Could Government Be the Largest Threat to Our Freedoms?
March 1, 2010
CNN
By Paul Steinhauser
A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.
Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.
The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans.
According to CNN poll numbers released Sunday, Americans overwhelmingly think that the U.S. government is broken – though the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what’s broken can be fixed.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted February 12-15, with 1,023 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the overall survey.
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Future Disasters Include Solar Storms
March 1, 2010
NPR
By Jon Hamilton
A massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service, government officials say.
That was their conclusion after participating in a tabletop exercise that looked at what might happen today if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859.
Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. Minor storms are common and can light up the Earth’s Northern skies and interfere with radio signals.
Every few decades, though, the sun experiences a particularly large storm. These can release as much energy as 1 billion hydrogen bombs.
How Well Can We Weather The Solar Storm?
The exercise, held in Boulder, Colorado, was intended to investigate “what we think could be close to a worst-case scenario,” says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder. The Center is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“It’s important to understand that, along with other types of natural hazards, (solar) storms can cause impacts,” says Craig Fugate, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who also took part in the tabletop exercise.
Bogdan and Fugate say that eventually there will be another storm as big as the ones in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina.
But the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation.
In the tabletop exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, Bogdan says.
Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles “basically took out” most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives, Bogdan says.
“When you go into a gas station and put your credit card in and get some gas,” he says, “that’s a satellite transaction.”
Disabled Satellites Are Just The Beginning
The worst damage came nearly a day later, when the solar storm began to induce electrical currents in high voltage power lines. The currents were strong enough to destroy transformers around the globe,” Bogdan says, leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power.
Without electricity, many people also lost running water, heat, air conditioning and phone service. And places like hospitals had to rely on emergency generators with fuel for only two or three days, Bogdan says.
In many ways, the impact of a major solar storm resembles that of a hurricane or an earthquake, says Fugate.
But a solar Katrina would cause damage in a much larger area than any natural disaster, Fugate says. For example, power could be knocked out almost simultaneously in countries from Sweden to Canada and the U.S., he says. So a lot more people in a lot more places would need help.
Individuals don’t need to make any special preparation for a solar storm, Fugate says. The standard emergency kit of water and food and first aid supplies will work just fine.
“If you’ve got your family disaster plan together, you’ve taken the steps, whether it be a space storm, whether it be a system failure, whether it be another natural hazard that knocks the power out,” Fugate says.
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Apple and Child Labor
March 1, 2010
Bloomberg.com
By Connie Guglielmo
Apple Inc. said three of its suppliers hired 11 underage workers to help build the iPhone, iPod and Macintosh computer last year, a violation it uncovered as part of its onsite audit of 102 factories.
“Apple discovered three facilities that had previously hired 15-year-old workers in countries where the minimum age for employment is 16,” the company said in a 24-page report on “Supplier Responsibility” posted on its Web site. The workers were “no longer in active employment at the time of our audit.”
Apple didn’t name its suppliers and manufacturers. The company visited sites in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Philippines and the U.S. Apple also found three cases where suppliers “falsified records” to conceal underage hiring, more than 60 facilities where employees were overworked, 24 partners that paid less than the minimum wage and 57 who didn’t offer all required benefits.
“Apple’s Code sets a maximum of 60 work hours per week and requires at least one day of rest per seven days of work,” the company said. Apple also said it asked suppliers to end a practice “where wage deductions were used for disciplinary purposes.”
The company said it stopped doing business with at least one unnamed supplier after finding repeated violations and “inadequate actions” to address the problems.
Recruitment Fees
Apple’s review also found that at eight facilities, including suppliers in Taiwan, foreign workers paid excessive recruitment fees to hiring agencies to get jobs. The company said employees were reimbursed $2.2 million in fee overcharges over the past two years and that Apple has set a standard limiting such fees to the “equivalent of one month’s net wages.”
Apple “also created extensive training programs to educate workers about their right to a safe and respectful work environment,” Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, said today.
As part of that training, more than 128,000 workers received information outlining their rights and more than 5,000 supervisors and managers received training on their responsibilities to employees, Apple said in its report.
The company also established courses for workers to expand computer and technical skills and set standards for dormitories, medical treatment and pregnancy non-discrimination.
Apple rose $2.62 to $204.62 yesterday in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares more than doubled last year.
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Are Global Earthquakes Getting Worse?
March 1, 2010
MSNBC
Chile is on a hotspot of sorts for earthquake activity. And so the 8.8-magnitude temblor that shook the region overnight was not a surprise, historically speaking. Nor was it outside the realm of normal, scientists say, even though it comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.
One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so.
The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, originated on a hot spot known as a subduction zone, where one plate of Earth’s crust dives under another. It’s part of the active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.
“This particular subduction zone has produced very damaging earthquakes throughout its history,” said Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The largest quake ever recorded, magnitude 9.5, occurred along the same fault zone in May 1960.
Even so, magnitude-8 earthquakes occur globally, on average, just once a year. Since magnitudes are given on a logarithmic scale, an 8.8-magnitude is much more intense than a magnitude 8, and so this event would be even rarer, said J. Ramón Arrowsmith, a geologist at Arizona State University.
Is Earth shaking more?
The Ryukyu Islands of Japan were hit with a 7.0-magnitude quake on Friday night. News of that tremor, the Haiti quake and now Chile may make it seem as if Earth is becoming ever more active. But in the grand scheme of things, geologists say this is just Mother Nature as usual.
“From our human perspective with our relatively short and incomplete memories and better and better communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent,” Arrowsmith said. “But this is probably not any indication of a global change in earthquake rate of significance.”
Coupled with better communication, as the human population skyrockets and we move into more hazardous regions, we’re going to hear more about the events that do occur, Arrowsmith added.
However, “relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years,” said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth’s lithosphere.” (The lithosphere is the outer solid part of the Earth.)
While the Chilean earthquake wasn’t directly related to Japan’s 7.0-magnitude temblor, the two have some factors in common.
For one, any seismic waves that made their way from Japan to the Chilean coast could play a slight role in ground-shaking.
“It is too far away for any direct triggering, and those distances also make the seismic waves as they would pass by from the Haiti or Japan events pretty small because of attenuation,” Arrowsmith told LiveScience. (Attenuation is the decrease in energy with distance.) “Nevertheless, if the Chilean fault surface were close to failure, those small waves could push it even closer.”
In addition, both regions reside within the Ring of Fire, which is a zone surrounding the Pacific Ocean where the Pacific tectonic plate and other plates dive beneath other slabs of Earth. About 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur along this arc. (The next most seismic region, where just 5 to 6 percent of temblors occur, is the Alpide belt, which extends from the Mediterranean region eastward.)
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Science Mimicking Photosynthesis in Artificial Leaves
March 1, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Researchers from Imperial College London have launched a £1 million ($1.6 million) study to create what they call an “artificial leaf,” mimicking the process of photosynthesis that allows plants to generate energy from the sun.
Plants use solar radiation to power a chemical reaction that converts water and carbon dioxide into sugar. Part of this reaction entails splitting water molecules into their component hydrogen and oxygen parts, something that remains very expensive using modern technology.
Photosynthesis is so efficient, however, that scientists estimate that it could meet all the Earth’s power needs for a year from merely an hour of sunlight. An artificial photosynthesis system that used only 10 percent of the light hitting it could meet all global energy needs if it covered only 0.16 percent of the Earth’s surface area (about 315,000 square miles).
“We know that plants have already evolved to do it and we know that, fundamentally, it’s a workable process on a large scale,” said John Loughhead of the UK Energy Research Center. “Ultimately, the only sustainable form of energy we’ve got is the sun. From a strategic viewpoint, you have to think this looks really interesting because we know we’re starting from a base of feasibility.”
In contrast to other alternative energy sources such as solar panels or windmills, which produce electricity directly, the Imperial College researchers want to use photosynthesis to produce fuels — either hydrogen for fuel cells, or sugars for biofuel engines. Even though the burning of these fuels would still produce carbon dioxide, the researchers believe it would be balanced out by the carbon dioxide that the artificial leaf removed from the air to make the fuel in the first place.
As one of their first steps, researchers are working on an artificial copy of the enzyme, photosystem 2, that plants use to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
“It doesn’t mean that you try to build exactly what the leaf has,” researcher James Barber said. “Leonardo da Vinci tried to design flying machines with feathers that flapped up and down. But in the end we built 747s and Airbus 380s, completely different to a bird.”
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Surge in Infertility Leads Many UK Woman Out of Country
March 1, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
In vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a popular method by which women who are having trouble getting pregnant are able to use donor sperm to achieve pregnancy. In the UK, however, there is a shortage of donor sperm that is causing British women to have to travel to countries like Denmark in order to find some.
A 2005 British law change outlawed the donating of sperm anonymously. UK law also has a long-standing rule that prohibits men who donate from receiving any sort of monetary compensation. Because of these rules, and the fact that many men fear having to provide their identities with the donation because the children may eventually try to find and meet them, few British men are donating sperm these days. As a result, the waiting list to receive IVF in the UK is several years.
In 2007, Denmark changed its laws and now permits anonymous donors, which has led to a surge in foreign women coming there to receive IVF treatment. Danish donors are also compensated between $60 and $200 for their donations which has helped to facilitate a large number of casual donors. The Danish sperm bank, Cryos, is the largest sperm bank in the world and is a popular destination for “infertility tourists” seeking to have children.
