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| Puppet Masters |
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Brian Bennett
Los Angeles Times 2013-06-20 15:03:00
During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI. Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed. Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3. |
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Cybelle Clements
"Overall Repression on Media in Turkey"guardianlv.com/ 2013-06-14 12:22:00
Hayat TV (Life TV), a Turkish channel broadcasting extensive live coverage of the ongoing protests in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, Istanbul, has been ordered to shut down. Regulators have ordered the broadcast to cease at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, June 14 due to a licensing issue; however, Hayat TV asserts this is a pretext to force closure of their broadcast of the protests. In an open letter published today by blog EUObserver.com (which reports on events in the Arab world), Mustafa Kara, TV Broadcast Coordinator for Hayat TV, asks readers to "support freedom of press" and spread news of the closure (which the station hopes to reverse). The letter reads in its entirety: Suppression of media within Turkey (TV channels there initially continued to broadcast a documentary on penguins and a cooking show instead of early coverage of the protests) left many Turkish citizens in the dark about the events as they developed, hearing of them instead through social media and word of mouth. Outrage against this and other government handling of Taksim has fueled the ongoing protests. And with Turkish authorities warning earlier today that they'll raid Taksim Square within 24 hours, it does appear curious timing to restrict live broadcasts of the events. |
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Glenn Greenwald
Guardian 2013-06-19 10:54:00
Obama and other NSA defenders insist there are robust limitations on surveillance but the documents show otherwise Since we began began publishing stories about the NSA's massive domestic spying apparatus, various NSA defenders - beginning with President Obama - have sought to assure the public that this is all done under robust judicial oversight. "When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls," he proclaimed on June 7 when responding to our story about the bulk collection of telephone records, adding that the program is "fully overseen" by "the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them". Obama told Charlie Rose last night: The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA "is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law." Talking points issued by the House GOP in defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only "allows the Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.-persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States." The NSA's media defenders have similarly stressed that the NSA's eavesdropping and internet snooping requires warrants when it involves Americans. The Washington Post's Charles Lane told his readers: "the government needs a court-issued warrant, based on probable cause, to listen in on phone calls." The Post's David Ignatius told Post readers that NSA internet surveillance "is overseen by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" and is "lawful and controlled". Tom Friedman told New York Times readers that before NSA analysts can invade the content of calls and emails, they "have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress." |
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Fars News Agency
2013-06-19 17:51:00
Russian President Vladimir Putin said chemical laboratories in Iraq are producing chemical weapons for the terrorists in Syria, confirming a detailed report by Far News Agency (FNA) last month which said former Ba'ath regime officials are involved in the production and procurement of such weapons to the Syrian terrorists. "We know that Opposition Fighters were detained on Turkish territory with chemical weapons," Mr. Putin told a press conference in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland after meeting the leaders of the industrialized nations in a G8 Summit. "We have information out of Iraq that a laboratory was discovered there for the production of chemical weapons by the opposition. All this evidence needs to be studied most seriously," he continued. Putin questioned the credibility of allegations by the US, UK and France that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's forces had used chemical weapons, and attributed equivalent horrors to the forces supported by the West. | |
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Comment: And there we have it directly from UN human
rights investigators. Obama's red line has been crossed, by none other
than the Al-Qaeda troops the US, UK and France are now supporting, not
by Syrian forces.
