How Texas Kills You. Legally, I mean:
The state of Texas, blocked from purchasing lethal injection drugs by major pharmaceutical companies that refuse to participate in executions, bought them instead from an in-state, compounding pharmacy with a history of more than a dozen safety and cleanliness violations, NPR has learned.
Rite-Away Pharmacy and Medical Supply in suburban San Antonio produced injectable pentobarbital from 2019 through at least late 2023 for Texas to use in executions, records from the state Department of Criminal Justice and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration revealed.
The Rite-Away branch where the drugs were prepared is a compounding pharmacy, which means it can create drugs in-house from raw ingredients. Multiple states, including Texas in the past, have turned to compounding pharmacies to prepare their supplies of execution drugs from raw materials.
After Rite-Away agreed to make the pentobarbital injections, a state representative started hand-delivering small amounts of the active ingredient in pentobarbital, in powder form, to Rite-Away, the pharmacist said. The powder came in a bag stamped with a photocopied label that he guessed came from the original container, he said. The pharmacist said he figured the state purchased the larger stash from a “chemical company.”
“The most important logo on something like that is the thing that shows the federal drug schedule on it,” the pharmacist said. “And it was always clearly marked as it is.”
But the employees made the deliveries in cars that were not marked at all, he said. The vehicles they came in when delivering the powder looked like their personal ones, the pharmacist remembered. They were not marked as property of the Department of Criminal Justice.
“I don’t remember any of them ever coming in a DOC vehicle,” the former Rite-Away employee said, “because, again, that would attract attention.”
But the Rite-Away pharmacy where the execution drugs were prepared wasn’t the only one with problems.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice sued another San Antonio Rite-Away office that is also owned by members of the Chaudhary family. Lawyers asserted it broke federal law for years by dispensing powerful opioids to people without valid prescriptions, falsifying hundreds of prescriptions for controlled substances and ignoring serious red flags that indicated people intended to abuse their medications. One woman died from an overdose shortly after the pharmacy filled her fentanyl prescription despite red flags, attorneys for the federal government alleged.
Well, hey, if you want a pharmacy to prepare drugs to kill people, wouldn’t you want to get them from a pharmacy with a track record of killing people?
Whataburger Tracks Texas Power Outages. When, wait for it, the State Of Texas’ system for tracking power outages predictably broke down during Hurricane Beryl, a burger chain came to its rescue:
Hurricane Beryl had pummeled Southeast Texas on Monday, leaving millions in the Houston area without power. But with technical issues plaguing the tracker for the city’s main energy provider, there was no way to check the status of power outages — or find the still-lit pockets where residents could buy food, gas and other necessities.
Then Bryan Norton, a 55-year-old tech worker and podcast host, found help from an unlikely source: the Whataburger app.
The app’s map showed where its restaurants — which have a massive presence across Houston — were still open. Instead of providing Texans with info about where they could snag burgers, biscuits and taquitos, Norton soon noticed the map could be used to gauge where power in the city was still on or had been restored.
His discovery went viral after he posted about it on social media, where thousands credited him with helping them find out if their loved ones had power or how they could escape the sweltering heat as temperatures and humidity levels soared.
As of Wednesday night, CenterPoint’s website shows power has been restored to over a million customers, down from a peak of some 2.26 million on Monday. About 40 percent of Whataburger’s 165 locations across the Houston area are open.
A CenterPoint spokesperson said in a statement to The Post that its outage map has been unavailable since a destructive storm in May led to “technical challenges” as customers flooded the site. There are plans to replace the map with a “redesigned cloud-based platform” by the end of July, the spokesperson added.
After investing his hedge fund into Chinese fentanyl producers, stopping the flow of Chinese-produced fentanyl into the US is now one of Dave McCormick’s top priorities if he is elected to the US Senate this November. In the past, he’s called Chinese fentanyl a “terrorist threat” and an “insidious attack on America” in interviews and social media posts.
“I think we need to treat it as a national security threat it is,” McCormick told attendees at the time. “What would I do? I would go after China in the sense I’d interdict ships, I would treat this like it’s nuclear plutonium.”
That same Dave McCormick?:
However, federal tax forms show that Bridgewater Associates invested in China’s largest fentanyl producer, Humanwell Healthcare, when McCormick served as CEO of Bridgewater Associates.
In 2021, seven Bridgewater Associates hedge funds held close to $1.7 million in stock in Humanwell Healthcare, which is traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
A 2022 Rand Corporation report on comparing the production of opiates stated that Humanwell Healthcare produces 90% of China’s fentanyl.
McCormick served as the President of Bridgewater Associates from 2009 to 2020 and then the company’s CEO from 2020 to 2022 when he lost to Dr. Mehmet Oz in the Republican primary for US Senate.In 2023, McCormick told the American Enterprise Institute that he was responsible for whatever the company did.
Oh.
Ramones Took A Rocket To Russia. Clarence Thomas? A Free Yacht Trip:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accused of not disclosing a yacht trip to Russia and a private helicopter flight to a palace in President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, among a slew of other gifts and loans from businessman Harlan Crow.
The list of potentially secret gifts also includes a loan of more than $267,000 provided by Thomas’ close friend Anthony Welters, the yacht trip to Russia from the Baltics, and the helicopter ride to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg. ProPublica first reported last year on the existence of extensive undisclosed gifts and lavish trips from Crow.
Absolute Power Equals Absolute Corruption. Our Supreme Court. BTW, there is no song called ‘Rocket To Russia’ on ‘Rocket To Russia’.
Riverfront East Mega-Project About To Begin:
More than three years after being officially announced, demolition and remediation will begin later this summer on the long-delayed $100-plus million project that will change the face of Delaware’s largest city.
Riverfront East, which will redevelop the east side of Wilmington’s Riverfront to mirror the 30-plus years of development on its west side, will transform the now largely abandoned 86.3-acre site into blocks of new retail shops, residences, office space and greenways with a riverwalk along the Christina River.
The project was announced in May 2021 at a press conference in an abandoned South Market Street parking lot across from Christina Crossing.
It was teeming with city and state officials as the unveiled plan outlined that the first phase of the project covering about 12 blocks on the northern edge of Riverfront East would be completed by late 2023.
It’s now mid-2024 and a building has not yet been demolished, never mind any work on construction of new buildings, the riverwalk, roads or the “central green.”
You know, because of those ‘pesky environmental studies’ which predictably found ‘no significant impact’.
While my skepticism continues unabated, the area in question really is in need of change. Abandoned warehouses, brownfields, and marshland. My question is: Will it benefit the residents who live in the area, or will they be driven out?
What do you want to talk about?