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(credit: National Cancer Institute)

Personal biases held by physicians and others in the field of healthcare continue to affect patients of all kinds. These can be biases about specific diseases or treatments, or biases about the patients themselves.

Pain management is one area in which racial disparities have been widely documented but haven’t been fully understood. A new study published in PNAS indicates that incorrect beliefs about racial differences cause white doctors and medical students to make less-appropriate pain-treatment recommendations. In short, black patients may be getting short-changed on pain management if their doctors think that black bodies are inherently stronger than white bodies.

To study the phenomenon of racial bias in pain treatment, the researchers conducted two studies. They first examined the beliefs of whites who were not medical professionals to establish baseline prejudices about pain perception for people of different backgrounds. They found that white adults with no medical training endorse at least some false beliefs about biological differences with black people, including the incorrect belief that blood coagulates at different speeds for people of different races.

Verizon workers rallying in July 2015, just before their contract expired. (credit: Communications Workers of America)

After 10 months of failed negotiations, 36,000 Verizon workers went on strike this morning. As a result, Verizon will use nonunion workers to perform repairs, network maintenance, and customer service on its fiber and copper wireline networks.

The strike was called by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which complain that Verizon is seeking to move jobs offshore, outsource work to low-wage contractors, close call centers, and force technicians to go on months-long assignments away from home.

“Verizon executives want wireline technicians to work away from home for as long as two months at a time, anywhere from Massachusetts to Virginia, without seeing their families,” the CWA said yesterday. “Working parents like Isaac Collazo, a cable splicer from New York, fear they will be forced to choose between caring for their kids and keeping their jobs.”

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, chairman of the Article 29 Working Party.

Exceptions in the proposed EU-US Privacy Shield framework that would allow the US to carry out mass surveillance of EU citizens are "not acceptable," the Article 29 Working Party of EU data protection authorities said today in a press conference.

The Chairman of the group, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, explained that the Article 29 Working Party would look with "great interest" on the forthcoming ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on whether mass surveillance of EU citizens could be legal. If the CJEU finds that the surveillance carried out by GCHQ is unlawful, it would have a big impact on the national security exceptions included in Privacy Shield.

Falque-Pierrotin said that the data protection authorities also had some concerns about the independence and effectiveness of the Privacy Shield ombudsperson who will deal with complaints from Europeans about how their data has been used by the NSA.

Ford

The Ford GT: the company's birthday present to itself for finishing 1-2-3 at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. There's a 3.5L turbocharged EcoBoost engine that's good for more than 600 horsepower.

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So far, we've seen the new Ford GT in Forza, at auto shows, and on the track at Daytona. Deliveries of the 600hp (447kW) supercar begin later in the year, but with just 500 cars planned, many have wondered how they will be allocated. On Wednesday morning, the Blue Oval revealed its plan; customers will be chosen from online applicants, and if you have $400,000 and want a GT in your garage, you have until May 12th to apply.

On Tuesday afternoon, we spoke to Henry Ford III about the program. He told us there had been plenty of internal discussion on how to allocate 500 GTs across the 10,000 Ford dealers in the US and 18 other countries. "We want to put the car in the hands of people who are true brand ambassadors for Ford," he told us. That means people who will drive their GTs—to track days, to Cars and Coffee, and the like—rather than lock it away, or worse, flip it for a quick buck.

Senior management at Ford will review the applicant pool and make some hard choices after the May deadline. The lucky few will be guided through the ordering process by a concierge service that will liaise between the local Ford dealer and Ford Performance, the new division that is responsible for developing and building the GT (as well as some of Ford's other more interesting vehicles).

(credit: Thomas Hawk)

"We Shall Overcome," a song that was the "unofficial anthem to the civil rights movement," was wrongly placed under copyright and should be put in the public domain, according to a lawsuit filed today in federal court. The complaint (PDF) was filed by the same group of lawyers who succeeded at putting the world's most famous song, Happy Birthday, into the public domain after years of litigation. It's a proposed class action that seeks the return of copyright licensing fees they say were wrongfully collected by Ludlow Music Inc. and The Richmond Organization, which claim to have copyrighted "We Shall Overcome" in 1960.

According to the lawsuit, the song is much older than that. The plaintiffs say the song is based on "an African-American spiritual with exactly the same melody and nearly identical lyrics from the late 19th or early 20th century."

At most, they say, the defendant companies own specific arrangements of the song, or additional verses that were added in 1960 when the song was copyrighted and again in 1963.

On May 22 2014, Mr Shafi Ahmed, consultant general colorectal, and laparoscopic surgeon at Barts NHS trust was in the news for bringing his craft a good deal closer to the gaze of his medical students.

By donning Google Glass as he removed tumours from the liver and bowel of a 78-year-old British man, he allowed 13,000 trainees and clinicians to witness a surgeon’s eye view of the procedure as it happened.

Now, the streaming surgeon is going live again. The Royal London hospital's operating theatre—with the surgery at centre stage—will be available for all to see live in virtual reality at lunchtime on Thursday, April 14.