Drug Contamination Of Waterways Threatens Life On Our Planet
July 30, 2010
Natural News
by Mike Adams
The President’s Cancer Panel (PCP) recently released its yearly report to the President outlining the status of cancer in America. This year’s report focuses primarily on environmental factors that contribute to cancer risk. According to the report, pharmaceutical drugs are a serious environmental pollutant, particularly in the way they continue to contaminate waterways across the country (and the world).
Many reports have recently appeared about pharmaceutical contamination of water supplies, rivers, lakes and other waterways, but spokespersons from the drug and chemical industries have denied that this pollution poses any risk whatsoever to the environment. But this report, issued directly from PCP, provides a stunning indictment of the dangers associated with pharmaceutical pollution.
The executive summary of the PCP report includes the following statements:
“[P]harmaceuticals have become a considerable source of environmental contamination. Drugs of all types enter the water supply when they are excreted or improperly disposed of; the health impact of long-term exposure to varying mixtures of these compounds is unknown.”
It’s important to note that PCP is required by law to assess the National Cancer Program and offer a truthful evaluation of the various things it finds to be responsible for causing cancer. The panel is a division of the National Cancer Institute itself, so its findings hold fairly considerable weight in the scientific world (or they should, if the reaction wasn’t so politicized).
The report itself is quite extensive, evaluating everything from the environmental and health impacts of drug and pesticide pollution to cell phone radiation and nuclear testing residue. But the section on pharmaceutical drugs is especially interesting when considering the fact that numerous reports have shown that drugs and drug residue that ends up in water supplies typically isn’t filtered out by municipal treatment plants.
No laws exist to protect the public from pharmaceuticals
Many chemicals are highly regulated because they are known to negatively affect human and environmental health. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is tasked with regulating exposure to these chemicals, but pharmaceuticals are not included in its regulatory scheme. Despite years of prodding by environmental scientists, the EPA has given very little attention to the dangers posed by widespread pharmaceutical contamination.
According to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study conducted back in 2002, antidepressants, blood pressure and diabetes medications, anticonvulsants, oral contraceptives, hormone replacement therapy drugs, chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, heart medications and even codeine are all showing up in the water supplies of American cities. This study was the first national-scale evaluation of pharmaceutical drug contamination in streams, and roughly 80 percent of the streams tested were found to be contaminated as well.
In 2008, an AP investigation found that at least 46 million Americans are drinking water contaminated with trace amounts of pharmaceuticals. Even though every city tested has its water treated and “purified” prior to being delivered to the public, trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs are making their way through to the tap. (Since not all major metropolitan areas were tested, the number of people affected is likely far higher than what was reported by AP.)
In spite of all this, water quality reports don’t disclose the levels of pharmaceuticals found in tap water. Since the EPA and FDA have failed to establish any proper guidelines for drug contamination in water, most people have no idea that their water contains a dangerous cocktail of prescription medications.
Hospitals, consumers and drug companies are all responsible
None of this is surprising if you consider that unused and expired drugs cannot be legally returned to the pharmacies where they were purchased. Many people just flush them down the toilet because the drug labels actually encourage patients to dispose of them this way (and they probably don’t know what else to do with them).
People who take prescription and over-the-counter drugs will excrete them as well, contributing to the drug overload being found at wastewater treatment plants. (Drugs are not necessarily “broken down” by your digestive system.)
It is also regular protocol for hospitals to flush millions of pounds of unused medications every year, a practice that contributes significantly to water contamination.
And let’s not forget the drug companies that dump large amounts of their own pharmaceuticals into water supplies. The same AP investigation found that more than 270 million pounds of pharmaceutical compound residue is dumped every year into waterways nationwide, many of which serve as drinking water for millions of people.
The U.S. isn’t the only place where Big Pharma is dumping its waste, either. In 2009, researchers found that India’s rivers are full of dangerous pharmaceuticals, too.
One Indian river where 90 different pharmaceutical companies dump their waste tested positive for over 21 active drug ingredients. In one river alone, there was enough ciprofloxacin (a strong antibiotic) being dumped every day by drug companies to treat 90,000 people! (And scientists detected this in water that was supposedly purified by the drug companies before being released into the environment).
