Sightings

Maggie Clark of Stateline writes: In recent years, federal funding for state homeland security efforts to respond to emergencies has been gutted.Federal grant spending on state and local homeland security is at an all-time low. In Massachusetts, funding from the state homeland security grant program is down 76 percent in the last five years, to $4 million in fiscal 2012, according to Federal Funds Information for States. The state ranked 34th in per capita spending in homeland security grant funding, at $1.20 per person. more »

"Women should not have to compromise their health because a private company controls their own genetic information," said Sandra Park, staff attorney with the ACLU Women's Rights Project. "Patients deserve the best available care, including access to testing and options for second opinions before making serious decisions about their health. These patents prevent them from getting that." more »

I’m here at the White House today because I want to make a difference and I hope you will join me. My name is Francine Wheeler. My husband David is with me. We live in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. David and I have two sons. Our older son Nate, soon to be 10 years old, is a fourth grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Our younger son, Ben, age six, was murdered in his first-grade classroom on December 14th, exactly 4 months ago this weekend. more »

Some of the most striking surrealist drawings were exquisite corpses, a game that involved collaboration and chance. In the game — the name of which derives from a sentence created when the surrealists first used the process to write poetry: The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine — each participant made a drawing on a section of a folded sheet of paper without seeing the others’ drawings. The resulting hybrid creatures generated by the game influenced surrealist imagery, reappearing in artists’ individual works. more »