For more info, check out: Syria: WMD Redux |
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RT.com
2013-06-19 20:05:00
Employees of Bank of America say they were encouraged to lie to customers and were even rewarded for foreclosing on homes, staffers of the financial giant claim in new court documents. Sworn statements from several Bank of America employees contain a number of damning allegations, the latest claims entered as evidence in a multi-state class action lawsuit that challenges the bank's history with foreclosures. According to testimonies obtained by journalists at ProPublica, supervisors at various Bank of America branches across the United States encouraged employees to regularly deny loan modification applications with no reason. At times, they were told to make up excuses to customers who risked losing their homes. In one of the sworn statements, an ex-bank staffer said he would be directed to deny upwards of 1,500 loan modification applications at a single time with no apparent reason. |
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RT.com
2013-06-19 19:55:00
Former investigators of the TWA Flight 800 airplane crash have revealed that an explosion came from outside the plane, thereby contradicting the government's conclusion that the fatal crash was an accident. The investigators claim they were silenced from telling the truth by their superiors, and were forced to conclude that the 1996 crash was an accident sparked by a fuel tank explosion. In a new EPIX film called "TWA Flight 800", the former National Transportation Safety Board investigators communicate their beliefs that an outside explosion was responsible for the deadly crash that occurred nearly 17 years ago, killing all 230 people on board. The documentary film revolves around the crash of the Trans World Airlines Flight 800, a Boeing 747-131 that exploded and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York on July 17, 1996. The plane had been en route from New York to Paris, but went up in flames over the Atlantic Ocean, just 12 minutes after take-off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. There were no survivors, and some speculated that the plane might have been the target of a terrorist attack. |
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Kristan T. Harris
CudahyNow 2013-06-19 19:42:00
Hypothetical: "Can I have an extra 2 years to pay my $7,000 in back property taxes Uncle SAM?" Response: "No. We are going to take it from you tomorrow. Oh, by the way. and we misplaced $28,000 dollars of your money. See you tomorrow." The Federal Reserve has kinda, sorta misplaced $9,000,000,000,000 as shown by a recent video surfaced on you tube (see video below). Your tax money is being stolen. No one at the federal reserve is keeping track of what happened to 9 trillion dollars. With black budgets and under the table deals can we just guess where all the money has gone? Into the pockets of the Bilderberg fortune 100 attendees. We provided detailed evidence the organization exists with actual documents from their conference recently released to us! Read the documents at Unusual Bilderberg Documents Uncovered at Georgetown University. So thats $28,125 roughly stolen from every American citizen. Its time for a class action lawsuit . The Federal Reserve is private isn't it? |
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| Society's Child |
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Masha Volynsky
Cesky Rozhlas 2013-06-20 15:56:00
A fire at an electrical substation left many Prague's residents without power on Tuesday night. The blackout did not cause any direct injuries, but left some stranded in lifts or without a way to get home. At around 10:30 pm on Tuesday, almost half of the capital - in the eastern central and southern regions - lost power. For some, the electricity came back on after a few minutes, but most remained in darkness for an hour to an hour and a half. Some buildings were also left without running water. The reason was a massive fire at an electrical substation in the southern Chodov district. Some 60 tons of oil ignited causing a loud explosion and fierce blaze. Officials at the ČEPS company, which manages power distribution, presume that the explosion was caused by damage to the porcelain electrical bushing in the transformer. Vladimír Tošovský, chairman of the board of directors of ČEPS: "This is not an unusual defect. It happens. The last time this happened in the Czech Republic was in 2009 in Vyškov, when a similar transformer burnt down. On the other hand, this transformer is not very new, it is 15 years old. It is now completely destroyed and we will have to build a new one." |
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Kamila Hinkson
The Star 2013-06-15 14:56:00
The story of Nicole Sauve, who found 400-year-old bones in her Point Edward backyard, was ordered to hire an archaeologist, and is now saddled with a $5,000 bill. A Sarnia couple who set out to build a fence dug up more than they bargained for recently when they unearthed a 400-year-old skeleton and got stuck with a $5,000 bill from the province. The archeological misadventure began two weeks ago when Ken Campbell came across some bones while digging post holes in their backyard. He put them aside, thinking they must have belonged to an animal. The following week, his wife, Nicole Sauve, asked about the bones, which sat unceremoniously atop a bucket of earth "I said, 'They're not animal bones, Ken. Let's dig some more and see what we can find,' "she said. What they found was the rest of the skeleton of an aboriginal woman. |
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Joseph Lichterman
Reuters 2013-06-19 14:49:00
The latest search for the remains of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa ended on Wednesday in a field near Detroit, where federal agents had dug with heavy equipment and shovels for three days in the hope of answering the decades old question, "Whatever happened to Jimmy Hoffa?" Since Monday, 40 agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Michigan state police and Oakland County sheriff's office, and forensic anthropologists from Michigan State University had combed an acre of the overgrown field not far from where Hoffa was last seen alive in 1975. "We did not uncover any evidence relevant to the investigation on James Hoffa," Robert Foley, head of the FBI's Detroit office, told reporters. "Of course we're disappointed." The search for Hoffa, who was 62 when he disappeared and is thought to have been killed by members of organized crime, has become near mythical, providing fodder for rumors, books, and movies, including 1992's Hoffa, starring Jack Nicholson. Law enforcement officials decided to search the field after reputed mobster Anthony Zerilli, 85, told the FBI Hoffa was buried there. When Hoffa disappeared, the property was owned by a man Zerilli said was his first cousin. Zerilli is the son of former reputed Detroit mob boss Joseph Zerilli. |
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C J Hughes
In a move that may enrage those who enjoy a cigarette on their couch
after work, but delight air-freshener-wielding neighbors, a major
landlord has banned smoking in all of its apartments across the country.New York Times 2013-06-13 09:32:00 As of this month, the Related Companies has decided that tenants can no longer light up in the 40,000 rental units it owns or manages. The edict, which builds on an effort that began for Related with a handful of its New York buildings in 2009, is meant to create healthier living conditions, company officials said.
