A Michigan doctor faces life in prison after he admitted to intentionally misdiagnosing patients with cancer and recommending unnecessary chemotherapy to dying patients.

Dr. Farid Fata pleaded guilty Tuesday to 13 counts of health care fraud, two counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks, reported the Detroit Free Press.

The crimes were part of a moneymaking scheme, he said.

"It is my choice," Fata told the court. "I knew that it was medically unnecessary."

Prosecutors plan to seek life in prison for the 49-year-old married father of three, saying the case was "the most egregious" health care fraud their office had ever seen.

"In this case, we had Dr. Fata administering chemotherapy to people who didn't need it, essentially putting poison into their bodies and telling them that they had cancer when they didn't have cancer," said U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade. "The idea that a doctor would lie to a patient just to make money is shocking."

Fata made about $35 million as part of a Medicare fraud scheme through his practices in suburban Detroit.

My father, W.F. "High" Hightower, was a populist. Only, he didn't know it. Didn't know the word, much less the history or anything about populism's democratic ethos. My father was not philosophical, but he had a phrase that he used to express the gist of his political beliefs: "Everybody does better when everybody does better."

Before the populists of the late 1800s gave its instinctive rebelliousness a name, it had long been established as a defining trait of our national character: The 1776 rebellion was not only against King George III's government but against the corporate tyranny of such British monopolists as the East India Trading Company.

The establishment certainly doesn't celebrate the populist spirit, and our educational system avoids bothering students with our vibrant, human story of constant battles, big and small, mounted by "little people" against ... well, against the establishment. The Keepers of the Corporate Order take care to avoid even a suggestion that there is an important political pattern - a historic continuum - that connects Thomas Paine's radical democracy writings in the late 1700s to Shays' Rebellion in 1786, to strikes by mill women and carpenters in the early 1800s, to Jefferson's 1825 warning about the rising aristocracy of banks and corporations "riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman," to the launching of the women's suffrage movement at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the maverick Texans who outlawed banks in their 1845 state constitution, to the bloody and ultimately successful grassroots struggle for the abolition of slavery, and to the populist movement itself, plus the myriad rebellions that followed right into our present day.

Congress has been working on some important legislation recently that will benefit the country's service-disabled veterans.

The 2014 Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act (S. 2258) now heads to President Obama for his signature, after the House passed the bill on Tuesday. The legislation increases the COLA for vets' disability benefits starting Dec. 1, 2014. The rate of the increase will be the same as the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients. The annual COLA legislation, which the Senate approved last week, also affects the disability payments and compensation for vets' surviving spouses and children.

And on Wednesday afternoon, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved bipartisan legislation that would give disabled vets hired as federal employees access to their full year's sick leave immediately upon starting their jobs.

The Federal Reserve Wednesday reassured investors that it will hold interest rates near zero for a "considerable time" after it ends the bond-buying program known as quantitative easing in October. In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) closed at a new record high.

Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget and author of the book, The Great Deformation, David Stockman, has significant concerns about that very policy.

"I'm worried... that we've got the greatest bubble created by a central bank in human history," he told Yahoo Finance.

In a recent blog post, Stockman offered a handful of high-flying stocks as evidence of what he sees as "madness."

"...Twitter, is all that is required to remind us that once again markets are trading in the nosebleed section of history, rivaling even the madness of March 2000."

Behind the madness

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Stockman blamed Fed policy for creating that madness.

"We have been shoving zero-cost money into the financial markets for 6-years running," he said. "That's the kerosene that drives speculative trading - the carry trades. That's what the gamblers use to fund their position as they move from one momentum play and trade to another."

And that, he says, is not sustainable. While Stockman believes tech stocks are especially overvalued, he warns that it's not just tech valuations that are inflated. "Everything's massively overvalued, and it's predicated on zero-cost overnight money that continues these carry trades; It can't continue."

And he still believes, as he has for some time - so far, incorrectly - that there will be a day of reckoning.

"When the trades begin to unwind because the carry cost has to normalize, you're going to have a dramatic re-pricing dislocation in these financial markets."

As Yahoo Finance's Lauren Lyster points out in the associated video, investors who heeded Stockman's advice last year would have missed out on a 28% run-up in stocks. But Stockman remains steadfast in his belief that the current Fed policy and the resultant market behavior can not continue. "I think what the Fed is doing is so unprecedented, what is happening in the markets is so unnatural," he said. "This is dangerous, combustible stuff, and I don't know when the explosion occurs - when the collapse suddenly is upon us - but when it happens, people will be happy that they got out of the way if they did."

