A new study sheds light on a frightening fact — many parents are putting their children at risk of death simply because of the way they put them to bed. This is occurring even when parents have been educated about the risks.
Researchers from Penn State University used video recordings to see how parents put their babies to bed, filming the infants for one night each at one, three, and six months old. Their results were published in the journal Pediatrics.
“Most times the cause of death was the sleeping situation of the infant,” said one expert.
Many of the risks they found are directly linked to what many refer to as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
“Pediatricians talk about safe sleep positions during the newborn hospital stay. They are supposed to talk about it at every checkup through six months,” said Dr. Ian M. Paul, an author of the study. He’s also chief of the Division of Academic General Pediatrics and vice chairman of Clinical Affairs at Penn State College of Medicine, as Deseret News reported.
But when the researchers watched the videos, almost all of the babies had risk factors for sudden infant death, according to Paul.
“We have called them SIDS babies, but we have a new name for them now,” Dr. Charles Shubin, director of pediatrics at Mercy FamilyCare in Baltimore, Maryland, and assistant professor of pediatrics at The Johns Hopkins University, told LifeZette.
“They’ve changed the name to SUDI — Sudden Unexpected Death in Infants,” continued Shubin. “How is it different? With SIDS, there is nothing that a parent or anyone else could have done to prevent the child from dying. Today, we do an adequate death-scene investigation — which we used not to do — and we find out most times that the cause of death was the sleeping situation of the infant.”
The videos in the new Penn State study show both bed-sharing and infants being placed on their sides or their stomachs at bedtime — despite a recent nationwide campaign by pediatricians that advises babies should always sleep on their backs.
“I’ve been practicing pediatrics for almost 50 years. When I started out the advice was opposite — put babies on their tummies so they won’t choke,” said Shubin. “So now a grandma or great-grandma tells the new mom, ‘Don’t listen to the doctor — we always put babies on their tummies.’ Tradition is a huge barrier to babies being put to bed correctly.”
The most common risk that the videos illuminated was babies put into cribs with loose bedding, bumper pads, positioners, and other items that increase danger, study author Paul said.
Related: In Search of Slumber for Sleepy Babies
“Those things that look so cute and comfy should be saved until the child is older,” said one Reading, Massachusetts, mom of an infant and a two-year-old. “I cringe when I see a baby crib stocked with stuffed animals and blankets. I always ask the parents if they pull everything out at night when baby goes in. It’s too important not to.”
The new study also found that babies often sleep in several different places over the course of the night. “When it happens, the second position is riskier than the first,” according to Paul.
“The first form of SUDI is unsafe bedding, toys, and bumpers in bed with the child,” said Shubin, who is also a member of the Baltimore City Child Fatality Review team. “The other cause of SUDI is another person sleeping with the baby that suffocates the infant. People are in denial about this — insisting we now have breastfeeding recommendations that naturally put the baby in the bed with Mom for at least a few minutes at night. But the reality is, it’s risky. You risk killing your baby when he or she is in bed with you.”
Shubin recommends products like the Co-Sleeper Bassinet, which attaches to the parents’ bed. “You can breastfeed a baby in bed — the Co-Sleeper allows Mom to return the baby to a small crib right next to her. Mom can reach baby, nurse baby, and put baby back.”
The Co-Sleeper is expensive for some families, said Shubin. (A mini Co-Sleeper retails for about $175.) In Baltimore, however, each new parent who needs one is given a Pack ‘n’ Play for their new baby. “There’s no excuse not to have a safe space for baby to sleep,” he said.
Shubin says his review team deals with stories such as a tired mother who came home from work and took a nap with baby on the couch. Tragically, her arm pushed the baby’s face into the cushion, suffocating it. “We had one mother who twice slept with her baby this way, and lost them both to SUDI,” he said.
The babies have no findings as to cause of death in an autopsy, said Shubin. “Suffocation does not leave anything you can see, which is how SIDS as a syndrome developed. Then, we started looking at more than just the baby — the baby’s sleeping environment came under scrutiny, too.”
“We don’t like to admit that this is why most babies are dying,” said Shubin. “It’s from something entirely avoidable.”
The post Stunning Kiddie Crib Dangers appeared first on LifeZette.
Donald Trump went into full attack mode against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over the case against Trump University. You can find here a video, with transcript, of Trump defending his contention that a “Mexican” judge is a problem for him because of Trump’s outspoken opposition to illegal immigration from Latin America. I have a few comments to make.
First, if I were Trump’s attorney and was dealing with a judge or seemed unduly hostile to me or my client, I would definitely think about making a motion saying that the judge’s hostility derives from my attacks against a special interest group of which the judge is a member ( in this case, “Hispanic Americans”) and that he should recuse himself if for no other reason than “the appearance of impropriety.”
