Young, stupid and naïve was the way Alex Rodriguez described his behavior during his tenure with the Texas Rangers between 2001 and 2003.

The latest A-Bomb from A-Rod was that he used performance enhancing drugs during that particularly prolific part of his career…after adamantly denying this for years.

So now Rodriguez becomes the poster-boy for Major League Baseball’s juicing era; he’s by far the most famous player to admit using performance enhancing substances.

Other players like Mark McGwire, Sammy “Captain Cork” Sosa, Barry Bonds and The Rocket are also widely believed to have juiced, and like A-Rod’s, their denials have become required viewing for YouTubers.

“When I arrived at Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure,” Rodriguez told ESPN reporter Peter Gammons. “I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day.”

“Back then it was a different culture. I wanted to prove I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time. I did take a banned substance, and for that I am very sorry and deeply regretful.”

According to the New York Times, Rodriguez said he didn’t know what he took and emphasized he’s been clean since joining the Yankees before the 2004 season. His positive test dates to 2003, his last with the Rangers.

In keeping with terms of the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the player’s union, testing that year was carried out randomly, was associated with no penalties, and the results were to be kept secret.

All that changed in April, 2004 when the Feds, in hot pursuit of perjury charges against Barry Bonds in the BALCO case, seized the positive urine specimens from 2003. One of those cups contained A-Rods’ urine, which was reportedly glowing in the dark.

Last week the Feds unsealed 200 pages of evidence against Barry Bonds.

They plan to use it in March when the former San Francisco Giants slugger stands trial on charges he perjured himself before a grand jury in the 2003 BALCO case by claiming he never knowingly used steroids.

The documents tie the all-time home run king to 4 positive tests. They also include doping calendars and transcripts of a secretly-taped conversation in which Greg Anderson, Bonds’ longtime trainer and confidant says he injected Bonds with the juice.

Anderson has racked up more than a year behind bars for contempt by famously refusing to testify before that very same grand jury. His obstinance may yet invalidate some parts of the Fed’s case.

Three of the 4 positive tests date to 2000-2001 and were performed at the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative. The fourth, a specimen collected by MLB in 2003 showed the designer steroid THG, a synthetic testosterone and clomid, a female fertility drug.

That specimen had come up clean using MLB-sanctioned tests, but it was seized by the Feds a year later and handed over to the UCLA Olympic Analytical Lab which found the goods. 

The tape-recorded conversation took place in 2003. It involved Steve Hoskins, a former Bonds business manager, and Anderson. Transcripts reveal Anderson saying he injected Bonds with designer steroids that weren’t detectable at the time.

Hoskins and Bonds had been childhood friends that reconnected when Bonds returned to the Bay area to play Left for the Giants in 1993. They had a spat in 2003 and next thing you know, Hoskins was wearing a wire for the Feds.

In sworn testimony before the BALCO grand jury, Bonds admitted using “the clear” and “the cream,” but claimed he did not know they were laced with performance enhancing substances.

Two days after federal officials discovered that Peanut Corporation of America knowingly shipped salmonella-laced products 12 times in the last 2 years, they launched a criminal investigation.

Soon there followed a public lynching on Capitol Hill and a liquidation filing under Chapter 7 of Virginia’s bankruptcy laws.

That was fast.

The salmonella outbreak has sickened 637 people in 43 states and killed at least 8. Nearly 2,000 products have been recalled.

“A criminal investigation has been initiated through (the FDA’s) office of criminal investigation. (It has) to work through the Department of Justice to develop a case and prosecute, if that’s what it comes to,” Stephen Sundlof told the Washington Post.

Sundlof is director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the FDA.

The investigation might or might not trigger felony charges against PCA and its management team, according to Michael Taylor, a one-time food safety official at the FDA now at George Washington University.

“Under the food safety law, if you ship an adulterated food in interstate commerce, that violates one of the so-called prohibited acts and can be prosecuted criminally,” Taylor told the Post.

“Food can be considered adulterated if it is produced under unsanitary conditions.”

According to Taylor, the penalties for relevant misdemeanors top out at a fine of $1,000 plus a year in prison per offence. For felonies, the maximum punishment is a $10,000 fine and 5 years in jail.

No one knows yet whether it’s possible to file separate claims for each tainted lot, or how the bankruptcy filing will affect progression of the criminal investigation.

“The penalties are relatively light,” Taylor said. “If the facts are…as…reported, you have a company that was knowingly and recklessly shipping products from a facility known to be contaminated with salmonella,” he told the Post.

“The question is whether the criminal remedies in the Food and Drug Act are sufficient, given the severity of the harm.”

Looks like we know the answer to that.

The director of China’s central leading group on rural work has outlined an approach to manage growing unrest precipitated by a sharp economic downturn that has left 26 million migrant workers jobless.

“If mass incidents happen,” said Chen Xiwen “all officials must go to the front line and try to persuade people face-to-face. They cannot…push police to the front lines. The police cannot be deployed unless there are truly unfortunate situations where people are beating, attacking, robbing or burning.”

