Wednesday, September 2, 2009

NYT 9/2/09

There were several articles in the paper today that I feel were about social issues. I read Plenty of Data on Sex Offenders, But Registries Are Just a Start, which discussed the case of Phillip Garrido and how registries focus on high risk offenders. There are so many offenders that it is impossible to keep a regular watch on them all and the goal is to one day distinguish which are going to be potential problems in order to keep children and citizens safe. Another article I read that I thought was interesting was Call to Jury Duty Is Striking A New Fear: Financial Ruin. It discussed the various reasons and hardships that citizens are facing and are using as excuses to get out of jury duty. It explained how its been harder to get people for jury duty because of the financial times and how it would be counterproductive to force people to perform their jury duty anyway because it might result in an unfair trial. This is a social issue because we need people for jury duty to have an unbiased opinion yet for some people it is financially not possible. One last article I read and found relevant to current social issues was Taking Big Rish for Big Payoff, Industry Seeks Cancer Drugs. Cancer has become either increasingly common or increasingly identified. Either way the lack of solutions to the numerous different types of cancer is a problem facing society. Pfizer is the world's largest phamaceutical company and they are focusing their efforts on a narrowed population of a particular gene affected in order to approach the world problem of cancer one small step at a time. With so many mutations it is impossible to develop one cure all cancer treatment so this company is hoping to tackle a small, specific population in order to find a feasible cure. There was also a small article on the ever popular issue of health care discussing various possible directions for a bill that was somewhat informative on the current debate.

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