Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.

Mac McClelland | Mother Jones | AlterNet | July 18, 2013

The thing that struck me when I first met my cousin Houston was his size. He wasn’t much taller than me, if at all, and was slight of frame. On the other side of the visitors’ glass, he looked surprisingly small, young for his 22 years. The much more remarkable thing about him turned out to be his vocabulary, vast and lovely, lyrical almost—until it came to an agitated or distracted halt. In any case, all things considered, he seemed altogether extremely unlike a person who had  recently murdered someone.

The symptoms displayed by Houston (in my family, a cousin of any degree is simply “a cousin”; technically, Houston is my third) in the year preceding this swift and horrific tragedy have since been classified as “a classic onset of schizophrenia.” At the time, it was just an alarming mystery. Houston had been attending Santa Rosa Junior College, living with his mom, playing guitar with his dad, when he became withdrawn and depressed. He slept all day; his band had broken up, and suddenly he had no friends. His dad, Mark, who had once struggled with depression and substance abuse but was now a pillar of the recovery community, and his mom, Marilyn, tried to help, took him to a psychiatrist. Houston didn’t have a drinking problem, but he mostly stopped drinking anyway. He didn’t smoke pot anymore, or even cigarettes. His psychiatrist indicated possible schizoaffective disorder in his notes, but put Houston on a changing regimen of antidepressants over the next eight months. It didn’t make any difference. Houston had started stealing his mom’s Adderall. He said it helped him feel better. He got fired from multiple jobs. Marilyn kicked him out, and he moved in with Mark.

“This was not my nephew,” my Aunt Annette, Mark’s sister, says of Houston’s behavior then. “He was always solicitous and loving and talkative with me. Now, he was anxious, quiet, said very strange things. He would say things that seemed not to come from him. I asked him how his therapy was going, and he said, ‘Terrible.'”

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Rally against gays in Haiti includes death threats

The Haitian National Palace (Presidential Palace), located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, heavily damaged after the earthquake of January 12, 2010. Note: this was originally a two-story structure; the second story completely collapsed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cathy Kristofferson | Oblogdeeoblogda | July 19, 2013

Thony Belizaire / AFP/Getty Images

Wednesday we posted about religious groups, under the umbrella of the Haitian Coalition of Religious and Moral Organizations,  planning to march against homosexuality. Today over 1,000 people took part in that Port-au-Prince demonstration.

The protesters, urging lawmakers not to pass equal marriage legislation, marched carrying anti-gay signs while chanting songs. One song threatened to burn down the Haitian Parliament if its members make gay marriage legal.

“I believe in God, and God condemns homosexuality,” said protester Eddy Jean-Pierre, a self-described Protestant. “Haiti is not going to accept this, and God will punish us further if we allow this law to pass.”

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Valley Voice: Expect a gay brain drain in states that forbid gay marriage

Hank Plante | Desert Sun | July 19, 2013

Now that we have become what the Human Rights Campaign calls “two Americas” when it comes to gay rights, could a gay and lesbian “brain drain” away from states that ban same-sex marriage be far behind?

It was telling that 300 of America’s top corporations and municipalities were so worried about losing talented gay and lesbian workers that they filed briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to take the action they did: throwing-out California’s Proposition 8 and gutting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Several of those companies were concerned about losing LGBT workers with foreign-born partners, prompting the companies to write a letter to Congress, saying, “We can’t afford to lose our most precious resource: talent.”

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Vatican ‘gay lobby’ back in headlines

AAP | Herald Sun | July 20, 2013

THE Vatican’s “gay lobby” is back in the headlines after the alleged exposure of a homosexual prelate appointed by Pope Francis to a key position at the Vatican bank.

The Italian weekly L’Espresso said on Friday that prelate Battista Ricca had gay relationships during his time at the Vatican embassy of Montevideo in Uruguay as well as an affair with a Swiss guard which ultimately saw him sent back to Rome in disgrace.

Vatican expert for L’Espresso Sandro Magister said Ricca provided lodgings and a pay check for captain Patrick Haari in 1999 and was once left badly beaten after trawling notorious gay hangouts before his behaviour saw him transferred out of Montevideo in 2000.

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Senators Reach Deal on Student Loan Interest Rates, Prepare for Vote

Interest Rates (Photo credit: 401(K) 2013)

Jenna Johnson | The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | July 19, 2013

Under pressure from the White House, Senate leaders are quickly moving forward with a plan to change how the government sets federal student loan interest rates, tying them to market rates but imposing caps on how high those rates can go.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday that a vote could come this week, but senators who worked on the proposed legislation said next week is more likely.

A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise on Thursday morning following weeks of negotiations, as Department of Education staffers camped out in their offices. On Tuesday, the senators ventured to the White House to meet with President Obama, who urged them to make a decision.

Under this new proposal, undergraduates would all pay the same interest rate, a change from recent years when some low- and middle-income students received a lower rate. Graduate students and parents of students would pay higher interest rates with higher caps.

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Jimmy Carter: US “Has No Functioning Democracy”

English: US President Jimmy Carter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Alberto Riva | International Business Times | Reader Supported News | July 19, 2013

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of American democracy.

“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the Atlantik Bruecke, a private nonprofit association working to further the German-U.S. relationship. The association’s name is German for “Atlantic bridge.”

Carter’s remarks didn’t appear in the American mainstream press but were reported from Atlanta by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, whose Washington correspondent Gregor Peter Schmitz said on Twitter he was present at the event. The story doesn’t appear in the English-language section of the Spiegel website and is only available in German.

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Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo! and Twitter Letter to Obama on Surveillance

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Reuters | Reader Supported News | July 19, 2013

ozens of companies, non-profits and trade organizations including Apple Inc (NSQ:AAPL), Google Inc (NSQ:GOOG) and Facebook Inc (FB.O) sent a letter on Thursday pushing the Obama administration and Congress for more disclosures on the government’s national security-related requests for user data.

General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, suggested he was open to the idea but that officials were trying to determine a way to disclose that information without jeopardizing FBI investigations.

“We just want to make sure we do it right, that we don’t impact anything ongoing with the FBI. I think that’s the reasonable approach,” Alexander told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, when asked about the letter.

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