"Telegraph.co.uk" - Arctic meltwater could lower temperatures at home, study warns

Average temperatures in Britain could fall by several degrees due to a massive pool of melted ice water heading south from the arctic, scientists have warned.

The Telegraph, April 6, 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8431325/Arctic-meltwater-could-lower-temperatures-at-home-study-warns.html

The pool, which has grown by more than a fifth over the last decade, could interrupt the flow of the Gulf Stream which brings warm water from the tropics, raising average European temperatures by between five and ten degrees Celsius.

Scientists are monitoring the large area of cold water amid fears that changing wind patterns could move it south towards the North Atlantic.

A study by 17 institutes from ten European countries warned that the effects of the melted ice could be abrupt in altering the balance of the Thermohaline Circulation, which keeps warmer waters flowing across the Atlantic.

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"Henry Giroux" - Militarized Conservatism and End(s) of Higher Education

Tuesday 5 April 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

http://truthout.org/militarized-conservatism-and-ends-higher-education

There can be little doubt that America has become a permanent warfare state.(1) Not only is it waging a war in three countries, but its investment in military power is nearly as much as all of the military budgets of every other country in the world combined. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute states, "The USA's military spending accounted for 43 per cent of the world total in 2009, followed by China with 6.6 per cent; France with 4.3 per cent and the UK with 3.8 per cent."(2) The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost Americans a staggering $1 trillion to date, second only in inflation-adjusted dollars to the $4 trillion price tag for World War II."(3) Pentagon spending for 2011 will be more than $700 billion. To make matters worse, as Tom Englehardt points out, "We dominate the global arms trade, monopolizing almost 70% of the arms business in 2008, with Italy coming in a vanishingly distant second. We put more money into the funding of war, our armed forces and the weaponry of war than the next 25 countries combined (and that's without even including Iraq and Afghan war costs)."(4) Moreover, the United States maintains a massive ring of military bases and global presence around the world, occupying "over 560 bases and other sites abroad"(5) and deploying over 300,000 troops abroad, "even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services."(6) In spite of how much military expenditures drain much-needed funds from social programs, the military budget is rarely debated in Congress or a serious object of discussion among the public. Rather than avoid squandering resources and human lives on foreign wars, we avoid "the realities and costs of war."(7)

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"Amnesty International" - Israel's Campaign to Avoid Accountability for Gaza War Crimes

By Amnesty International

Global Research, April 5, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24167

Israeli campaign to avoid accountability for Gaza war crimes must be rejected

Recent Israeli government calls for the UN to retract the 2009 report of its Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict are a cynical attempt to avoid accountability for war crimes and deny both Palestinian and Israeli victims of the 2008-2009 conflict the justice and reparations they deserve, Amnesty International said today.

Statements by leading Israeli politicians that Israel’s conduct in the 22-day conflict in Gaza and southern Israel has been vindicated, following the publication of a Washington Post opinion piece by Justice Richard Goldstone on 1 April 2011, are based on a deliberate misinterpretation of Justice Goldstone’s comments. The international community must firmly reject these attempts to escape accountability and act decisively for international justice, as it has done on Libya, Sudan and other situations where war crimes and possible crimes against humanity have been committed.

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"Dean Baker" - The Real Story Behind Job Creation

Published on Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/05/usemployment-usa

March's job numbers were greeted rapturously by the business press. Scratch the surface of the data and things are not so rosy

by Dean Baker

When the labour department announced that the US economy had created 216,000 jobs in March, it set off a round of celebrations throughout Washington policy circles. The word in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets was that the economy was back on course; we were on the right path.

Those who know arithmetic were a bit more sceptical. If the economy sustained March's rate of job growth, it will be more than seven years before we get back to normal rates of unemployment. Furthermore, some of this growth likely reflected a bounceback from weaker growth the prior two months. The average rate of job growth over the last three months has been just 160,000. At that pace, we won't get back to normal rates of unemployment until after 2022.

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"Robert Reich" - Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich, ASAP!

By Robert Reich, RobertReich.org
Posted on April 4, 2011, Printed on April 6, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150497/why_we_must_raise_taxes_on_the_rich%2C_asap%21

It’s tax time. It’s also a time when right-wing Republicans are setting the agenda for massive spending cuts that will hurt most Americans.

Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.

Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma – even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget – it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)

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"William Pfaff" - U.S. Can’t Resist Meddling in the Middle East

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/us_cant_resist_meddling_in_the_middle_east_20110405/

Posted on Apr 5, 2011

By William Pfaff

The struggle is under way to re-establish American control over the successors to those despots whom popular uprisings have ousted from Tunisia and Egypt, threatening the careers of still other abusive absolute monarchs and presidents-for-life (and their offspring).

The report that Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh is to be thrown to the crocodile crowds by the American government, allowing for bids by the CIA for a successor, was “leaked” (meaning not announced at a press conference) to The New York Times. His fault, in American officials’ eyes, is not so much the killing and other violence he has deployed against citizen protestors of his rule, tolerable until now (as in the earlier cases of Presidents Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia), as it is the failure of this violence to suppress popular uprising. These figures are not disqualified by despotism but for unsuccessful despotism.

The finding against President Saleh is that he has lost his utility as an instrument in the American war against “the Yemeni branch of al-Qaida,” which official America perceives as an important confrontation with international jihadism. Popular opinion in rightist American circles fears Shariah law’s replacement of the U.S. Constitution in American courtrooms, and the takeover of all Europe by fanatical Islamic immigrants bent on establishing a global caliphate.

The threats are the same as those proclaimed and battled by the Rev. Terry Jones of Gainesville, Fla., whose next project, after recently provoking the killing of more than 20 persons in Afghanistan, is to place on trial, in absentia, the Prophet Muhammad. All these are linked instances (however remotely) of an American political hysteria, exploited in a time of demagogy, such as the United States has seen before.

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"Robert Scheer" - The Peasants Need Pitchforks

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_peasants_need_pitchforks_20110405/

Posted on Apr 5, 2011

By Robert Scheer

A “working class hero,” John Lennon told us in his song of that title, “is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you’re so clever and classless and free/ But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: “Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.” 

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"Adele Stan" - You Thought the Koch Brothers Were Bad? Turns Out They're Even Worse Than You Thought

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet

Posted on April 5, 2011, Printed on April 6, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150520/you_thought_the_koch_brothers_were_bad_turns_out_they%27re_even_worse_than_you_thought

You knew they were big. You knew they were evil. From the union-busting actions of their minions in Wisconsin and Ohio to their war on health-care reform, to their assault on the environment and their attacks on the science of climatology, Charles and David Koch have earned their place as the focus of progressives' scrutiny in the age of the Tea Party -- the destructive and regressive movement they bankroll. But a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund shows that, as bad as you thought the Kochs were, they're actually worse. And their reach into virtually every aspect of political, economic and physical life on the planet is probably greater than you thought possible.

In The Koch Brothers: What You Need to Know About the Financiers of the Radical Right, author Tony Carrk, policy director of the CAP Action War Room, lays out a case that is breathtaking in its scope, showing how the Koch brothers are using their billions with the aim of reshaping the global economic system in such a way as to enrich themselves and their heirs at the expense of most other inhabitants of the planet.

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"Agence France-Presse" - Ozone Depletion over Arctic at Record Level: WMO

Published on Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by Agence France-Presse

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110405/sc_afp/wmoozoneclimateweatherarctic_20110405121743

GENEVA – Depletion of the ozone layer over the Arctic has reached record levels, and Nordic countries will have to watch for higher than normal ultraviolet radiation in coming weeks, the UN weather agency said Tuesday.

The Arctic ozone layer suffered a loss of about 40 percent from the beginning of winter to late March, up from the previous record of about 30 percent over the entire winter, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.

"Depletion of the ozone layer -- the shield that protects life on Earth from harmful levels of ultraviolet rays -- has reached an unprecedented level over the Arctic this spring because of the continuing presence of ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere and a very cold winter in the stratosphere," the WMO said in a statement.

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"Michelle Chen" - How Chemical Hazards May Wreak Havoc on Children's Bodies

By Michelle Chen, On The Issues Magazine
Posted on March 30, 2011, Printed on April 6, 2011
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2011spring/2011spring_Chen.php

When a little girl starts growing breasts a year after losing her first baby tooth, her parents probably understand the situation as little as she does. And when it happens to girls across the country, and to many girls growing up in certain neighborhoods but not others, scientists struggle to explain the phenomenon as well.

Women's bodies have always carried biological freight from one generation to the next, bearing the physical imprint of industry and environmental loss. One of the most confounding effects of environmental change is precocious puberty among girls -- taking the form of an unusually young first period, early growth of pubic hair, or breast buds in the first grade -- which may be tied to where families live, the products they consume, and how healthy and happy they'll be later in life.

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