Ranking 37th — Measuring the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System | Health Policy and Reform Evidence that other countries perform better than the United States in ensuring the health of their populations is a sure prod to the reformist impulse. The World Health Report 2000, Health Systems: Improving Performance, ranked the U.S. health care system 37th in the world1 — a result that has been discussed frequently during the current debate on U.S. health care reform. The conceptual framework underlying the rankings2 proposed that health systems should be assessed by comparing the extent to which investments in public health and medical care were contributing to critical social objectives: improving health, reducing health disparities, protecting households from impoverishment due to medical expenses, and providing responsive services that respect the dignity of patients. Despite the claim by many in the U.S. health policy community that international comparison is not useful because of the uniqueness of the United States, the rankings have figured prominently in many arenas.
Privacy and Security Fanatic: Conspiracy Theory With Teeth: Government Allegedly Forced TruTV To Yank FEMA Camps Episode | Network World What is one sure-fired way to feed a conspiracy theory? Make a TV episode supposedly exposing a conspiracy theory and then, after alleged government pressure, have truTV yank that episode off the air. The episode was Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theory "Police State" about "secret" FEMA camps or fusion centers. There are still no public answers as to why this happened. It is, at the least, thought-provoking. Although I did not see this episode when it aired, and had never seen Ventura's Conspiracy Theory series, I did watch the program via YouTube to see what all the fuss was about. According to Alex Jones, truTV pulled the episode from the airing schedule due to government threats. The thing is, I do watch what is happening to our freedom and our privacy, innocent people in peace groups put on watchlists, so there were many things I did know in this episode and many that I did not. According to the ACLU, the number of fusion centers jumped from 40 to at least 72. FEMA camps?
Money in Politics -- See Who's Giving & Who's Getting Porn Company Rejects Mass Lawsuits, Goes After Torrent Sites The growing trend for some porn companies is to get into bed with a law firm and go down the mass litigation route against users in the hope of extracting millions of dollars in cash settlements. However, one leading company says that the process has difficulties and is not as straightforward as advertised. So this year, instead of chasing file-sharers they will go after torrent sites instead. Pink Visual is a prominent adult entertainment studio based in Van Nuys, California. Pink Visual’s holding company, Ventura Content, is no stranger to anti-piracy litigation. Despite high value warning shots such as this, the growth of both tube and torrent sites continues to be of concern to the wider adult industry. Part of the company’s strategy will be educational, with reminders sent to subscribers informing them of their responsibility not to spread Pink Visual’s content and the consequences for doing so. “It wasn’t as straightforward as advertised,” Vivas said about the model.
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WikiLeaks Archive - Cables Show D.E.A.’s Global Reach Sia Kambou/AFP-Getty; Jose Mendez/EPA; Ramin Talaie/EPA; Mark Wilson/Getty Images Leaked cables reveal the Drug Enforcement Administration’s global reach, noting dealings with Lansana Kouyaté of Guinea, left, Ricardo Martinelli of Panama, center left, and Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone. Karen Tandy, right, the D.E.A.’s former administrator, discussed Afghan missions in the cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments. Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs: Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing the do not offer large disclosures. Sticky Situations Mr.
Monitoring America (Printer friendly version) Monday, December 20, 2010; 1:40 AM Correction to this article: An earlier version of this article contained several incorrect numbers that have since been updated. The errors occurred because of the accidental duplication of 74 records in a database of over 4,000 counterterrorism organizations that The Post assembled. While not affecting the overall conclusions of the article, the 74 duplications mean that there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism, not 4,058. Of the total, the number created since the 2001 attacks is 934, not 935. Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. Counterterrorism on Main Street * U.S.
Mattel disavows Barbie Video Girl porn link Somehow somebody put a link to a pornographic chat site on a Barbie.com page used to promote Barbie Video Girl, a version of the iconic doll that comes with an embedded video camera. Sandra McDermott reported the problem to her local TV news station Tuesday after clicking on the link while trying to upload video on the Barbie.com Web site with her 10-year-old daughter. Her daughter was uploading the video for a Barbie Video Girl movie contest, where kids enter videos they've shot using the toy. When it looked like the computer might have frozen, McDermott clicked on a navigation link that should have taken her to www.barbie.com/videogirl/. Instead, she was taken to the very not-safe-for-work Camlive.com Web site, which offers "Live Sex Chat - Amateur Cams and Pornstars." To continue reading, register here to become an Insider It's FREE to join "I pushed my daughter out of the way and said, 'Oh my gosh, did you see that?'"
Monitoring America Correction to this article: An earlier version of this article contained several incorrect numbers that have since been updated. The errors occurred because of the accidental duplication of 74 records in a database of over 4,000 counterterrorism organizations that The Post assembled. While not affecting the overall conclusions of the article, the 74 duplications mean that there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism, not 4,058. Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. The need to identify U.S.
Top Secret America: Local agencies help collect data on Americans Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States. Other democracies — Britain and Israel, to name two — are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.