The drug contamination levels found in India’s rivers were 150 times the detected levels found in the U.S. These findings prove that drug companies couldn’t care less how much drug residue they dump in water as long as they can get away with it. They don’t even believe that pharmaceutical contamination is a threat to the environment.
“Based on what we now know, I would say we find there’s little or no risk from pharmaceuticals in the environment to human health,” explained microbiologist Thomas White, a consultant for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, in a Dallas Morning News article about the AP investigation. This is similar to BP’s CEO saying, after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, that the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico was “tiny” compared to how big the ocean is.
Studies show drug residue cocktails actually do cause harm
Though the chemical and drug industries deny any danger from exposure to drug residue in the water, science (and common sense) says otherwise.
A 2006 study conducted by researchers from the University of Insubria in Italy simulated drug-tainted water by creating a low-level mixture of various drug residues and testing it on embryonic cells. They discovered that, even at low doses, the drug residues actually stopped cells from reproducing.
Even though current water contamination levels are measured in parts per million or parts per billion, there is no way to know just how much exposure people are actually experiencing. People drink contaminated water, shower in contaminated water and cook with contaminated water, so it’s illogical to suggest that there’s no harm being caused by widespread exposure, even at “low” doses, especially when the exposure is a combination of dozens of different drugs that have never been tested in combination.
People are not the only beings that are affected by pharmaceutical contamination, either. The world’s aquatic ecosystems (and the plants and animals that belong to them) are all being negatively impacted.
Drugs are being found in fish
According to an MSNBC report back in 2009, all kinds of drugs are being found in the bodies of fish near major U.S. cities. Researchers found drugs for high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression in the livers and tissue of fish.
Researchers are in agreement that aquatic species of all types are being harmed by continuous exposure to water contaminated with pharmaceuticals. Even though wastewater is treated in the U.S. before entering waterways, most treatment facilities do not have the proper filtering technology to remove dangerous drug residues from wastewater before it gets dumped.
Beyond having their sperm damaged, some fish are actually changing sexes. Males are becoming females and females are becoming males as a result of drug exposure in the water. Other water creatures are experiencing things like organ failure and the inability to grow. It makes a reasonable person ask “How long until these effects start to hit humans?”
Or have they already?
“We have no reason to think that this is a unique situation. We find pretty much anywhere we look, these compounds are ubiquitous,” explained Erik Orsak, an environmental contaminants specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in response to the findings.
And it’s not just near American cities where fish are turning up with all kinds of drugs in their bodies. As of 2008, more than 100 different pharmaceutical compounds have been detected around the world, affecting fish and wildlife everywhere. These are chemicals that simply do not belong in our environment. And yet they are there, dumped into our waters by the pharmaceutical industry and its hospitals, pharmacies and consumers.
Why we need more research on the toxicity of pharmaceutical contaminants
Many animal studies have been or are being conducted on pharmaceutical exposure, and they are indicating that these drugs are causing widespread harm. But very few official human trials have been conducted, prompting many to push for increased efforts.
If drug residue is building up in animals and wildlife, then of course it’s building up in humans as well, posing the risk of significant harm. Reproductive failure, thyroid dysfunction, cancer, osteoporosis — all of these diseases and more may be caused, at least in part, by prolonged exposure to low levels of all sorts of drugs in the water supply.
Many states pushing for drug waste legislation
Because the truth about drug contamination in water is no longer a secret, many states have begun enacting legislation to regulate drug disposal. Last August, Illinois passed the Safe Pharmaceuticals Disposal Act, which restricts hospitals from flushing drugs down the drain.
California has a similar law in place, and New York is working on one as well, according to a recent report:
The same report indicates that there have been five bills introduced to regulate drugs at the federal level.
While this addresses the hospital waste problem, there’s still the human and drug company waste problems. No matter how you look at it, pharmaceutical drugs are going to continue making their way into the water supplies because they will pass through the bodies of consumers first!
Drug companies must be held responsible for their waste-water
Since it’s already been revealed that drug companies are failing to properly treat their wastewater before dumping it into rivers (even though they claim to be treating it), U.S. regulatory agencies need to step up and correct the problem. Regular monitoring of wastewater contaminant levels is the only way to halt the chemical contamination of waterways.
And if U.S. companies are polluting water supplies in other countries (such as India), they should be held accountable for their actions. There’s no excuse for U.S. companies to pollute anywhere in the world just because they’re operating outside domestic borders.
Wastewater treatment plants should be retrofitted
State and local legislators would do well to put forth their own legislation to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities so they can properly filter out pharmaceuticals (and dispose of them safely). Since there’s no way to stop human elimination of pharmaceuticals (apart from slowly educating the masses to stop swallowing dangerous pharmaceuticals), municipalities need to do their part to prevent these dangerous toxins from getting into water supplies in the first place.
Together, these measures would help to drastically reduce the amount of pharmaceutical waste entering our environment.
It’s the environment, stupid!
The careless disposal of toxic pharmaceuticals is proving to be highly destructive, despite reassurances by some that it’s not that big of a deal. The health of the planet and all of its amazing biodiversity is now threatened by the steady poisoning of toxic chemical pharmaceuticals.
And it’s not just pharmaceuticals, either. Chemical byproducts and waste from many different industries are polluting our environment at unprecedented rates. Mercury (from dental fillings), fluoride (dripped into the public water supply on purpose, if you can believe that!), and all sorts of other chemicals and heavy metals are showing up in food, water and the global environment.
Haven’t we poisoned our planet enough already?
Plants, animals and even humans can only take so much of this. That’s why we need to keep fighting against the corporations that are causing this harm and force them to stop destroying the world in which we hope to raise our children.
After all, if we keep poisoning the planet at this rate, there won’t be much left to offer future generations except a toxic stew of patent-protected chemicals that all the corporations pretend pose no problem at all.
Click here to read the full report
Feds Raid Amish Dairy And Threaten Action Over Raw Milk Sales
July 30, 2010
NaturalNews.com
by Ethan Huff
The U.S. government gestapo is at it again in its crusade against raw milk. Recently, the jackboots swarmed a Pennsylvania Amish man’s private dairy farm for the second time, falsely accusing him of violating the ridiculous prohibition on selling raw milk across state lines.
Farmer Dan Allgyer’s farm was raided by the same agents who paid him a visit back in February, telling him both times that they were there for an “inspection”. Just like last time, the agents drove flagrantly past “No Trespassing” and “Private Property”, this time arriving around 4:30 a.m. when Allgyer’s family was still asleep and as he was preparing to milk his cows.
The group began to interrogate Allgyer, and served him a warrant claiming they had “credible evidence” that he was involved in interstate commerce involving raw milk. According to Allgyer’s personal account, upon being questioned as to why the agents were at the farm so early when the warrant clearly stated that it was valid only at “reasonable times during ordinary business hours”, one of them retorted that “ordinary business hours for agriculture start at 5 a.m.”
After scouring farm equipment and taking a bunch of pictures, the agents eventually left. But the next morning, Allgyer received an overnight, urgent letter from officials about “regulatory action” that would be taken if he failed to take “corrective action”.
Some people might not know this, but according to the precedent set by the Wickard v. Filburn case, practically everything can now be considered to affect “interstate commerce” and thus fall under federal jurisdiction. In the little-known case, then President Franklin Roosevelt coerced the Supreme Court into supporting certain New Deal proposals that revolutionized the definition of “interstate commerce”.
Wickard v. Filburn had to do with a farmer who was growing too much wheat during a time when there were wheat quotas. To make a long story short, the courts established that even growing your own wheat and feeding it to your cattle falls under the banner of “interstate commerce” because there is the potential to affect interstate commerce.
It is under this faulty premise that federal and state agents are challenging Farmer Allgyer and others who may be selling raw milk products directly to consumers. Though Allgyer is running a private farm, federal agents are operating on illegitimate precedent by accusing him of being involved in interstate commerce.
Click here for the full report.
Mainstream Media Slants Cancer Articles Towards Unrealistic Outcomes
July 30, 2010
Natural News
by David Gutierrez
“Very few news reports about cancer discuss death and dying, and even those that do generally do not mention palliative and hospice care,” the researchers wrote.
Palliative care is medical care designed to reduce suffering and improve quality of life but not to cure a disease. It is a major component of care for terminal or hard-to-cure cancers.
The researchers reviewed 436 articles that had appeared in the magazines Newsweek, Parade, People, Redbook and Time, as well as eight daily newspapers in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. They found that while 32.1 percent of the articles focused on successful treatment of at least one patient, only 7.6 percent covered patients who died or were expected to. Only 2.2 percent addressed both positive and negative outcomes.
Of 216 people mentioned by name in the articles reviewed, 78.7 percent were survivors and only 21.3 percent died. Yet 50 percent of U.S. residents diagnosed with cancer do not survive the disease.
In addition, the researchers found that although many cancer treatments can have serious and even dangerous side effects, only 30 percent of the articles reviewed mentioned the possibility of adverse effects.
Fifty-seven percent of the articles covered only aggressive forms of cancer treatment, yet only 13.1 percent acknowledged that such treatments do not always result in improved survival. Only two of the articles (0.5 percent) mentioned end-of-life care, while only 11 (2.5 percent) mentioned both aggressive treatment and palliative care.
Such skewed coverage gives people a distorted image of their treatment options, the researchers warned.
“Unrealistic information may mislead the public about the trade-offs between attempts at heroic cures and hospice care,” they wrote.
Click here to read the full report
Music Benefits The Brain
July 30, 2010
NaturalNews.com
by S.L. Baker
Northwestern University scientists have pulled together a review of research into what music — specifically, learning to play music — does to humans. The result shows music training does far more than allow us to entertain ourselves and others by playing an instrument or singing. Instead, it actually changes our brains.
The paper, just published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, is a compilation of research findings from scientists all over the world who used all kinds of research methods. The bottom line to all these studies: musical training has a profound impact on other skills including speech and language, memory and attention, and even the ability to convey emotions vocally.
So what is it that musical training does? According to the Northwestern scientists, the findings strongly indicate it adds new neural connections — and that primes the brain for other forms of human communication.
In fact, actively working with musical sounds enhances neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt and change. “A musician’s brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound. In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean,” Nina Kraus, lead author of the Nature paper and director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, explained in a statement to the media. “The efficient sound-to-meaning connections are important not only for music but for other aspects of communication.”
For example, researchers have found that musicians are better than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words. Their brains also appear to be primed to comprehend speech in a noisy background.
What’s more, children who have had music lessons tend to have a larger vocabulary and better reading ability than youngsters who haven’t had any musical training. And children with learning disabilities, who often have a hard time focusing when there’s a lot of background noise, may be especially helped by music lessons. “Music training seems to strengthen the same neural processes that often are deficient in individuals with developmental dyslexia or who have difficulty hearing speech in noise,” Dr. Kraus stated.
The Northwestern researchers concluded their findings make a case for including music in school curriculums. “The effect of music training suggests that, akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness and thus requires society to re-examine the role of music in shaping individual development,” they wrote.
In addition to musical training, listening to music has also been shown to have some remarkable beneficial effects on the body. For example, as NaturalNews has previously reported, Tel Aviv University scientists found that premature infants exposed to thirty minutes of Mozart’s music daily grew far more rapidly than premature babies not exposed to classical music (http://www.naturalnews.com/028011_m…) and researchers at the University of Florence in Italy documented that listening to classical, Celtic or Indian (raga) music once a day for four weeks significantly reduced the blood pressure in people suffering from hypertension (http://www.naturalnews.com/023479_b…).
Click here for the full report.
US Financial System Begging For $76 Billion More
July 30, 2010 by Duffy
Filed under Government
July 30, 2010
Bloomberg
by Sandrine Rastello
The U.S. financial system remains fragile and banks subjected to additional economic stress might need as much as $76 billion in capital, according to the results of International Monetary Fund stress tests.
The findings, released today as part of a broader IMF report on the U.S. financial system, suggested that while the nation’s banking system is stable, it remains vulnerable. Home prices, commercial real estate loans and economic growth have the potential to cause shocks that could expose banks to more losses.
Under one scenario, small and regional banks as well as subsidiaries of foreign banks would need $40.5 billion in additional capital to meet a benchmark capital ratio of 6 percent Tier 1 common equity from 2010 to 2014. Under the adverse scenario, those needs rise to $76.3 billion, according to the report.
“Pockets of vulnerabilities linger,” the fund said in the report. The U.S. is recovering from what the IMF called “one of the most devastating financial crises in a century.”
Because the economic recovery is proceeding slowly, regulators must be especially vigilant in guarding against risks and weak spots, the report said.
The IMF also renewed its call for the Obama administration to push ahead with changes to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprise housing companies. The report suggested a partial privatization strategy, in which the government would take over the GSEs’ public housing mission while privatizing investment operations.
Regulators’ Role
The IMF stopped short of recommending recapitalizing the banks it studied in the report. Instead, it urged regulators to monitor conditions, especially for smaller institutions with less market access.
The numbers “are not frightening,” said Christopher Towe, the IMF’s deputy director of monetary and capital markets who directed the assessment. The review process was created in the wake of the Asian crisis, and the U.S. is the first major economy to undergo it since the global financial turmoil.
“We are particularly concerned about the situation among the small and medium-sized banks, which are most heavily exposed to the commercial real estate sector,” he told reporters in a press briefing yesterday.
The IMF said second-quarter results underscore the balance- sheet risks identified by the stress tests. “Initial releases of second-quarter earnings results have been disappointing,” the IMF report said.
Real Estate
The IMF said about $1.4 trillion of commercial real estate loans will mature from 2010 to 2014, almost half of which are already “seriously delinquent,” with payments 90 days or more past due, or “underwater,” with loan values exceeding property values. Home prices are another concern, as are the spillover effects if problems intensify as they spread among institutions.
U.S. regulators will need to step up their efforts to coordinate oversight after the Dodd-Frank legislation that President Barack Obama signed this month, the IMF said. The report generally praised the new law, while also flagging ongoing concerns.
“In some areas we were a little bit disappointed,” Towe said. “We see the system of regulatory agencies as still remaining exceptionally complex with a very large number of agencies involved and we would have preferred to have seen a much more bold streamlining.”
Click here to read the full report
Aides Seek To Downsize Obama’s Exposure
July 30, 2010 by Duffy
Filed under Government
July 30, 2010
LA Times
by Peter Nicholas & Janet Hook
If Ronald Reagan was the classic Teflon president, Barack Obama is made of Velcro.
Through two terms, Reagan eluded much of the responsibility for recession and foreign policy scandal. In less than two years, Obama has become ensnared in blame.
Hoping to better insulate Obama, White House aides have sought to give other Cabinet officials a higher profile and additional public exposure. They are also crafting new ways to explain the president’s policies to a skeptical public.
But Obama remains the colossus of his administration — to a point where trouble anywhere in the world is often his to solve.
The president is on the hook to repair the Gulf Coast oil spill disaster, stabilize Afghanistan, help fix Greece’s ailing economy and do right by Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official fired as a result of a misleading fragment of videotape.
What’s not sticking to Obama is a legislative track record that his recent predecessors might envy. Political dividends from passage of a healthcare overhaul or a financial regulatory bill have been fleeting.
Instead, voters are measuring his presidency by a more immediate yardstick: Is he creating enough jobs? So far the verdict is no, and that has taken a toll on Obama’s approval ratings. Only 46% approve of Obama’s job performance, compared with 47% who disapprove, according to Gallup’s daily tracking poll.
“I think the accomplishments are very significant, but I think most people would look at this and say, ‘What was the plan for jobs?’ ” said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.). “The agenda he’s pushed here has been a very important agenda, but it hasn’t translated into dinner table conversations.”
Reagan was able to glide past controversies with his popularity largely intact. He maintained his affable persona as a small-government advocate while seeming above the fray in his own administration.
Reagan was untarnished by such calamities as the 1983 terrorist bombing of the Marines stationed in Beirut and scandals involving members of his administration. In the 1986 Iran-Contra affair, most of the blame fell on lieutenants.
Obama lately has tried to rip off the Velcro veneer. In a revealing moment during the oil spill crisis, he reminded Americans that his powers aren’t “limitless.” He told residents in Grand Isle, La., that he is a flesh-and-blood president, not a comic-book superhero able to dive to the bottom of the sea and plug the hole.
“I can’t suck it up with a straw,” he said.
But as a candidate in 2008, he set sky-high expectations about what he could achieve and what government could accomplish.
Clinching the Democratic nomination two years ago, Obama described the moment as an epic breakthrough when “we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless” and “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Those towering goals remain a long way off. And most people would have preferred to see Obama focus more narrowly on the “good jobs” part of the promise.
A recent Gallup poll showed that 53% of the population rated unemployment and the economy as the nation’s most important problem. By contrast, only 7% cited healthcare — a single-minded focus of the White House for a full year.
At every turn, Obama makes the argument that he has improved lives in concrete ways.
Without the steps he took, he says, the economy would be in worse shape and more people would be out of work. There’s evidence to support that. Two economists, Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder, reported recently that without the stimulus and other measures, gross domestic product would be about 6.5% lower.
Yet, Americans aren’t apt to cheer when something bad doesn’t materialize.
Unemployment has been rising — from 7.7% when Obama took office, to 9.5%. Last month, more than 2 million homes in the U.S. were in various stages of foreclosure — up from 1.7 million when Obama was sworn in.
“Folks just aren’t in a mood to hand out gold stars when unemployment is hovering around 10%,” said Paul Begala, a Democratic pundit.
Insulating the president from bad news has proved impossible. Other White Houses have tried doing so with more success. Reagan’s Cabinet officials often took the blame, shielding the boss.
But the Obama administration is about one man. Obama is the White House’s chief spokesman, policy pitchman, fundraiser and negotiator. No Cabinet secretary has emerged as an adequate surrogate. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is seen as a tepid public speaker; Energy Secretary Steven Chu is prone to long, wonky digressions and has rarely gone before the cameras during an oil spill crisis that he is working to end.
So, more falls to Obama, reinforcing the Velcro effect: Everything sticks to him. He has opined on virtually everything in the hundreds of public statements he has made: nuclear arms treaties, basketball star LeBron James’ career plans; Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.
Few audiences are off-limits. On Wednesday, he taped a spot on ABC’s “The View,” drawing a rebuke from Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell, who deemed the appearance unworthy of the presidency during tough times.
“Stylistically he creates some of those problems,” Eddie Mahe, a Republican political strategist, said in an interview. “His favorite pronoun is ‘I.’ When you position yourself as being all things to all people, the ultimate controller and decision maker with the capacity to fix anything, you set yourself up to be blamed when it doesn’t get fixed or things happen.”
A new White House strategy is to forgo talk of big policy changes that are easy to ridicule. Instead, aides want to market policies as more digestible pieces. So, rather than tout the healthcare package as a whole, advisors will talk about smaller parts that may be more appealing and understandable — such as barring insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.
But at this stage, it may be late in the game to downsize either the president or his agenda.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said: “The man came in promising change. He has a higher profile than some presidents because of his youth, his race and the way he came to the White House with the message he brought in. It’s naive to believe he can step back and have some Cabinet secretary be the face of the oil spill. The buck stops with his office.”
Click here to read the full report
9/11 First Responders Bill Fails In House
July 30, 2010 by JP
Filed under Government
July 30, 2010
WCBSTV.com
by Sean Hennessey
The topic of 9/11 was the center of an emotional storm on Thursday — this time in Washington, D.C. — as lawmakers debated healthcare funding for responders.
And has CBS 2 HD witnessed, the most heated moments were between two respected members of New York’s delegation.
During the debate over healthcare for 9/11 responders, politics got in the way of the people the bill is supposed to help.
“Thank God for our country that the first responders of 9/11 didn’t look for cover before they did what they had to do and lived up to their oath,” said Rep. Peter King (R-Long Island).
King called Democrats cowards for circumventing traditional House rules in an effort to avoid amendment issues like immigration that could come up during the midterm elections.
“This bill should be more important than a campaign talking point. You could have passed it any time during the past three and a half years but you want political cover,” King said.
That sent queens Democrat Anthony Weiner into a red-faced rage.
“The gentleman is wrong! The gentleman is providing cover for his colleagues rather than doing the right thing! It’s Republicans wrapping their arms around Republicans rather than doing the right thing on behalf of the heroes!” Rep. Weiner said.
“It is a shame! A shame!”
Watching it all from his home on Long Island was John Foal, a responder who lost half his foot in the days after 9/11.
“I’m utterly disappointed,” Foal said.
And he was sickened when the bill that would help him and thousands of others was rejected by a vote of 244-150, with 39 abstentions.
“I think they’re caught up in the partisan politics of Congress and at the end of the day thousands of men and women who risked their lives without prejudice now have to suffer,” Foal said.
Named after James Zadroga, an NYPD detective who died from respiratory disease related to 9/11, the $7.4 billion bill would provide healthcare and compensation payments to those still struggling with exposure to Trade Center toxins.
“We need healthcare. We need that compensation. So many men and women are financially burdened,” Foal said.
The bill’s sponsors said they’ll try and vote again in September, which means more waiting for those who’ve waited long enough.
Click here for the full report.
July Was The Deadliest Month Of Afghan War
July 30, 2010 by JP
Filed under Government
July 30, 2010
Associated Press
by Robert Reid
NATO announced Friday that six more U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for July to at least 66 and surpassing the previous month’s record as the deadliest for American forces in the nearly 9-year-old war.
In Kabul, police fired weapons into the air to disperse a crowd of angry Afghans who shouted “death to America,” hurled stones and set fire to two vehicles after an SUV, driven by U.S. contract employees, was involved in a traffic accident that killed four Afghans, according to the capital’s criminal investigations chief, Abdul Ghaafar Sayedzada.
The contractor, DynCorp International, confirmed that its employees, working on a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, were involved in an accident on the airport road. In a statement, DynCorp said that when its employees got out of their vehicle, they and other DynCorp employees, who arrived at the scene to help, were attacked by the crowd, which burned their vehicles.
“Our condolences go out to the families of those who were killed or injured,” DynCorp said. “An investigation is under way.”
People at the scene said foreigners fired shots, killing and wounding Afghan civilians. DynCorp said the contractors fired no shots and that Afghan police helped move the contractors to safety away from the crowd. Hospital officials said the deaths and injuries were caused by the traffic accident.
Afghan police, some carrying riot shields, converged on the area, firing warning shots into the air to disperse the protesters. Sayedzada said the crowd burned two foreigners’ vehicles, causing heavy black smoke to rise from the scene.
“It is our right to raise up our voice and protest when innocent Afghans are harmed,” said Azizullah, a 25-year-old student, who like many Afghans uses one name.
Ahmad Jawid, who also was at the scene, asked: “Are we not Muslims? Are we not from Afghanistan? Infidels are here and they are ruling us. Why?”
A fatal traffic accident caused by a U.S. military convoy in 2006 triggered an anti-American riot in Kabul that left at least 14 people dead and dozens injured.
A NATO statement Friday said one service member died following an insurgent attack and two others were killed in a roadside bombing the same day in southern Afghanistan. A U.S military official confirmed all three were American troops.
Earlier in the day, a U.S. military official confirmed three other American service members died in two separate blasts in southern Afghanistan on Thursday.
The six deaths raised the U.S. death toll for the month to at least 66, according to an Associated Press count. June had been the deadliest month for the U.S. with 60 deaths. There have been 264 U.S. service members killed in combat and noncombat situations so far this year in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, according to the AP.
U.S. and NATO commanders had warned casualties would rise as the international military force ramps up the war against the Taliban, especially in their southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan last December in a bid to turn back a resurgent Taliban.
British and Afghan troops launched a new offensive Friday in the Sayedebad area of Helmand to try to deny insurgents a base from which to launch attacks in Nad Ali and Marjah, the British military announced. Coalition and Afghan troops have sought to solidify control of Marjah after overrunning the poppy-farming community five months ago.
The American deaths this month include Petty Officer 2nd Class Justin McNeley from Kingman, Arizona, and Petty Officer 3rd Class Jarod Newlove, 25, from the Seattle area. They went missing last week in Logar province south of Kabul. McNeley’s body was recovered Sunday, and Newlove’s body was pulled from a river Wednesday evening, Afghan officials said.
Senior military officials in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the sailors were never assigned anywhere near where their bodies were found.
Newlove’s father, Joseph Newlove, told KOMO-TV in Seattle he was baffled why his son had left the relative safety of Kabul. “He’s never been out of that town. So why would he go out of that town? He wouldn’t have,” he said.
New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped in Logar in 2008 while trying to make contact with a Taliban commander. Rohde and an Afghan colleague escaped in June 2009 after seven months in captivity, most spent in Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.
Four Afghan civilians were killed and three were injured when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in Zabul province of southern Afghanistan, provincial spokesman Mohammed Jan Rasoolyar said. When police arrived at the scene, Taliban fighters opened fire. One insurgent was killed, the spokesman said.
