Move over Marion Barry, you have some competition! It can’t be a banner day for any politician when he has to call a press conference to declare that he’s not a crack addict, but that’s precisely what Toronto Mayor Rob Ford did today. After a week of silence, Ford addressed the controversy that began when three journalists—two from the Toronto Star and one from Gawker—reported that they had seen a video of an inebriated Ford smoking from a crack pipe. Ford’s comments today, from the Star and Toronto Sun:

“There has been a serious accusation from the Toronto Star that I use crack cocaine. I do not use crack cocaine nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.”

“As for a video, I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist. It is most unfortunate, very unfortunate that my colleagues and the great people of this city have been exposed to the fact that I have been judged by the media without any evidence.”

So what to make of this? You can parse it for yourself, but John Cook at Gawker thinks Ford chose his words carefully. He did not, for example, say that he has never smoked crack, only that he does not do so currently. That he denied being an addict is irrelevant—nobody said he was. And Ford chose not to comment on the video instead of denying it was him. Nothing he said, in other words, “is inconsistent with Rob Ford having been caught on tape smoking crack cocaine within the past six months.” (Cook and the Star reporters were given a chance to buy the video but did not do so. Gawker’s subsequent attempt to buy it via crowdfunding has hit a snag, notes Slate, because the website’s contact person says he has lost contact with the video’s owner.)

Miscarriages happen naturally all the time. Punishing women for that is the kind of thinking that belongs in the Middle Ages, not 21st century America.

More tales from the police state… Brought to you by the poorest, unhealthiest, and dumbest state in the Union. The Taliban? Nope, the GOP. Women who miscarry a pregnancy could face imprisonment if Mississippi has its way. The state Supreme Court is set to rule on whether or not the state can arrest women for delivering a stillborn or losing a pregnancy any time throughout the nine-month period of time a fetus is developing.

According to Mother Jones, the current case involves a woman named Nina Buckhalter, who was arrested in 2009 for giving birth to a stillborn baby. Devastated, Nina named the baby Hayley and was arrested two months later for manslaughter. The grand jury found that the 29-year-old woman “willfully, unlawfully, feloniously” killed “a human being by culpable negligence” because she had a trace amount of methamphetamines in her system.
If the state Supreme Court rules that Nina can be prosecuted for having a stillbirth, it opens the door for Mississippi to charge any woman who has a miscarriage for murder. Mississippi is the one conservative state at the epicenter of the war against abortion. Anti-abortion activists and politicians have made effort upon effort to define a fetus as a human being so they can charge women who have abortions with murder, therefore making abortion illegal.

Despite finding meth in her system, evidence proving that the drug caused the stillbirth is extremely thin. From the Mother Jones piece:

The cause of any given miscarriage or stillbirth is difficult to determine, and many experts believe there is no conclusive evidence that exposure to drugs in utero can cause a miscarriage or stillbirth. Because of this, prosecuting Buckhalter opens the door to investigating and prosecuting women for any number of other potential causes of a miscarriage or stillbirth, her lawyers argued in a filing to the state Supreme Court—”smoking, drinking alcohol, using drugs, exercising against doctor’s orders, or failing to follow advice regarding conditions such as obesity or hypertension.” Supreme Court Justice Leslie D. King also raised this question in the oral arguments last month: “Doctors say women should avoid herbal tea, things like unpasteurized cheese, lunch meats. Exactly what are the boundaries?”

And that’s precisely why this case must be dismissed. A ruling in favor of the prosecution allows state officials to invade the privacy of pregnant women. Are we going to investigate every pregnant woman to make sure they’re drinking herbal tea and eating lunch meat? Will they be arrested if they are? Will pregnant women now be forced to be under surveillance to make sure they do nothing that could complicate a pregnancy? Will a cop be assigned to each and every pregnant woman to watch them 24-hours a day for nine months?

Worse yet, such a ruling could allow authorities in Mississippi to prosecute women who have had a legal abortion. Women who take the morning-after pill could also be subject to arrest, even though the drug is legal and approved for women as young as 15. This ruling may very well end up banning abortion in Mississippi: if a woman can be jailed for losing a wanted pregnancy, clearly she can be imprisoned for ending a pregnancy on purpose.

This kind of invasion of privacy is exactly what Republicans claim they oppose, yet they seem to have no problem being hypocrites when it comes to women. It’s outrageous and shreds the constitutional rights of actual human beings who are protected by law. This is why only “all persons born” have rights. Any woman could have a miscarriage or stillbirth. It happens every day. In fact, approximately 500,000 pregnancies result in a miscarriage every year in the US. Should we investigate and prosecute each woman who has one? Not only is such an idea ridiculous, it’s a violation of privacy and a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. Such actions also place more emotional and mental stress on women who just lost a pregnancy. That’s heartbreaking enough as it is; the last thing a woman needs is to be harassed by the state over it.

But the story gets worse. In Mississippi’s obsession with punishing women for losing pregnancies, they could literally be taking a mother away from her child. In the past four years since the case against her began, Buckhalter cleaned up her life, attended college, earned a degree, and gave birth to a child. In short, Mississippi is seeking to imprison Buckhalter for a stillbirth that may or may not have been due to meth, thereby depriving her living, breathing child of its mother. How heartless is that?

Last time I checked, inconclusive evidence does not land people in prison and we certainly should not jail women who lose pregnancies through no fault of their own. Miscarriages and stillbirths happen naturally all the time. We shouldn’t punish women for losing pregnancies. That’s the kind of thing that belongs in the Middle Ages, not 21st century America.

