Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

When Susan G. Komen announced Tuesday afternoon it was pulling its grants for breast-cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood, the reaction from critics was fast and furious.

The move was called, in some of the nicer assessments: “disgusting,” “anti-women,” and an “act of cowardice.” The president of Planned Parenthood said she couldn’t understand how the nation’s leading breast-cancer charity “could have bowed to this kind of bullying,” alleging that the funding was cut because of pressure from anti-abortion groups. Planned Parenthood offers wide-ranging reproductive health care services, but its work is centered on pro-choice decision-making and sexual education.

Petitions were also started that called for the partnership between Komen and Planned Parenthood to be restored…

Komen explained its decision by blaming new rules that prohibit it from giving money to groups under federal investigation. Planned Parenthood, which is the subject of congressional inquiry over whether it spent public money on abortions, falls into that category. Critics of the Komen decision say that inquiry is a “faux” one, and not likely to turn up anything…

Komen for the Cure has been under fire before, a number of times. As Amanda Marcotte points out in Slate, Komen was already “under serious scrutiny” by critics who believe “the organization cares more about shoring up their image than making real progress in the fight for women’s health…”

The Post’s Melinda Henneberger, who once suffered from breast cancer, writes that she doesn’t feel betrayed by the decision because “Komen has for some time seemed to me to be run like any other big business…”

I’m rarely surprised over the actions of charities which have become a corporate entity unto themselves – instead of remaining focused on whichever need prompted their profitable beginnings. Nothing new about a “non-profit” that is very profitable for its administrators – in terms of dollars and political clout.

Poisonally, henceforth I will advise anyone asking — to avoid the Susan Komen charity like the political plague they are. There is no shortage of legitimate, good-hearted and courageous charities dealing with women’s health. I’d suggest starting with Planned Parenthood.

UPDATE: Mollie Williams, Komen’s top public health official resigned in protest. “Williams believed she could not honorably serve in her position once Komen had caved to pressure from the anti-abortion right.”

Donors reacting to Komen’s decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood contributed $650,000 in 24 hours, nearly enough to replace last year’s Komen funding.

UPDATE 2: Mayor Mike Bloomberg — a longtime supporter of the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation — made a strong public rebuke of the organization Thursday by giving $250,000 to Planned Parenthood.

UPDATE 3: We won! Komen returns to profiding funds to Planned Parenthood.

In the brutal world of online commerce, where a competing product is just a click away, retailers need all the juice they can get to close a sale.

Some exalt themselves by anonymously posting their own laudatory reviews. Now there is an even simpler approach: offering a refund to customers in exchange for a write-up.

By the time VIP Deals ended its rebate on Amazon.com late last month, its leather case for the Kindle Fire was receiving the sort of acclaim once reserved for the likes of Kim Jong-il. Hundreds of reviewers proclaimed the case a marvel, a delight, exactly what they needed to achieve bliss. And definitely worth five stars…

By last week, 310 out of 335 reviews of VIP Deals’ Vipertek brand premium slim black leather case folio cover were five stars and nearly all the rest were four stars. The acclaim seemed authentic, barring the occasional indiscretion. “I would have done 4 stars instead of 5 without the deal,” one man bluntly wrote…

But three customers said in interviews that the offer was straightforward. Searching for a protective case for their new Kindle Fire, they came upon the VIP page selling a cover for under $10 plus shipping (the official list price was $59.99). When the package arrived it included a letter extending an invitation “to write a product review for the Amazon community.”

“In return for writing the review, we will refund your order so you will have received the product for free,” it said…

The merchant, which seems to have no Web site and uses a mailbox drop in suburban Los Angeles as a return address, did not respond to further requests for comment. As of last week, the company (as opposed to its products) had received 4,945 reviews on Amazon for a nearly perfect 4.9 rating out of five…

Under F.T.C. rules, when there is a connection between a merchant and someone promoting its product that affects the endorsement’s credibility, it must be fully disclosed. In one case, Legacy Learning Systems, which sells music instructional tapes, paid $250,000 last March to settle charges that it had hired affiliates to recommend the videos on Web sites.

Amazon, sent a copy of the VIP letter by The New York Times, said its guidelines prohibited compensation for customer reviews. A few days later, it deleted all the reviews for the case, which itself was listed as unavailable. Then it took down the product page itself.

RTFA. Some of it is useful, some humorous. Some of it is about as ignorant as you would expect from an American newspaper. Apparently, they expect one of the largest retailers in the world – amazon.com – to maintain a staff of reviewers to read and evaluate the personal reviews of thousands of products on a daily basis.

