Poor Mojo's Newswire

Hospitals aren't doing enough to encourage breastfeeding among new mothers, according to a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Across the country, just 14 percent of these institutions have a model written breastfeeding policy in place, and the majority give infants food or drink other than breast milk when it's not medically necessary, according to the agency's August issue of Vital Signs. Improvements may require "large cultural changes within hospitals," CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden said during a press briefing, noting that many routinely give formula to all infants. Frieden explained that some formula companies provide hospitals with the supplies they need for preemies and other special needs infants who cannot breastfeed at no charge as long as the hospitals put samples of formula in the goody bags they send home with new mothers. Hospitals worry that changing this practice would cost them money, Frieden said, but, he countered, promoting breastfeeding will in the long run reduce costs because it will lower the burden of illness in these children. . . .

. . . The website was florida.arrests.org, a privately run enterprise that siphons booking photos out of county-sheriff databases throughout the Sunshine State, and posts them where Google’s web crawlers can see them for the first time. Desperate to get off the site, Cabibi quickly found an apparent ally: RemoveSlander.com. “You are not a criminal,” the website said reassuringly. “End this humiliating ordeal … Bail out of Google. We can delete the mug-shot photo.” Cabibi paid RemoveSlander $399 by credit card, and within a day, the site had come through. His mug shot was gone from florida.arrests.org, and his Google results were clean. “The RemoveSlander site was perfect. It seemed like it was just tailored to the mug-shot site,” Cabibi said in a recent telephone interview from Orem, Utah. “I searched ‘how to remove mug shots from florida.arrests.org,’ and the site was the first result. And I paid.” With that, Cabibi passed through one of the latest niche industries on the web: the mug-shot racket. Exploiting Florida’s liberal public-records laws and Google’s search algorithms, a handful of entrepreneurs are making real money by publicly shaming people who’ve run afoul of Florida law. Florida.arrests.org, the biggest player, now hosts more than 4 million mugs. On the other side of the equation are firms like RemoveSlander, RemoveArrest.com and others that sometimes charge hundreds of dollars to get a mugshot removed. On the surface, the mug-shot sites and the reputation firms are mortal enemies. But behind the scenes, they have a symbiotic relationship that wrings cash out of the people exposed. Florida.arrests.org is the brainchild of a computer-savvy Florida ex-con named Rob Wiggen. The 32-year-old served three years in federal prison for participating in a small-time credit-card-skimming operation (.pdf) out of a Mexican restaurant in Tallahassee. When he got out of jail in 2007, he was looking for more legitimate opportunities. Last year he seized on the idea of repurposing the booking photos that Florida police departments are obliged to make public under the state’s sunshine laws. . . .