Indian billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the world’s biggest maker of vaccines, will slash the price of polio immunization and introduce shots for diarrhea and pneumonia, undercutting Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline Plc. (GSK)

Poonawalla, who set up the Serum Institute of India Ltd. in 1966, will use last year’s acquisition of a Dutch vaccine business to add the injectable form of polio inoculation to the oral drops the Pune, India-based company supplies to organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund, he said. The closely held group also plans to sell a low-cost pneumococcal shot to compete with Pfizer’s $4 billion Prevnar pneumonia vaccine by 2016.

The plan by Serum Institute, which says it supplies vaccines used to immunize two out of three children worldwide, will “revolutionize” efforts to eradicate polio that affects nerves and results in paralysis, said Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general at the World Health Organization. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a key funder of the effort to exterminate the malady, has backed the proposal as oral drops, made of live virus, carry the risk of infection.

“On May 30, Mr. Gates came over for a private dinner at my house,” and asked that Serum Institute remain family-owned, Poonawalla, 71, who also rears thoroughbred racehorses, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters. “The obvious reason was that, as soon as we sell the company, ‘big pharma’ would immediately double the price of vaccines.”

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School shooting survivors arrive in Newtown


[font size = 0]Justin Jourdain, a 2008 graduate of Red Lake High School who was in the school during the shootings that occurred in 2005, poses with a Red Lake Band of Chippewa flag signed by students and residents of the reservation in Bemidji, Minn. Jourdain and others are taking two signed flags on a trip to Newtown, Conn., to offer comfort to the grieving community in the wake of the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. - Photo: AP / SL[/font size]

When members of Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation received a plaque from Columbine High School massacre survivors, they hoped the gift would stay with them.

The Columbine survivors presented it to them in 2005, after people at Red Lake – including five students – were gunned down in what was then the second most-deadly school shooting.

We hope you never pass this on, the Columbine survivors told them, but if a tragedy like this happens again, go help heal the community where it does.

Late Thursday morning, four survivors from the Red Lake massacre arrived in Newtown with that plaque, which they planned to give students at the town's middle school Thursday night. The survivors were among 13 Red Lake students and even more administrators who traveled to help those affected by the Dec. 14 Newtown shooting spree that left 20 children dead.

"They've just traveled almost 30 hours driving cross-country in the middle of all this weather to get out here and to be with the families," coordinator Stephanie Hope Smith said in front of Newtown's Edmond Town Hall.

If massacre of 20 children in Newtown doesn't bring gun control, what will?



Disbelief, horror, revolt: This is what we all felt when the news arrived. By its magnitude and cruelty, it surpassed everything else. We were not ready for it. Earlier tragedies should have immunized us. But they didn’t. Not to this violence, to this bloodshed.

A young man assassinates his mother with her own weapons. Then, he goes to an elementary school and murders 20 children, one after the other, firing more and more bullets into their small bodies.

Why?

The need, the desire to understand is as strong as the pain itself.

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Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz honored Sandy Hook Elementary shooting victim Jack Pinto during New York’s game against the Atlanta Falcons yesterday. On one of Cruz’s cleats the football player wrote “Jack Pinto, My Hero,” on the other, Cruz wrote ”R.I.P Jack Pinto.” Cruz also had a small honor for the six year old on one of his gloves. He wrote inscribed, “Jack Pinto This one is 4 U.!”

“There are no words that can describe the type of feeling you get when a kid idolizes you so much that they want to, unfortunately, put him in a casket with your jersey on,” Cruz told a reporter with the New York Daily News. “I can’t even explain it.”

Nancy Lanza feared son, Adam, was ‘getting worse’; told friend ‘he was burning himself with a lighter’



Less than a week before her son would launch his horrifying attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun-loving mom Nancy Lanza knew “she was losing him” and that “he was getting worse.”

A drinking buddy of Lanza’s told the Daily News that her son Adam had long been troubled and rarely came up in conversation.

“She just looked down at the glass and said, ‘I don’t know. I’m worried I’m losing him,’” said the bar pal, who asked not to be named, of the ominous conversation at the watering hole My Place in Newtown, Conn.

...

“Nancy told me he was burning himself with a lighter. In the ankles or arms or something,” he recalled of a conversation they had about a year ago. “It was like he was trying to feel something.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nancy-lanza-feared-son-adam-worse-article-1.1221505#ixzz2FHiYsEn4

Pakistani children light candles to pay tribute to Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims in southern Pakistani port city of Karachi on Dec. 15, 2012. Pakistan has sent condolences to the United States over the shooting incident, local media reported Saturday.

