Resolution Proposed to Protect Citizens Who Videotape Cops

A U.S. Congressman has introduced a resolution that would protect citizens who videotape cops in public from getting arrested on state wiretapping charges.

Edolphus Towns, a Democrat from New York, introduced the resolution on Thursday, the same day USA Today wrote a scathing editorial denouncing these types of arrests.

These types of arrests have become an epidemic throughout the country as more people are carrying some type of video-recording device on them at all times.

But the case that has gained the most national attention has been the arrest of Anthony Graber, a National Guardsman who is facing 16 years in prison because he uploaded a video of a Maryland State Trooper pulling a gun on him during a traffic stop.

Read more at Photography is Not a Crime.

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Federal Money Backed Dangerous Brain Injections

This sounds like something out of Nazi Germany. Notice that the federal government and pharmaceutical companies paid millions to support the research.

Columbia University has quietly suspended research at a nationally prominent brain-imaging center and reassigned its top managers after federal investigators found that it had routinely injected mental patients with drugs that contained potentially dangerous impurities.

The investigations found that the center — regarded by experts as the nation’s leader in the use of positron emission tomography, or PET, for psychiatric research — repeatedly violated Food and Drug Administration regulations over a four-year period.

“Failure to promptly correct these violations may result in legal action without further notice,” the agency wrote to Columbia in December 2008, citing lax internal quality control and sloppy procedures for formulating drug injections.

F.D.A. investigators returned in January 2010 and found that many of the center’s lab’s practices had not changed, and cited a long list of specific violations, including one instance in which the staff hid impurities from auditors by falsifying documents.

“They raided the place like it was a crime scene, seizing hard drives,” said one former lab worker, who requested anonymity because he feared reprisals from the university.

Read more at the New York Times.

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