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Forging his way through the predictable UK media censorship: Dr Andrew Wakefield Responds to Measles Outbreak in Swansea
March 23, 2011 As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.
March 23, 2011
SOLAN: Spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar advocated the use of organic farming in the hill state of Himachal Pradesh, where, he said, farm practices were still saved from the menace of pesticides.
The founder of Art of Living Foundation sent out a strong message to use spirituality to remove the growing lack of trust among people and also root out social evils.
"Dhayan and pranayam can be effective tools to bring us closer to each other," he said. He also made an appeal, particularly to doctors, to take a pledge to put an end to female foeticide and effectively contribute to empowerment of women. Citing the example of southern states where alcohol is not served at weddings, Sri Sri said this needs to be propagated in Himachal as well where drinking is common at such occasions.
March 23, 2011 by Frank James
Not all liberals are going negative on President Obama for ordering U.S. military action in Libya, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) who had the albeit extreme reaction of raising the possibility of impeachment.
Indeed, the president is getting important political cover on his left flank from liberals arguing that he chose perhaps the only available course that remained.
John Judis, writing in The New Republic where he is senior editor, writes:
So I ask myself, would these opponents of U.S. intervention (as part of U.N. Security Council approved action), have preferred:
March 23, 2011 March 23, 2011,
By Robert Schmidt and Tom Schoenberg
March 23 (Bloomberg) -- A plan to resolve a nationwide probe of foreclosure and mortgage-servicing practices is being opposed by four more Republican state attorneys general, who say the terms of a deal may foster a “moral hazard.”
In a letter to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, a Democrat who has taken the lead in the investigation, the officials objected to new documentation requirements and principal reductions outlined in the proposed settlement submitted to the country’s top mortgage-servicing companies this month.
March 23, 2011 Informa is Launching PRIME, a new Peer-Reviewed Journal Devoted to the Rapidly Growing and Evolving Fields of Aesthetics and Anti-Ageing Medicine
LONDON, March 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Informa - the leading publishers of medical, scientific and business journals - is unveiling PRIME, a new international peer-reviewed publication which has been designed to fill the need for quality scientific research and information on the rapidly growing and continually evolving Anti-Ageing and Aesthetics market.
By 2050, more than 30% of the population in OECD member countries will be over 60 years old - a dramatic increase from the 17% at the start of the 21st century. That extreme demographic shift comes with increased focus on how to care for the elderly as well as shining the spotlight on slowing or reversing the effects of ageing.
March 23, 2011 By - Mar 22, 2011
Those who don’t look back on Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a golden age, morning in America or the moment when someone finally stood up to all those welfare queens may find a little solace in Bradford Martin’s “The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan.”
Whatever humiliations the left suffered during those years, argues the author, a history professor at Bryant University in Rhode Island, it was less moribund and more effective than we tend to remember.
If it couldn’t stop the administration from funding the right-wing contras in Nicaragua, it still prevented
March 23, 2011 By - Mar 22, 2011
Japan Asia’s second-largest wheat importer, is set to increase milling-wheat purchases by 21 percent this fiscal year as demand wasn’t hurt by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the agriculture ministry said today.
The volume of milling-wheat purchases will increase to 5.16 million metric tons in the year ending March 31, from last year’s 4.26 million tons, said Shirara Shiokawa, grain trade director at Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.
The ministry confirmed that seven ports in the nation’s eastern and northern prefectures are open to unload imported wheat from vessels to supply flour-milling facilities in the region, Shiokawa said. The death toll following the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami was 9,199 as of 11 p.m. local time yesterday, according to the National Police Agency in Tokyo. Tokyo Electric Power Co. has been battling to prevent a meltdown at a crippled nuclear plant after losing electricity that helps circulate cooling water to the units.
March 23, 2011 http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=9011
by Randy Shaw‚ Mar. 22‚ 2011
The remarkable new documentary on 1960’s folksinger and activist Phil Ochs offers a striking contrast between 1960’s activists and those of 2011. The former engaged in massive anti-war protests against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson – despite his historic enactment of federal civil rights laws, Medicare, and the War on Poverty. Yet Barack Obama’s endless, $2 billion a week war in Afghanistan, and his capitulation to Wall Street proceeds without a peep. Even well-known musicians involved with social justice causes have avoided playing at protests against Obama’s policies. For all of their sometimes naïve idealism, 1960’s activists understood that “liberals” also wage unnecessary wars and weaken social and economic justice. But today’s activists are so fearful of empowering the right wing that they give Democrat Obama a pass on almost every issue, and then complain that he ignores progressive concerns.