This is all around stupid and backwards, however where she fucked up is in deciding to name it and give it a birth certificate and thus a death certificate. She gave fuel to the fire. DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS! IT WILL ONLY MAKE THEM WILDER! *Shakes head.

Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year’s annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service.

More than 26,000 people were surveyed internationally for the poll.

They were asked to rate 16 countries and the European Union on whether their influence in the world was “mainly positive” or “mainly negative”.

Germany came out top, with 59% rating it positively. Iran was once again the most negatively viewed.

Global views of Europe’s biggest country have improved significantly in 2013, according to the poll.

It was conducted for the BBC by GlobeScan and PIPA, who conducted face-to-face and telephone interviews with randomly selected people in 25 countries.

Of those countries, 22 have been surveyed two years in a row, so become the tracking countries on which the average ratings are based.

These averages exclude the target country’s rating of itself. So for example, the opinions of Germans on Germany are excluded, meaning the country’s average rating is based on 21 tracking countries.

View of India deteriorates

A three-point increase in Germany’s average rating returned it to the top of the BBC list, displacing Japan, which saw its positive ratings drop from 58% to 51%, and fell from first to fourth place overall.

The BBC’s Stephen Evans in Berlin says the poll results may be a reward for diligent German diplomacy. Government ministers frequently tour countries with markets for German goods, or countries like Mongolia with raw materials for German products, he says.

There were high positive ratings for Germany in recession-hit Spain and France - though not in Greece - despite the well-publicised placards depicting Chancellor Angela Merkel as a Nazi, paraded during anti-austerity protests in Europe.

The UK saw a bigger increase in positive ratings than any other country and climbed to third place in the table, in the wake of its hosting of the 2012 Olympics.

The poll also indicates that positive views of China and India have fallen sharply around the world over the last year. After improving for several years, views of China have sunk to their lowest level since polling began in 2005, putting it in ninth position.

India is ranked 12th, with negative views (35%) slightly outnumbering positive ones (34%) for the first time.

But Germany, whose economy has done better than almost every other in Europe in recent years, scored well across the world.

In Ghana, 84% of people polled said Germany’s influence was mainly positive, while 81% in neighbouring France and 76% in Australia felt the same. But in debt-laden Greece a majority of people polled gave Germany negative ratings.

Positive views of the EU dropped to their lowest level last year but have stabilised this year, rising one point to 49% on average.

But this figure masks significant changes. There has been a sharp drop in positive ratings by Germans, down 14 points to 59%. Canadians and Americans both give significantly lower ratings to the EU. In the UK, positive views of the EU continue to fall steadily and, for the first time this year, more Britons rate it negatively (47%) than positively (42%).

Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran came out worst in terms of how they are viewed globally. Only 15% of respondents said they saw Iran as having a mainly positive influence.

A coalition of Canadian drug policy experts is calling on the country to decriminalize the use of drugs—not just, say, marijuana or other “soft drugs,” but all drugs. Thanks to a “stunning display of unimaginative thinking,” Canada has been cracking down on drug users, which has done nothing to hamper the flow of illegal drugs into the country, writes the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. Instead, the strategy has only made it harder to treat addicts, the National Post reports.

The group says the underground marijuana industry alone is a $357 million annual business in British Columbia, and the government could take advantage by regulating and taxing it. The group also wants the government to provide clean needles and pipes for drug users who need them. Canada wouldn’t be the first to try these sorts of measures, the experts note; the Czech Republic decriminalized all drugs in 2010. The result? Drug use remained essentially flat, and the social costs usually associated with drug use softened, says the CDPC. The group is run out of the Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction, notes Raw Story.

First Tumblr , now Hulu? On the heels of its billion-dollar acquisition of the blogging site, Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo has put in an offer for the video-streaming site, reports AllThingsD. This time, however, Yahoo has some serious competition, with the likes of DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, private-equity firm KKR, and an investment team led by former News Corp exec Peter Chernin among those in the mix, reports Reuters and Bloomberg.

How much the suitors are bidding isn’t clear, reports the Wall Street Journal, which says it will take weeks to work through the offers given the complications involved with broadcasters licensing their shows to Hulu. A range of outcomes is possible, from no sale at all, to a bidder taking a minority stake, to a bidder taking over entirely. Hulu is currently owned by News Corp, Walt Disney, and Comcast, the parent companies of Fox, ABC, and NBC.

The face of American poverty is now a suburban one, according to new research from the Brookings Institution. Researchers found that the number of people living in poverty in the suburbs soared 64% between 2000 and 2010, more than twice the rate of urban areas—meaning that now more poor people live in suburbs than in cities or rural areas, although the overall poverty rate remains higher in cities, the Miami Herald reports. Researchers say the explosion in suburban poverty is the result of many factors, including the housing bust, urban gentrification, and the loss of manufacturing jobs. In places like Orange County, California, “everything is nicely maintained. Things look good on the surface,” the director of a charity helping struggling families tells the LA Times. “But the need has just skyrocketed.”

Ray Manzarek, the 74-year-old co-founder of one of the 1960s’ most influential bands, The Doors, is dead. According to a message posted on the band’s Facebook page, Manzarek died of bile duct cancer while in Rosenheim, Germany, on May 20.

If ever there was a sonic siren that could compete with Jim Morrison’s haunting vocals, it was the piercing, throbbing wail of Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s Vox Continental organ. That sound has been silenced with Manzarek’s death Monday in Rosenheim, Germany. R.I.P.