And officials should punish the instigators, learn from the conflict and figure out how to improve what they do, he added.

In that order, we assume.

Right now 15% of China’s 130 million migrant workers are unemployed and 6 million more will enter the pool this year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

China’s ranks of migrant workers have exploded in the past 20 years, as farmers are increasingly forced to rely on supplemental income, which can account for up to 60% of their total take.

“There is a saying in the countryside that to feed the mouth depends on farming but pocket money comes from outside,” Xu Yong told the Washington Post.

But “that road is blocked this year,” said the director of the Center for Chinese Rural Studies at Central China Normal University.

So at a recent conference with the state-owned press, Chen offered more than just crisis management tips. He urged local officials to solve land disputes, resettlement issues and environmental problems for example, lest they spawn demonstrations.

So will the protests increase? Xu couldn’t say for sure. “During the Spring Festival, most migrant workers went home and had a rest,” he said.

“After this, they will hunt for jobs. If they can’t find any jobs but stay in the cities, it will be easy to generate conflict and instability.”

“April and May will be the most serious time,” Xu said.

Female physicians implement evidence-based guidelines for drug utilization in heart failure more often than their male counterparts, according to Magnus Baumhäkel and colleagues at the University Hospital of Saarland.

Meanwhile, female heart failure patients are less likely than male patients to receive guideline-recommended drugs, the scientists reported in European Journal of Heart Failure.

To reach these conclusions, the scientists carried out a cross-sectional, observational study of 1,857 New York Heart Association Class II heart failure patients who were treated in eastern Germany from March through November, 2006.

Just over 52% of the participants were male and 63% received care from male physicians.

Female participants were a bit older—their mean age was 70 while the men clocked in at 66.

The scientists found that 80% of heart failure patients received either an angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB). Nearly 4% received both. Only 70% of the patients were receiving beta-blockers, a third recommended drug for heart failure.

But the key was that use of “ACE-inhibitors or ARBs was significantly higher in male compared with female patients, and recommended doses also tended to be higher in males,” wrote the scientists.

Men also tended to get higher doses of beta-blockers, consistent with trial findings showing that higher doses of all these drugs are more effective.

Even so, only half the participants got “sufficient doses of ACE-inhibitors and only every fourth patient [was treated] with the recommended dose of a beta-blocker,” they wrote.

All in all, the researchers were left to conclude somewhat gallingly that a “female patient was likely to receive the worst medical treatment from a male physician, whereas male patients were best treated by a female physician.”

For young children, a family history of frequent, sun-splashed vacations is associated with more nevi, and nevi counts are a reliable indicator of lifetime skin cancer risk.

In fact for kids under the age of 7 each waterside vacation bumps the small nevi count by 5%, according to Lori Crane and colleagues at the University of Colorado.

In 2005, Crane and colleagues examined 681 children that were born in 1998 and lived continuously in Colorado. They also interviewed parents each year between 2003 and 2005 regarding vacations, sun exposure, and the use of sun block and hats.

The scientists classified vacations as waterside or not after asking about recreational activities like boating, surfing and water skiing.

They also accounted for climate and time of the year when vacations took place. Hawaii vacations counted as waterside no matter when they took place for example, but coastal North Carolina getaways counted as waterside only during summer.

No word on whether demerits were given to sun seekers venturing to Boston, by the way. 

Their findings appear in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

“Parents should be aware of the effect that vacations may have on their children’s risk for developing melanoma as adults and they should be cautious about selection of vacation locations,” wrote the scientists.

Interestingly, use of sunscreens and hats did not impact risk of developing small nevi, nor did eye color. And neither vacation length nor total estimated UV exposure predicted nevus counts; it was just the number of vacations.

Crane’s team suggested a threshold phenomenon could explain these observations. According to this hypothesis, radiation necessary to trigger nevus formation is obtained early during the vacation and additional exposure has no impact.

Boys were found to be at greater risk for sun-driven nevi development. They accumulated19% more by age 7 than girls. And Hispanic ethnicity reduced the risk of nevi by 35% versus Caucasians.

The presence of facial freckles and a positive sunburn history were also associated with more nevi.

Nine years ago, US food makers asked the FDA to let them radiate food to destroy insects, parasites and pathogenic bacteria like E. coli and salmonella before it hit the shelves.

The Feds did nothing until 3 years ago, just after spinach laced with E. coli killed 3 and sickened 200. That’s when they permitted the irradiation of spinach and lettuce, only. 

Of course no one’s gotten around to doing that yet, but whatever.

The FDA does allow meat irradiation, but alas no one does that either.

In fact pretty much the only food getting zapped these days are spices and random imported products like Indian mangoes, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, a chorus of food experts are shouting to anyone who’ll listen that widespread pre-market food irradiation would greatly reduce the incidence of food poisoning in this country. 

Which might be a good thing since the CDC estimates there are 76 million incidents of food-borne illness per year in the US, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths like the ones traced to a Georgia facility owned by the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America.