DaVita’s new planned world headquarters in Denver

One of the nation’s largest providers of kidney dialysis deliberately wasted medicine in order to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in extra payments from Medicare, a former clinic nurse and a doctor are charging in a whistle-blower lawsuit.

The lawsuit says that the company, DaVita, used larger than necessary vials of medicine knowing that Medicare would pay for the unused portion of each vial if it were deemed unavoidable waste. DaVita, which treats nearly a third of the nation’s dialysis patients, denies the accusations.

The accusations are the latest related to how financial incentives may have driven overuse of pharmaceuticals in the dialysis business. In January, Medicare began a payment system that pays for the overall treatment and does not pay separately for the drugs accompanying it. Many practices, including the size of some vials used, suddenly changed, providing an instant case study of how financial incentives can influence treatment choices.

The lawsuit says that until January, for example, DaVita required nurses to use one 10-microgram vial of Zemplar, a vitamin D drug, instead of a six-microgram dose in three two-microgram vials,. It then billed Medicare for all 10 micrograms even though four went unused.

Instead of giving an entire 100-milligram vial of Venofer, an iron drug, once or twice a month, the clinics gave 25-milligram doses more frequently, the suit says. But since the drug came only in a 100-milligram vial, Medicare was billed for 100 milligrams for each dose, even though 75 milligrams were wasted, the lawsuit says…

This so-called bundled payment system has instantly turned drugs from a source of profit to a cost to be avoided. And dialysis clinics have responded.

Not especially different from the ever-popular cost-plus billing often used in the military-industrial complex. My least favorite form of welfare for capitalists producing non-consumable goods. If you have a guaranteed profit of any size – and can inflate the legitimate costs 100% – you double your profit.

 
The evangelical Christian broadcaster whose much-ballyhooed Judgment Day prophecy went conspicuously unfulfilled on Saturday has a simple explanation for what went wrong — he miscalculated.

Instead of the world physically coming to an end on May 21 with a great, cataclysmic earthquake, as he had predicted, Harold Camping, 89, said he now believes his forecast is playing out “spiritually,” with the actual apocalypse set to occur five months later, on October 21.

Camping, who launched a doomsday countdown in which some followers spent their life’s savings in anticipation of being swept into heaven, issued his correction during an appearance on his “Open Forum” radio show from Oakland, California…

Reflecting on scripture afterward, Camping said it “dawned” on him that a “merciful and compassionate God” would spare humanity from “hell on Earth for five months” by compressing the physical apocalypse into a shorter time frame.

But he insisted that October 21 has always been the end-point of his own End Times chronology, or at least, his latest chronology…

Asked what advice he would give to followers who gave up much or all of their worldly possessions in the belief that his Judgment Day forecast would come true, Camping drew a comparison to the nation’s recent economic slump.

“We just had a great recession. There’s lots of people who lost their jobs, lots of people who lost their houses … and somehow they all survived,” he said.

“People cope, he added. “We’re not in the business of giving any financial advice. We’re in the business of telling people maybe there is someone you can talk to, and that’s God.”

A good bartender will achieve the same effect – for the cost of a couple of beers.

A man stands near the crowned head of a statue of Jesus being built in Swiebodzin, 110 km west of Poznan, western Poland, November 4, 2010. The statue, whose body is 33 metres high, is expected to be completed in November.

It’s being erected as a tourist attraction holy monument.

The Haredi Vuvuzela

Israeli police broke up a scam carried out by ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups who faked ID cards for fictitious students in order to receive millions of extra dollars from the state.

Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police arrested six people after they found more than 1,000 fake ID cards during a raid on three ultra-Orthodox educational institutions in Jerusalem.

The fraud lasted more than a year, Rosenfeld said, and cost the government “tens of millions of shekels.”

Israel provides stipends for students who study at full-time Jewish seminaries, or Yeshivas, a policy in place for years, but one that has been facing increased opposition from the country’s secular majority.

Consecutive government coalitions receive support of ultra-religious parties just like old-fashioned ward-heelers who in turn get a payoff from the government treasury.

Certainly looks like it works well. For votes, I mean. Not honesty or education.

A Warren [Michigan] woman accused of telling her 12-year-old son he had cancer and holding fundraisers to bilk people was formally arraigned in 39th District Court.

Carol Lynn Schnuphase, 47, is charged with second-degree child abuse and two counts of taking money under false pretenses. The child abuse charge carries a penalty of four years in prison and the false pretense charges are five-year felonies…

“She shaved her son’s head and eyebrows every other week,” said Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith. “She crushed tablets and put them in his applesauce to make him appear lethargic and as if he was going through chemotherapy.

