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Disco legend Donna Summer died this morning in Florida at the age of 63, family sources have told the Associated Press. The singer had been battling cancer for some time.

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“I was absolutely horrified,” said Gagnon, of Camp Verde, Arizona. “I never gave them permission to drill into my son’s mouth. They did it for profit.”

Isaac’s case and others like it are under scrutiny by federal lawmakers and state regulators trying to determine whether a popular business model fueled by Wall Street money is soaking taxpayers and having a malign influence on dentistry.

Munchausen by profit.

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The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment doesn’t have very many words, but if those words are to retain their meaning, the Ninth Circuit will have to put a check on the government’s ability to blacklist its citizens without recourse.

In much the same way as Karl Rove, the campaign is trying to turn Romney’s strength—his private-sector experience—into a weakness. “Yes, Governor Romney was a skilled generator of wealth, but he did so at the cost of families like yours. Just imagine what he’ll do in the White House.” The Romney campaign has been trying to do the same to the president—and may well succeed—but for now, it’s a half-step when compared to this effort.

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Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at UC San Diego, recently helped run a study that provided multiple sclerosis patients with either a marijuana joint or a placebo that looked, smelled, and tasted like marijuana. After smoking whichever substance they were given, patients were tested to see if it reduced their muscle spasticity — an affliction, common to MS patients, that causes painful, uncontrollable spasms of the extremities. Spasticity was unaffected among the placebo patients but dropped 30 percent on average among the patients given real marijuana. The side effects? “Smoking caused fatigue and dizziness in some users,” says Reuters, “and slowed down people’s mental skills soon after they used marijuana.”

The UC San Diego study is just the latest to suggest that marijuana has some medical benefits. Sixteen states, thousands of doctors, and tens of thousands of sick people concur in that judgment. It is dramatized by the personal testimony of sick people who are offered much more powerful drugs, but nevertheless insistthat consuming marijuana was most effective at helping them. (Don’t miss the video at the top of this post, as powerful a testimonial for medical marijuana as you’ll find.)

Marijuana is nevertheless classified under the Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule One drug. Under the law, drugs placed in that category must meet all of the following criteria (emphasis added):

• The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
• There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision

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Our plane got delayed 20 minutes so we got out the instruments and played a 4 song impromptu set for the packed plane.

Romania here we come!

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Stung by a UN official’s criticism of the country for allowing some of its people to go hungry, Canada has dismissed him as a “patronizing academic” and said there are more pressing food concerns in other countries.

“Canada has long been seen as a land of plenty. Yet today one in 10 families with a child under six is unable to meet their daily food needs,” Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Conservative government of Canada has reacted like a scalded cat. Uncharacteristically, at least three ministers have been trotted to the microphones to abhor this “ill-informed, patronising academic”. And don’t mention the facts; that obesity and diabetes rates are rocketing especially in remote communities where fresh food is expensive or unobtainable. Canada’s First Nations citizens are often poor; have high levels of violence, substance abuse and crime; have poor diets and poor health.

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The US army has said a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon’s Africa Command next year in a pilot programme that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

General Ray Odierno, the army’s chief of staff, says the plan is part of a new effort to provide US commanders around the globe with troops on a rotational basis to meet the military needs of their regions.

…

Military advisers are also in Uganda to draw lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help train African Union soldiers to fight Somalia’s al-Shabab group.

Lessons like not to fund insurgents on the principle of my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend, perhaps?