Clippings: September 2nd, 2009.

The University of Texas has decided to end participation in the National Merit Scholarship Program. This saddens me, as I was one of those folks who benefited from the program when I was attending UT.

Starting next fall, the university will begin channeling that money into need-based aid instead.

I’m a little shocked that there hasn’t been more attention to this NYT article about Memorial Medical Center in the wake of Katrina.

It is now evident that more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients — and far more patients were injected — than was previously understood. When the names on toxicology reports and autopsies are matched with recollections and documentation from the days after Katrina, it appears that at least 17 patients were injected with morphine or the sedative midazolam, or both, after a long-awaited rescue effort was at last emptying the hospital. A number of these patients were extremely ill and might not have survived the evacuation. Several were almost certainly not near death when they were injected, according to medical professionals who treated them at Memorial and an internist’s review of their charts and autopsies that was commissioned by investigators but never made public.

Linking to this Fast Company article about fonts that make people mad (thanks to Radley Balko) gives me an excuse to link to one of my favorite Achewoods.

Someone thinks it is a good idea to cancel their morning local news program and replace it with a televised radio show. Yeah. I don’t see this ending well. Televised radio works very well; if your name is “Howard Stern”.

This is already on FARK, but I couldn’t let it pass; last week they linked to a NY Daily News story about a former rapper who got Warner Music to pay for her Ph.D in psychology. Great story; persecuted artist sticks it to the evil record company execs, right? Except the story was a complete fabrication.

One Response to “Clippings: September 2nd, 2009.”

  1. […] Sheri Fink’s story about one hospital during Katrina (which I noted back in September) shared a Pulitzer for investigative reporting with the Philadelphia Daily News. Interestingly, […]