The Veterans Affairs Department wants to increase the annual salaries of new physicians and dentists by up to $35,000 as part of a nationwide recruitment effort to hire more doctors and improve veterans' access to care.

The change, which the department announced Wednesday, would update existing pay tables for several categories of physicians in the Veterans Health Administration, enabling newly hired doctors to potentially earn between $20,000 and $35,000 more than the current salary ranges. The pay ranges for physicians who serve in leadership roles, including department undersecretaries and VA medical center directors, would not change. The notice outlining the new policy will be published Thursday in the Federal Register and will take effect on Nov. 30.

"We are committed to hiring more medical professionals across the country to better serve veterans and expand their access to timely, high-quality care," said VA Secretary Bob McDonald, in a statement.

The bison population in Yellowstone National Park will be significantly reduced this winter, as park officials have announced a plan to cull up to 900 animals that attempt to leave or drift away from the park.

The park's famous bison population currently stands at roughly 4,900, meaning it could be reduced by about one-fifth.

According to Reuters, the cull announced Tuesday by Yellowstone's science and research branch would be the largest in seven years.

However, it would still leave the herd's numbers significantly higher than what both state and federal wildlife officials have established as the target goal - a population of somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500.

"It will not get us close to the goal of 3,000, but it will stabilize the population and bring it down somewhat," David Hallac, chief of the park's science and research branch, told Reuters.

Although Yellowstone's bison compose the only remaining herd of free-ranging buffalo in the United States, officials want to keep the population from growing too large, out of fear that drifting animals will spread a bacterial disease known as brucellosis to cattle that also graze in Montana's fields.

It has been widely reported that Michelle Obama's fight against childhood obesity in America's schools has reached past the lunchroom into bake sales and even the vending machines.

The First Lady's new standards remove any sugary snacks over 200 calories from the machines. Sometimes machines are emptied all together leaving students upset and hungry.

The Census Bureau reported Thursday that the nation's marriage rate is the lowest since 1920, and the first-time inclusion of same sex married couples did little to reverse the decline.

According to Pew Research Center analysis, the marriage rate of Americans 18 and older hit a bottom of 50.3 percent in 2013, down from 50.5 percent in 2012. In 1920, the first year mentioned, 65 percent were married, and the marriage rate hit a high of 72.2 percent in 1960.

Ian Glomski thought he was going to make a difference in the fight to protect people from deadly anthrax germs. He had done everything right - attended one top university, landed an assistant professorship at another.

But Glomski ran head-on into an unpleasant reality: These days, the scramble for money to conduct research has become stultifying.

So, he's giving up on science.

And he's not alone. Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade. There are far more scientists competing for grants than there is money to support them.

That crunch is forcing some people out of science altogether, either because they can't get research funding at all or, in Glomski's case, because the rat race has simply become too unpleasant.

"My lab was well-funded until, basically, the moment I decided I wasn't going to work there anymore," he says during an interview on the porch swing of his home in Charlottesville, Va. "And I probably could have scraped through there for the rest of my career, as I had been doing, but I would have had regrets."

Glomski's problem was that he could only get funding to do very predictable, unexciting research. When money gets tight, often only the most risk-averse ideas get funded, he and others say.

Two acts of ugly terrorism occurred in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963.

One act was widely abhorred. The other act ignored.

Many across America know about the 9/15/63 Birmingham murders of four little girls slain in the bombing of a black Baptist church 18-days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his stirring "I Have A Dream" speech.

However, few know about the Birmingham murder of Johnny Robinson, a 16-year-old shot in the back by a policeman hours after that church bombing.

If the deaths of those four children inside that Birmingham church catalyzed the 1960s-era Civil Rights Movement contributing to the racial progress America now praises itself for achieving, the death of Johnny Robinson represents yet another instance of the regression across America on the issue of effectively addressing lawlessness by law enforcers - lawlessness that most often evades legal accountability.

Historically, America has a history of downplaying brutal behavior by police.

Police abuses - from fatal shootings through false arrests to the gratuitous use of foul or threatening language - are dismissed as isolated acts of a 'few bad apples' instead of as an endemic scourge historically impacting minorities and increasing impacting non-minorities. Top policy-makers and even much of the public embrace this dismissal dynamic.