A presidential commission journeys into the nightmare of the past Fulfilling a pledge made on the 30th anniversary of Israel's founding, Jimmy Carter last year appointed a 34-member presidential commission on the Holocaust to develop a memorial in the U.S. to the 6 million victims of the Nazis' "final solution." Last week, as a first step in that effort, the commission toured the sites in Eastern Europe where the campaign of extermination of Jews took place in a search for ...

The aging bosses seated at the defense table in the packed federal courtroom in lower Manhattan look harmless enough to be spectators at a Sunday-after noon boccie game. Anthony Salerno, 75, the reputed head of the Genovese crime family, sits aloof and alone, his left eye red and swollen from surgery. White-haired Anthony Corallo, 73, the alleged Lucchese family chief, is casual in a cardigan and sport shirt. Carmine Persico, 53, is the balding, baggy-eyed showman of ...

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the few sectors around that appears to be weathering these difficult times with relative ease. On Friday the European Commission suggested why that might be: it claims Big Pharma systematically rigged the market to squeeze out copycat medicines. By using patent lawsuits and other delaying tactics to prevent cheaper generic medicines from entering the market, the drug majors cost European consumers up to $4 billion over an eight-year period until 2007, ...

The global war against drugs is fought seemingly every day in the jungles of Colombia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the inner cities of the U.S. and the trafficking corridors of Central America. But, according to a new report, it's an abject disaster. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, an organization launched by former Presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico , declared today that the "global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals ...

As white and Negro Freedom Riders continued their rolling assault against segregation last week, they produced some profound results in South and North alike: In Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged the Interstate Commerce Commission to start enforcing the vaguely worded federal ban on segregation in restaurants, waiting rooms and toilets at interstate bus terminals. The ICC in 1955 outlawed segregated seating in interstate buses. But that rule is rarely obeyed in the South, and the ICC has acted against only one offending bus line, which ...

At least four-fifths of the 76-member pontifical commission on birth control favors a change in the Roman Catholic Church's traditional prohibition against mechanical and chemical methods of birth control. Ending three years of study on the question, the commission last week presented its findings to Pope Paul VI. Although its precise recommendations remain secret, the commission majority concluded that since the love and affection of marriage partners is as important as procreation, they are entitled to practice contraception when there is good and sufficient reason to limit the ...

Over the past six years, The Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled more than 180 million pieces of metal jewelry that contained dangerous levels of lead, and in August 2009 it lowered the acceptable amount of lead in children's jewelry to 300 parts per million . But the progress in regulating lead appears to have propelled manufacturers to use another toxic metal, cadmium. In January of this year, an Associated Press investigation revealed that many cheap metal pendants and ...

New evidence of Soviet spyingIt read like a chapter of seabed science fiction, but last week Swedes were taking very seriously indeed a report by their government charging the Soviet Union with a spectacular underwater spy effort off the Swedish coast. After a six-month investigation, an official commission concluded that up to six submarines had been involved in a bold intrusion into the waters near Sweden's Musk Island naval base last October. The fleet was said to include three advanced miniature submarines, some equipped with tanklike ...

One of the most familiar of all trade names was booked for a major operation last week. The Federal Trade Commission told the manufacturers of Carter's Little Liver Pills to cut the word "liver" out of the product name. The tiny, white-coated globules, FTC found, are an irritative laxative , and have no medicinal effect on the liver. The FTC had spent several years, and undertaken a great deal of medical research in reaching its decision. Even now, his liver ...

As questions swirled around its accounting practices, Tyco International, an industrial and services conglomerate with $36 billion in annual revenues--and a beaten-down stock price--said last week it would split into four companies in a bid to "unlock tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value." The company's combative CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, predicted the breakup would add 50% to the stock price. Going him one better, Don MacDougall of J.P. Morgan Chase said the move would make the stock worth $80 ...