Denmark is one of the few nations that allows anonymous donations as well as monetary compensation for them. For this reason, Danish clinics are flourishing with increased business. DanFert in Copenhagen more than doubled its IVF customers since 2007. Vita Nova in Copenhagen has seen a 40 percent increase in women seeking IVF from Britain alone.
Danish clinics also cater to single women who are trying to have children, a controversial scenario rejected by many other nations who aim to serve couples trying to conceive. Such liberal laws have attracted all sorts of women from around the globe who wish to bear children but are otherwise unable.
Because of the popularity of the program, Danish banks have begun opening up franchised fertility clinics in other countries that permit it, including in the US and India. In these countries, men who are looking to make some extra cash often donate to the clinic, a practice that has all but ceased in Britain due to the laws.
Many women are hoping that UK laws will once again allow for anonymous sperm donors. They believe it will help to increase supply and end the shortage that has prevented many women from receiving IVF there.
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‘Preventative’ Mastectomy Found to Not Have any Benefits
Chron
By Todd Ackerman
Breast cancer patients are increasingly having preventive surgery to remove the unaffected breast, but a new study suggests it’s not beneficial for the vast majority of women who undergo it.
Researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center on Thursday reported that an analysis of the records of more than 100,000 patients revealed a survival benefit in 6 percent of those who opted to have a double mastectomy. Most who benefited fit a particular profile that doctors can easily identify at diagnosis.
“It’s important for women to understand that, except for one subset of breast cancer patients, they don’t need to do this,” said Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian, an M.D. Anderson professor of surgical oncology and one of the study’s two lead authors. “Hopefully, it’ll reassure patients wondering if they should.”
The observational study, which was published online Thursday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found a double mastectomy offers a slight but real benefit to patients 50 and younger whose cancer is estrogen receptor negative and in the early stages. The study is the first to find such an association between the procedure and survival.
The study found no benefit among patients 60 or older undergoing a double mastectomy and murky results among those aged 50 to 60.
Women diagnosed with breast cancer are known to have an increased risk of developing breast cancer in the opposite breast. But the study found that preventive surgery on the opposite breast had little survival benefit, save for the one subset, either because patients die from the cancer they already have or from other medical conditions, or because the risk isn’t realized in their lifetime.
Surgeries increasing
The number of double mastectomies has grown dramatically in recent years. Many patients who choose that option say they do so because it gives them peace of mind.
Previous studies have found that the number more than doubled from 1998 to 2003, and Bedrosian said based on her experience the trend has seemingly continued to escalate. Statistics from 2003 show 11 percent of women having a mastectomy opted for one in their disease-free breast as well.
The increase is attributed to scans that can detect smaller, earlier cancers; genetic tests that can warn women of the inherited risk they face; and better plastic surgery techniques that make reconstructive surgery more appealing than it once was.
Bedrosian’s team identified 107,106 women in the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results registry who had a mastectomy to treat Stage I to Stage III breast cancer. Among that group, 8,902 women also had their unaffected breast removed.
At a five-year follow-up, 88.5 percent of those who had the elective mastectomy were alive, compared to 83.7 of those who didn’t.
After controlling for different variables, the M.D. Anderson team found that the younger women with early-stage tumors not fueled by estrogen had a survival benefit of 4.8 percent at five years, meaning for every 100 patients, fewer than five who would have died without the additional surgery were still alive. The prognosis is usually poorer for estrogen receptor-negative patients.
No other group showed a clear benefit.
One expert’s response to the data was to recommend that any woman requesting an elective mastectomy wait a year before having it done.
“In a younger woman with (estrogen receptor)-negative disease, an (elective) mastectomy may be considered,” said Dr. Victor Vogel, national vice president for research at the American Cancer Society. “In the vast majority of women older than 50 with ER-positive disease, prudent waiting is probably the most appropriate.”
Information for patients
One of Bedrosian’s patients was happy to have the data. Diagnosed in December with Stage II estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer, the 33-year-old woman hadn’t thought of a double mastectomy until learning of her particular susceptibility to the disease spreading.
“For me, it was a very matter-of-fact decision,” said Rachel Jackson, an Austin triathlete who has yet to schedule either mastectomy. “I’m planning to live to 70 or 80.”
Nearly 200,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and 40,000 die of it. The majority do not have mastectomies.
Bedrosian emphasized that the study findings should not be interpreted as “a uniform mandate.”
“This is still a decision to be made by the patient after talking with her doctor,” Bedrosian said. “A younger woman with early-stage ER-negative breast cancer might have good reason not to want a (double) mastectomy, and an older woman — say, with a significant family history — might have good reason to want one.”
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Bill Gates’ Vaccination Scam Looks to Generate Money, Not Cures
Rense.com
By Thomas C. Mountain
The “richest man in the world,” Microsoft’s Bill Gates, recently announced that he was making a $10 billion donation towards finding vaccines to prevent some of the world’s worst diseases.
