VITAMEDIAS
A Bloody Cacophony: When he hears a noteworthy transmission, which he says happens about 15 times a day, Wolmer, a blue-eyed, balding 55-year-old with a pleasant smile, punches a few lines of text into his PC. Seconds later, the message appears on cell phones carried by reporters and editors from a dozen South Florida news operations.
TV news directors and newspaper editors have hired Wolmer to take over what has long been considered the newsroom's dirtiest job: listening to the mind-numbing chatter on police radios. Companies like Wolmer's News Busters have existed for decades in some major cities, including Washington, D.C., and New York, but they generally employ people who respond to police scenes and sell photos or footage to the highest bidder. These firms have prospered because many TV news operations have reduced staff while increasing the number of minutes of broadcast time, says Al Tompkins, an instructor at the Poynter Institute, a training center for journalists in St. Petersburg. In addition, new technology has made it more difficult for newsrooms to keep track of police activity. "It used to be that any boneheaded reporter could pick stuff up off scanners," Tompkins says. "But it's gotten a lot harder." [...]
Wolmer can't escape the scanners inside his home. There are six in the kitchen, another five above his workbench in the garage, and others in the bedroom-turned-office that Janet uses to keep the business's books. Wolmer has two portable scanners he takes with him when he leaves the house. Preparing to go out for a quiet meal with Janet on his 55th birthday on September 10, Wolmer grabbed the portable radios. He says he also carried one to his daughter's wedding reception earlier this year. To not bother others, he keeps the volume low.

.DE!
Myth Dispelled: Shoe Size, Penis Size Not Linked
Despite eons of speculation to the contrary, two British scientists have laid to rest the idea that a man's shoe size is in any way correlated to the size of his penis. [!!!!]

CULTURAS IN VITRO - Music Biz Pays for CD Price Scam: A $143.1 million price tag has been set for conspiring to rip off CD buyers. And the world's five largest music companies and three largest music retailers have agreed to pay up.
Antitrust Settlement with Record Distributors and Retailers
Congress: Labels Sell Kids Smut: The music industry has refused to stop marketing explicit content to minors, according to a congressional subcommittee. And Congress wants to know why.
Labels tap into free tunes to woo fans: In a fight to win back fans from the "gray zone" of online song-swapping services, the music industry is borrowing a trick from its nemeses: free music downloads.

CONTAMINANTES - Celebs step into generic drug debate: Large pharmaceutical companies are waging what appears to be a successful lobbying and public relations battle to prevent the House from taking up a bill that would make it easier for generic drugs to enter the marketplace.
[Lá como cá...]
Drug Industry Is Told to Stop Gifts to Doctors: The government warned pharmaceutical companies today that they must not offer any financial incentives to doctors, pharmacists or other health care professionals to prescribe or recommend particular drugs, or to switch patients from one medicine to another.
The government informed the industry that many practices commonly used in the marketing and sale of prescription drugs could run afoul of federal fraud and abuse laws.
Pills, Profit and the Public Health: First there was aspirin to treat pain and inflammation, then came Advil, Aleve, and 40 other similar drugs. By 1999, Celebrex and Vioxx were on the scene, and they now outsell every other prescription pain reliever on the market. Every year, $4 billion is spent on Celebrex and Vioxx alone.
"There's never been a study showing that they are more effective at relieving symptoms of joint pain and inflammation than all these other medicines that have been available for many, many years and are much more affordable," said Dr. Matt Handley, a physician with Group Health Cooperative, a nonprofit managed-care organization in Seattle.
On top of the $532 million spent every year on over-the-counter drugs, consumers spent $90 billion more on prescription drugs last year than the $64 billion that was spent just six years ago.

VITAMEDIAS - Internet 'best' for green news: The internet is the best place to go for news of the environment, according to an online poll.
Most respondents said the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in South Africa had been valuable.
Twice as many people were worried about the environment as the numbers concerned about terrorism.

ECO-TERRORES - Stock market shock explained: Two physicists have an explanation for the convulsion of the stock market just ten days ago that left traders reeling and economists scratching their heads. The market was behaving like a muffled guitar string, they suggest, thanks to short-termism and technological limitations.

CONTAMINANTES - AIDS is called a security threat : AIDS is called a security threat - HIV could weaken 5 nations, CIA told
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could harm the economic, social, political and military structure in each of the five countries [China, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Russia], a CIA official said in releasing the declassified portions of the council's report.
HIV would spark tensions over spending priorities, drive up health care costs and sharpen military manpower shortages, said David Gordon, a CIA official and the report's author.

.DE! Vatican scientists accused of destroying Turin Shroud: Microscopic particles that could have proved whether or not the Shroud of Turin could be dated to around the time of the death of Christ have been destroyed by Vatican scientists.

CULTURAS IN VITRO - Art trumps right to privacy: A US Federal court has thrown out the case against artist Barbara Kruger for her appropriation of a 1960 photo, and against the Whitney Museum and LA MoCA for selling merchandising reproducing the offending image

CULTURAS IN VITRO - Book on Censorship Deemed Suitable for U.S. Eyes Only: About 30 copies of Richard Meyer's book Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art just managed to make it to his lecture last week at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre. This even though the book technically has been banned for sale in Canada and Britain by its original publisher, Oxford University Press.
No one's saying where precisely the books, which were sold after his lecture, came from, not even Meyer, an art historian at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He'd signed a deal in September, 1995 with OUP, headquartered in Britain, for Outlaw Representation, giving the publisher worldwide rights.
However, as Meyer assembled his text and cleared permissions for the 200 photographs he planned to include, OUP grew concerned about a couple of things. One was a 1979 picture of two leather-clad homosexuals, by famous U.S. gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, that Meyer planned to position alongside a 1953 coronation picture of the Queen and Prince Philip, taken by famous British gay photographer Cecil Beaton. The other was another Mapplethorpe picture, of a naked five-year-old boy, Jesse McBride, whom Mapplethorpe photographed at Jesse's mother's house -- she commissioned the work and was in the room when he took it -- in the mid-1980s.
In the interests at least of, ahem, good taste, would Dr. Meyer perhaps like to remove these pictures, he was asked. Dr. Meyer would not. "I mean, the whole book is about censorship, about images that are troublesome, about intellectual and artistic freedom," he said this week on the telephone from his home in California. "I just didn't think the book should end up colluding in the very thing it was exploring."