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Tuesday, February 28, 2012
TB levels in London as high as those in some African countries | Vaccine News Daily
Monday, February 27, 2012
THE DAILY STAR :: Opinion :: Columnist :: Lebanon's Palestinians, the shame rises
The current debate in Lebanon about the legal status of several hundred thousand resident Palestinian refugees reflects the best and worst of the Arab world. The mistreatment, abysmal living conditions and limited work, social security and property rights of these Palestinians are a lingering moral black mark – but change is in the air, initiated largely by Lebanese.
To be fair to Lebanon, all Arab countries similarly mistreat millions of Arab, Asian and African foreign guest workers, who often are treated little better than chattels or indentured laborers. Racism and discrimination are alive and well in most Arab societies. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, however, are a distinct case. Most were born in the country and know no other residence. They are involuntary long-term refugees, and are not here by choice to work.
Afghan Women's Writing Project | Nature’s Origin
Trust an empty soil and it will grow a flower
for you whether or not you’ve seeded it. Trust is the origin of nature.
If we trust ourselves to do the things we want, we will do them.
Trust is the basis of a married life
in the union of two persons, or in a family.
If you decide to believe in someone, you will already think better of her.
By trusting people, I can do my best for them,
and if I think a person trusts in me, I must do better. I will.
Trust is in prayers, that the words of a human are heard by God.
Without trust, we would not step forward. Trust is the future.
The Kabul Writers
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
Investigations: Utility Scale Wind Towers from China and Vietnam
there is a reasonable indication that an industry in the United States is threatened with material injury by reason of imports from China of utility scale wind towers, provided for in subheading 7308.20.00 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States, that are alleged to be sold in the United States at less than fair value (LTFV) and that are alleged to be subsidized by the Government of China.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Senators take emergency oil reserve hostage to force Keystone approval
Will the GOP ever stop pushing Keystone XL? (Photo by truthout.)
Cross-posted from Climate Progress.
Republican congressional leaders have failed to force President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. But that’s not stopping them from trying over and over again, taking hostages in the process.
First they used the payroll tax cut extension as a vehicle to force a decision on the pipeline in 60 days, even before the final route was identified. Obama was forced to reject the permit because there was no time to assess its potential pollution.
This week, several senators took a different hostage: our emergency oil supply. On Feb. 13, Sens. David Vitter (R-La.), John Hoevan (R-N.D.), and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) introduced the Strategic Petroleum Supplies Act, S. 2100, that would prevent Obama from selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) unless Keystone is approved:
… the administration shall not authorize a sale of petroleum products from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve … until the date on which all permits necessary … for the Keystone XL pipeline project application filed on September 19, 2008 (including amendments) have been issued.
In other words, unless the president approves Keystone, he cannot sell our emergency oil — even if Iran causes an oil supply disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, a hurricane or other disaster disables oil production or refining facilities, or any other type of event causes gasoline prices to soar above $4 per gallon. If any of these events happen, middle class Americans would pay significantly higher gasoline pump prices, giving billions of dollars more to big oil companies that made record profits last year.
These are not far-fetched examples — all of these situations occurred. President George H. W. Bush sold SPR oil in 1991 before the first Iraq war in case of a supply disruption. President George W. Bush sold SPR oil in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina knocked out oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama sold SPR oil in 2011 to offset the disruption of Libyan oil production due to its civil war. In fact, Sen. Vitter praised Obama for the latter SPR oil sale.
All of these SPR sales lowered gasoline prices and prevented significant economic damage while protecting drivers from huge gasoline price spikes. Such emergency sales would be prohibited under S. 2100 unless the Keystone XL pipeline is approved.
Additionally, this bill threatens our national security, because it would give Iran more incentive to cause an oil supply disruption knowing that the U.S. could not legally access its 695 million barrels of oil reserves.
These hostage-taking senators would argue that the Keystone XL pipeline — like the SPR — is vital to provide oil for Americans. However, that is false. It is likely that a large portion of the tar-sands oil sent to Texas refineries will be for export [PDF], and would not be sold in the U.S. At a December congressional hearing, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) questioned the CEO of Keystone pipeline owner TransCanda about keeping the tar-sands oil in the United States. The CEO “said he could not guarantee that the fuel from the pipeline would stay in the United States.”
Watch it:
On Feb. 14, 800,000 Americans signed an emergency petition
to senators urging them to stop trying to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. These Americans oppose the pipeline because it would lead to the doubling of Canadian tar-sands oil production, which produces 15 percent more carbon dioxide pollution compared to conventional oil, at a time when we must shift to lower carbon fuels to reduce the impacts of climate change.
The Senate is trying to force a pipeline route through Nebraska that is not yet identified, let alone evaluated to determine its impact on air and water quality. Because much of the tar-sands oil refined in the U.S. would go overseas, Americans would bear the environmental risks while other nations get the oil.
Sen. Vitter’s bill would force the president to approve the harmful Keystone XL pipeline just to get access to our emergency oil reserves and protect Americans from economic or security threats. Regardless of whether senators oppose or support approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, they should oppose this attempt to destroy a vital economic and national security safeguard.
Filed under: Oil, Politics
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
CENSORED NEWS: Ethnic Studies March: In the Warrior Spirit
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Gingrich - a historian with history
Of course someone found a photo of Gingrich with Arafat shaking hands. Gingrich always loved the limelight and has always belonged to the say/do anything to get noticed school of politics/celebrity. But now he is someone else and tomorrow he will be... whomever he needs to be to please his current audience...
After Gingrich declares Palestinians 'invented', picture emerges of U.S. Presidential hopeful with Yasser Arafat
Friday, November 25, 2011
Assassination by Drone - Legal? Not.
Executive Order 12333
(As Amended by Executive Orders 13284 (2003), 13355 (2004)
and 13470 (2008))
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Big Ag - Superbugs and the meat we eat - connected
Anyone who says we do not need more protection from over-zealous big agriculture companies who drug animals at will and then endanger us - is either being paid by big agriculture or just hiding from facts of more food sickening Americans.
More MRSA Found In U.S. Retail Meat (Turkey, Too)
There are two new studies out that confirm, once again, that drug-resistant staph or MRSA — normally thought of as a problem in hospitals and out in everyday life, in schoolkids, sports teams, jails and gyms — is showing up in animals and in the meat those animals become.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Running Out of Antibiotics: Europe Gets It
In the United States, it’s been “Get Smart About Antibiotics” Week this past week, an annual observance in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its medical and public health partners try to raise awareness of antibiotic resistance. The real action this week though was in Europe, where individual researchers and the EU’s version of a CDC — the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control — are speaking out about the problem with unusual candor.
Here’s the short version: In Europe, according to the ECDC, 25,000 people each year die as a result of multi-drug resistant infections, causing an additional cost to society of 1.5 billion Euros ($2.02 billion): 938 million Euros ($1.27 billion) in hospital and outpatient medical costs, and an additional 596.3 million Euros ($806 million) in lost productivity.
Dr. Marc Sprenger, director of the ECDC, said Friday:
This certainly is an underestimate of the true economic impact of antimicrobial resistance. In particular, the figures were based on data for just five multidrug-resistant bacteria.The estimate was also based on a conservative figure for the cost of a day in hospital… We think the real cost of treating a patient with a multidrug-resistant infection would be higher than this. My take home message is that antimicrobial resistance is one of the most serious public health challenges that we face.
Sprenger was talking at the release of a major Europe-wide report (press release here too) that found organisms that cause serious hospital infections are becoming substantially resistant to last-resort drugs. In some countries, 50 percent of Klebsiella isolates are resistant to carbapenems — that’s the almost-untreatable hospital superbug CRKP that has appeared in 37 US states so far — and so are 25-50 percent of Pseudomonas isolates, another deadly hospital-acquired organism.
Meanwhile, 13 countries just in the EU have found more than 100 cases of infection with bacteria carrying NDM-1, the gene and enzyme that renders organisms effectively untreatable by any antibiotic except for 1-2 old, imperfect drugs. And the ECDC warns that the various countries within the EU simply don’t have the surveillance or personnel to track that bug as it walks undetected across borders in the guts of unknowingly infected people and into hospitals.
