Morning radar: Three things we're talking about this morning
Facebook v. breastfeeders We have our first breastfeeding/Facebook scrap of 2011: A Facebook page dedicated to all things breastfeeding, called The Leaky Boob, was taken down over the weekend for violating the Facebook terms of service. No, it wasn't because of the goofy name, but because there were photographs of breastfeeding moms.
Run by Jessica of theleakyboob.com, the page is back up, but the controversy is just getting started. Some of the Facebook members' accounts were disabled in the brouhaha and Jessica is still mad-as-hell. Canadian blogger Emma Waverman of MSN's Embrace the Chaos echoed much of the sentiment before the page was reinstated, "The worst part of this particular action is that Facebook has removed an incredibly supportive place for breastfeeding women to ask questions, seek advice, connect and celebrate."
Autism fraud News that the work of already-disgraced researcher Andrew Wakefield - his much-repeated 1998 study suggested vaccines cause autism - was a complete fraud is moving like wild fire across the media.
As Globe columnist André Picard explains of the 12-child study, three of the nine children reported with regressive autism did not have autism at all. "Despite the claim that all 12 children were 'previously normal,' five had documented developmental problems long before their shots." And it turns out that parents of 11 of the 12 children blamed the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine for their children's health problems before they were recruited for the study, Picard writes.
Commentary is bubbling up from all corners. Forbes blogger Daniel Fisher focuses on the fact that the study was the function of a legal strategy.
"What makes this case particularly disturbing is that none of the outcry that accompanied the Vioxx scandal or other drug scares has erupted here," he writes. "Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of children have been needlessly exposed to injury or death to serve a flawed legal strategy and the lawyers are silent. Maybe because there's nobody with deep pockets to sue." And maybe that's why major anti-vaccine critics like former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy, who has published a number of books on the topic, remain silent on the news.
Will power Elizabeth Edwards rewrote her will six days before she died, leaving everything to her children and nothing to her philandering ex, John.
Seems like a fair response to public humiliation. Many of us would have made that change, well, immediately.