Staff Blog
Where's the best sledding hill in Philly? (1 Answer)
What We’ve Found: Bike messenger protest, Swiss anti-Islam vote, Middle East markets dive, health-care bill’s saving debated, controversial “Bo-tax” and Penn prof leads study about male hormone boosters
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
Philadelphia bicycle messengers were planning to demonstrate tonight against controversial City Council measures that would mandate the paid registration of all bicycles in the city and result in steeper fines for traffic violations.
Fifty-eight percent of Swiss voters approved a referendum banning the construction of minarets on Muslim mosques, even after polls suggested that such a measure would be rejected by a majority of voters. The resulting scandal caused a Swiss Justice Minister to suggest that certain policies should not be decided with public referendums.
After officials announced that the Middle East conglomerate Dubai World was deeply in debt and struggling financially, United Arab Emirates markets dropped dramatically, and the UAE's central bank offered other UAE banks cheap loans in an effort to stave off a run on every bank in the country.
Even after the U.S. Congressional Budget Office found that every part of the health-care bill currently being debated by the Senate could be paid for with spending cuts and tax increases, experts were debating whether the bill would be able to reduce the nation's deficits or not.
Plastic surgery patients and doctors were outraged over a five percent "Bo-tax" in the health-care bill, which would be applied to any cosmetic surgery that does not fix injury-related, congenital or illness-related disfigurements.
A University of Pennsylvania endocrinologist is leading a study to see whether lowered testosterone levels are natural for men, and whether popular hormone-boosting medications impair bodily functions in older men.
Where’s my violin? Go to 16th & JFK on any day and watch how bike messengers follow the law. They routinely ride on the sidewalks and run through red-lights. If they even wait for the light to turn green, they do little figure 8’s in the crosswalk around pedestrians, because they refuse to stop on those illegal track bikes. I have never, ever, observed a bike messenger actually come to a complete stop for a red-light. They are offended because they are being perceived as law breakers? Too bad. The behaviors of bike messengers and other rogue bicyclists are the very reason behind the proposed new fines and regulations.