Simultaneously, in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a British researcher expressed her frustration that no one takes this seriously. In an online essay, Laura Piddock, who is president of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, says:
When… patients are denied treatment with a new cancer drug because of its expense, there is public outrage despite the possibility of extending life by only a few weeks. Antibiotics are not perceived as essential to health or the practice of medicine, despite such agents saving lives so that individuals can live for many years after infection… Cancer drugs… sometimes only extend life for weeks or months, whereas antibiotics can extend life for years.
Possibly the most encouraging thing about the EU’s candor is how directly it confronts the tie between antibiotic resistance in human medicine and antibiotic use in agriculture. On Thursday, the European Commission announced a 5-year, 12-point plan to reduce resistance, and half of their proposed “concrete actions” address curbing antibiotic use in agriculture:
- Improve awareness raising on the appropriate use of antimicrobials
- Strengthen EU law on veterinary medicines and on medicated feed
- Introduce recommendations for prudent use of antimicrobials in veterinary medicine
- Strengthen infection prevention and control in hospitals, clinics, etc.
- Introduce legal tools to tighten prevention and control of infections in animals in the new EU Animal Health Law
- Promote unprecedented collaboration to bring new antimicrobials to patients
- Promote efforts to analyse the need for new antibiotics in veterinary medicine
- Develop and/or strengthen multilateral and bilateral commitments for the prevention and control of AMR
- Strengthen surveillance systems on AMR and antimicrobial consumption in human medicines
- Strengthen surveillance systems on AMR and antimicrobial consumption in animal medicines
- Reinforce and co-ordinate research
- Improve communication on AMR to the public.
And just in case those seem like theoretical, low-priority concerns, a new coalition rose up in Europe last week to emphasize how important ag antibiotic control really is to human health. Three groups — the Soil Association, Compassion in World Farming and Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming — published a report that painstakingly documents the connections between specific antibiotics used in farming and specific drug-resistant organisms showing up in humans in European countries.
The groups call for cutting antibiotic use on EU farms in half by 2015. Noting that agriculture has simply ignored calls for reduced use on the basis of human health and animal welfare, they smartly propose recasting it as a competitive issue: Lesser antibiotics as a sign of better quality.
The EU has done more than most other regions of the world to monitor farm animal welfare and outlaw some of the worst intensive farming practices (battery cages, sow stalls, veal crates). EU reforms have had an important impact in encouraging similar changes in practices worldwide, through either voluntary action by industry or through law.
The EU should now take the lead again with effective action to end the misuse of antibiotics in farming, and ensure the conditions are provided for the animals to maintain good health based on their own immune systems rather than through routine reliance on antibiotics.
This would be in the interests of Europe’s farmers, establishing their reputation globally for high-quality standards while meeting the demand of their customers, who seek higher standards of animal welfare, more transparency and better quality in their food production.
See Also:
- Opposing industrial-scale pig farming — in Europe
- EU Parliament Votes To Oppose Most Farm Antibiotic Use
- Superbugs in Canadian chicken? Yes, and US too
- Government Health Agency Agrees Mega-Farms Are A Health Risk …
- Opposing industrial-scale pig farming — in Europe
Flickr/JeremyBrooks/CC
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Trying to buy US Congress to be Pals with Big Business
Everyone else beware of ads by US Chamber that claim they are on your side - they are not. They and their biggest US businesses are the ones who have moved all the jobs out of the US and paved the way for today's taking everyone in the 99% down several rungs so they can decide how you will live or not!
Chamber of Commerce getting early start with attack ads
Friday, November 04, 2011
Monday, October 31, 2011
Do something for peace - Blog it Nov. 4th
Wondering what you can do to help peace seep into everyone's mind? Now waiting here - just blog along with thousands of others in 120+ countries for Peace on Friday!
Bloggers from all across the globe
will blog for peace.
We will speak with one voice.
One subject
One day
Friday, October 28, 2011
New Flu Study - a survey of old research
You might give lots of credence to new research but "opinions based on surveying old research papers and "averaging" it and making implied judgments on research that was not done?
I got my shot and will continue doing so, until I see basic research based on current vaccine results - not a survey on other people's research.
, Nicholas S Kelley PhD a, Prof Alfred Sommer MD b, Edward A Belongia MD c
