy to help them power through any of the dozens of variations of the common cold that terrorize the United States on an annual basis, regulating cold medicines just seems like a solid idea. As such, big ups to the Food and Drug Administration for announcing Wednesday it will remove roughly 500 unapproved cold and allergy medications from the market as part of an ongoing crackdown on ineffective prescription drugs. As part of its standard operating procedures, the FDA requires companies to submit all new prescription drugs for scientific review before they are launched, but of course things never work out quite the way they are supposed to happen. As a result, thousands of drugs exist on the market without having been properly tested and proved. Many of them predate the FDA's drug regulations and have eluded scrutiny for decades. The agency is now trying to tackle the problem by removing many of these products from the market, including pills using untested combinations of decongestant and cough-suppressing ingredients. However, the decision may not have as far-reaching an impact as you may expect simply because most Americans buy their cold medicines over the counter, meaning the prescription medicines cited by the FDA represent a small portion of the market. "We don't expect today's action to have a negative impact on consumers," said Deborah Autor, director of the FDA's Office of Compliance. "There are multiple other products available to treat cold, cough and allergy symptoms." As part of the mandate, manufactures who have not registered their products with the agency must halt production and shipments immediately. Among the affected products are drugs combining two varieties of the same ingredient, such as the allergy-reliever antihistamine. Regulators called such combinations "irrational" and stated that they could cause excessive drowsiness. Worse still, doctors may not even realize they are prescribing unapproved drugs because the products are often labeled just like FDA-approved products. All of this stems from a decision by Congress in 1962 that the FDA should review all new medications for effectiveness. Included in that decree was an order for thousands of drugs already on the market to be evaluated over time. The problems in testing those drugs came, predictably, when manufacturers claimed their medications were grandfathered under earlier laws. Ah, the pharmaceutical industry and its powerful lobbyists, skirting government orders for decades…..but I digress. The FDA finally began cracking down on unapproved drugs in 2006 and has taken action against 17 types of medications and dozens of companies. The agency has also seized millions of dollars' worth of medications, but because federal law does not call for fines for selling unapproved drugs and criminal prosecutions are rare, the seizures and reprimands tend to have little effect………..
- When you’ve stolen an election to remain in power, it follows reason to imagine that you might be a tad more paranoid than your average political leader. When your continent and scores of other nation’s in your corner of the world are engulfed in riots and anti-government uprisings, that paranoia can easily rise to an even higher level. Putting two and two together in basic paranoid dictator math, one can see how Zimbabwean President/dictator Bob Mugabe might be on edge and do something foolish like illegally detain one of Zimbabwe’s leading human rights campaigners, Munyaradzi Gwisai, and 44 other activists. Gwisai and the activists will be detained at least through this weekend, following a Harare court decision Tuesday. Gwisai, a University of Zimbabwe professor, was arrested with other participants for the intolerable crime of……talking. Granted, they were discussing the North African uprisings, but even the most passing reference to anti-government movements in other nations is obviously the first step in staging an uprising of your own, at least to the mind of a paranoid dictator like Mugabe. He’s so intent on avoiding such an uprising that he is preemptively arresting people for talking or even thinking about the riots in nearby countries. These arrests are more than basic, low-brow harassment: Gwisai the other others are facing treason charges and could face the death penalty. All 45 detainees are being represented by human rights lawyer Alec Muchadehama, who says his clients were tortured while in police custody. The arrests are the latest repressive maneuver in a massive clampdown by Mugabe. In the past month alone, more than 100 people from various opposition groups have been arrested. An additional 1,000 opposition supporters have been forced into hiding by the crackdown. Last week, national police arrested Joe Sikhala, leader of a breakaway faction of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party. They charging him with kidnapping two people in the diamond fields of Chiadzwa, in Manicaland, even though the arrest coincidentally came just days before the One Million March against Mugabe that was planned for March 1, an event Sikhala was heavily involved in organizing. The campaign of oppression has extended into both high-density slum areas and rural districts across Zimbabwe and focused heavily on MDC, which seize control of parliament in the March 2008 elections. Soldiers have been a frequent sight in Harare’s high-density slum areas and in rural areas over the past week as Mugabe attempts to maintain control over any potential feelings of dissent that could spark a revolt. Does this mean Zimbabwe won’t be able to join in on the riot party spreading across Africa and the Middle East? Of course not. It merely means that the fight will be more bitter and bloody, that’s all…………
No comments:
Post a Comment