Lap bands for teens? Is Jared Lee Loughner competent to stand trial for the Giffords shooting? Will high-speed rail happen in California? What skeptic Michael Shermer thinks about the brain and beliefs.
Lap-band maker sets sights on teens
Allergan Inc. is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market its relatively new weight-loss device to obese teenagers. Clinical trials are currently taking place on young adults. The surgery works by fitting a silicone ring around the stomach to decrease food intake. More than 600,000 people have had the surgery since 1993, including teenagers. Doctors already can perform the surgery on minors with parental approval. Allowing Allergan to specifically target teens could make it more likely that insurers would pay for the surgery. How effective has the surgery been for adults? What are the safety concerns long-term? Is surgery the only answer for some teens?
Guests:
Dr. Robert Cywes, Bariatric Surgeon participating in Allergan’s clinical trials on teens
Diana Zuckerman, President of the National Research Center for Women and Families; President of the Cancer & Treatment Fund
Steven Mittelman, Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Physiology & Biophysics, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and Keck School of Medicine, USC
Is Loughner competent to stand trial?
Tomorrow a federal court in Tucson, Arizona is expected to rule on whether Jared Lee Loughner is competent to stand trial. The young man stands accused in the infamous January shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others. The violent rampage that left six people dead – including a little girl and a federal judge – shook the country. New reports suggest that Loughner will be found incompetent to stand trial – for now. How is competency assessed in such cases? How do you quantify "crazy?" Could he be medicated in order to be competent for trial at a later date? What will public reaction be if he is found incompetent?
Guest:
George Parnham, Criminal Defense Attorney, Represented Andrea Yates
Netanyahu lays out terms for “painful” peace
Earlier this morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of the House and Senate. Just last week, the Israeli leader sharply criticized President Obama for proposing that Israel’s pre-1967 borders should be the basis for peace talks with the Palestinians. Today Netanyahu pledged to make “painful compromises” and for the first time explicitly said that some West Bank settlements would find themselves outside Israel’s final borders. But Netanyahu also reiterated a number of conditions that have been unacceptable to Palestinians in the past. He restated Israel’s refusal to repatriate millions of Palestinians to homes in Israel, maintained that contested Jerusalem can’t be shared with the Palestinians and insisted that Israel maintain its military presence on what would be the eastern border of a Palestinian state. A senior Palestinian official in the West Bank called Netanyahu's speech “a declaration of war against the Palestinians.” Is Netanyahu serious about concessions? Or is this just more of the same? How likely is it that his words today will entice Palestinians back to the negotiating table?
Will high-speed rail happen in California?
Construction on California’s high-speed rail system is supposed to get underway in 2012, but a couple of new reports are throwing some monkey wrenches into the works. The Legislative Analysts Office just released a report on the project questioning the plan to start laying track in the central valley instead of in a more populace area. They also slam the California High-Speed Rail Authority as being too weak to handle the growing project. Another report from an independent peer review panel of transportation experts says the authority is understaffed and their planning is inadequate. The CHSRA says the criticism is constructive. But they’re moving forward, noting that President Barack Obama and Governor Jerry Brown have shown their strong support for the project by allocating millions of dollars to it. So, is high-speed rail in California a boondoggle or the most viable plan out there? And will legislative wrangling hamstring the project?
Guests:
Jeff Barker, Deputy Executive Director of the California High-Speed Rail Authority
Daniel Krause, Executive Director, Californians For High Speed Rail, a grassroots, statewide coalition of high speed rail supporters advocating for the high speed rail project approved by California voters in November 2008
Rick Geddes, Transportation expert; Associate Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University; Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); Author of The Road to Renewal: Private Investment in U.S. Transportation Infrastructure
Michael Shermer’s skeptical take on the brain: can you believe it?
Besides having sex for pleasure and cooking food before ingestion, there is one other way in which humans differentiate from the rest of the animal kingdom: our big, believing brains. Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, attempts to explore this heady notion in his new book The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. Shermer argues that the brain is a “belief engine,” and it is hardwired to construct a belief system as a way of assigning patterns and meaning to the surrounding world. Actual explanations for these beliefs, he argues, come later, after the beliefs have already been formed. What do you think about Shermer’s take on brains? What, more importantly, do you believe?
Guest:
Michael Shermer, author, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Henry Holt/Times Books/Macmillan); founding publisher of Skeptic magazine; Executive Director of the Skeptics Society