It also seems likely to create controversy. Where past efforts against smoking have focused on public gathering places - like bars, stadiums and courthouses - Related is now trying to prohibit legal private behavior. Not that smokers will get kicked to the curb right away. New tenants must sign a contract promising not to smoke anywhere in the building, including their private terraces or balconies. If they break the rules, they can be evicted. But those already renting will not face the same fate until after they renew their leases and sign the no-smoking contract. With a turnover rate of 10,000 a year, Related's apartments could conceivably be smoke-free in a few years' time. Critics point out that tenants could always lie about their habit, and hide it successfully. Also, it can be very difficult to evict tenants - especially those whose rents are regulated, as they have strong protections and guaranteed lease renewals. |
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Kris Betts
KVUE News Austin 2013-06-19 12:58:00
Liberty Hill -- Vinny is German Shepherd with a bullet wound on the back of his neck. On Monday, a Leander police officer shot Vinny when he says the dog and another German Sheppard came running at him while trying to serve a warrant. "He said they were growling, and closing distance very quickly," said Lt. Derral Partin, a spokesperson for Leander Police. However, Vinny's owners Renata and Chris Simmons, say Vinny has never acted aggressively. "This dog wasn't after him. This dog was just running up going 'hey what are you doing?' and they have a right to do that. This is my yard; this man should not have even been there. He could have killed my husband's best friend," said Renata Simmons. |
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Yahoo! News
2013-06-20 00:00:00
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom said Thursday he was "in tears" after a European company deleted all the data it was hosting from his shuttered file-sharing site. Netherlands-based LeaseWeb announced it had deleted all Megaupload files from 630 servers. LeaseWeb said in a statement it hosted the data for over a year at its own expense without receiving any requests to access it or retain it before deciding the time had come to use the servers for other purposes. But Dotcom said in a series of Twitter posts that his lawyers repeatedly asked LeaseWeb to keep the data pending U.S. court proceedings. Dotcom said that millions of users' personal files had been lost in the "largest data massacre in the history of the Internet." |
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guardian
2013-06-18 00:00:00
Erdem Gunduz - dubbed 'standing man' - stages eight-hour vigil and is joined by 300 people during silent protest A Turkish man has staged an eight-hour silent vigil in Istanbul's Taksim Square, the scene of violent clashes between police and anti-government protesters in recent weeks, inspiring hundreds of others to follow his lead. Erdem Gunduz said he wanted to take a stand against police stopping demonstrations near the square, the Dogan news agency reported. He stood silently, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre which was draped in Turkish flags and a portrait of Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, from 6pm on Monday. |
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| Secret History |
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Megan Gannon
LiveScience 2013-06-20 15:37:00
An entire Maya city full of pyramids and palatial complexes has been discovered in a remote jungle in southeastern Mexico, archaeologists report. Covered in thick vegetation, the ruins were found in Campeche, a province in the western Yucatán peninsula that's littered with Maya complexes and artifacts. The newfound site is dubbed Chactún and it stretches over roughly 54 acres (22 hectares). Researchers think the city was occupied between during the Late Classic Maya period, from roughly 600 A.D. until 900 A.D., when the civilization mysteriously collapsed. "It is one of the largest sites in the Central Lowlands, comparable in its extent and the magnitude of its buildings with Becan, Nadzcaan and El Palmar in Campeche," archaeologist Ivan Sprajc said in a statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). |
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Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story 2013-06-20 14:33:00
Thomas "Beau" Walker, the great-great-great grandfather to U.S. President George W. Bush, was a notorious slave trader who either personally led or heavily invested in expeditions to kidnap Africans from their homeland and bring them to America as slaves, a journalist and historian announced this week. Word of the presidential ancestor came by way of retired journalist and genealogist Roger Hughes and historian Joseph Opala, who illustrated their findings to Slate. They made the discovery by comparing the signatures of known Bush ancestor Thomas Walker with a notorious slave trader of the day who bore the same name. Stacked side-by-side, the signatures looked almost exactly the same. They also recovered several letters Walker wrote, in which he complains about the cost of the people he's kidnapped. "Times on the coast is by no means as favourable as I expected," Walker reportedly wrote. "Slaves is at the price of 150 [illegible] and the coast seemes [sic] to be lin'd with vessels of all kind." "I have purchased seventeen fine negroes and am this day proceeding down the coast to try what I do can there," another of Walker's letters reads. "Slaves is at a very greate [sic] price." There were at least two other known slave-owners in the Bush family, according to Hughes. |