If you were curious about what the disbarred lawyer, former Florida inmate, bagpipe-blowing fringe candidate Montgomery Blair Sibley thinks about last week's election, you're in luck. He thinks it stinks.

Sibley, who has been disbarred from 13 different federal courts and three state bars during his career, is suing D.C.'s three representatives to the Electoral College, which is slated to meet next month and confirm that President Obama won on November 6. And, like he always does, Sibley doubts Obama's legitimacy to hold the office to which he just won another four years.

In one complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Sibley calls Obama's birth certificate, college transcripts and other identifying documents "questionable." So, basically the same birther shit as usual.

His second complaint takes direct aim at the Electoral College itself. Citing the 12th and 23rd amendments, Sibley hopes to stop the 332 electors pledge to Obama from voting for a candidate he sees as illegitimate. Or something like that.

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MUCH of the coverage of Tuesday’s results has focused on the strength of Barack Obama’s coalition — minorities, women and young voters. But that analysis misses the real point. The contours of the 2012 presidential race were shaped less by the country’s changing demographics than by the underlying attitudes and values of American voters, who are always far more complex than they appear to pollsters.

The president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics. He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in: A nation that makes the investments we need to strengthen and grow the middle class. A nation with a fair tax system, and affordable and excellent education for all its citizens. A nation that believes that we’re most prosperous when we recognize that we are all in it together.

From the 2012 campaign’s earliest days, analysts focused on historic economic and political metrics to explain the steep uphill climb Mr. Obama faced in his re-election bid: no sitting president had been re-elected with unemployment higher than 7.2 percent; or the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index below 78 percent; or the “right track” rating for the country as low as it was.

Such conventional indicators failed to capture the mind-set of the American people who always had a broader view of the nation’s economic situation and what had happened to their lives. A national survey of 800 voters conducted by our firm — not for the Obama campaign — during the final weekend before Tuesday’s vote, confirmed that a clear majority of Americans viewed this election in the context of the scale of the economic crisis we faced and the deep recession that ensued.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/opinion/obama-won-on-values-not-demographics.html?ref=politics&_r=1&&pagewanted=print

...1) Modernize voter registration. Over and over, vote-watchers said that this was one of the biggest problems Tuesday. Voters would get to the front of the line and find out that they weren’t on the registration lists, for whatever reason. That caused confusion and delay. In some cases, it meant people couldn’t vote. In most cases, it meant longer lines.

The good news? “This is a very solvable problem,” said Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice. “We have the technology to do it.” States can reduce errors by improving their online registration systems or by making registration automatic at various points, as when people receive their drivers’ licenses. Many states are moving in this direction, but not all. An upgraded system could also help keep track of voters’ registration status when they move.

Congress could also chip in. The Voter Empowerment Act, sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) would upgrade voter-registration standards across the country and make same-day registration more common. It would also create more ways to register voters automatically, such as students at public universities.

2) Make sure local jurisdictions keep their polling stations well-equipped. Another reason that many polling stations had long waits Tuesday was that they were simply ill-prepared, said Mary Boyle of Common Cause. Stations ran out of ballots. Their machines broke down. The poll workers were unprepared. “We had reports of stations where people were voting on one machine when ten were supposed to be working,” she said. Likewise, said Pamela Smith of VerifiedVoting, many states use older machines that are prone to glitches — when they break, that bogs everything down.

Congress is well within its rights to set national standards for federal elections and provide enough money for stations to upgrade their infrastructure and train poll workers. This happened in 2002, when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act to help states replace their outdated punch-card and lever systems. But that money has since dried up — even as new problems have arisen with the newer electronic machines.

3) The Senate could actually confirm nominees to head up the Election Assistance Commission. Back in 2002, Congress set up this nonpartisan federal commission to aid local jurisdictions with things like certifying electronic voting machines or coming up with contingency plans in case of a disaster. But to date, the panel has no commissioners sitting on it, as Republicans in the Senate have blocked the nominees. (The commission is supposed to have two Democrats and two Republicans.) Having a functioning commission, said Weiser, might have helped states such as New York and New Jersey that found themselves scrambling to set up voting alternatives after Hurricane Sandy.

4) Expand early voting. Allowing people to vote early can help alleviate the pressure on Election Day. But not all states allow early voting. And this year, some states, like Ohio and Florida, cut back on early voting at the last minute, causing chaos and longer waits. Here, too, Congress could set national standards on early voting, so that the process isn’t left to state officials who may often have partisan reasons for mucking with the schedule. “When we see such broad problems across so many states as we did this year,” said Weiser, “it may be appropriate for Congress to act.”

Another related, long-proposed idea would be to make Election Day a national holiday. That way more people can vote at different times throughout the day, easing the wait.

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