text: Concerned about antibiotics in your meat? Then here’s more cause for alarm: According to new data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, sales of antibiotics for domestic food animals increased last year, from 28.8 million pounds in 2009 to 30.6 million pounds in 2010. What’s more bothersome is that the increase in antibiotic sales doesn’t correspond directly with an increase in meat production. While antibiotic sales jumped 6.7 percent, meat production only increased by 1.3 percent.
  Animals destined for meat production are given regular doses of antibiotics for various reasons: to keep them healthy (industrial farms are breeding grounds for disease), to counteract an unbalanced diet (cows fed only grain develop a life-threatening condition called “acute acidosis;” antibiotics are needed to keep them alive), and to promote growth (antibiotics increase metabolic rate and nutrient absorption, accelerating growth). Unchecked antibiotic use is cause for concern. The more antibiotics are used, the more antibiotic-resistant microbes become, making it more difficult and expensive to treat infections.
  To find antibiotic-free meats, look for certified organic meat, which must be raised without use of growth hormones or antibiotics, or buy your meat from local farmers who use sustainable, humane practices. Visit EatWild.com or LocalHarvest.org to find local farmers who sell sustainable meat.
  Wild yam is useful during pregnancy, though it also was used in the first prescription contraception.
  Wild yam (Dioscorea villosa) is a versatile herb that might not win any beauty contests. Its rootstocks grow crooked and bear horizontal branches of long, creeping runners with thin reddish-brown stems that grow to a length of over 30 feet.
  The plant has winged seed pods and clusters of small, drooping yellow-green flowers that bloom from June to August. The heart-shaped leaves are long and broad with furrowed veins, which run lengthwise from the center top of the heart shape and fan outward. The leaves are usually alternate, but sometimes grow in twos and fours near the base of the plant. The upper surface of the leaf is smooth while the underside is downy.
  In medical usage, the herb is best known for chemical components used in the first prescription contraceptive pills. Wild yam root contains diosgenin, which can be converted to synthetic progesterone.
  Despite its contraceptive uses, wild yam also is used during pregnancy. Because the herb nourishes the female endocrine system, herbalists believe wild yam can help prevent miscarriage and is one of the best herbs to relieve general pain during pregnancy. Early settlers used the small tubers, as they fell away from the vine, to ease labor pains, colic and leg cramps and to prevent morning sickness and miscarriage.
  Wild yam is the basis for many herbal and pharmaceutical remedies and was used widely throughout history in many cultures. The pharmaceutical industry has used yam root as a basis for steroids and cortisone, anti-inflammatory drugs to reduce the swelling caused by rheumatism and hydrocortisone cream to treat eczema. The 16th-century herbalist John Gerard believed it outranked other wild herbs because of its value as a treatment for colic and liver ailments.
  Wild yam, which should not be confused with a sweet potato, has been used medicinally in China, Japan and throughout Southeast Asia for at least 2,000 years. It forms part of “The Pill of Eight Ingredients” traditionally prescribed in Chinese medicine to treat hypothyroidism and diabetes. Herbalists also prescribe the herb for exhaustion, lack of appetite, chronic thirst, chronic coughs and wheezing. The herb was popular with the ancient Aztec and Mayan people primarily as a source of food and for pain relief. Colonial doctors learned about this herb from Native Americans and used it as a treatment for rabies, epilepsy and nervous ailments.
  Some physicians brewed the flowers into a mild tea for bronchial conditions. Make a decoction by covering the root with boiling water and simmering for half an hour before straining and refrigerating.
  The herb has a bitter taste and its most common culinary use is to enhance soups. The root also can be eaten as a boiled vegetable, though it can cause an upset stomach.
  This perennial, native to North America, prefers damp woods, swamps and thickets, and grows best in partial shade. Find young tubers in the leaf axils in late summer. Plant them immediately in individual pots and keep them inside until spring. The herb is easy to propagate from root cuttings taken in the late fall or winter. If you plant wild yam near a wall, the leaves will climb gracefully and form a trellis of quiltlike greenery.