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Megan Gannon
LiveScience 2013-06-19 15:21:00
In Shakespeare's England, many kids were coerced into acting careers not by stage moms but by "child catchers," new research shows. Elizabethan-era boy players were prized in adult theater companies for their prepubescent looks and high-pitched voices, which allowed them to act in female roles alongside men. But some boy players were put into all-children acting troupes, and not all of them voluntarily; rather many were systematically exploited and abused, according to an Oxford University scholar. While writing his new book Shakespeare in Company (Oxford University Press), Bart van Es found that child catchers seized young boys on their way to school, handing them over to theater company bosses that forced the kids to perform on stage or else face whipping. Van Es even found documents that show Queen Elizabeth I herself signed commissions allowing theaters to kidnap children, he said. "Technically these warrants were designed to allow the Master of the Children to 'take up' boys for service in the Chapel Royal," which was a group of priests and singers established to serve the British monarchy, van Es explained. "But the reality was very different. It was well known that the Children of the Chapel Royal was really an acting company, and the Queen did nothing to intervene," van Es said in a statement. |
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| Science & Technology |
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Jon M. Chang
Yahoo! News 2013-06-20 00:00:00
Remember when Tupac made an appearance at last year's Coachella festival? It wasn't really Tupac but a holograph of the late rapper. The holograph wasn't like watching a regular 3D TV image. You didn't need glasses, it was viewable to the entire audience, no matter what angle they were watching at, and it wasn't just a projected two dimensional image. It looked like Tupac was really on stage. The engineers of the Object-Based Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by V. Michael Bove Jr. and his graduate student Dan Smalley, are working on technology that might enable that experience in your living room. The group is aiming to make true holographic videos not only a reality, but an affordable reality. Sure, there have been other types of glasses-free 3D screens and devices, including the Nintendo 3DS handheld gaming system or various 3D TVs shown by Vizio and Toshiba, but those have suffered from poor viewing angles, causing the image to be distorted when you move off the right or left. They also aren't considered true holograms. |
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Fairewinds Energy Education
2013-06-12 00:00:00
"When do the risks of a technology become untenable?"
About This Podcast After two weeks of traveling, Arnie is back in town to recount his adventures on this week's podcast. His first trip was to Canada to testify about the Pickering Nuclear Plant on Lake Ontario. His second trip was to southern California to speak at the conference "Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Lessons for California" alongside former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, and former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford. While Arnie was in California, we received the news that the San Onofre Nuclear Plant near San Diego was closing permanently. So, what happens at San Onofre now? Comment: Listen in, and find out. |
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| Earth Changes |
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The Extinction Protocol
2013-06-20 08:38:00
A magnitude-5.7 earthquake shook central Chile on Wednesday, causing buildings to sway in the capital but apparently causing no major damage. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck at 17:29 p.m. local time and its epicenter was about 60 kilometers (37 miles) east-north-east of Los Andes, Chile. Officials discarded the possibility of a tsunami and said there were no immediate reports of deaths or damages. Chile is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries. A magnitude-8.8 quake and the tsunami it unleashed in 2010 killed more than 500 people and destroyed 220,000 homes. - ABC |
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Yahoo! News
2013-06-20 00:00:00
Singapore urged people to remain indoors amid unprecedented levels of air pollution Thursday as a smoky haze wrought by forest fires in neighboring Indonesia worsened dramatically. Nearby Malaysia closed 200 schools and banned open burning in some areas. The Pollutant Standards Index, Singapore's main measure for air pollution, surged to a record reading of 371, breaching the "hazardous" classification that can aggravate respiratory ailments. The previous all-time high before this week was in 1997, when the index reached 226. The hazardous reading lasted three hours before easing to 253 in the evening, still "very unhealthy." Smog fueled by raging Indonesian blazes has hit Singapore and Malaysia many times, often in the middle of the year, but the severity of this week's conditions has strained diplomatic ties. Officials in Singapore say Jakarta must do more to halt fires on Sumatra island started by plantation owners and farmers to clear land cheaply. "This is now the worst haze that Singapore has ever faced," Singapore's Environment Minister Vivian Balakrishnan wrote on his Facebook page. "No country or corporation has the right to pollute the air at the expense of Singaporeans' health and wellbeing." The haze has shrouded the city-state's skyscrapers in a pall of noxious fumes and posed numerous inconveniences for Singaporeans, some of whom complained of coughs and covered their faces with handkerchiefs while walking outdoors. |
