Winslow Myers - From Israel, a Declaration of Interdependence

The fond foolishness—or was it?—of the Israeli graphic designer’s recent Youtube video declaring his love for the Iranian people and his pledge not to bomb Iran brought back the almost forgotten Christmas moment in the trenches of World War I, when soldiers on both the French and German sides put down their weapons and sang “Silent Night” together. Peace threatened to break out all up and down the lines until those pitiless realists on both sides, the generals, forced their minions to restart the interminable slaughter.

The Israeli’s video also brought back the memory of a powerful event thousands of us attended in 1984. To celebrate the achievements of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, my organization, Beyond War, had set up a live televised satellite “spacebridge” between Moscow and San Francisco. Large audiences in both places listened to the pleas of the two leaders of the IPPNW, Leonid Brezhnev’s personal physician Evgeny Chazov, and the distinguished Boston cardiologist Bernard Lown, for reconciliation between the Soviet and American nations.  Chazov played a recording of a healthily pulsating heart to underscore the reality that human hearts beat identically everywhere. The Moscow Boy’s Choir and the San Francisco Boy’s Choir sang—together.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/28-1

Chip Ward - We Screwed Up

[Note: I became politically active and committed on the day 20 years ago when I realized I could stand on the front porch of my house and point to three homes where children were in wheelchairs, to a home where a child had just died of leukemia, to another where a child was born missing a kidney, and yet another where a child suffered from spina bifida.  All my parental alarms went off at once and I asked the obvious question: What’s going on here?  Did I inadvertently move my three children into harm’s way when we settled in this high desert valley in Utah?  A quest to find answers in Utah’s nuclear history and then seek solutions followed.  Politics for me was never motivated by ideology.  It was always about parenting.

Today my three kids are, thankfully, healthy adults.  But now that grandchildren are being added to our family, my blood runs cold whenever I project out 50 years and imagine what their world will be like at middle age -- assuming they get that far and that there is still a recognizable “world” to be part of.  I wrote the following letter to my granddaughter, Madeline, who is almost four years old.  Although she cannot read it today, I hope she will read it in a future that proves so much better than the one that is probable, and so terribly unfair.  I’m sharing this letter with other parents and grandparents in the hope that it may move them to embrace their roles as citizens and commit to the hard work of making the planet viable, the economy equitable, and our culture democratic for the many Madelines to come.]

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175521/

Pratap Chatterjee - Militarizing the Middle East: Arms Shipments Continue Despite Abuses

A mysterious ship laden with weapons is expected to dock in Port Said, Egypt, this week. The MV Schippersgracht left Southport in North Carolina, the Pentagon’s largest ammunition port, on March 3, 2012. The ship is on contract to the U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command, which refuses to explain what weapons are on board or what the ultimate destination of the weapons are, claiming security concerns.

Data on the MV Schippersgracht shipment came from an investigative collaboration between Amnesty International, Transarms and the International Peace and Information Service (IPIS).

Brian Wood, Amnesty International’s head of arms control, raised the alarm: “This ship of shame should not be allowed to unload its dangerous cargo in Egypt, and there is a substantial risk that this is what it plans to do,” he said in an Amnesty press release.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/22-0

Thirty Companies Contribute $41 Million to 524 Members of Congress, Receive $10.6 Billion in Tax Rebates

A new report to be released Wednesday, March 21 by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) and Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) found that thirty unusually aggressive tax dodging corporations have made campaign contributions to 524 (98 percent) sitting members of Congress, and disproportionately to the leadership of both parties and to key committee members. The report, "Loopholes for Sale: Campaign Contributions by Corporate Tax Dodgers," examines campaign contributions made by a total of 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies in 2006, 2008, 2010 and to date in 2012, and is available at http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/loopholes-sale.

Loopholes for Sale focuses on campaign contributions by 30 companies – dubbed the “Dirty Thirty” – that a previous U.S. PIRG/CTJ study found collectively paid no federal corporate income taxes between 2008 and 2010 while receiving $10.6 billion in tax rebates and spending millions to lobby Congress. Altogether, these companies spent $41 million on campaign contributions during the four most recent election cycles, with each member of Congress receiving $58,000 on average (top recipients and donors listed below).

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/03/21-3

Sayer Ji - Has Drug-Driven Medicine Become A Form of Human Sacrifice?

Benjamin Rush accurately foretold a grave possibility facing Americans today, namely, that the art and science of healing be restricted to a select class of allopathic physicians, who have the sole legal right to recommend and administer medicines, and whose pharmacopeia excludes – as a matter of principle – all the healing foods, vitamins and herbs which have been used safely and effectively for countless millenia in the prevention and treatment of disease.