  Anita B. Stone is a certified master gardener, horticultural therapist and partners an herb business in North Carolina.
  When shopping for a new clothes-washing machine, look for one that meets the standards of Energy Star, a government-backed energy-efficiency program. Energy Star-qualified washers use an average of 50 percent less energy and 40 percent less water than conventional washers. In one year, a qualifying model can save you between $45 and $125 in energy costs and $20 to $35 on your water bill.
  It's not a wash: Compare washers’ electricity and water use. (All numbers are averages and vary according to model and usage.)
  The Los Angeles Times and the Toronto Star can’t abide the lies of the president–but they’ve never come clean about plagiarism by their own top staff.
  On August 18th, the morning after Bill Clinton’s nationally televised speech about his “not appropriate” relationship with Monica Lewinsky, most newspapers hit him with both barrels. Based on personal experiences I’ll describe in just a bit, I was particularly interested in the editorials at two papers, the Toronto Star and the Los Angeles Times. According to the Star editorial, the speech was way overdue and it proved Clinton “is a common liar,” and that he “has diminished his high office, has fueled public cynicism, and has invited people to accept a low standard of responsibility.” The Times editorial said that Americans “have a right to feel disappointment” in Clinton and exhorted readers to “think of all the grief Clinton could have saved himself, his family, the White House staff, and the country” if he had only spoken the truth last January. The editorial was titled “Seven Months Late.” In short, these two papers made it clear that they morally condemn any delay in telling the truth or in taking responsibility for having lied.
  Anyway, that’s their position when it comes to presidents. It’s not their position when it comes to reporters. At least not their reporters.
  In early 1989, shortly after I began work as an editor at the Washington Monthly, the magazine received a letter from a Canadian reader notifying us of something amiss in a column by Toronto Star Washington, D.C. bureau chief Bob Hepburn that ran in the paper on January 5, 1989. We got the Hepburn column and soon saw for ourselves that the letter writer was correct: Three paragraphs in the column were identical to three paragraphs in the already-published January 1989 Monthly cover story about corruption and mismanagement in the D.C. city government by then-editor Jason DeParle, now with the New York Times (save for one word: Hepburn’s bow to originality was to use “murders” where DeParle had used “killings”). Hepburn made no mention of DeParle.
  In October 1989, I read a piece in that month’s Vanity Fair by a writer named Ann Louise Bardach about a $1 million murder-for-insurance scheme that almost worked. It involved a doctor who killed a patient, body switching, and a nationwide manhunt. It remains one of the best true crime stories I’ve ever read. A few years later, I stumbled upon a 154-word notice inside the second section of the Los Angeles Times stating that Bardach was suing Times reporter Edwin Chen and Penguin Books for copyright infringement over Chen’s 1992 Penguin paperback, Cheating Death. I called Bardach up, soon met with her, and got Chen’s book. I saw with my own eyes that there were at least 40 passages in Chen’s book that were virtually identical to passages in Bardach’s piece. I learned that Chen received $50,000 for his book and was about to make a movie deal when Bardach’s lawsuit interrupted his plans. I obtained a copy of the sworn deposition Chen gave in preparation for trial, where I learned that before coming out with his book, Chen had talked to Bardach twice about her research; that Chen hired five researchers to work on his book—about a crime that unfolded in Southern California and Ohio—while he was working for the Times in Washington, D.C. and Saudi Arabia; that along with letters of introduction he sent to some of these researchers, Chen provided Bardach’s Vanity Fair piece; and that in his book’s acknowledgements, Chen mentioned all of his hired researchers but did not mention Bardach. I also learned that subsequently, although neither Chen nor Penguin ever admitted any wrongdoing, under a judgment entered in favor of Bardach by the court, Penguin paid Bardach $25,000. (Chen kept his $50,000.)
