Forums: Consequences Of The Black Death

Some major health insurance companies have stopped issuing certain types of policies for children, an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law, state officials said Friday. Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty said in his state UnitedHealthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield have stopped issuing new policies that cover children individually. Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland said a couple of local insurers in her state have done likewise.

It's believed up to 77 million people have been exposed to toxic levels of arsenic from contaminated drinking water in Bangladesh. The Lancet medical journal reports the high arsenic exposure is the tragic result of a community development project in the 1970's that went terribly wrong. The UN's World Health Organisation is describing Bangladesh's arsenic crisis as "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history." Presenter: Matt Abud Speakers: Dr Dipankar Chakraborti, head of School of Environmental Studies, Calcutta's Jadaypur University; Arif Ahamed, project team leader, World Bank . ABUD: Over twenty percent of all deaths in the study...

Twin nine-month-old girls were being treated at a London hospital on Monday after being mauled in their sleep by a fox. The animal apparently entered the house and climbed stairs before attacking Lola and Isabella Koupparis in their beds while their parents watched television, according to reports. (snip) In urban areas of England there are an estimated 27 foxes per square mile, living in close proximity to humans.

Sometimes you have a headline that makes the rest of the story superfluous, but here's the background. Actor Lance Baxter, otherwise known as "D.C. Douglas," currently known as the man who informs you how much GEICO can save you on car insurance, left a message last month with FreedomWorks in which he asked the group how many "mentally retarded" people it had on staff and what it would do when a tea partyer "killed someone." On April 14, FreedomWorks put his voicemail online. Today, Douglas reports he's been dropped from GEICO's campaign. His dramatic news release is here; he claims...