The basis for my motion would be the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which states explicitly that “Canon 2: A Judge Should Avoid Impropriety and the Appearance of Impropriety in All Activities.” (Emphasis added.)
Please note the language I emphasized. It isn’t necessary that the judge is actually behaving with impropriety. It is sufficient that his conduct appears improper, something that impairs confidence in the judiciary as a whole, regardless of the judge’s actual motives and conduct:
Canon 2A. An appearance of impropriety occurs when reasonable minds, with knowledge of all the relevant circumstances disclosed by a reasonable inquiry, would conclude that the judge’s honesty, integrity, impartiality, temperament, or fitness to serve as a judge is impaired. Public confidence in the judiciary is eroded by irresponsible or improper conduct by judges. A judge must avoid all impropriety and appearance of impropriety. This prohibition applies to both professional and personal conduct. A judge must expect to be the subject of constant public scrutiny and accept freely and willingly restrictions that might be viewed as burdensome by the ordinary citizen. Because it is not practicable to list all prohibited acts, the prohibition is necessarily cast in general terms that extend to conduct by judges that is harmful although not specifically mentioned in the Code. Actual improprieties under this standard include violations of law, court rules, or other specific provisions of this Code.
Because Trump is so inflammatory, let’s step back a little and try to imagine a different situation that might make things clearer. Imagine that Trump is actually Trumpberg, a Jew who’s employee is suing him for sexual harassment. Imagine too that Trumpberg’s case is assigned to Judge Mohamed Mohamed, an American of Palestinian descent.
Although the lawsuit has nothing whatsoever to do with either Israel or the Palestinians, Trumpberg and his lawyer can’t help noticing that the judge rules against Trumpberg on every single initiative he brings or every defense he makes. Unless Trumpberg and his lawyer are complete crooks, malfeasors, or incompetents, at a certain point they’re going to say “This guy has it out for Trumpberg because he’s a Jew.”
Unless the judge’s rulings are so obviously an abuse of discretion that a preschooler could discern a problem, Trumpberg’s only recourse is to make a motion asking the judge to recuse himself because of the appearance of impropriety. He’s not saying that the judge is biased, but that he appears biased.
Let me be the first to say that this motion will fail because a judge will never concede that he has a bias problem or an appearance of bias problem. But it is a valid motion and if you’re losing every initiative anyway, you may as well bring it. And that’s sort of what Trump is doing, only being Trump he’s doing so loudly and publicly. So no, it’s not a totally crazy move; it’s the desperate move of someone who, rightly or wrongly, feels that he has a valid case over which a biased judge presides.
Second, I’m absolutely certain that Judge Curiel is in fact biased against Trump. That Curiel is of Mexican origin isn’t the problem. The problem is that he’s a Democrat judge appointed by a Democrat administration.
Those two facts do not mean that Judge Curiel is not, in most ways, an estimable man, who pays his bills, works in soup kitchens, and raises his children with a perfect balance of love and discipline. They do not mean that he is not an intelligent or hardworking man. They do not mean that he is a corrupt man in terms of accepting money in exchange for favors. Indeed, his bio suggests that he was diligent in going after drug cartels, many of which prey on Southern California’s Hispanic community, where he worked as a Federal prosecutor. If Judge Curiel is a nice man, and there’s no reason to believe he’s not, I’d probably enjoy talking with him for a few minutes at a cocktail party and, if he also has a nice wife and nice kids, I’d be happy to see him move into our neighborhood.
But (and yes, there’s always a “but” after I’ve said nice things like thing). . . .
But I know these Democrat judges, having spent almost thirty years litigating in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are fine judges if the case does not ping their political antennae. Thus, if two little old ladies are fighting it out, they’ll be fair. Or if two banks are fighting it out, they’ll still be fair.
Bad things happen, though, when one of the parties is from a class disfavored under the Democrat paradigm, e.g., banks; super-wealthy people who aren’t, like Tom Steyer, Mark Zuckerberg, or George Soros, bankers for the Left; large corporations; officers in large corporations; employers being sued by an employee, etc. In those cases, the moment that disfavored class member walks into court, he, she, or it is a marked target.
The bias against the enemies of the Left is overwhelming in a courtroom presided over by a Leftist judge. You might win, provided that all the facts and all the law run your way, but even if the facts and law support you overwhelmingly, you shouldn’t count on it. I’ve worked on at least four cases in which the corporate or banking defendants did everything by the book, while the individual plaintiffs were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to have committed actual fraud or indefensible stupidity . . . and still lost.