Malaria is the number one killer in Africa. From what I’m hearing about $1 billion of Bill Gates donation/tax write-off is for research to find a vaccine to prevent malaria.
The African country of Eritrea, where I live, has reduced malaria mortality by 85 percent in the last seven years. How? By using basic public health methods. By distributing pesticide treated mosquito nets and organizing the pesticide retreatment every three months of mosquito nets. By habitat eradication. And by community medical clinics for immediate treatment.
Malaria is a parasite-based disease noted for its variety and quick development of resistance to medication. Any “vaccine,” if even a billion dollars is able to produce such, would have a limited lifetime and new, patented medications would have to be bought by Africa’s poor every few years.
So “donating” a billion dollars to develop a malaria “vaccine” could turn into tens of billions of dollars in drug sales in Africa alone, and Bill Gates, through his drug company investments, will quietly pocket more African blood money.
All the while a very successful malaria mortality reduction program is operating, effectively, safely and affordably, in Eritrea.
Why isn’t this being publicized internationally? Could it be that such a program is not going to put billions into the pockets of the drug lords of Western finance?
Bill Gates and other assorted financial terrorists through their control of the Western media and “aid” organizations are suppressing implementation of a successful malaria mortality program while investing in a malaria drug addiction for Africa’s people.
These financial terrorists are perfectly willing to see millions die in Africa while they search for their next highly profitable “wonder drug” to cure malaria, all the while deliberately ignoring, worse, engineering a white out/cover up of what could prevent millions of deaths, let alone uncounted suffering.
And HIV/AIDS, Africa’s N0.2 killer? Bill Gates is said to be providing over a billion dollars for research into developing an AIDS vaccine. AIDS, a virus based disease, has already shown to have varieties and to have developed resistance to the medications developed to treat it. Like the flu vaccine, a new AIDS vaccine would most likely have to be developed every few years to combat the latest strain of the AIDS virus; another gold mine of new, patented medications for sale to Africa’s sick.
Eritrea has reduced HIV/AIDS infection rates by 40 percent, according to Physicians for Peace, and is the only country in Africa to reduce HIV/AIDS. How? By using public health education promoting condom use everywhere in the country. Over a billion for a “vaccine” that may never work while an effective program that can reduce HIV/AIDS infection by 40 percent, safely and affordably can be immediately implemented?
Remember, Western billionaires didn’t get that way by being out to really help anyone. Millions die in Africa as the Western drug lords and their financial terrorist stockholders reap their billions in blood money. All the while real heroes in the Eritrean public health service struggle to save people’s lives.
So don’t believe that Bill Gates is up to any good when he donates $10 billion to vaccine research, just the opposite. And don’t forget that as far at the USA is concerned in Africa, no good deed goes unpunished, and, once again, Eritrea is subject to UN Security Council sanctions.
Stay tuned to Online Journal for more news from Africa’s Horn that the so called free press in the west refuses to cover.
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16 Year-Old Loses Eyesight After HPV Vaccination
March 1, 2010
The One Click Group
By Francis J. DiMario, Jr, Mirna Hajjar and Thomas Ciesielski
We report the course of a 16-year-old girl who presented with near complete visual loss associated with chiasmal neuritis and a biopsy proven tumefactive demyelinating lesion on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in association with a recent immunization against human papilloma virus.
She had received her second vaccination against human papilloma virus 10 days prior to her presentation. There was no family history of demyelinating disease, collagen-vascular disease, or rheumatological disorders.
In the context of prior vaccination in a 16-year-old girl, acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis is likely to explain the multifocal deficits.
Larger epidemiologic studies will be needed to confirm a role of the human papilloma virus immunization and demyelinating disease.
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Allergies May Be Meat-Related
March 1, 2010
Business Week
By Robert Priedt
A carbohydrate in meat called alpha-gal may be the unrecognized cause of recurring severe allergic reactions in some patients, a new study suggests.
The study included 60 people in Australia and the United States who experienced the recurrent severe allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis with no known cause. Allergy tests revealed that 25 of the 60 patients had positive responses to alpha-gal. A positive response was considered a level of greater than 1.0 international units per milliliter of immunoglobulin E (IgE).
The tests did not identify any other allergens that would explain the cause of anaphylaxis in the 25 patients who were positive for alpha-gal or in the other 35 patients, the study authors noted.
The findings were scheduled to be presented Sunday at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology annual meeting, in New Orleans.
“These studies continue to suggest not only that IgE to a carbohydrate has important clinical implications in food allergy and anaphylaxis, but that the presence of this antibody may well have been under-appreciated in terms of the number of patients affected and the geographical scope,” study author Dr. Scott P. Commins, of the University of Virginia, said in an academy news release.
A person who suffers an anaphylactic reaction to something unknown is at increased risk for recurring anaphylaxis if the trigger isn’t identified.
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