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Charles Q. Choi
OurAmazingPlanet 2013-06-19 08:27:00
Arrays of sensors stretching across more than 1,500 miles in Africa are now probing the giant crack in the Earth located there - a fissure linked with human evolution - to discover why and how continents get ripped apart. Over the course of millions of years, Earth's continents break up as they are slowly torn apart by the planet's tectonic forces. All the ocean basins on the Earth started as continental rifts, such as the Rio Grande rift in North America and Asia's Baikal rift in Siberia. The giant rift in Eastern Africa was born when Arabia and Africa began pulling away from each other about 26 million to 29 million years ago. Although this rift has grown less than 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) per year, the dramatic results include the formation and ongoing spread of the Red Sea, as well as the East African Rift Valley, the landscape that might have been home to the first humans. "Yet, in spite of numerous geophysical and geological studies, we still do not know much about the processes that tear open continents and form continental rifts," said researcher Stephen Gao, a seismologist at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Mo. This is partly because such research has mostly focused on mature segments of these chasms, as opposed to ones that are still in development, he explained. |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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No new articles. |
| Health & Wellness |
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Sebatian A. B.
The American medical system is corrupt, ineffective and unnecessarily
costly. These outcomes are due to state violence on behalf of the
politically connected elite (namely private insurers, physicians,
pharmaceutical and medical device companies). Artificial scarcity,
price-gouging, misallocation of research funding and the suppression of
alternative (non-patentable) therapies can be ameliorated by revoking
state-conferred elite privilege and re-establishing cooperative,
mutualized healthcare financing.c4ss.org 2013-06-20 09:54:00
"Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, 157 - 61 Grocery Insurance The essential problem with medical financing is described by the Grocery Insurance analogy - third party payment (nominally "private" insurers or the state) divorces price from cost, distributes responsibility, suppresses competition and puts upward pressure on prices: when your insurer only requires a small deductible for each trip to the supermarket, you will probably buy a lot more caviar, filet mignon and white truffle oil. Likewise, the seller will raise prices. When someone else pays, the seller and the buyer do not have antagonistic interests; the seller wants to charge higher prices and the buyer does not care. Ultimately, costs are externalized. Insurance companies are unscrupulous in their efforts to contain costs, deny coverage and swindle customers (as a matter of necessity) - despite it all, costs are aggregated within the insurance fund and redistributed in the form of higher premiums for everyone. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the insurance model is based on trying to eat yours. The state, as disorganized as it is, has less incentive to ruthlessly minimize costs, but immense waste is written off as necessary humanitarian spending. The state suffers diseconomies of scale, bureaucratic inertia, lacks incentive to economize and by its nature the state is centralized and prone to corruption. Hospitals, drug companies and doctors take advantage of the inept Panopticon by price gouging, pushing drugs and executing unnecessary procedures. Thus, the two-pronged system of unaccountability drives healthcare costs in one direction - up. Meanwhile, tax and premium-payers are gouged with nowhere to turn - to the point at which 17% of U.S. GDP and 23% of the Federal budget is spent on sick care. Nobody should blame sick people for the broken system; they operate within very narrow constraints, especially lack of access to healthy food, clean water, accurate medical information and they endure unsafe working conditions. Claiming that people are hedonistic free-riders is facile. Few will make healthy choices because of the specter of future medical costs; they do so to avoid contracting a disease. The problem is that there are few choices, period, and they're all unhealthy. |
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Cari Nierenberg
LiveScience 2013-06-20 13:04:00
In the largest outbreak ever reported in the U.S. of blastomycosis, a fungal infection with flulike symptoms, 55 people in central Wisconsin became sick in 2010. The fungus that causes blastomycosis is commonly found in soil, but exactly what triggered the spike in cases in Marathon County remains a mystery, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Wisconsin health officials. Unlike a blastomycosis outbreak in a neighboring Wisconsin county in 2006, in which a pile of waste in a large yard was the likely source, the culprit in this episode remains elusive. "We didn't find evidence for a single source in the environment that could explain all the cases," said Kaitlin Benedict, an epidemiologist with the CDC's Mycotic Diseases Branch, who was involved in the research. "We think there were probably multiple 'hot spots' for the fungus in several different neighborhoods." It's also unclear why infection rates among Asians, particularly those of Hmong descent, were about 12 times higher than non-Asians, the report said. Some 45 percent of people affected by the outbreak were of Hmong ethnicity. This group is originally from Southeast Asia, but many of those who became sick in the outbreak had been living in Wisconsin for more than a decade, according to the report. The large number of cases among the Hmong was one of the most surprising things about this outbreak, Benedict said. "This is the first known report of Asians being disproportionately affected" by the fungal illness, she said, adding that previous studies have shown high blastomycosis rates among African-Americans in other U.S. states. The report was published online (June 3) in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. |
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Chris Kresser
chriskresser.com 2012-10-05 00:07:00
Beyond just being loaded with "artery-clogging saturated fat" and sodium, bacon has been long considered unhealthy due to the use of nitrates and nitrites in the curing process. Many conventional doctors, and well-meaning friends and relatives, will say you're basically asking for a heart attack or cancer by eating the food many Paleo enthusiasts lovingly refer to as "meat candy". The belief that nitrates and nitrates cause serious health problems has been entrenched in popular consciousness and media. Watch this video clip to see Steven Colbert explain how the coming bacon shortage will prolong our lives thanks to reduced nitrates in our diets. In fact, the study that originally connected nitrates with cancer risk and caused the scare in the first place has since been discredited after being subjected to a peer review. There have been major reviews of the scientific literature that found no link between nitrates or nitrites and human cancers, or even evidence to suggest that they may be carcinogenic. Further, recent research suggests that nitrates and nitrites may not only be harmless, they may be beneficial, especially for immunity and heart health. Confused yet? Let's explore this issue further. |
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Anthony Gucciardi
NaturalSociety 2013-06-19 22:45:00
The world of meat-eaters got a rude awakening earlier this year when it was found that meat passed off as beef in the U.K. was actually horse meat. But, if you thought meat in the U.S. was safe from secret ingredients, the bliss of your ignorance may soon be shattered. A recent analysis into several different fast food hamburgers found relatively little meat, and a whole host of other "stuff". According to GreenMedInfo, the study was to determine what exactly Americans are eating when they consume their 5 billion hamburgers annually. The burgers, from 8 different fast food establishments, were analyzed by weight and then microscopically for tissue types. Their analysis found that water constituted about half of the weight of the burgers, with water content ranging from 37.7% to 62.4%, with an average of 49%. Meat, what you'd expect to make up the majority of the burgers, was found to be as low as 2.1% in some cases, to the maximum of 14.8% in others. |
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Lee Rannals
Over a thousand pedestrians had to make a trip to the emergency room in 2010 forRedOrbit 2013-06-19 23:17:00
injuries related to using their cell phone and walking. According to a new nationwide study published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, more than 1,500 pedestrians were injured while walking due to cell phone distractions. This number has more than doubled since 2005, even though the total number of pedestrian injuries dropped during that time. The researchers from this study even believe that the number is actually higher than results show. "If current trends continue, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of injuries to pedestrians caused by cell phones doubles again between 2010 and 2015," said Jack Nasar, co-author of the study and professor of city and regional planning at The Ohio State University. "The role of cell phones in distracted driving injuries and deaths gets a lot of attention and rightly so, but we need to also consider the danger cell phone use poses to pedestrians." Nasar and colleagues found that people between the ages 16- and 25-years-old were most likely to be injured from distracted walking, and most were hurt while talking rather than texting. The team used data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) to make the finding. They examined data for seven years involving injuries related to cell phone use for pedestrians in public areas. |
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Brett Smith
RedOrbit 2013-06-19 23:13:00
