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POPSWal-Mart "You Bastards"!!!! The company persuaded a federal district court judge and the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals to award it the full amount, even though Shank's family had paid for the lawsuit. Nor did it matter that the settlement covered a fraction of her expenses and losses. Wal-Mart's healthcare plan clearly states that it gets first dibs on any money recovered by injured employees. Such provisions aren't uncommon in health plans, and Wal-Mart isn't the first to enforce one. Doing what the law allows isn't the same as doing the right thing, however. The company made itself whole at the expense of a helpless former employee who will never be whole again. Instead of having some resources to improve her care, Shank will receive only the basic services afforded her by Medicaid and Social Security. Nor will the trust fund be in a position to reimburse Medicaid (i.e., taxpayers), which stood to collect any unspent money upon Shank's death.
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POPSIn defence of plastic "New plastics that change from liquid to solid on impact are finding applications in protective clothing and plastic products are being developed using the principles of nature - an area of research called biomimetics. So plastic can be valuable and can be used for functions where it needs to last for a considerable length of time. Concepts of green design should now be applied to all new plastics products so that disposable items, such as plastic packaging and throwaway consumer items, biodegrade and do not fill landfill sites or litter the landscape or seas"
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POPSSupermarkets Throwing Away 2 Million Tons Of Food A Year We visited a dozen stores over several nights last week to check what was being thrown away and discovered hundreds of pounds worth of food dumped. At a Sainsbury’s superstore next to the Dome in Greenwich, South East London – the chain’s flagship “environmentally-friendly” shop with its own wind turbines – staff said it was standard practice to throw away food before its sell-by date. And they’re not even allowed to take it home. One said: “Someone just stands there and throws it into the skip. We wish we could buy it – but we’re not allowed.” Pointing to meat on the “reduced” shelf, he added: “Come midnight, anything that hasn’t been sold will get taken off the shelf... if it’s out of date it will be logged on the computer, put against our losses, then in the skip.” Four-pint bottles of milk with nine days still to run had been thrown out, along with nine cans of cola with a date stamp of April 2009.
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POPSWhy We Read I spent all my time growing up in the public library. I remember hiding "The Sterile Cuckoo" and "Catcher In The Rye" and "A Clockwork Orange" from my parents. It was my little secret, my corner of the world where people were different; like me :) "One day, he tapped a wall of stone. A door appeared. Behind it was a different world, not better really, but brighter and less dull. I read for the same reason that he tapped: to look for doors, to push through walls."
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POPSTetris 25th birthday "I always thought that every game has a certain shelf life. In the early PC business it would take somebody else a year to copy your game, so I thought we had a year or two before somebody came up with a better Tetris," Rogers added. "You know what? They tried. But in 25 years, nobody has." :)
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POPSBravo For Bush And Bravo For The Traders
Well, if Congress moves to seal the deal, oil prices will probably keep on falling. That’s the way traders work. They discount the future. Psychology and expectations can turn on a dime. The congressional ban on offshore drilling expires September 30, so that becomes a key date. A new report from Wall Street research house Sanford C. Bernstein says that California actually could start producing new oil within one year if the moratorium were lifted. The California oil is under shallow water and already has been explored. Drilling platforms have been in place since before the moratorium. They’re talking about 10 billion barrels worth off the coast of California. There’s also a “gang of 10” in the Senate, five Republicans and five Democrats, that is trying to work a compromise deal on lifting the moratorium. So it’s possible a lot of action on this front could occur much sooner than people seem to think. Deregulate, decontrol, and unleash the American energy industry.
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POPSUnclaimed dead stack up in Wayne County morgue Things like this truly sadden me, I don't blame people for not claiming them. As is stated ""Some people really have to make a choice of putting food on the table or burying their loved ones." What is really to blame is this crash/ recession which was engineered by the banks as it was in 1929. To think that they caused people to even have considered that decision is criminal.
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POPSObama Asks His Left-Wing Brownshirts to Report Any Counter-Revolutionary Behavior.....
A new level of insanity has been reached, Obama wants people who are bad-mouthing his legislation reported. Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East Germany's Secret Police http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi?currentPage=all Ulrike Poppe used to be one of the most surveilled women in East Germany. For 15 years, agents of the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, or State Security Service) followed her, bugged her phone and home, and harassed her unremittingly, right up until she and other dissidents helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989. One shelf, just to the left of her desk, is special. It holds a pair of 3-inch-thick black binders " copies of the most important documents in Poppe's secret police files. This is her Stasi shelf. Poppe learned to recognize many of the men assigned to tail her each day. They had crew cuts and never wore jeans or sneakers. Sometimes they took pictures of her on the sidewalk,