“Dr. Mercola” - How Western Diets Are Making the World Sick

Dr. Mercola

March 31 2011

http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/archive/2011/03/31/how-western-diets-are-making-the-world-sick.aspx

Physician Kevin Patterson noticed something during his work as an internist-intensivist at the Canadian Combat Surgical Hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Afghan soldiers, police and civilians he treated had very different bodies from those of the Canadians he treated in his home country.

The organs of the Canadians, Americans, and Europeans he treated were encased in fat.  Afghan civilians and soldiers had little or no fat or adipose tissue underneath the skin. Patterson has become convinced that the effects of urbanization are making people everywhere in the world both fatter and sicker.

According to NPR:

“[Patterson] explains that the increase in abdominal fat has driven the epidemic of diabetes over the last 40 years in the developed world -- and that he's now seeing similar patterns in undeveloped regions that have adapted Western eating patterns.”



“Dr. Mercola” - Foods with Scary Surprises

Dr. Mercola

March 31 2011

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/03/31/foods-with-scary-surprises.aspx

The FDA has established guidelines for a number of contaminants that it will allow in our food supply. Mainstreet.com has assembled a list of some of the most common products for which the FDA has set contamination thresholds. Here's just a taste of what they found:

Potato Chips The FDA only takes action when 6 percent or more of chips show rot from pre- or post-harvest infection.

Tomatoes Acceptable levels of mold contamination go as low as 15 percent in canned tomatoes to as high as 45 percent for ketchup. And the FDA allows up to 30 fly eggs per every 100 grams of tomato sauces, or up to two maggots per every 100 grams of tomato juice.

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“BW” - President George W. Bush, Mrs. Laura Bush, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Other Leaders Discuss Human Freedom and Economic Opportunity for Afghan Women at Bush Institute Conference

Business Wire

March 31, 2011

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110331006368/en/President-George-W.-Bush-Mrs.-Laura-Bush

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A decade ago, when Mrs. Laura Bush delivered her historic radio address calling attention to the plight of women and children suffering under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were banned from the workforce and prohibited from gaining an education. Today, women represent 26 percent of all Afghan civil servants, 24 percent of government-media workers, 21 percent of private-media workers, and 24 percent of all Community Development Council members.¹ They also make up 28 percent of teachers at the primary and secondary level.² Many Afghan women are now employed as university professors, doctors, lawyers, judges, and police officers.

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“Jim Kouri” - Rep. Issa grilling homeland security officials today

Jim Kouri

March 31st, 2011

http://www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/rep-issa-grilling-homeland-security-officials-today-1

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will hold a public hearing today with ranking members of the Department of Homeland Security to discuss the agency's handling of its disclosure responsibilities.

Several news organizations and public-interest groups have complained that DHS allows political appointees to play a pivotal role in prioritizing or censoring information it is required to release under the agency’s Freedom of information Act (FOIA) guidelines.

Even lawmakers have complained about the DHS's handling of FOIA requests. After Rep. Issa began chairing the committee in January, his first act was to request that DHS officials to submit to his office thousands of pages of records, memoranda, and emails between agency officials.

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“Stephanie Sajor “ - Federal Reserve System Makes Effort Towards Transparency

Stephanie Sajor

March 31, 2011

http://www.thirdage.com/news/federal-reserve-system-makes-effort-towards-transparency_3-31-2011

The Federal Reserve system chairman Ben S. Bernanke showed that he is making a commitment towards creating more transparency. Bernanke said he will meet regularly with reporters and the media to discuss the bank's decision-making process and will answer questions.

The Federal Reserve is seen as one of the most secretive of government divisions, and faced criticism particularly during the financial crisis.

