Australia: No residency for boy with Down syndrome

SYDNEY, Australia - Thirteen-year-old Lukas Moeller has Down syndrome. His father is a doctor who came to Australia from Germany to help fill a shortage of physicians in rural communities.

But now Australia has rejected Dr. Bernhard Moeller's application for residency, saying ( Read more... )

Hat tip to Nezua, here. Admittedly, the article comes from the UK's Daily Mail, a notoriously tabloidy/salacious source. Still, it's distressing, and not the sort of thing one can spin, so I'm not being leery of them as I usually would.

A man told today how he was shot three times in a London street for wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt.

Dube Egwuatu ( Read more... )

Your desperation is showing.

RICHMOND -- The chairman of the Virginia Republican Party has compared Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden because of the Illinois senator's past association with Bill Ayers, who has confessed to domestic bombings as a member of the Vietnam War-era Weather Underground.

Virginia Democrats, and ( Read more... )

Conn. high court rules gay couples can marry

Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled Friday that gay couples have the right to marry, making the state the third behind Massachusetts and California to legalize such unions. The ruling comes just weeks before Californians go to the polls on a historic gay-marriage ballot question, the first time the issue ( Read more... )

Lisa at Questioning Transphobia has posted an article about Angie Zapata, the Latina trans woman murdered earlier this year(?). Lisa calls particular attention to one detail of the articles. Her killer, Anthony Andrade, claims that she deceived him and he flew into a murderous rage when he discovered that she was trans, an all-too-common defense ( Read more... )

From CNN:
Artificial blood tested on patients without consent

Friday, February 20, 2004 Posted: 9:27 AM EST (1427 GMT)

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Paramedics are testing an experimental blood substitute on severely injured patients without their consent in an unusual study under way or proposed at 20 hospitals around the country.

The study was launched ( Read more... )

I used to think I had a clue what death was...

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A West Virginia woman is at the Cleveland Clinic after walking the line between life and death.

Doctors are calling Val Thomas a medical miracle. They said they can't explain how she is alive.

They said Thomas suffered two heart attacks and had no brain waves for more than 17 hours. At ( Read more... )

Via
( Read more... )

...I didn't even know this had happened.
Dorothy Dixon was subjected to months of abuse prior to her death, according to police

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, police now believe that Dorothy Dixon, who was found dead on January 21 as the result of injuries she sustained from being beaten, scaled and shot with a pellet gun, may have been ( Read more... )

Dear government: Was this really necessary?

Afraid of public trial, author to plead guilty in online obscenity case
Saturday, May 17, 2008
By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

She battled the federal government's allegations for more than a year and a half, but in the end, Karen Fletcher's mental health will win out over her principles. And ( Read more... )