Worries Over Water As Natural Gas Fracking Expands

Drive through northern Pennsylvania and you'll see barns, cows, silos and drilling rigs perched on big, concrete pads. Pennsylvania is at the center of a natural gas boom. New technology is pushing gas out of huge shale deposits underground. That's created jobs and wealth, but it may be damaging drinking water. That's because when you "frack," as hydraulic fracturing is called, you pump millions of gallons of fluids underground. That cracks the shale a mile deep and drives natural gas up to the surface — gas that otherwise could never be tapped.

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Report: Dangers of fracking greater than previously understood

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and thousands of drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century's gold rush for natural gas. Drilling companies in recent years have developed techniques to unlock these enormous reserves, and energy companies are clamoring to drill.

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Academics fronting ghostwritten medical journal articles as ‘guest authors’ should be charged with fraud, say UofT law professors

http://media.utoronto.ca/media-releases/education/academics-fronting-ghostwritten-medical-journal-articles-as-%E2%80%98guest-authors%E2%80%99-should-be-charged-with-fraud-say-uoft-law-professors/

University of Toronto

Posted on August 3, 2011

TORONTO, ON – Two University of Toronto Faculty of Law professors argue that academics who ‘lend’ their names, and receive substantial credit as guest authors of medical and scientific articles ghostwritten by industry writers, should be charged with professional and academic misconduct and fraud, even if they contain factually correct information.

In an article published today in PLoS Medicine, Professors Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens argue “Guest authorship is a disturbing violation of academic integrity standards, which form the basis of scientific reliability.” In addition, “The false respectability afforded to claims of safety and effectiveness through the use of academic investigators risks undermining the integrity of biomedical research and patient care.”

In “Legal Remedies for Medical Ghostwriting: Imposing Fraud Liability on Guest Authors of Ghostwritten Articles,” Stern and Lemmens argue that since medical journals, academic institutions, and professional disciplinary bodies have not succeeded in enforcing effective sanctions, a more successful deterrence would be through the imposition of legal liability on the guest authors, “and may give rise to claims that could be pursued in a class action based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).”

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Health Freedom Alliance: Feds Silence Scientist Over Salmon Disappearance

Health Freedom Alliance,  on August 2, 2011 – 10:03 pmNo Comment

http://healthfreedoms.org/2011/08/02/feds-silence-scientist-over-salmon-disappearance/

A leading fishery scientist believes she has solved the mystery of a new salmon disappearance. Dr. Kristi Miller’s findings were so telling, they were published in Science journal in January and media outlets everywhere were notified.

Canadian bureaucrats, however, have a different plan. The Privy Council Office will no longer allow interviews or let Dr. Miller speak freely about her discovery. Read on to find out what might be killing tons of Salmon off the west coast of Canada.

~Health Freedoms

VANCOUVER — Top bureaucrats in Ottawa have muzzled a leading fisheries scientist whose discovery could help explain why salmon stocks have been crashing off Canada’s West Coast, according to documents obtained by Postmedia News.

The documents show the Privy Council Office, which supports the Prime Minister’s Office, stopped Kristi Miller from talking about one of the most significant discoveries to come out of a federal fisheries lab in years.

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Robert Scheer: The Recovery Is Dead, Long Live the Recovery

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_recovery_is_dead_long_live_the_recovery_20110803/

Posted on Aug 3, 2011

By Robert Scheer

The die has been cast. Obama’s “nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists,” as an editorial in the normally sedate New York Times described the deal to raise the debt ceiling, is a disaster in the making. It rules out a vigorous government response to the persistent economic stagnation in which joblessness, housing foreclosures and an ever-widening gap between the top 2 percent and the rest of Americans have become the norm.

But to use the word “capitulation” is too kind, since this president, as was Bill Clinton before him, is clearly one of those “New Democrats” who welcomes the opportunity to jettison the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as outmoded political baggage. Otherwise, why would Obama have reached for a “grand bargain” in which he even put Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table before the Republicans rolled him?

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Sarah Jaffe: How Recession Is Hastening the Wal-Martization of America

By Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Posted on August 2, 2011, Printed on August 3, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151888/how_recession_is_hastening_the_wal-martization_of_america

With all the focus on the drama surrounding the debt ceiling, and the much-too-late focus on the economic pain the final deal's austerity agenda will inflict, items that really matter—jobs, jobs, and jobs--have been all but ignored. 