“It was pretty clear that the Fed needed to do something to be seen as more open,” said Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed official, to the Los Angeles Times. Reinhart is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

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“Adriana Barnes” - Bank Foreclosures Are Becoming A Long Term Universal Nightmare

Adriana Barnes

March 31, 2011

http://dailynewspulse.com/bank-foreclosures-are-becoming-a-long-term-universal-nightmare/2215428/

Representatives of the five largest mortgage servicers — Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc.— met with government officials in Washington on Wednesday. They discussed a settlement of investigations into problems in the foreclosure process, including bank employees signing documents without reading or understanding them, a practice called robo-signing. Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller, who is leading the negotiations for the states, said that the session was a good first meeting but that no agreement was imminent. Attorneys general of all 50 states and representatives of seven federal agencies are investigating the foreclosure troubles.

Even Bigger Losses

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“James Porter” - Obama 2012 - Why He Will Get Re-elected

James Porter

March 31, 2011

http://technorati.com/politics/article/obama-2012-why-he-will-get/

Obama 2012! President Barack Obama will get reelected! Some on the right will take this prediction as political heresy. If the economy continues to improve, unemployment goes down and we save face in Libya, Obama will win reelection; barring anymore global catastrophes. The main reason Obama will win reelection are the potential Republican candidates that will oppose him.

The electorate will ultimately vote with their pocketbooks and their best interests; at least the sane ones will. The other tangible or intangible depending, on your point of view is Obama’s charisma and his squeaky clean (scandal proof) image. Love him or hate him, he is a fine father, husband, has superior intellect and is a man of unimpeachable integrity who seems to stay above the fray of petty partisan bickering. In the final analysis, people like those qualities in their leaders and trust them. Everyone realizes that President Obama inherited a mess unlike any of his predecessors. Two wars and an economy on the verge of total meltdown. All things considered, he has done an admirable job. His ratings in the polls have been fair to good. If things continue to improve look for a second term. Let’s take a look at those who are vying for the GOP nod in 2012.

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“SD” - Catching Cancer With Carbon Nanotubes: New Device to Test Blood Can Spot Cancer Cells, HIV on the Fly

SCIENCE DAILY

March 30, 2011

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110329134134.htm

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2011) — A Harvard bioengineer and an MIT aeronautical engineer have created a new device that can detect single cancer cells in a blood sample, potentially allowing doctors to quickly determine whether cancer has spread from its original site.

The microfluidic device, described in the March 17 online edition of the journal Small, is about the size of a dime, and could also detect viruses such as HIV. It could eventually be developed into low-cost tests for doctors to use in developing countries where expensive diagnostic equipment is hard to come by, says Mehmet Toner, professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

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“Alison Rose Levy” - Organic Farm Groups Sue Monsanto

Alison Rose Levy

March 31, 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alison-rose-levy/monsanto-lawsuit_b_842336.html

Family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations filed suit against Monsanto in New York court on March 30th. According to the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) which filed on their behalf, the plaintiffs were forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from future accusations of patent infringement when Monsanto's genetically modified seed contaminates their crops, something which cannot be prevented once GM seeds are released.

"It seems quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be accused of patent infringement, but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director and Lecturer of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

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"James Hansen" - Perceptions of Climate Change

Friday 1 April 2011

http://50.17.184.149/perceptions-climate-change/1301356800

This past winter, for the second year in a row, seemed pretty extreme in both Europe and the United States. So this is a good time to check quantitatively how seasonal climate change is stacking up against expectations. People’s perception of climate change may be the most important factor determining their willingness to accept the scientific conclusion that humans are causing global warming (or global climate disruption, as you please). It is hard to persuade people that they have lying eyes.

In the paper attached to my congressional testimony in 1988 (1) we asserted that the perceptive person would notice that climate was changing by the early 21st century. I used colored dice to illustrate how the frequency of unusually warm seasons was expected to change.

We considered three scenarios for future greenhouse gas amounts. Figure 1 [4] shows that the real world so far is close to scenario B. Temporary aside: there are two main reasons that greenhouse gas growth moved off the track of scenario A onto scenario B in the early 1990s, as shown in Figure 2 [4]: (1) the growth of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) was greatly diminished by successive tightenings of the Montreal Protocol, (2) the growth of methane slowed sharply.

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