We have entered an era where medicine no longer bears any resemblance to the art and science of healing.  The doctor no longer facilitates the body’s innate self-healing capabilities with time, care, good nutrition and special help from our plant allies.  To the contrary, medicine has transmogrified into a business enterprise founded on the inherently nihilistic principles of pure, unbridled capitalism, with an estimated 786,000 Americans dying annually from iatrogenic or medically-caused deaths.*

Read More:

http://greenmedinfo.com/blog/has-drug-driven-medicine-become-form-human-sacrifice

Can Fluoride Calcify Your Arteries?

New research reveals a startling new finding: fluoride is likely contributing to the epidemic of cardiovascular disease by stimulating calcification of the vascular system, including the coronary arteries.

In a study published in the journal Nuclear Medicine Communications this month (Jan. 2012), researchers assessed fluoride uptake and calcification in the major arteries of 61 patients who were administered sodium fluoride, the active ingredient in most fluoridated toothpastes. The study revealed:

"The coronary fluoride uptake value in patients with cardiovascular events was significantly higher than in patients without cardiovascular events." They also found that there was a signification correlation between fluoride uptake and calcification observed in most of the arterial walls, indicating that the fluoride itself likely stimulates the precipitation of calcium within the arteries.

It is already well-known that vascular calcification is highly correlated with cardiovascular disease mortality. The hardening of the arteries associated with atherosclerosis is in part due to the calcification of plaque which subsequently becomes brittle and susceptible to breaking off into an artery-obstructing clot.

Read More:

http://greenmedinfo.com/blog/can-fluoride-calcify-your-arteries

West Antarctic Ice Shelves Tearing Apart at the Seams

A new study examining nearly 40 years of satellite imagery has revealed that the floating ice shelves of a critical portion of West Antarctica are steadily losing their grip on adjacent bay walls, potentially amplifying an already accelerating loss of ice to the sea.

The most extensive record yet of the evolution of the floating ice shelves in the eastern Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica shows that their margins, where they grip onto rocky bay walls or slower ice masses, are fracturing and retreating inland. As that grip continues to loosen, these already-thinning ice shelves will be even less able to hold back grounded ice upstream, according to glaciologists at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

Read More:

http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/?p=3471

Renee Parsons - Iran and the Non Proliferation Treaty

Soon after President Obama's speech before AIPAC's annual convention, the potential attack on Iran, which just a few weeks earlier had seemed so imminent, faded quietly into the background. Gone from the headlines were the daily threats of military options 'on the table' and bellicose rhetoric that did little to calm the fevered war pitch that was building prior to the AIPAC meeting.

In what seemed like walking a political tightrope, the president offered an impressive inventory of his administration's support for Israel with caution against "too much loose talk of war" and that "now is not the time for bluster" as the president appeared to distance himself from beating the tom-tom for war. Missing, however, was any mention of the president's earlier suggestion implementing UN Resolution 242 which requires a return to the 1967 borders regarding the Palestine-Israel dispute -- an issue at the top of a long list of grievances on U.S. Mideast policy with undeniably deep roots in creating terrorism. 

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/iran-nuclear-weapons_b_1385241.html

Alan Phillips - Vaccine Exemptions: How Hospitals Violate Workers’ Rights

Following swine flu emergency declarations in 11 states, Washington D.C., American Samoa and the entire U.S. in 2009, hospitals around the country began implementing new flu vaccine mandates for their employees. Healthcare workers who worked for decades without getting vaccinated were suddenly required to choose between getting vaccinated and getting fired. Some observed that it was the workers vaccinated in prior years that most often took sick leave each winter to recover from flu-like illnesses. Nevertheless, since the so-called pandemic,[1] hospitals have increasingly been adding vaccine requirements. And the pro-vaccine push hasn’t stopped there; in more recent months, entirely new categories of employees have been facing new vaccine requirements including airline employees, pharmacists, and hospital sales reps. Ultimately, all workers and adults may be required to get vaccines as the rapidly advancing vaccine pharmaceutical agenda continues to roll forward ignoring science and liberty.

Read More:

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/vaccine-exemptions-how-hospitals-violate-workers%E2%80%99-rights?utm_source=www.GreenMedInfo.com&utm_campaign=380abfb4cd-Greenmedinfo&utm_medium=email

Mara Hvistendahl - Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

The popular conception of nuclear power is straight out of The Simpsons: Springfield abounds with signs of radioactivity, from the strange glow surrounding Mr. Burn's nuclear power plant workers to Homer's low sperm count. Then there's the local superhero, Radioactive Man, who fires beams of "nuclear heat" from his eyes. Nuclear power, many people think, is inseparable from a volatile, invariably lime-green, mutant-making radioactivity.

Coal, meanwhile, is believed responsible for a host of more quotidian problems, such as mining accidents, acid rain and greenhouse gas emissions. But it isn't supposed to spawn three-eyed fish like Blinky.

Over the past few decades, however, a series of studies has called these stereotypes into question. Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy. * [See Editor's Note at end of page 2]

Read More:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste