Who qualifies as a journalist? The failures of the new DOJ guidelines.

Free Press reports on the new DOJ guidelines:

Last Friday, the Justice Department released revised guidelines governing the Department’s interactions with the press. President Obama had ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct the review in response to the news earlier this year that the DoJ had obtained the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors and the emails of a Fox News reporter.
One of the main issues is whether citizen journalists (e.g., many serious writers/reporters/investigators who run their own websites to report the new) will have any protection at all. This article warns that the federal government is moving in the direction of declaring an "official press," deeming who is a journalist and who is not. This, in the digital age where citizen journalists are making a tremendous impact on news gathering.

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The scourge of patent trolls

Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Thanks to trolls like IPNav, the Times explains, U.S. companies are forced to spend upwards of $30 billion every year on patent litigation. Most of that money goes to troll profits and legal expenses, with less than 25 percent flowing to inventors. Even Spangenberg concedes that his business uses “the courts as a marketplace, and the courts are horribly inefficient and horribly expensive as a market.” Patent trolls like IPNav are a symptom of a fundamentally broken system.
According to the NYT:
There is debate about the definition of patent trolls, but the term broadly refers to people who sue companies for infringement, often using patents of dubious value or questionable relevance, and then hold on like a terrier until they get license fees. In recent years, patent trolls — they prefer “patent assertion entities,” or P.A.E.’s — have gone from low-profile corporate migraine to mainstream scourge. This is partly because the number of patent infringement suits has more than doubled in recent years, to 4,731 cases in 2012 from 2,304 in 2009, according to that RPX report. The cost to businesses, which pass along the expense to consumers, is immense. One study found that United States companies — most of them small or medium-sized — spent $29 billion in 2011 on patent assertion cases.

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Ralph Nader discusses a better approach to hernia repair surgery

This article at Common Dreams is ostensibly a discussion about hernia repair surgery, namely, an option to be treated more humanely and cheaply in Canada than in the U.S. The discussion turns to deeper criticisms of the American way of providing healthcare, however.

Too many general surgeons and hospitals have on average over 10 times the rate of recurrence, four times the rate of infection, and often use expensive mesh both to replace lack of surgical skill and to speed up the operation. Plus they charge much more before they quickly say “sayonara.” The Shouldice [Hospital, outside of Toronto] procedure is described by hospital officials as a “natural tissue repair that combines the surgical technique with the body’s natural ability to heal,” and takes, on average, forty-five minutes to complete. Except in rare circumstances, “the technique does not use artificial prosthetic material such as mesh because mesh can introduce unnecessary complications such as infections or migration, dramatically increasing the cost of the operation. Shouldice does not use laparoscopic technology because of the potential intestinal punctures and bladder and blood vessel injuries, which may lead to infection and peritonitis.” Shouldice staff note that laparoscopic surgery also requires general anesthesia and hugely higher costs for disposable items per surgery than is the case at their hospital. There are about one million abdominal wall hernia operations yearly in the U.S. Hospitals and general surgeons for the most part do not use the Shouldice Procedure. Still the deplorable “quick and dirty” that invites overuse of mesh – about 80 percent of the patients – has become a perverse incentive for higher billings in the United States. Superior talent is needed for the more natural procedure used by Shouldice.

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Surveillance State dries up investigative reporting

From WND:

The president of Associated Press is warning that reporters’ sources already are drying up because of the threat posed by the Obama administration’s grab of news agency telephone records. In a report by the news wire, AP President Gary Pruitt said the Justice Department’s seizure of the records was unconstitutional, and ultimately Americans may be uninformed or misinformed about their government as a result.

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