You are currently browsing the archives for March, 2009.
NaturalNews -Â What do you get when you combine cholesterol medication, three different blood pressure drugs and aspirin into a single pharmaceutical pill? If you believe the drug company that funded its own study on this chemical cocktail, you get a wonder drug that has all the “benefits” of five different drugs with no more side effects than a single drug! That’s the story from Bangalore, India, anyway, where 2000 citizens of India were recruited into a clinical trial to test these drugs. The use of low-income citizens in developing nations as guinea pigs is now a common Big Pharma practice, by the way. It’s cheaper than using Americans as guinea pigs, and the risk of lawsuits from harm or death is much lower in such countries. Read Article
NaturalNews -Â Over 38 million people in the U.S. are currently taking statin drugs to lower high cholesterol levels. However, German scientists at the Martin Luther-University in Halle-Wittenberg have just published research in the Journal of Lipid Research that shows, for some people, taking statins actually increases the risk of having heart attacks. The researchers studied over 1,000 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD), and found that a subset of those had high levels of an enzyme called phospholipid transferprotein, or PLTP for short. PTLP is known to influence the metabolism of cholesterol-containing molecules like low density lipoprotein (LDL, or the “bad” cholesterol) and high density lipoprotein (the “good” cholesterol known as HDL) . While the exact role PLTP plays in cardiovascular health remains unknown, the enzyme is associated with atherosclerosis (the accumulation of plaque in arteries) and heart disease. So a team of scientists led by Axel Schlitt decided to measure the amount of PLTP in 1,085 patients with CAD and then track these PLTP levels to see what the relationship of the enzyme might be to future cardiovascular events. Read Article
Boston Globe – Just months before the start of last year’s stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks. Switching from a heavy reliance on bonds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds. The agency refused to say how much of the new investment strategy has been implemented or how the fund has fared during the downturn. The agency would only say that its fund was down 6.5 percent – and all of its stock-related investments were down 23 percent – as of last Sept. 30, the end of its fiscal year. But that was before most of the recent stock market decline and just before the investment switch was scheduled to begin in earnest. Read Article
AP — The deepening recession means growth in the developing world will slow to 2 percent this year, according to the World Bank, which predicts that economic activity will remain depressed for the next two years.Back in November, the World Bank estimated that the gross domestic product – a total output of goods and services – in the developing world would grow by 4.4 percent this year. Rapidly deteriorating financial and economic conditions around the world, however, prompted the World Bank on Tuesday to revise its estimate sharply lower to 2.1 percent. That’s down from 5.8 percent last year. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The number of profiles held on the national DNA database has risen by 40 per cent in two years and has topped five million, it was disclosed last night. Figures released by the Home Office showed that there are now 5.1 million profiles on the database ““ up 1.4 million since February 2007. The Home Office estimates that because of duplicates there are about 13 per cent more profiles than individuals on the database. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Claims that some formula milks help babies settle more easily and sleep longer could be misleading, Government experts have warned. Good Night milks by Hipp Organic and Cow and Gate, given to babies aged six months and over, were attacked for making claims about “settling baby for the night” or being “gentler on the baby’s tummy”. The formula milks, which are thickened with cereals to help them take longer to digest, have been available in the UK for just over a year. But the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition said: “Specifically the committee is unaware of published scientific evidence to support the statements being made about ‘settling the baby for the night’ or being ‘gentler on the baby’s tummy’.” Read Article
The Guardian – The government is backing a project to install a “communication box” in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe, the Guardian can reveal.Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant “heartbeat” revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU officials behind the plan believe it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. A consortium of manufacturers has indicated that the router device could be installed in all new cars as early as 2013. However, privacy campaigners warned last night that a European-wide car tracking system would create a system of almost total road surveillance. Read Article
The Australian – THE federal government’s proposed internet censorship regime is not the silver bullet to stop child pornography, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says. A blacklist of more the 2,000 websites, including child pornography sites, banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) was published on the whistleblower website Wikileaks over a week ago. Critics said the leak showed the government should step back from mandatory filtering and that the plan would not solve the problem of child pornography, which is often spread over peer to peer networks rather than the web. Senator Conroy said the government had never claimed the filter itself would stop child pornography. Read Article
ABC News – Israel has conducted three military strikes against targets in Sudan since January in an effort to prevent what were believed to be Iranian weapons shipments from reaching Hamas in the Gaza Strip, ABC News has learned.Earlier this week, CBSNews.com was the first to report that Israel had conducted an airstrike in January against a convoy carrying weapons north into Egypt to be smuggled into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. But actually, since January, Israel has conducted a total of three military strikes against smugglers transporting what were believed to be Iranian weapons shipments destined for Gaza, a U.S. official told ABC News. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Stop smoking. Drink less. Learn new skills. Stop defrauding the benefit office. Claim tax credits. Wear a condom. Join the Army. Britons are being bombarded by more than 10,000 government advertisements every day, prompting accusations that Labour is creating the “ultimate nanny state”. Messages from the state were relayed to the population via television, radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines and billboards on more than 3.7 million occasions during 2008, according to new research by media analysts at The Nielsen Company. Current major campaigns include the Department of Health’s “Condom ““ Essential Wear” campaign to promote safe sex, a police initiative to publicise the Anti-Terrorist Hotline, and the Department for Transport’s “Think! Bike” campaign to encourage drivers to look out for motorcyclists. The government is now the biggest spender on advertising in the country. Read Article
The Historian – Big Brother Cares About YOU!
Washington Post – When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker. If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe. Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish. But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. Read Article
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
Haaretz (Israel) – Is the U.S. about to lose its status as the dominant global superpower? Will the dollar collapse? If so, what would become the new global reserve currency and what would replace U.S. hegemony in a new world order?
American troops are currently stationed in over 150 countries around the world and have been actively engaged in combat since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001. The pretext for the invasion of Afghanistan was provided by the 9/11 attacks. A second front in the U.S. “war on terror” was opened in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. As well these military expenditures, the U.S. has an outstanding national debt of $10.8 trillion and rising. Read Article
The Times – LAW enforcement agencies are seeking scientists to develop an artificial nose that can detect the smell of fear as terrorists pass through security at airports. The US Department of Homeland Security is advertising for specialists to devise airport scanners that will sniff out “deceptive individuals”. The technology builds on recent breakthroughs in finding human scent-prints which, many researchers believe, may be as unique to individuals as fingerprints. Read Article
The Historian – Al Queda by Yves St Laurant anyone?
Canadian Free Press – Good news to know that the truth will always out–even when you’re Barack Obama. “Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.” The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes. The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong. For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming. Read Article
Reuters – The global economic crisis will hit jobs hard, with unemployment set to reach double digits in many developing and advanced countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Sunday. “By the end of 2010 the unemployment rate could be approaching double digit figures in all G8 countries with the sole exception of Japan, as well as in the OECD area as a whole,” the OECD forecast in a background paper to G8 labor and employment ministers gathering in Rome. In new projections to be issued on Tuesday the OECD will forecast growth in the 30-nation bloc will contract by 4.2 percent this year, the Paris-based body’s general secretary, Angel Gurria, told reporters on Friday. Read Article
Bloomberg — California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said a make-shift tent city for the homeless that sprang up in the capital city of Sacramento will be shut down and its residents allowed to stay at the state fairgrounds. Schwarzenegger said he ordered the state facility known as Cal-Expo to be used for three months to serve the 125 tent city residents, some of them displaced by the economic recession. The encampment may be shut down within a month, said Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. The move comes after the Sacramento City Council last night agreed to spend $880,000 to expand homeless programs. Read Article
The Historian – Sorry the bank foreclosed on you and took your home, but there is no bail-out money for you as you are not important. Now where can we hide you away out of site (& of mind)?
Daily Mail – Lord Mandelson yesterday warned colleagues that it was time to stop ‘ bashing’ the financial sector. The Business Secretary said that banks had been given a ‘well deserved bloody nose’ but insisted the economy now needed them to succeed. It is understood that the Government accepts that criminal charges will not be brought against any executives whose irresponsible lending drove their employers to seek a bailout by the taxpayer. Former RBS chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin also looks set to keep his £700,000-a-year pension despite Government claims that it would be clawed back. Read Article
The Historian – Yes don’t be nasty to the poor little multi-millionaire bankers. I mean they would be understanding if you got yourself into a financial pickle wouldn’t they?
Reuters – The United States deployed two missile-interceptor ships from South Korea on Monday, a military spokesman said, days ahead of a North Korean rocket launch widely seen as a long-range missile test that violates U.N. sanctions.The launch presents the first significant challenge by the prickly state to U.S. President Barack Obama, who will discuss Pyongyang’s intentions with global leaders including Chinese President Hu Jintao this week at the G20 summit in London. Read Article
BBC – Eight people have died in a suicide bomb attack on a police compound in southern Afghanistan, officials say. The deaths came as a bomber wearing a police uniform detonated explosives inside Kandahar’s district headquarters in Andar, AP news agency reported. Three police and five civilians were killed in the blast, government spokesman Zalmay Ayubi told the agency. Read Article
NPR News – Two decades since the catastrophic oil spill in Prince William Sound, today’s threats to the ocean “” from acidification to dead zones “” are harder to see. Philippe Cousteau, CEO of EarthEcho International, and Peter Seligmann, chairman of Conservation International, discuss the ocean environment. Read Article
Reuters – President Barack Obama said in an interview published on Sunday that leaders of the G20 major global economies would send a “strong message of unity” this week on confronting the world economic crisis. “With respect to the stimulus, there is going to be an accord that G20 countries will do what is necessary to promote trade and growth,” Obama told the Financial Times newspaper. “The most important task for all of us is to deliver a strong message of unity in the face of the crisis.” Read Article
The Historian – I wonder if he has also been given a pre-G20 briefing on instructions by Henry Kissinger like Kevin Rudd & Gordon Brown had?
Reuters – U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Sunday the government will have about $135 billion left after banks give back some bailout money and declined to say whether he will ask Congress for more.Treasury expects the banks this year to return about $25 billion of money that they received from the government, because they were able to replace it with private capital or decided that they do not want money with strings attached. Read Article
The Historian – Do you really think that the banks are going to voluntarily turn round and say “no more free taxpayer funded handouts thanks, we’re full”?
The Guardian – Legal moves may force Obama’s government into starting a new inquiry into abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed. Read Article
BBC – US President Barack Obama has said he will consult Pakistan’s leaders before targeting militants in that country. “If we have a high-value target within our sights, after consulting with Pakistan, we’re going after them,” Mr Obama told CBS television. But Mr Obama ruled out deploying US ground troops inside Pakistan. Read Article
The Historian – Well at least they are doing the sporting thing and telling them when they will be bombing their country so to clear a path for the pipeline