I figured out this judicial bias problem back in the 1980s, when I was still more than a decade away from switching party affiliation. I knew judges were a problem when I was cheering Bill Clinton’s presidential victory. That judges were biased against the rich and corporate was deep in my bones when I signed on to MoveOn.org, which was trying to derail Clinton’s impeachment for defiling the oval office and lying under oath. And I really loathed judges for being so hostile to banks and other monied parties when I was still convinced that Anita Hill was telling the truth. The reality was that I mostly worked for defendants in civil cases in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that meant I mostly lost. (And if you’re wondering, I’m pretty honest about my clients’ cases, and know a dog or a fraud when I see one.)
So the problem isn’t that Judge Curiel is Mexican, although his background might have something to do with his party affiliation. The problem is that he’s a Democrat and Trump is correct that he will never get a fair trial in that courtroom — something that’s true whether Trump ultimately deserves to be found liable or not.
Does the above rant mean it was smart for Trump to make these statements publicly? No. It was dumb, because it created a fecal storm that allows the media to divert attention from the mountains of evidence about Hillary’s corruption, her national security violations, and the very real possibility that America’s spies were exposed because of her selfishness. (And it’s no surprise that those who loved Plamegate seem uninterested in Hillary-gate.)
Nevertheless, dumb or not, it did my heart good to see someone openly attacking a Democrat judge because these judges deserve to be attacked. They use their courts for politics over justice whenever the opportunity arises. Perhaps Judge Curiel isn’t that man, and he has been fair, but overall the system is stacked against disfavored parties in Democrat judge’s courtrooms.
It was nearly twenty years ago. William Safire had her pegged. He said Hillary Clinton was a “congenital liar.”
Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar.
Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.
1. Remember the story she told about studying The Wall Street Journal to explain her 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading? We now know that was a lie told to turn aside accusations that as the Governor’s wife she profited corruptly, her account being run by a lawyer for state poultry interests through a disreputable broker.
She lied for good reason: To admit otherwise would be to confess taking, and paying taxes on, what some think amounted to a $100,000 bribe.
2. The abuse of Presidential power known as Travelgate elicited another series of lies. She induced a White House lawyer to assert flatly to investigators that Mrs. Clinton did not order the firing of White House travel aides, who were then harassed by the F.B.I. and Justice Department to justify patronage replacement by Mrs. Clinton’s cronies.
Now we know, from a memo long concealed from investigators, that there would be “hell to pay” if the furious First Lady’s desires were scorned. The career of the lawyer who transmitted Hillary’s lie to authorities is now in jeopardy. Again, she lied with good reason: to avoid being identified as a vindictive political power player who used the F.B.I. to ruin the lives of people standing in the way of juicy patronage.
3. In the aftermath of the apparent suicide of her former partner and closest confidant, White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, she ordered the overturn of an agreement to allow the Justice Department to examine the files in the dead man’s office. Her closest friends and aides, under oath, have been blatantly disremembering this likely obstruction of justice, and may have to pay for supporting Hillary’s lie with jail terms.
In a recent Quinnipiac poll voters were asked to describe Hillary Clinton in a single word and the word they chose was “liar.” There were others, of course:
Of 1,563 voters surveyed by Quinnipiac University, 178 said “liar” was the first thing that popped into their heads in association with Clinton — followed by 123 who chose “dishonest” and 93 who said “untrustworthy.”
Even the loathsome Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News nailed Hillary:
Question: Is it worse for a news anchor to lie about being forced down by enemy fire in Iraq than it is for a perennial presidential candidate to lie about ducking sniper fire — with her young daughter, yet — in Bosnia?
Both are horrible, but it’s worse for Hillary Clinton, who expects to run the country, to lie about something like this than it is for a blow-dried TV anchor to lie.
The fact that Brian Williams and Clinton (inset with daughter) thought they’d get away with their outrageous war stories despite there being living, breathing witnesses, video and now social media, is bizarrely disturbing. The hubris of the famous in believing that they can get away with lying forever because they are above it all never fails to astound. And never fails to happen.
Via Legal Insurrection a useful video:
Click here to view the embedded video.
Lists of Hillary Clinton lies can be found here and here.
She wanted to join the Marines.
She wanted to be an Astronaut.
Clinton has claimed that she got a letter from NASA Public Affairs that stated that the space agency was not taking women astronauts, a slap in the face of her girlhood ambitions to be an astronaut. Oberg, having researched the matter thoroughly, cannot find a copy of the letter or even an example of such a letter, which is to say that females need not apply.
But now she has sunk to a new low. She is accusing the families of the Benghazi dead of being liars.
Liar, liar, pantsuit on fire: Hillary Clinton still insists she didn’t tell the grieving families of the Benghazi victims that an anti-Islam video was to blame.
Yet family members say she said just that, three days after the attack, at the Sept. 14, 2012, ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base.
