More than 1,000 protesters held a "Free Shorty" march in Culiacan yesterday for Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Another report says there were 2,000 marchers.

I like his writing style, which reads as if he is talking.

I like his honesty and the fact that he names names.

I found it a breathe of fresh air that he expresses how he feels about events that have happened to him without the usual equivocation that is so common these days.

A new study confirms what people like our own Hanna Rosin and Texas A&M professor Joan B. Wolf have been saying for years now: The benefits of breast-feeding have been overstated. The study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, is unique in the literature about breast-feeding because it looks at siblings who were fed differently during infancy. That means the study controls for a lot of things that have marred previous breast-feeding studies. As the study's lead author, Ohio State University assistant professor Cynthia Colen, said in a press release, "Many previous studies suffer from selection bias. They either do not or cannot statistically control for factors such as race, age, family income, mother's employment--things we know that can affect both breast-feeding and health outcomes."

Colen's study is also unique because she looked at children ages 4-14. Often breast-feeding studies only look at the effects on children in their first years of life. She looked at more than 8,000 children total, about 25 percent of whom were in "discordant sibling pairs," which means one was bottle-fed and the other was breast-fed. The study then measured those siblings for 11 outcomes, including BMI, obesity, asthma, different measures of intelligence, hyperactivity, and parental attachment.

When children from different families were compared, the kids who were breast-fed did better on those 11 measures than kids who were not breast-fed. But, as Colen points out, mothers who breast-feed their kids are disproportionately advantaged--they tend to be wealthier and better educated. When children fed differently within the same family were compared--those discordant sibling pairs--there was no statistically significant difference in any of the measures, except for asthma. Children who were breast-fed were at a higher risk for asthma than children who drank formula.

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I can't be the only one who just heaved a sigh of, "oh, Lord, I don't know if I have the stomach for the sh!tstorm that this will unleash."

Pierce:

Did you know about the secret files? No, not the ones in the safe at the Mena Airport. And, no, not the ones that poor Vince Foster burned at Hillary Clinton's discreet pied a terre on Dupont Circle before she had him killed and transported to Fort Tryon Park. And no, not the ones that were buried under the billing records in the White House closet. The ones at the Clinton library. The Secret Clinton Files!

[snip]

How in the name of god is "the death of White House aide Vince Foster" a "Clinton-era scandal."? (Whitewater wasn't a scandal, either, but never mind.) The poor man got hounded by the sociopaths on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal until he couldn't take it any more and shot himself in the head. (He specifically mentioned this in his suicide note.)  These are the Clinton Rules coming back with a vengeance. "Scandal" is anything the courtier press says it is, and a "cover-up" is engaged any time every single document desired isn't produced immediately. Unfortunately, this time around, nobody can book rooms at Parker Dozhier's fish camp. As Gene Lyons -- on his own and with Joe Conason -- point out, over and over again, it wasn't so much the "vast rightwing conspiracy" that plagued the Clinton administration, but the limitless sweet-tooth of the "respectable" press for whatever came down the puke funnel.

But, hey now. Secret files!

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Ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich showed up at a press conference in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don to proclaim that he's still the lawful head of the country's government. He also appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin for protection from "extremists," in a statement released by Russian state media, which has further (and curiously) begun using the term "Kyevan Rus," which is a direct reference to "Russian Ukraine."

Meanwhile in Kiev, interim Ukrainian President Olexander Turchynov has warned Russia against threats of military intervention in the Crimea or elsewhere in the country, and has asked that the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol stand down and not leave port. Arseniy Yatsenyuk was confirmed today as the country's new prime minister, and promptly accused Yanukovich and his friends of having looted Ukraine's government of some $37 billion.

With his attention having been diverted by the Olympic Games in Sochi, Putin now suddenly finds himself on the brink of experiencing a significant and humiliating political setback in Ukraine, a country which he has been alternately courting and bullying for the better part of a decade, in an ongoing effort to discourage Ukrainians from seeking closer economic and political ties with the European Union.

How Putin will react to Yanukovich's ouster remains to be seen. According to some regional experts, while direct military intervention on his ally's behalf seems unlikely given the corresponding risks of massive resistance by ethnic Ukrainians and a full diplomatic rift with the West, the Russian president still has several considerable options available as potential means to bend Ukraine to his will.

I'm just hoping this Bubble pops before my first is college age.

And probably wanking to the plethora of sexually explicit images.

Krugman announced Friday on his blog that he'll be retiring from Princeton at the end of the academic year in 2015. He will join CUNY's Graduate Center as a professor in the Ph.D. program in economics and be named a distinguished scholar at the Graduate Center's Luxembourg Income Study Center.

The columnist wrote that relocating to New York was part of his motivation for the change and that his work at the Times would not be affected. TPM