“We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Smith said Schuphrase, who is unemployed, used money from the fund-raisers to pay bills and everyday expenses. When authorities removed her son from her home this summer, she told people that he died and that she needed money for his funeral, Smith said…

Local churches held fundraisers for the boy, officials said. One event, held at St. Thomas Church in Eastpointe, raised more than $7,000. Schnuphase allegedly accepted the donations as a check in her name.

Every day, some scumball figures out how to make crime just a little sleazier.

A retired transit worker was nearly cheated out of a $14 million jackpot by a coldhearted clerk who pocketed the winning ticket.

Milledge McCassell, 72, proved that what you really need to hit it big is a dollar, a dream – and a lot of determination…

McCassell’s road to riches began at the Dynasty Deli and Grocery in Jamaica, Queens, where he took a stack of lottery tickets on Aug. 26. He scanned the tickets at a self-service station – and to his delight, one of them prompted the screen to flash “BIG WINNER.”

When McCassell went to the clerk to find out how much he’d won, the guy gave him “a few dollars,” said New York Lottery spokesman Carolyn Hapeman.

“Milledge said, ‘What about the big winner?‘ The clerk said, ‘You didn’t give me a big winner ticket. I don’t know what you’re talking about…’”

“I knew something wasn’t right so the next day, I went to another retailer I trusted and together, we called the Lottery to file a complaint,” he said.

Lottery officials and state police investigators went to Dynasty Deli to question the clerk and review electronic information on the store’s machines.

The data “cast serious doubt that [the clerk] never received the ticket as he claimed,” said Hapeman. “All of a sudden, the deli clerk miraculously was able to find the ticket and returned it…”

Lottery officials said all machines were removed from the deli, which is now banned from selling tickets.

Hopefully, the DA will decide to prosecute the clerk – if he’s still in town.

Rebecca and Trent Dupaix of Eagle Mountain, Utah, spent a year searching for their dream home. The couple, who have five children, considered 15 to 20 houses before finding “the one.”

They were thrilled when they closed on a $227,000, rock-and-stucco home with five bedrooms and two and a half baths in March 2009.

But four months later, when a local television reporter was doing a story on housing taxes in their subdivision, the Dupaixs discovered that their sales contract included a “resale fee” that allows the developer to collect 1 percent of the sales price from the seller every time the property changes hands — for the next 99 years…

A growing number of developers and builders have been quietly slipping “resale fee” covenants into sales agreements of newly built homes in some subdivisions. In the Dupaix contract, the clause was in a separate 13-page document — called the declaration of covenants, conditions and restrictions — that wasn’t even included in the closing papers and did not require a signature…

Freehold Capital Partners, a real estate financing firm founded by the Texas developer Joseph B. Alderman III, has been leading the charge. According to William White, Freehold’s chief operating officer, the firm has signed up more than 5,000 developers who are adding the covenant to developments worth hundreds of billions of dollars that will be built out over the next decade in 43 states…

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equals

Anna Chapman need never have bothered with moving to Manhattan to become a sleeper agent for the Russian intelligence service. The experience of another femme fatale, Robin Sage, suggests the 28-year-old spy, who posted raunchy photos on her Facebook profile, should instead have honed her social networking skills.

In just a month, Sage made connections with hundreds of people from the US military, intelligence agencies, information security companies and government contractors. The 25-year-old navy cyberthreat analyst was invited to speak at security conferences and offered jobs at companies including Google and Lockheed Martin.

Her Twitter profile proclaimed: “Sorry to say, I’m not a Green Beret! Just a cute girl stopping by to say hey! My life is about info sec [information security] all the way!”

But there was a slight hitch: Robin Sage did not exist. The pretty cybergeek, supposedly educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a prep school in New Hampshire, was in reality an avatar created by a security researcher to find out how social networking sites could be used to covertly gather intelligence.

Thomas Ryan, co-founder of Provide Security says…Sage attracted dozens of connections across sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, including a senior intelligence official in the US marine corps, the chief of staff for a US congressman and several senior executives at defence contractors, as well as an official from the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds, launches and runs US spy satellites…

The security analyst told the magazine that the vast majority (82%) of Sage’s online friends were men, suggesting her looks lay behind her popularity. His conclusion after completing the study: “The big takeaway is not to befriend anybody unless you really know who they are.”

Especially if you’re just looking for someone to jump into bed with you.