George Stephanopoulos asked her Sunday if she’d told the victims it was about the film. Clinton gave a flat “no.”
She added: “I said very clearly there had been a terrorist group, uh, that had taken responsibility on Facebook, um . . .”
The families remember things differently.
Tyrone Woods’ father said he hugged Clinton and shook her hand. Then “she said we are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son . . . She said ‘the filmmaker who was responsible for the death of your son.’ ”
Sean Smith’s mother said Hillary is “absolutely lying . . . She said it was because of the video.” Smith’s uncle backs her up.
Glen Doherty’s sister agreed: “When I think back now to that day and what she knew, it shows me a lot about her character that she would choose in that moment to basically perpetuate what she knew was untrue.”
It’s one thing to claim that at the age of six you were named after Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s quite another to call the grieving families of the dead liars.
Perhaps it’s no surprise coming from someone who sleeps through meetings, is often confused, can’t remember how many devices is more than one, and has suffered brain damage. She’s absolutely a liar. The question is, does she even understand that?
I told you it would be a problem.
Getcher intact babies here!
And yes, they are violating the law.
Here are some notable quotes courtesy of Twitchy:
“my department contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here”
“If we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, we can make it part of the budget”
Dissecting cadaver babies is just “just a matter of line items.”
Here’s the video. Consider yourself warned of the graphic nature of the purveyors of baby parts.
Click here to view the embedded video.
It’s no wonder Obama donors want to stop the release of these atrocities. There is a special place in hell for these monsters.
[NOTE: The following was cross-posted on the National Association of Scholars site yesterday.]
Every year about this time there are a spate of articles about a very small number of remarkable students who were accepted at all eight Ivy League colleges. This year is no different, and I will get to them presently, but there is one story among them this year that is quite different: Ronald Nelson, from Memphis, got into all the Ivies (plus Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, and Washington University), but turned them all down in favor of the University of Alablama.
His reason was primarily economic. None of the Ivies et al. offer full merit scholarships, but Alabama offered him a four year free ride plus admission to its selective honors program. The Ivies et al. offered some financial aid but all told him that he “would probably end up paying quite a bit” before graduating. His family could have managed — his father is an engineer and his mother a FedEx manager — but decided not to. Debt “wasn’t a burden that Ronald wanted to take on and it wasn’t a burden that we wanted to deal with for a number of years after undergraduate,” his father said. Nelson concluded that his decision would not hurt chances of getting into a top flight medical school or other graduate program, and he and his family agreed to ”put that money away and spend it on his medical school, or any other graduate school.”
The way financial aid is structured these days, middle class families like Nelson’s must assume mountains of debt to attend Ivy League schools that in turn offer “zero family contribution” grants to poor students, allowing them to attend and graduate debt-free. Thus an Ivy League education is, among other things, an income transfer program from the middle class to the poor.
Affirmative Action?
Ronald Nelson is black, but no one familiar with his credentials — a 4.58 weighted GPA, 15 AP courses, 2260 out of 2400 on his SAT and 34 out of 36 on his ACT, National Merit Scholar, president of his senior class, state-recognized saxophone player — could reasonably regard him as an affirmative action admit. Still, as evidence that the corrosive, insidious insinuations of racial preference are so pervasive that they cast a shadow over the accomplishments even of someone as talented as Ronald Nelson, it is reasonable to ask what the chances are of a white or Asian student with qualifications equal to or better than Nelson’s being accepted to all the Ivies et al.
Apparently, not very good. Business Insider took a look at most of the small, elite group of students who were accepted at all the Ivies and then some, and found that they all “have one specific thing in common — they’re all the children of immigrants” or immigrants themselves (except for Nelson, who is an American not African black). The only white student in the group is Stefan Stoykov from Indianapolis, who “ten years ago, arriving to the US as an immigrant from Bulgaria, … did not speak a word of English.”
Perhaps even more surprising than the absence of whites from this group of all-Ivy admits is the virtual absence of Asians — “virtual,” not actual, absence because one of the Ivy Elect is Pooja Chandrashekar from Fairfax County, Virginia’s, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, whose un-Ivies included Stanford, MIT, Duke, UVa, Michigan, and Georgia Tech. Her parents, both engineers, immigrated from Bangalore, India, but there appear to be no Chinese-, Japanese-, or Korean-American students who gained admission to this select group by being admitted to all the Ivies.
Harvard and the other Ivies have long been accused of having at least a de facto quota for Asian admissions, and what can accurately if ironically be called the “underrepresentation” of Asians admitted to all the Ivies may provide additional ammunition for a new federal discrimination complaint against Harvard filed by a coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups.
In the old days the Ivies had a quota on Jews. Now it appears they may have quotas on Asians and native-born whites.