The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Ex-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) proprietary traders Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon are teaming up with former colleague Marc Mezvinsky to start a hedge fund, according to a person with knowledge of their plans.

The three are raising money for their new firm, Eaglevale Partners LP, which plans to start trading in the first half of 2012, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The fund will employ a global macro strategy, seeking to profit from economic trends by trading securities from bonds to commodities.

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto donned a wig with shoulder-length gray hair and a scraggly, long gray beard to star on an upcoming hourlong episode of the CBS Emmy-winning show “Undercover Boss.” The episode is scheduled to air 8 p.m. Dec. 21.

Peduto spent four days collecting garbage, working as a carpenter hanging doors with the Pittsburgh Housing Authority, cutting logs with a chain saw with Department of Public Works employees and posing as a “self-sufficiency coordinator helping community members who are breaking out of the chain of poverty.”

The days were long, Peduto said. He was up at 5 a.m. putting on makeup from a location in Green Tree, where he stayed during the October filming. It took two hours to apply makeup. “Each one of those hairs were put on separately,” he said. He worked from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. and conducted mayoral business until 9 or 10 p.m.

Charlie Cook, one of the most respected political experts in the country, believes Hillary Clinton has only a 25-30 percent chance of running for president, and in any case he thinks she is either “rusty” or “she has lost her fastball.” He bases that on her disastrous book tour, in which she said some very inappropriate things and also did not sell many books.

The author of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report newsletter for almost 30 years also disappointed a local audience when he did not give Jeb Bush much of a chance of gaining the Republican nomination.

“Bush has two issues working against him to win the Republican primary for the 2016 presidential election,” Cook said. “One is immigration reform, which he favors; and two, is his advocacy of education reform.”

Neither of those causes would sit well with Republican primary voters, Cook said.

Artificial growth hormone is used to treat children and teens when their pituitary gland fails to produce enough natural growth hormone. It is also given to speed up growth and increase height when a child is short, either because of genetic abnormalities, chronic kidney disease, or below-normal signs of growth at birth. Increasingly, growth hormone is being used because parents believe their child might benefit from being taller, according to Coste.

While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved growth hormone in 1985, Coste noted there is still little known about the potential impact of the hormone on long-term health.

Researchers still have no idea what the effect of taking growth hormone in childhood might have over longer periods of time. "It's an additional elephant in the room, what happens to these individuals when they experience aging," said Ichord. "Who knows what the same population might be like in their 40s, 50s or 60s?"

Ichord said physicians treating children need to evaluate potential lifelong implications of treatment. "We in pediatrics need to be humble about things we do to children when they are young and be prepared to look at the long-term outcomes of treatments we prescribe," she noted.

Hillary Clinton’s latest attempt to explain away her comment that she and Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House has prompted her to possibly stumble into another verbal thicket, saying that they are not “truly well off.”

In an interview with the Guardian published Sunday, Hillary Clinton made a third attempt to tamp down the “dead broke” comment, made earlier this month to ABC’s Diane Sawyer. While defending the millions of dollars she and the ex-president have earned giving paid speeches and writing books, she insisted they are not “truly well off” like other wealthy people they know, fueling criticism that the potential presidential candidate does not relate to ordinary people.

But it also included making sure Hillary gets the benefit of the national spotlight that’s sure to burn hot on her if the inevitable happens to Bill Clinton before the 2016 primary season.

“Obviously, you have to have a big state funeral for me, with as much pomp and circumstance as possible,” Bill Clinton says in the excerpt. “I’m thinking maybe I should be buried at Arlington [National Cemetery] rather than at my library in Little Rock. After all, I was commander in chief for eight years and have every right to be buried at Arlington …”

“When I’m gone, people will think only of my good points and forgive, if not forget, the bad. I’ll be remembered in a positive light more in death than I was in life. That always happens. Everybody knows that. So you’ll have to take maximum advantage of my death …”

“It should be worth a couple of million votes.”

One of the savviest politicians of our generation, known for his wit, charm, and calm under extreme pressure, Bill Clinton appears out of character in the speeches and interviews televised since his bypass surgery September 6, 2004 and his mental deterioration may be accelerating. Remember, this is the president who withstood public impeachment before the entire world for his relationship with Monica Lewinski without once losing control. Now, he is easily angered by hecklers, and makes factual mistakes and racial slurs while aggressively defending his wife’s campaign for presidency. Everyone sees his mental and emotional decline, yet to date, no medical professionals have spoken out about the cause or offered help.

Not a single one — not one bypass surgeon, cardiologist or psychiatrist — has stepped forward in his defense; even though all of them are trained to recognize “post bypass surgery cognitive dysfunction.” One of the best-kept secrets in medicine is the brain damage caused during bypass surgery. During my 40 years of medical practice I have never heard a doctor warn a patient before bypass surgery that an expected complication is memory loss. After surgery when the family complains of dad’s fits of anger, I have never heard a doctor admit that personality change is a common consequence of surgery. Yet these well-recognized side effects have been reported in medical journals since 1969.1

Brain damage during bypass surgery is so common that hospital personnel refer to it as “pump head.” The primary cause is emboli produced during surgery from clamping the aorta and from the “heart-lung machine.” This machine pumps blood to keep the patient alive while the heart is stopped during the operation. Unfortunately, this pump also introduces toxic gases, fat globules, and bits of plastic debris into the bloodstream of the patient under anesthesia. Once they are in the bloodstream, these particles migrate to the brain where they can clog capillaries and prevent adequate amounts of blood and oxygen from flowing to the brain. Essentially, all patients experience brain emboli during surgery and for many the damage is permanent.

In 2001, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 5-years after bypass surgery 42% of patients showed decline in mental function of approximately 20 percent or more.2 A study published this year (2008) in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery using MRI testing just after bypass surgery found brain damage in 51% of patients.3 Three years after their time on the bypass pump, significant permanent reduction in mental capacity was identified in 31% of patients. I am not talking major stroke here; but these patients can’t remember names or numbers as they once did, experience sleep disturbances (including nightmares), suffer mood swings, and lose intellectual acuity. Approximately 30 percent of people suffer persistent depression and some even contemplate suicide