NEW YORK — Newsstand sales of U.S. magazines are continuing to fall. An industry group says single-copy sales fell 12 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2008. Total circulation, including subscriptions, edged down 1 percent. The figures are being released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, based on 521 magazines that gave circulation numbers for both years. The total circulation of those titles stands at roughly 340 million. About 36 million are sold at newsstands and other retailers but account for a disproportionate amount of publishers’ revenue because subscriptions are discounted. Cosmopolitan is still the most popular magazine at newsstands, though sales fell nearly 8 percent to 1.6 million. Average single-copy circulation at leading U.S. consumer magazines for the first half of 2009, among magazines that reported totals to the Audit Bureau of Circulations: 1. Cosmopolitan – 1,616,908 (down 7.8 percent) 2. People – 1,319,350 (down 12.77 percent) 3. Woman’s World – 1,175,550 (down 8.31 percent) 4. First – 1,066,167 (down 9.29 percent) 5. Us Weekly – 843,479 (down 2.98 percent) 6. In Touch Weekly – 745,123 (down 17.67 percent) […]
Editor’s Note: There is a groundswell of attention in the news to marijuana’s role in causing and preventing various types of cancers. Last week, AlterNet published an article from the Marijuana Policy Project about a new study finding that pot smokers have a lower risk of head and neck cancers than people who don’t smoke pot. Earlier this year, the corporate media pounced on a study suggesting that men who had been using marijuana at least once per week and who had started smoking pot prior to age 18 had an elevated risk of testicular cancer known as nonseminoma, which makes up fewer than half of one percent of all cancer cases among men. Head, neck and testicular cancers are of course quite serious ailments to deal with, but what about cancer of the most obvious organ at risk with pot smoking, the lungs? Where’s the science on that? The article below by Fred Gardner, editor of the medical marijuana research quarterly journal O’Shaughnessy’s, shares the results of a major medical study the media completely ignored, and his conclusions are quite blunt on the matter: Smoking pot doesn’t cause lung cancer. In fact, the study found that cigarette smokers […]
The resource curse has gone global. For years, oil wealth was mostly a danger to those, paradoxically, who possessed it. Resource-rich Middle Eastern countries, and their labor-exporting neighbors, failed for decades to invest adequately in their people or to diversify their economies. A massive influx of oil receipts and worker remittances discouraged investment in sectors conducive to steady long-term growth, fostered corruption and patronage, inflated regional real estate and stock markets, and provided irresistible incentives for governments to spend with wasteful, shortsighted abandon. But today, the Middle East’s resource curse is spilling over into the international financial system. Unanticipated petrodollar flows are fueling financial bubbles, financing a Middle Eastern arms race, and damaging the global economy through speculative oil-price feedback loops. All the elements of previous boom-and-bust cycles in the 1970s and 1980s and again in the past decade remain in place. What’s happening is both comfortingly familiar and terrifyingly new. Sudden surges in oil-revenue flows to and from the Middle East — known as ‘petrodollar recycling’ — have certainly been a problem before. But in the last few years, they have become critically destabilizing. Today’s Great Recession has generally been understood as a story about real […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
