Americans will get the same ham slabs and bacon slices they have enjoyed for generations, even after Smithfield Foods becomes a Chinese subsidiary, Smithfield CEO Larry Pope told Congress on Wednesday.
"It will be the same old Smithfield, only better," Pope said at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing.
But several senators weren't buying the bacon-will-be-unbroken story once Hong Kong-based Shuanghui International Holdings owns Smithfield.
The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
The Ender's Game author and anti-gay activist Orson Scott Card responded to boycotts threats against the upcoming film adaptation starring Harrison Ford. The queer geek group Geeks OUT is organizing boycotts and "Skip Ender's Game" events in several U.S. cities because of Card's views on homosexuality. He wrote in 2008 that "marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down." Card responded to the backlash in a statement to Entertainment Weekly: "With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. ... Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute."
A few weeks after a historic collection of black history books was discovered in a dumpster outside a school in Highland Park, Mich., protests continue and a school board member has resigned. City Emergency Manager Donald Weatherspoon said the collection had been thrown away by accident but noted that the city didn't have the resources to maintain it, according to The Detroit Free Press. Residents pulled about a thousand books on black culture and history from the trash. The collection was started after the civil rights movement, when demand began to grow for a school curriculum that included black history.
Amazon announced Tuesday that it will launch a comics and graphic novels imprint called Jet City Comics. One of their first publications will be a comic adaptation of George R.R. Martin's short story "Meathouse Man," which Martin says is "one of my strangest, darkest, and most twisted short stories."
GOP Colorado Senate candidate Jaxine Bubis was recently revealed to be Jaxine Daniels, author of steamy erotic novels. Bubis joins a list of porn-dabbling politicians, including Scooter Libby and his 2005 novel The Apprentice.
Rejoice, unhappy spinsters of America — the "Princeton mom" is writing a self-help book to help you "avoid an unwanted life of spinsterhood with cats."
Reed Johnson writes about the enigmatic "Voynich manuscript," a medieval text written in an unbroken code, noting "the perverse sway that the book has over its would-be conquerors." He writes: "But as much as each of us strives to be the one to crack the code, I think few of us would truly like to see it solved ... the book's resistance to being read is what sets it apart. Undeciphered, the manuscript exists in a sort of quantum indeterminacy — one that collapses into a single meaning the moment the text is finally measured and understood. And no matter how thrilling such a text might be, it will remain a disappointment for being closed off, completed — for being, in the end, no longer a mystery."
According to The Mumbai Mirror, Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of the newly-merged Penguin Random House, has asked the author Vikram Seth to return a $1.7 million advance for failing to turn in his manuscript for A Suitable Girl, the sequel to his hugely successful (and, at about 1,400 pages, huge) novel A Suitable Boy. Seth's agent told The Mirror by phone that "Vikram has been known to take his time with his books. Our aim is to settle this new date with Hamish. If we can't, then Vikram will decide what he wants to do next."
Forty-year-old Jeremie Seals has had a tough life.
He left home at 14, and his health isn't good. He had a heart attack when he was 35. He has congestive heart failure, and nerve pain in his legs that he says is "real bad."
"Long story short, I'm terminal," he says, matter-of-factly.
Seals is unwilling to divulge too much about his past. But over the years, he says his health has deteriorated to such a degree that he can no longer hold a job.
By 2011, he was sleeping in his car, and that's when his medical problems started having a big financial impact. That year, he visited the emergency room at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland 15 times and was admitted to the hospital 11 times.
"I basically lived at the emergency department," he said. "Ever since I'd had a heart attack, anytime my chest hurt, I'd either call the ambulance or go up to the hospital. And I think it was also out of desperation to just get out of my car and off the street."
His regular visits to the ER brought him to the attention of one of Oregon's new coordinated care organizations. As part of the nation's health care overhaul, Oregon has been given permission to conduct its own experiments. One way it's trying to reduce Medicaid costs is to encourage people who constantly turn up in the emergency room — so-called frequent fliers like Seals — to get their health care from regular doctors instead.
Lisa Pearlstein of Health Share of Oregon, one of the care coordinators, remembers her first meeting with Seals in 2011, when she began to guide him through the medical maze:
"He's sitting in a chair and complaining about his feet being wet. And I said, 'Why are your feet wet?' And he said, 'I have holes in my shoes.' And I said, 'Would you like a new pair of shoes?' And so I ended up getting him a new pair of shoes that day. And so we connected over those shoes."
"Teresa Heinz Kerry continues to improve and remains in fair condition at Massachusetts General Hospital, while doctors seek the cause of seizure-like symptoms she experienced on Sunday," State Department spokesman Glen Johnson says in a statement sent to reporters Tuesday afternoon.
In the most extensive comments so far about her condition, Johnson also says that:
"As evaluations continue, she, Secretary of State John Kerry, and their family are deeply grateful that physicians have ruled out a variety of possible triggers or other ailments, including heart attack, stroke, or a brain tumor."