  Journalists—especially, I would later find out, cornered journalists—like to use their word skills to make plagiarism seem more complicated and less wrong than it is. Plagiarism isn’t really just about words. Primarily, it’s about screwing with journalism’s fundamental assumption: A reader presupposes of any newspaper story stating X that the reporter named in the byline has attempted to independently verify X. Fiction-writing á la Stephen Glass or Mike Barnicle violates that assumption—in these cases, the writer knows he has done no such thing. But plagiarists like Hepburn and Chen violate it too, the only difference being that fiction writers know there is no independent evidence for X while plagiarists simply don’t have any.
  Secondarily, plagiarism is a form of theft. Reporter A seeks out an explorer in the middle of the jungle and does what no one has ever done before: gets him to talk. When Reporter B skips the jungle and the cajoling and simply passes off the interview as his own, he is converting A’s labor and skill to his own profit. So, to sum up, plagiarism is a sin against readers—lying to them—and against writers—stealing from them. In fact, here’s a handy definition to remember when the b.s. starts flying: It’s lying about stealing.
  (Note: Since defensive wordsmiths will grasp at any straw, I should note that my having previously written about Hepburn and Chen—in the Fall 1994 Forbes MediaCritic—doesn’t make the piece you are now reading plagiarism. It’s just common sense that you can no more plagiarize from yourself than you can steal from your own bank account. And it’s the law: I never sold the previous piece to Forbes MediaCritic—being a freelancer at the time, I rented it out to the magazine for a single use. All subsequent intellectual property rights to the article remained mine.)
  Well, it’s clear what the Star and the Times think of lying about sex. What do they think about lying about stealing? (Which, unlike furtive sex, is clearly job-related.) Do they feel disappointed in their plagiarizing employees? Do they insist on a prompt confession and apology and enforce a high standard of responsibility?
  Shortly after I learned about Hepburn’s cribbing, I had a phone conversation with a top editor at the Toronto Star, who assured me that the matter would be dealt with in the strictest possible terms. But here’s what actually happened. On May 17, 1989, Hepburn wrote a column in the Star about the matter. He never used the word “apology” or said he was sorry. He called what he’d done a “mistake,” and hid behind the passive voice, saying, “This is the first time anything like this has ever happened to me.” Hepburn’s explanation was that in preparing the original column he collected material from his newspaper and magazine files on Washington and then “as is my practice, I had copied them on a legal-sized notepad.” What happened, he wrote, is that “when I actually wrote the column, I inadvertently repeated” DeParle’s material.
  Raise your hand if you think the Washington bureau chief of Canada’s largest newspaper doesn’t have access to a copying machine.
  To further minimize what he’d done, Hepburn noted that the offending three paragraphs were “all I took from the 12-page magazine article—not another sentence, not even a phrase.” (Actually that’s not true. Hepburn segued into the vexed paragraphs by remarking that they provided examples of why Washington was “the worst city government in the U.S.” And what was the title of DeParle’s story? “The Worst City Government in America.”) What Hepburn didn’t mention was that his column was only 16 paragraphs, and that some 100 of its 600-odd words were DeParle’s. Although the headline over Hepburn’s follow-up column oxymoronically refers to inadvertent plagiarism, the column itself never breathes the p-word.
  But the column did suggest that some punishment was at hand. Hepburn concluded, “[T]his will be the last column I write for the Toronto Star on this page for the foreseeable future.” But nine days later, Hepburn was back in the paper with two pieces, one on the business section front page. Today he is the paper’s foreign editor. (“Would a Canadian prime minister,” wondered that Star editorial about The Speech, “exposed as Clinton has been in trying to deceive the public, have the decency to resign? We would hope so.”)
  Neither Edwin Chen, nor his Penguin editor, nor the editor of the Los Angeles Times at the time this all happened, Shelby Coffey III (now a big-shot at ABC News), would talk to me about the Bardach episode. The Times‘ then-national editor, Norman C. Miller, did speak to me, telling me that at the time Bardach filed the lawsuit he was satisfied by Chen’s statement to him that “these were common sources and that he didn’t plagiarize.” But Miller admitted that he made this judgment without having looked at Chen’s damning deposition, a document Miller confessed to me he still hadn’t read by the time of our conversation, although it had by then been available for months.