But a new report by the National Employment Law Project looking at the jobs created since the recession officially ended brings the focus sharply back to jobs, and its findings are frightening: 73 percent of the jobs created since the supposed economic recovery began have been in low-wage fields, where workers make between $7.51 (the national minimum wage) and $13.52 an hour ($15,621 to $28,122 a year for full-time).

In contrast, 60 percent of the layoffs from the Great Recession were in what the report calls midwage occupations, those that make between $28,142 and $42,973 per year.

“But in the weak recovery to date, employment growth has been concentrated in lower-wage occupations, with minimal growth in midwage occupations and net losses in higher-wage occupations,” the report notes.

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Paul Craig Roberts: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, August 2, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25872

The United States Government and its presstitute media have wasted time and energy creating hysteria over a non-existent “debt ceiling crisis.” After reading the “news” in the Ministry of Propaganda and witnessing the stupidity of the US government, the rest of the world is struck dumbfounded by the immaturity of the “world’s only superpower.”

What kind of superpower is it, the world wonders, that is willing to go to the eleventh hour to convince the world, which holds its banking reserves in US Treasury debt, that the US government will default on the debt?

Every country in the world now worries about the judgment and sanity of the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

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"Tyler Durden" - China Boldly Goes (Again) Where Moody's Has Never Gone Before, Downgrades US From A+ To A, Outlook Negative

ZERO HEDGE

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/02/2011 20:39 -0400

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/china-boldly-goes-again-where-moodys-has-never-gone-downgrades-us-outlook-negative

As was predicted last week, China's rating agency Dagong, unlike its worthless western counterparts, has come through on its threat to downgrade the US in the event a subpar debt ceiling deal was hammered out. As Xinhua reports, 'Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. said Wednesday it has cut the credit rating of the United States from A+ to A with a negative outlook after the U.S. federal government announced that the country's debt limit would be increased." Confirming that not being branded a NRSRO is the only thing that allows a rater to still think straight (and not in terms of lost client revenue if one goes ahead and tells the truth), Dagong's decision was spot on: "The decision to lift the debt ceiling will not change the fact that the U.S. national debt growth has outpaced that of its overall economy and fiscal revenue, which will lead to a decline in its debt-paying ability, said Dagong Global in a statement." So while Moody's, which is now certified as the laughing stock of the sheep herd (sorry Mark Zandi, you will never be promoted to anything in this administration - we promise you), pretend that all is well and that the only thing better than $14.3 trillion in debt is $16.8 trillion, China demonstrates what happens when a rating agency actually knows how to do addition and/or long division.

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David Corn: Obama’s Hope-a-Dope Strategy

Progressives are furious that Obama, yet again, pulled his punches. The White House says it's all part of the master plan.

By David Corn | Tue Aug. 2, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/obama-tactics-liberal-anger

You may remember the moment when Barack Obama declared war on the Republican game plan—or so it seemed. Five days after negotiating a budget-cutting deal [1] that averted a government shutdown in April, Obama gave a speech [2] at George Washington University, slamming the GOP over the slash-and-burn budget proposal [3] of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Republicans, he declared, were pushing a "deeply pessimistic" vision [4] of America's future: "This is a vision that says even though Americans can't afford to invest in education at current levels or clean energy, even though we can't afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy." Such a vision, Obama vowed, would not prevail "as long as I'm president."

Fighting words—and liberals were elated. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic cheered [9], "He beat Ryan and the Republicans to a bloody pulp.…He expressed moral outrage in a way I've never heard him do before, and in a way I didn't think he was capable of."

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"Ed Silverman" - NIH Proposal On Conflicts Of Interest Is Gutted

By Ed Silverman // August 2nd, 2011 // 11:15 am

http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/08/nih-proposal-on-conflicts-of-interest-is-gutted/

One year after proposing to strengthen conflicts of interest rules for grant recipients, the National Institutes of Health has apparently gutted a key provision that would require universities to disclose financial ties between academic researchers and industry on publicly accessible web sites, according to Nature.

Specifically, the NIH proposal would require academic researchers who receive agency funding to more thoroughly report any financial conflicts of interest, and also require institutions - such as universities - to do a better job of gathering this information and then forwarding it to the NIH. This would include posting info on a web site.

At the time the proposal was made in May 2010, NIH director Francis Collins (see photo) told a media briefing that “the way in which science is moving forward, in order to be successful, partnerships between NIH funded researchers and industry are essential, they have been and will be, but we need to preserve the public trust” (read here).

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