Sherry Chandler » 2006 » September » 01

On the Job, Nursing Mothers Find a 2-Class System

When a new mother returns to Starbucks’ corporate headquarters in Seattle after maternity leave, she learns what is behind the doors mysteriously marked “Lactation Room.”

Whenever she likes, she can slip away from her desk and behind those doors, sit in a plush recliner and behind curtains, and leaf through InStyle magazine as she holds a company-supplied pump to her chest, depositing her breast milk in bottles to be toted home later.

But if the mothers who staff the chain’s counters want to do the same, they must barricade themselves in small restrooms intended for customers, counting the minutes left in their breaks.

Education Dept. Shared Student Data With F.B.I.

The Federal Education Department shared personal information on hundreds of student loan applicants with the Federal Bureau of Investigation across a five-year period that began after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the agencies said yesterday.

Under the program, called Project Strikeback, the Education Department received names from the F.B.I. and checked them against its student aid database, forwarding information. Each year, the Education Department collects information from 14 million applications for federal student aid.

Neither agency would say whether any investigations resulted. The agencies said the program had been closed. The effort was reported yesterday by a graduate student, Laura McGann, at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, as part of a reporting project that focused on national security and civil liberties.

Generally, only United States citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply for federal student financial aid.

Generic of Plavix Is Blocked

A federal judge in Manhattan ordered a Canadian company yesterday to stop distributing its generic version of the blockbuster anticlotting drug Plavix, granting a reprieve to Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, which co-market the brand-name drug.

And Thomas Frank, by way of Eschaton:

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

This post was written by sherry

Philosopher
Baxter by lamplight
Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
In love, he cannot therefore cease his trade;
Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
He feels it, introverts his learned eye
To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.

His mother died,–the only friend he had,–
Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
Couched like a cat sat watching close behind
And throttled all his passion. Is’t not like
That devil-spider that devours her mate
Scarce freed from her embraces?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems: Household Edition, 1867

This post was written by sherry