  In Chen’s deposition, when confronted by a passage from his book that is nearly identical to one of Bardach’s, he denied copying—what he did, he said, was describe an identical place with identical words. A place, by the way, that Bardach had visited, but that Chen had not. And indeed, the deposition makes it clear that many statements that in Chen’s book appear to be made to Chen were in fact only made to Bardach, some of them by people Chen never met. The readers of the Los Angeles Times were never informed of any of this. Not a word from Chen, nor from the paper’s celebrated media reporter David Shaw, and no fulminating editorials. To this moment, that buried 154-word lawsuit notice is it. And there is no evidence that Chen has ever been sanctioned. Today he is a highly regarded member of the Times‘ Washington bureau, his pieces regularly appearing on the front page. One of his recent efforts there ran under the headline: “Both Sides Urge Clinton to Admit He Told Lies.”
  Scott Shuger writes the “Today’s Papers” column for Slate magazine. His pieces have also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, the New Republic, Los Angeles, the Washington Monthly, and other national and local publications.
  At a Paris conference on new approaches to capitalism last week, Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told reporters that “Wall Street is talking up the recovery because it would like to sell stocks.” This is consistent with the financial industry’s shady tactics that David Corn and Kevin Drum discussed last Friday on Bill Moyers’ Journal. Instead of acting morally, Wall Street executives will do whatever they can to make a buck. And it’s all legal under our easygoing financial regulations.
  In the current issue of Mother Jones, Stiglitz attacks this moral bankruptcy head on. If we know that these economic villains knowingly trashed our economy, he asks, why do we let them get away with it? Here’s an excerpt:
  Read the piece for more on the Wall Street’s deals with the devil and why we continue to let executives bring home massive bonuses instead of hold them accountable.
  So Donald Trump used to be married to Ivana Trump. According to an account resurfaced by Tim Mak and Brandy Zadrozny at the Daily Beast, the former Mrs. Trump once used the word “rape” during legal proceedings in connection with an event between her and her ex-husband, the current GOP front-runner:
  The book, by former Texas Monthly and Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III, described a harrowing scene.
  The Daily Beast has the entire “violent assault.” It’s indeed harrowing. Trump has denied the allegations.
  It’s important to note that this never went to court, Trump never faced any charges, and Ivana Trump herself walked back the allegations before the book in question was published:
  “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
  This brings us now to Donald Trump’s lawyer who The Daily Beast reached out to for comment. He went on a tirade that would make Trump blush:
  Realizing perhaps that denying the undeniable criminality of spousal rape was not the best way to kill the story, Cohen switches gears, making things worse:
  Trump’s lawyer continued to threaten the reporter by saying, “Tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.”
  Shout out to my friend Nina Strochlic and former deputy Asawin Suebsaeng for helping report the story.
  Today the spring has finally come guys, and we are all extremely excited. Why today? Because it’sSaint Patrick’s Day — the first warm breath of spring, the day which always brings a good mood and the plenty of exciting experiences to all of us. We congratulate all Irish people worldwide, and wish health, wealth and good luck to all of you!
  Saint Patrick’s Day (or Paddy’s Day), which is celebrated on March 17, commemorates the death of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. It is the day for spiritual renewal and offering prayers for missionaries all around the world. This festive holiday is popular not in the Ireland only — it is also celebrated by the Irish diaspora living in Europe, the USA, Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, and other countries. Saint Patrick’s Day is usually associated with all Irish: green and gold colors, shamrocks and luck. It is the day of parades, wearing of the green, tasting frothy delights and drinking beer.
  We couldn’t pass this great holiday over:) On the occasion of St. Patrick’s day, MotoCMS grants a 10% OFF on ALL premium Moto Flash Templates to all of you! The Promo starts tomorrow, on March 17, and ends up on March 18 inclusive. So, hurry up and use this great offer: don’t miss your chance to purchase professional Moto Flash CMS Templates with a good discount.
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