Not to mention the government has long since gone on record saying food irradiation is safe, the technology has been available since Pearl Harbor, and there are irradiation centers already in place all over the US. They are currently used to sterilize medical supplies.

So what’s up?

Not much, really. Food producers think the benefits wouldn’t be worth the cost increases that would, of course, have to be passed on to consumers.

Some consumer groups don’t want widespread irradiation because it would hide a multitude of food industry sins, which is the moral equivalent of saying “just to prove what a lousy trapeze artist you are, we’re going to remove the safety nets.”

And the occasional wacko can still get some to believe that irradiated food turns people into tadpoles.

“We have ways to prevent illness and death that aren’t being used,” Christine Bruhn, director of UC Davis’ Center for Consumer Research sighed to the Times.

As birthrates in tropical countries drop and economic forces trigger migration toward cities, a funny thing is happening to the enormous swaths of farmland left behind.

They’re transforming back to what they were in the first place, tropical rain forests. 

And we’re not talking about a parcel of land the size of Granny’s Victory Garden, either.

In fact a recent report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates there are 2.1 billion acres of so-called “secondary” rain forest growing in the tropics right now.

That’s as big as the whole United States.

The pace of reforestation is phenomenal. Trees over 100 feet tall spring up within 15 years after land is abandoned, and in another 5 years a true rain-forest canopy forms once again.

According to the New York Times, for each acre of rain forest cut down today, 50 or so acres of secondary forest are growing on land that had recently been logged, farmed or damaged by natural disaster.

The unexpected development has actually triggered debate whether efforts to preserve first-growth rain forests are worth it or even necessary.

The good news is that secondary rain forests are avid carbon sinks just like their first-growth brethren. They will be an enormous help in blunting the greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide that continues to be released in prodigious amounts as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels and biomass.

The bad news is that secondary rainforests are probably not going to save the jaguars, tapirs and thousands of bird and invertebrate species that are headed for extinction due to the wonton destruction of primeval rainforests.

The animals have no way to access the new growth.

As many as 50% of all rain forest species remain threatened despite these heartening developments.

Three nanoseconds after the House signed off on a bill extending the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to 4 million children from low-income families, the Big O signed it into law.

The House had voted something like 7 times since 2007 to expand the program only to be stoned by George W. Bush who believed it would lead to “government-run health care for every American.”

The House never could muster the votes to overturn his poison pen.

SCHIP, originally formed in 1997 with bipartisan support, is directed at kids in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to afford private insurance.

Forty House Republicans voted for SCHIP. Two Democrats voted against it.

The Big O, still seething over l’affaire Daschle, trumpeted SCHIP as an indication how different things’ll be in his administration. Uh, once he finds people to fill the posts, that is.

California Democrat Henry Waxman chirped “while this bill is short of our ultimate goal of health reform, it is a down payment, and is an essential start.”

Meanwhile, Iowa Republican Steve King, derided SCHIP as “a foundation stone for socialized medicine,” and his buddy Tom McClintock of California added it was “slowly replacing employer health plans with government-paid health plans, with spiraling costs to taxpayers.”

The new SCHIP extends coverage to children and pregnant women who are legal immigrants, a rider that rankled a number of Republicans that had supported earlier versions.

To come up with the $32 billion required to fund the SCHIP expansion, the bill calls for Federal tobacco taxes to be jacked from 39 cents per pack to a buck. 

Remarkably, even after the SCHIP expansion is fully implemented, there’ll still be 5 million kids in the US who remain uninsured.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has blamed the US for the Great Economic Crisis which among other things put 25 million Chinese out of work last year.

Wen didn’t actually cite the US during his Davos rant against “excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit,” the utter lack of government oversight of financial institutions, and an “unsustainable model of development characterized by low savings and high consumption.”

But even Mo, Larry and Curley couldn’t have missed the reference.

Wen and Co. have been appalled to discover their supposedly safe holdings in the US financial sector weren’t so safe after all.

This includes more than a few bucks in Morgan Stanley, the cratered Reserve Primary Fund, Aunt Fannie and Uncle Freddie.

But when his blistering rhetoric fades, Wen knows he’s got a foot in the same potato sack we do. The 2 economies have to hop together, like it or not.

That’s because China enables our profligate spending in order to prop up its export-based economy.

China accumulates wealth by exporting just about everything to the US. It uses the money it makes to buy T-bills, which finances our trade deficit. This keeps US interest rates low, which lets US consumers buy more goods from China while preventing the Yuan from appreciating too quickly.

China now holds $2 trillion in US foreign exchange reserves according to the Wall Street Journal. Around the time Lehman tanked, it surpassed Japan as the largest foreign holder of Treasury bills.

That’s fine when it comes to US government-backed securities, but China did start pulling out of Fannie and Freddie in Q3 and Q4 2008, a move that forced the Feds to step in back in November and buy $600 billion in debt from the troubled organizations.

Someday, US taxpayers are going to feel that and it’s going to hurt.