Notliveweb

In a stark reminder of growing costs, the government has released a new estimate that healthcare spending grew to a record 17.3% of the U.S. economy last year, marking the largest one-year jump in its share of the economy since the government started keeping such records half a century ago. The almost $2.5 trillion spent in 2009 was $134 billion more than the previous year, when healthcare consumed 16.2% of the gross domestic product, according to...

In a last-ditch effort to revive struggling MySpace, owner News Corp. has adopted a new strategy that it hopes will give the site's millions of users a reason to keep coming back. MySpace -- which had begun to offer horoscopes, weather reports and other services -- wants to go back to its roots: entertainment. The online social network, which once dominated the field now lorded over by Facebook, will use information that users volunteer on the site -- and the celebrity pages they check out -- to recommend movie trailers, recently released songs and video games to them.

In their March 17 Times Op-Ed article, "Why glorify the murderers?" Ron Kehrmann, Yossi Mendelevich and Yossi Zur make a number of misleading statements and remove all historical context in their effort to demonize Palestinians as people who hate Israeli children more than they love their own. To begin with, the Palestinian Authority did not "decide to honor" Dalal Mughrabi, as the authors claim; the decision was made by a lower-level municipal council....

Ramona Ripston has never been one to back away from a fight. As the driving force behind the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California for 38 years, she's battled police over the treatment of prisoners and the homeless. She's marched against segregation and sued for better inner-city schools. She's taken authorities to court for withholding public housing and medical care from those she believes need them most. But with the recession taking a deep bite out of government budgets and philanthropy, Ripston has wearied of the setbacks dealt the causes she holds dear.

It turns out that tainted food can not only make people sick, but it can also cost them a bundle in the process. A new consumer research report released Wednesday has found that the health-related costs of food-borne illnesses total $152 billion a year, including the costs of medical bills, lost wages and lost productivity. That total is more than four times that of earlier estimates calculated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The findings come as regulatory efforts to patrol the country's food sector are growing amid reports of a string of costly -- and sometimes fatal -- outbreaks of food-borne illness involving peanuts, jalapeno peppers, spinach, beef and other foods.

Today's topic: In hindsight, did Congress and the president react too hastily in 2001 by passing the Patriot Act just weeks after the 9/11 attacks? Did the revisions in 2005 adequately address concerns that the act went too far or didn't go far enough? Jena Baker McNeill and Julian Sanchez finish their debate on the Patriot Act, key provisions of which Congress is considering reauthorizing. Point: Jena Baker McNeill Let's stop rehashing the birth of the Patriot Act and start talking about preventing terrorist attacks in 2010 and beyond.

The Times excels when it comments on social and political issues on its opinion pages. But when tackling technical issues, it often falls dramatically short. I am both frustrated and annoyed at the lack of knowledge of nuclear power that pervades this country, and the perpetuation of this ignorance by well-meaning but equally uninformed authority figures. The Times' Nov. 28 editorial, "No new nukes — plants, that is," perpetuates this ignorance. People fear what they don't understand.

The Israeli government has a long history of hunting down its enemies, as it did, famously, with members of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group that killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Because of this, most Israelis and much of the world assume that Israel's Mossad spy agency was responsible for the Jan. 19 slaying of Mahmoud Mabhouh, founder of Hamas' military wing, in his Dubai hotel room. United Arab Emirates police have released details of the killing, including that the hit squad members carried fake British, Irish and German passports, some in the names of Israeli citizens who apparently were unaware that their identities had been usurped.

Ending the Democrats' decades-long quest to create a healthcare safety net to match Social Security, the House of Representatives on Sunday night approved sweeping legislation to guarantee Americans access to medical care for the first time, delivering President Obama the biggest victory of his young presidency. The bill, which passed 219 to 212 without a single Republican vote, would make a nearly $1-trillion commitment in taxpayer money over the next decade to help an estimated 32 million uninsured Americans get health coverage.

The Times' April 4 article on Beijing's funding of a Los Angeles-area school district's Chinese language and culture program was disturbing -- not because of the program itself, but because of the knee-jerk xenophobia of its most vocal opponents. As The Times reported, some believe the Chinese government is just as interested in brainwashing students as it is in teaching students its languages and culture. Though Chinese is becoming an increasingly popular subject in American schools, it is still nowhere as omnipresent as English is in Chinese schools.