The $700 billion U.S. bailout program launched in response to the global economic meltdown had a far greater impact overseas than other countries’ financial rescue plans did on the U.S., according to a new report from a congressional watchdog.

Billions of dollars in U.S. rescue funds wound up in big banks in France, Germany and other nations. That was probably inevitable because of the structure of the Treasury Department’s program, the Congressional Oversight Panel says in a new report issued Thursday.

The U.S. program aimed to stabilize the financial system by injecting money into as many banks as possible, including those with substantial operations overseas. Most other countries, by contrast, focused their efforts more narrowly on banks in their nations that usually lacked major U.S. operations.

But the report says that if the U.S. had gotten more data on which foreign banks would benefit the most, the government might have been able to ask those countries to share some of the cost.

‘There were no data about where this money was going,’ panel chair Elizabeth Warren said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. ‘The American people have a right to know where the money went.’

An example: Major French and German banks were […]

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Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.

What it can and must do is radically simplify its tax, health-care, retirement and financial systems, each of which is a complete mess. But this is the good news. It means they can each be redesigned to achieve their legitimate purposes at much lower cost and, in the process, revitalize the economy.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy. Its summary contained these bland words about U.S. fiscal policy: ‘Directors welcomed the authorities’ commitment to fiscal stabilization, but noted that a larger than budgeted adjustment would be required to stabilize debt-to-GDP.

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A half century ago, Linus Pauling began his pioneering research into how vitamin C impacts health. Now, almost 25 years after Pauling’s death, a new study backs up his contention that vitamin C has remarkable healing and protective benefits.
In fact, now scientists have discovered how vitamin C may put the brakes on the growth of cancer cells.

Margreet Vissers, associate professor at the University of Otago’s Free Radical Research Group in New Zealand, headed the study which was just published in the journal Cancer Research. ‘Our results offer a promising and simple intervention to help in our fight against cancer, at the level of both prevention and cure,’ Dr.Vissers said in a statement to the press.

She pointed out that the role of vitamin C in cancer treatment has been debated for years, with many anecdotal accounts claiming vitamin C can help in both the prevention and treatment of cancer. In earlier studies conducted by Dr. Vissers, she demonstrated the vitamin’s importance in keeping cells healthy. And these findings suggested that vitamin C might be able to limit diseases such as cancer that involve cells that go haywire. In the case of a malignancy, for example, cells have unregulated growth.

So Dr. […]

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Today, Lisbon’s trendy bars, Porto’s factories and the Algarve’s glamorous resorts are powered substantially by clean energy. Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.

Land-based wind power - this year deemed ‘potentially competitive

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In January last year, it caused the Health Protection Agency to issue a National Resistance Alert. The focus was on a type of enzyme, carbapenemase, that destroys the antibiotic and makes the bacteria resistant. The Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring and Reference Laboratory in London had seen only eight bacterial samples producing such an enzyme in the years up to 2007. But there were 21 in 2008 and more than 40 in 2009.

The rise in the number of cases infected with these resistant bacteria was not the only development. It was not due to a single kind of bacterium carrying a single type of enzyme – resistance in different species of bacteria was appearing, due to different enzymes. And they were being imported into the UK as on-going infections in people who had been patients in hospitals in Greece, Turkey and Israel.

The most recent development, and the one that has hit the news this week, is that resistant bacteria producing a brand new carbapenemase, NDM-1, have been found in Britain and that some of them have come here from the Indian subcontinent. Some of the implications of the discovery are truly alarming.

The story started in 2008 with a 59-year-old man who had […]

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