Dr. Cristin Kearns Couzens our special guest to talk about her and Gary Taubes Salon piece Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies. She examines how the sugar industry, for decades, has kept scientists from asking the question whether sugar kills. Dr. Cristin Kearns Couzens first saw the devastating effects of sugar as a dental director of low-income clinics in Denver. She moved into dental administration, and took a position managing operations at the Kaiser Permanente Dental Care Program before leaving in 2009 to pursue independent research into the sugar industry's public relations claims. Dr. Couzens is currently a senior consultant at the University of Colorado Center for Health Administration and an instructor at the University of Washington School of Dentistry. She also hosts the blog Sugar Politics.
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Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights Pardiss Kebriaei is our special guest. She is representing Nasser al-Awlaki whose son, Anwar, and his sixteen year-old grandson, Abdulrahman, were assassinated by separate US drone strikes in Yemen. The Obama administration urged a federal court Friday to dismiss the damage lawsuit over the drone-strike killings of three U.S. citizens in Yemen last year, including an al-Qaida cleric. In a court filing, the Justice Department said the issue is best handled by the government's political branches, not the judiciary. U.S.-born al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, an al-Qaida propagandist, were killed in a drone strike in September 2011. Al-Awlaki's son, Abdulrahman, was killed the following month. The lawsuit filed by relatives of the three charged that senior CIA and military officials violated the Constitution and international law when they authorized strikes by the unmanned drones. It named as defendants Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, then-CIA Director David Petraeus and two commanders in the military's Special Operations forces. The suit seeks unspecified compensatory damages. Kebriaei's work focuses on challenging government abuses post-9/11, including in the areas of "targeted killing" and unjust detentions at Guantanamo and in the federal system. She represents men currently and formerly detained at Guantanamo in their efforts for release and reintegration, and represented the families of two men who died at the base in their lawsuit for accountability. She also represents Fahad Hashmi, who pled to material support for terrorism after years in pre-trial solitary confinement and Special Administrative Measures, in his efforts to challenge his continuing solitary confinement in a federal “supermax” prison. Pardiss joined CCR from the Center for Reproductive Rights, where she focused on international human rights litigation, and is an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College.