A new study from the Mayo Clinic on our 'Medication Nation' showed almost 70 percent of Americans are being prescribed at least one prescription drug. According to the study, published in the clinic's own Mayo Clinic Proceedings journal, antibiotics, antidepressants, and opioid painkillers are the top three groups of prescribed drugs in the US. Study co-author Jennifer St. Sauver said the study provides insight into the prescribing habits of doctors, which may or may not be indicative of health trends. "Often when people talk about health conditions they're talking about chronic conditions such as heart disease or diabetes," said St. Sauver, an epidemiologist at the clinic. "However, the second most common prescription was for antidepressants - that suggests mental health is a huge issue and is something we should focus on. And the third most common drugs were opioids, which is a bit concerning considering their addicting nature." In the study, the researchers used information from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, a health research collaboration that includes medical records from people living in Minnesota's Olmstead County. According to study authors, the study cohort represented almost 99 percent of those living in the county and the statistics from the project are comparable to those from other US populations. |
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Sayer Ji
Greenmedinfo.com 2013-06-19 19:24:00
"Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is either unbelievably stupid, or deliberately lying. The reality is, we don't know. The experiments simply haven't been done, and now we have become the guinea pigs." ~ David Suzuki, geneticist Now that the mainstream media is catching on to the public sentiment against GMO food, or at least against unlabeled GMO food, to the tune of millions of Americans who made it a point to drag themselves out of their homes to protest Monsanto last month (as well as at least 40 additional countries), inevitably the indictment will be made: "the anti-GMO movement is "unscientific."" Is that really so? What we do know is that the unintended consequences of the recombinant DNA process employed to create genetically engineering organisms are beyond the ability of present-day science to comprehend. This is largely due to the post-Human Genome Project revelation that the holy grail of molecular biology, the overly-simplified 'one gene > one trait' model, is absolutely false. |
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Lisa Song
InsideClimateNews.org 2013-06-19 12:47:00
ince 2010, at least three ruptured pipelines have spilled oil into U.S. neighborhoods, forcing officials to decide quickly whether local residents would be harmed if they breathed the foul air. But because there are no clear federal guidelines saying if or when the public should be evacuated during an oil spill, health officials had to use a patchwork of scientific and regulatory data designed for other situations. As a result, residents of the three communities received different levels of protection. No houses were evacuated in Salt Lake City, Utah, where a ruptured pipeline leaked 33,000 gallons of medium grade crude oil before it was discovered on the morning of June 12, 2010. The oil ran down Red Butte Creek, past neighborhoods where windows were left open in the summer heat. The fumes, which are known to cause drowsiness, left some people so lethargic that they didn't wake up until after noon. In Marshall, Mich. officials called for a voluntary evacuation after more than a million gallons of heavy Canadian crude spilled into the Kalamazoo River on July 25, 2010. But they agonized over the decision for four days before making that recommendation. In Mayflower, Ark. authorities quickly evacuated 22 families after a broken pipeline leaked about 200,000 gallons of heavy crude on March 29, 2013. But people living in the same subdivision, just a few blocks away, were not asked to leave. Neither were the residents of the lakeside community where the oil eventually pooled and where the cleanup continues today. After each of these spills, people complained of headaches, nausea and respiratory problems - short-term symptoms that health experts say are common after any chemical spill and usually disappear as the air clears. |
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Kevin Coupe
Forbes 2013-06-07 18:45:00
The latest news out of Oregon is that two wheat farms there have filed suit against Monsanto, charging that their businesses have been harmed by the discovery in the state of a field of genetically modified wheat from seeds that Monsanto developed and supposedly discontinued almost a decade ago. At the same time, the Center for Food Safety has filed a similar suit. It is possible that one or both of the suits could achieve class action status. So what do we know? Very little, as it happens. We know that there is a field with wheat that has been grown from genetically engineered seeds. We know Monsanto says it is shocked that this has happened, while cynics (and I'm one of them) believe that Monsanto is shocked like Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) was when he found out there was actually gambling going on at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca. I'm not going to litigate the whole GMO issue here. For one thing, it would take way too long and would be way too complicated. For another, I'm not nearly smart enough to understand it all, much less explain it. |
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Adam Hadhazy
Scientific American 2010-02-12 17:46:00
The emerging and surprising view of how the enteric nervous system in our bellies goes far beyond just processing the food we eat. As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of "butterflies" in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our "second brain". A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body. | |
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Comment: Learn more about the gut-brain connection and how this important relationship affects our mood, well being and behavior:
The Neuroscience of the Gut Brain, heart and gut minds A gut check for many ailments Are Gut Bacteria In Charge? Pay attention to your body's 'second brain' 'Knowing it in your gut' is real": The state of your immune system and your gut bacteria influences your personality The Real Butterfly in Your Stomach: Scientists Explore the Possibility of a "Second Brain" in Our Gut Mind-Gut Connection: Why Intestinal Bacteria May Have Important Effects on Your Brain Link between gut bacteria and behavior: That anxiety may be in your gut, not in your head |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience 2013-06-19 16:00:00
Yes, mom may really be pushing you into marching band because she always wanted to be drum major. New research finds that, consistent with what kids may believe, parents really do hope to live out unfulfilled ambitions through their children. Parents are more likely to hope that their child fulfills their own broken dreams when they see their kid as part of themselves, according to the study, which appears online today (June 19) in the journal PLOS ONE. "The child's achievements may come to function as a surrogate for parents' own unfulfilled ambitions," said study researcher Eddie Brummelman, a doctoral psychology student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "In this way, a sense of oneness with their children may compel parents to transfer their unfulfilled ambitions on to them. |
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| High Strangeness |
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Christine Bruun
Sasquatch Watch© 2013-06-19 00:00:00
It is easy to explain to you what Bigfoot is. It is what we don't know that is troubling. According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary definition, the name Bigfoot is derived "from the size of the footprints ascribed to it." It is known by many other names such as Sasquatch, Swamp Ape, as well as a variety of names used by the Indian tribes of the North American continent. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes it as "a large, hairy human-like creature believed by some persons to exist in the northwestern United States and western Canada. It seems to represent the North American counterpart of the Abominable Snowman, or Yeti." The Britannica goes on to say that a "British explorer David Thompson is sometimes credited with the first discovery (I 1811) of a set of Sasquatch footprints, and hundreds of alleged prints have been adduced since then." It continues by mentioning the Patterson photographs taken at Bluff Creek, California in 19667, referring to it as a legend. |
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Marc Lallanilla
Life's Little Mysteries 2013-06-19 16:43:00
The Marfa Lights, mysterious glowing orbs that appear in the desert outside the West Texas town of Marfa, have mystified people for generations. According to eyewitnesses, the Marfa Lights appear to be roughly the size of basketballs and are varyingly described as white, blue, yellow, red or other colors. Reportedly, the Marfa Lights hover, merge, twinkle, split into two, flicker, float up into the air or dart quickly across Mitchell Flat (the area east of Marfa where they're most commonly reported). There seems to be no way to predict when the lights will appear; they're seen in various weather conditions, but only a dozen or so nights a year. And nobody knows for sure what they are - or if they really even exist at all. The Native Americans of the area thought the Marfa Lights were fallen stars, the Houston Chronicle reports. The first mention of the lights comes from 1883, when cowhand Robert Reed Ellison claimed to have seen flickering lights one evening while driving a herd of cattle near Mitchell Flat. He assumed the lights were from Apache campfires. Ellison was told by area settlers that they often saw the lights, too, but upon investigation, they found no ashes or other evidence of a campfire, according to the Texas State Historical Association. During World War II, pilots from nearby Midland Army Air Field tried to locate the source of the mysterious lights, but were unable to discover anything. |
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NewStraitsTimes, Malaysia
2013-06-19 19:22:00
Dhaka: Owners of a Bangladesh garment factory were forced to offer prayers and distribute food to the poor on Wednesday in a bid to drive out what workers believed was a ghost at the plant, police said. Some 3,500 workers stopped work at the plant in Gazipur, north of Dhaka on Tuesday, and smashed furniture to demand action to remove the ghost, which some workers claimed had attacked them in the ladies' washroom. "The agitating workers refused to join duty and vandalised the factory after the management did not take any steps to drive out the ghost," Gazipur industrial police inspector Showkat Kabir told AFP. Kabir said the owners held special prayers - recitation of the Koran and hymns in praise of the Prophet Mohammed - at the factory and also distributed food among the poor to drive out the "ghost". "All the workers, owners and the managers will join the prayers and the factory will reopen on Thursday after two days of shutdown due to the ghost-related protests," he said. A medical expert said the "ghost attack" could be a sign of psychological distress in the wake of a series of deadly disasters involving garment workers in the past six months. |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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