The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein
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Outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is expected to announce tomorrow that the ban on women serving in combat in the U.S. military will be lifted. Women have been serving in combat in all but name for years, but the new policy will open up the final 20% of active duty military positions to female recruits.
[Photo credit: DVIDSHUB, Creative Commons.]
After the pomp and circumstance of yesterday’s inauguration, it’s refreshing to remember that not all nations buy into the trappings of the imperial presidency. Uruguay’s president, :
In a deliberate statement to this cattle-exporting nation of 3.3 million people, Mr. Mujica, 77, shunned the opulent Suárez y Reyes presidential mansion, with its staff of 42, remaining instead in the home where he and his wife have lived for years, on a plot of land where they grow chrysanthemums for sale in local markets.
Visitors reach Mr. Mujica’s austere dwelling after driving down O’Higgins Road, past groves of lemon trees. His net worth upon taking office in 2010 amounted to about $1,800 — the value of the 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage. He never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor. [NYT]
It’s a powerful lesson in leadership that Mujica doesn’t feel he needs an opulent lifestyle to project authority. His power resides in his office, not in conspicuous consumption.
[Photo credit: jonisanowl, Creative Commons.]
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
Eager for positive publicity in the wake of the Bangladeshi factory fire that killed over a hundred workers, Walmart pledged Tuesday to source more of its goods in the United States.
How much more? Well, Walmart promised to buy an additional $50 billion worth of American goods over the next decade. The New York Times crunched the numbers and found that $5 billion per year would be about 1.5% of what Walmart spends to buy and transport merchandise annually.
So, while a few American manufacturers will welcome the extra business, Walmart isn’t exactly pledging to change its business model.
[Photo credit: brandonevano, Creative Commons.]
Deborah Blum, the thinking woman’s crime writer, tackles the mystery of the Chicago dry cleaner who won a $450,000 lotto jackpot and died in his bed the next day with bloody froth on his lips and a lethal dose of cyanide in his bloodstream:
According to news reports, Kahn’s wife first realized he was ill when he emitted a loud scream. Interestingly enough, that tends to be a classic symptom of cyanide poisoning, an almost involuntary response to the internal collapse. Gettler once described this as a “death scream.” The description of Kahn’s death has him screaming, staggering to a chair, and dying as he sat there. In other words, cyanide killings tend to set a very specific range for actual time of death.
Kahn’s death is still a mystery, but the killer is likely to be caught when toxicologists determine exactly what kind of cyanide poisoned him. Cyanide is so tightly controlled, and available through so few channels, that toxicology can dramatically winnow the suspect pool, often down to just one person.
[Photo credit: Michael Till, Creative Commons.]
Sasha Abramsky of The Nation asks why President Obama has pardoned so few people:
While in the White House, Bill Clinton pardoned well over 100 people. So did President Bush. To date, Obama has pardoned less than two dozen and commuted even fewer sentences. His first commutation wasn’t until late November 2011, when, according to CBS News, he ordered the release of a woman who had served ten years of a twenty-two-year sentence for cocaine distribution. CBS reported that “the latest numbers from the US Pardon Attorney show that since taking office Obama has denied 872 applications for pardons and 3,104 for commutations of sentence.” A year later, ThinkProgress reported that the only presidential pardon granted in 2012 was for the lucky turkey, as part of the Thanksgiving tradition.
A president who talks the talk about more sensible, nuanced drug policy, and whose oratory frequently invokes what is best in the American political imagination, has shown himself remarkably reluctant to use one of the most important of presidential prerogatives—the power to right judicial wrongs. “This president,” says Anderson, “has been unbelievably timid and disinclined to do justice in cases that scream out for commutation. There’s not a lot of moral or political fortitude in play.”
[Photo credit: Scott Beale, Creative Commons.]
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
Former NFL linebacker Junior Seau was suffering from the concussion-linked brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) when he took his own life last spring, according to the National Institutes of Health:
In July the N.I.H. began its study and invited several nationally recognized neuropathologists to consult in the analysis of Seau’s brain tissue. They found “abnormal, small clusters called neurofibrillary tangles of a protein known as tau within multiple regions of Mr. Seau’s brain,” according to the statement. Tau has been found in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease and other progressive neurological disorders.
“I think it’s important for everyone to know that Junior did indeed suffer from C.T.E.,” Seau’s ex-wife, Gina, said in an interview with ABC News and ESPN. “It’s important that we take steps to help these players. We certainly don’t want to see anything like this happen again to any of our athletes.”
These findings are an important step towards scientific consensus on the reality of CTE in professional sports. Football is notorious for medical and legal concussion controversies, but CTE isn’t just a problem for football.
John Branch of the New York Times won a January 2012 Sidney Award for his profile of Derek Boogaard, an NHL player with a history of concussions who showed many of the symptoms of CTE during the two years before he died of an accidental drug overdose.
[Photo credit: patriotworld, Creative Commons.]
Leslie Patton of Bloomberg News has won the January Sidney Award for her eye-opening joint profile of a McDonald’s fry cook and the CEO of the company. The fry cook, Tyree Johnson, would have to work over 1 million hours a year in order to earn as much as the former CEO of McDonald’s, but in fact, he’s lucky to get 40 hours a week because neither of the two McDonald’s restaurants he works for will give him full-time hours.
Patton shows how the fast food industry is typical of our increasingly unequal economy that generates historic profits for executives and investors while leaving ordinary workers behind.
In 1979, Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green beret doctor, was convicted of the murders of his pregnant wife and two daughters. MacDonald has steadfastly maintained his innocence, claiming that a band of intruders wandered into his house and slaughtered his family. In his new book, Wilderness of Error, filmmaker Errol Morris argues that MacDonald was wronged by the criminal justice system and might even be an innocent man. In his a new e-book, Joe McGinnis, author of the bestselling book on the MacDonald case, Fatal Vision, recaps MacDonald’s post-conviction history and argues that justice was served in 1979 and MacDonald has been grasping at straws ever since. I review both books for the Columbia Journalism Review. Side-by-side, these two volumes amount to a journalistic sumo match where two heavyweights square off for control of the MacDonald narrative.
[Photo credit: Public.resource.org, Creative Commons.]