In Kandahar, a candidate in September’s parliamentary election escaped assassination Friday when a bomb planted on a motorcycle exploded, city security chief Fazil Ahmad Sherzad said. The Interior Ministry said a woman and a child were killed and another child was wounded.
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China Now 2nd Largest World Economy
July 30, 2010
MSNBC
by Reuters
Depending on how fast its exchange rate rises, China is on course to overtake the United States and vault into the No.1 spot sometime around 2025, according to projections by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and others.
China came close to surpassing Japan in 2009 and the disclosure by a senior official that it had now done so comes as no surprise. Indeed, Yi Gang, China’s chief currency regulator, mentioned the milestone in passing in remarks published on Friday.
“China, in fact, is now already the world’s second-largest economy,” he said in an interview with China Reform magazine posted on the website of his agency, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.
Cruising past Japan might give China bragging rights, but its per-capita income of about $3,800 a year is a fraction of Japan’s or America’s. (Check the latest US GDP report here)
“China is still a developing country, and we should be wise enough to know ourselves,” Yi said, when asked whether the time was ripe for the yuan to become an international currency.
Can It Be Sustained?
China’s economy expanded 11.1 percent in the first half of 2010, from a year earlier, and is likely to log growth of more than 9 percent for the whole year, according to Yi.
China has averaged more than 9.5 percent growth annually since it embarked on market reforms in 1978. But that pace was bound to slow over time as a matter of arithmetic, Yi said.
If China could chalk up growth this decade of 7-8 percent annually, that would still be a strong performance. The issue was whether the pace could be sustained, Yi said, not least because of the environmental constraints China faces.
In an assessment disputed by Beijing, the International Energy Agency said last week that China had surpassed the United States as the world’s largest energy user. If China can keep up a clip of 5-6 percent a year in the 2020s, it will have maintained rapid growth for 50 years, which Yi said would be unprecedented in human history.
The uninterrupted economic ascent, which saw China overtake Britain and France in 2005 and then Germany in 2007, is gradually translating into clout on the world stage.
China is a leading member of the Group of 20 rich and emerging nations, which since the 2008 financial crisis has become the world’s premier economic policy-setting forum.
In one important respect, however, China is still a shrinking violet: anxious to shield itself from the rough-and-tumble of global markets, it does not permit its currency to be freely exchanged except for purposes of trade and foreign direct investment.
And Yi said Beijing had no timetable to make the yuan fully convertible.
“China is very big and its development is unbalanced, which makes this problem much more complicated. It’s difficult to reach a consensus on it,” he said.
In the same vein, China was in no rush to turn the yuan into a global currency.
“We must be modest and we still have to keep a low profile. If other people choose the yuan as a reserve currency, we won’t stop that as it is the demand of the market. However, we will not push hard to promote it,” he added.
No Big Rise in Yuan
China has been encouraging the use of the yuan beyond its borders, allowing more trade to be settled in renminbi and taking a series of measures to establish Hong Kong as an offshore center where the currency can circulate freely.
But Yi said: “Don’t think that since people are talking about it, the yuan is close to becoming a reserve currency.
Actually, it’s still far from that.” He said expectations of a stronger yuan, also known as the renminbi, had diminished.
There was no basis for a sharp rise in the exchange rate, partly because the price level in China had risen steadily over the past decade. “This suggests that the value of the renminbi has moved much closer to equilibrium compared with 10 years ago,” he said.
Yi’s comments are unlikely to go down well in Washington, where lawmakers have scheduled a hearing for Sept. 16 to consider whether U.S. government action is needed to address China’s exchange rate policy.
China scrapped the yuan’s 23-month-old peg to the dollar on June 19 and resumed a managed float. The yuan has since risen only 0.8 percent against the dollar, and economists calculate that it has fallen in value against a basket of currencies.
China would stick to the principle of holding its $2.45 trillion of official reserves in a mix of currencies and assets.
The stockpile — the world’s largest — was so big that it was impossible to adjust its currency composition in a short space of time: “We won’t be particularly bearish on the dollar at a given time or particularly bearish on the euro at another time.”
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Google, CIA Invest In ‘Future’ Of Web Monitoring
July 30, 2010
Wire.com
by Noah Schachtman
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.
America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.
“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”
U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.
That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.
Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.
Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.
Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.
In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.
But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)
“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.
But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.
“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”
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