I never heard of Phil Ochs when growing up, and only learned of his songs when my wife purchased a box set of his recordings about a decade ago. But even if you have never heard an Ochs song, the new film about him is a powerful testament to the change in social change activism since the 1960’s.
Fear of the Right Wing
It could be said that activists felt comfortable bashing Democrat Johnson, because the only Republican President they had lived under was moderate Dwight Eisenhower. Yet progressives protested Jimmy Carter after experiencing Richard Nixon’s presidency, and also engaged in massive resistance – recall the Battle of Seattle in 1999 – against many of Democrat Bill Clinton’s policies.
But either due to the legacy of George W. Bush or increased political conformity, fears of the right wing has stifled progressive dissent in the United States. Activists ignore Barack Obama’s actions in boosting Wall Street and the military industrial complex, when they would have been out in the streets protesting similar actions under previous Democratic Presidents.
One key difference between then and now is that few 1960’s activists were concerned about maintaining friendly relations with Democratic Party politicians. The Ochs film reminds that 1960’s activist leaders were trying to change the system, not find a job or place for them in the Establishment.
Today, one-time political activist outsiders like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America operate like left branches of the Democratic Party, not as independent progressive forces. Nearly all of their daily emails attack Republicans, with no major protests or actions against Obama for an endless war in Afghanistan whose cost comes at the expense of teacher layoffs and the slashing of state and federal human services spending.
“Clarifying” Activism
Tom Hayden, who has provided brilliant and visionary social analysis of the American left for nearly fifty years, is among those interviewed in the Ochs film. He makes the point that the 60’s anti-war movement began with a rush of idealism, which then spun off in two directions as the protesters felt they were having little impact (a mistaken conclusion, as shown by Tom Wells in his classic, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam).
One direction led activists to the militant self-destructiveness embodied by the Weather Underground. But others moved toward what Hayden describes as a “clarification” about the nature of United States society, and its susceptibility to meaningful change.
This clarification left many concluding that overthrowing the status quo was actually a pipe dream, and that greater opportunities to improve people’s lives could be achieved either through local activism and/or other less “national” causes.
Today’s progressive activists and groups understand Obama’s betrayals, but by limiting protests to Republicans they confuse – rather than clarify – the dynamics of national power. The Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job, provided such clarification, but its message has not altered the “only bash Republicans” strategy.
“Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune” is less a story about a singer and more a tale of the changing fortunes of United States activism. It is hard for me to recall a more thought provoking film.
Randy Shaw is is the author of Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century, and The Activist’s Handbook.
March 23, 2011 http://www.pri.org/business/social-entrepreneurs/climate-change-activism-goes-hollywood2948.html
Living on Earth 16 March, 2011
Hollywood producer Marshall Herskovitz has a history of making audiences pay attention. He's best known for TV shows like "thirtysomething" and "My So Called Life," and films including "Blood Diamond" and "I am Sam." About 10 years ago, Herskovitz had a revelation. He told Living on Earth that he said to himself:
Gee, you know, I'm in a business where we make a movie, no one has heard of it. We then have a marketing department that spends $30 or $40 million, and then, a few weeks later, 80 percent of America knows about the film and some large percentage of those people want to go see it. That's a very well established craft. Why are we not applying that to climate change?
March 23, 2011 Almost half of Pakistanis drink unsafe water. It's World Water Day 2011, and this year's theme is "Water for cities: responding to the urban water challenge." In Pakistan, unsafe drinking water kills 100,000 children per year -- equivalent to a third of the children born in Canada every year. So it's either cute or tragically ironic that Pakistan is calling on its own children to help solve this crisis:
More than 840 children from 143 schools in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Vehari and Kabirwala have been working over the past month on ways to keep drinking water safe at home and school. Children will present their ideas today at events in their local areas, including speeches, poetry and presentations. Their suggestions will help form the basis of a manual about water purification at point of use that would be distributed to school children across the country.
Purification at point of use is last-ditch effort to provide clean drinking water: it's what you resort to when supplies themselves are contaminated. On the other hand, it can be remarkably effective, and cheap. In some areas, it's as simple as filling plastic water bottles with water and laying them on a dark-colored roof.
