Poor Mojo's Newswire

This morning a steam engine pulled into London's Liverpool Street Station. On board: 22 Holocaust survivors who had traveled 700 miles across Europe from Prague in the Czech Republic. And there to meet them on the platform: The man who saved their lives 70 years ago. The last time they made this journey it was the late-summer of 1939. They were children, and the Nazi armies were advancing. In those tense times, 669 mainly Jewish children boarded specially chartered trains at Prague's Wilson Station, bound for England and safety. "Our father was, when we were leaving, he was in the next room sobbing," Alice Masters told ABC News today on board during the final leg of the journey from the English coast.

In 1884, when President Grover Cleveland signed the bill making Labor Day a national holiday on the first Monday in September, he and its sponsors intended it not as a celebration of leisure but as a promotion of the great American work ethic. Work, they believed, was the highest calling in life, and Labor Day was a reminder to get back to it. It was placed at the end of summer to declare an end to the season of indolence, and also to distance it from May Day, the spring event that had become a symbol of the radical labor movement. The day most of us now spend in happy leisure was created to urge Americans to work more, not less. ... And to understand why is to get a clearer look at an important but little-understood piece of our own history: America’s long civil war over fun. The philosophical conflict embodied in Labor Day dates to the earliest days of the nation’s history. In 1625, just five years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, a rival settlement called Merry Mount was founded at the site of present-day Quincy. The inhabitants of Merry Mount shunned Puritanical injunctions and embraced the pleasures of the flesh. They drank great amounts of whiskey and beer and shamelessly fornicated. At the beginning of each May they erected a maypole, a pagan invention that had become the symbol of fun in villages across England, and danced around it with libidinal abandon. Merry Mount’s population of hedonists grew faster than the godly brethren of the Puritan settlements, threatening to create a new land that looked less like the Puritans’ vision of a pure society and more like their version of hell. So in 1628 the elders in nearby Plymouth Colony sent Captain Myles Standish and a force of men armed with muskets and swords to wipe their competitors from the earth. The Puritan army quickly conquered Merry Mount, arrested its leaders, and chopped down the maypole.

The Obama administration intensified its public campaign against health-care fraud Wednesday, putting drugmakers on notice that they will be forced to atone for improper marketing practices as prosecutors unveiled a record $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer. Officials at the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services called the agreement with Pfizer and one of its subsidiaries a cautionary example of their strategy to team up with states to police errant health-care businesses. The Pfizer unit Pharmacia & Upjohn pleaded guilty to a single felony charge that accused the company of marketing its anti-inflammatory drug Bextra for broader uses and higher dosages than those approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The company allegedly enticed doctors to prescribe the drug for pain relief by taking them on lavish trips, created sham requests for medical information as an excuse to send unsolicited advertising materials to physicians, and drafted articles promoting the pills without disclosing its role in preparing the stories.

DALLAS - Thomas McGowan's journey from prison to prosperity is about to culminate in $1.8 million, and he knows just how to spend it: on a house with three bedrooms, stainless steel kitchen appliances and a washer and dryer. "I'll let my girlfriend pick out the rest," said McGowan, who was exonerated last year based on DNA evidence after spending nearly 23 years in prison for rape and robbery. He and other exonerees in Texas, which leads the nation in freeing the wrongly convicted, soon will become instant millionaires under a new state law that took effect this week. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Exonerees will get $80,000 for each year they spent behind bars. The compensation also includes lifetime annuity payments that for most of the wrongly convicted are worth between $40,000 and $50,000 a year — making it by far the nation's most generous package.