Friday, February 18th, 2011
DEBORAH ZABARENKO, Environmental Correspondent - The Raw Story/Reuters
Stephan: The climate change deniers blather on; nature isn't listening. If you live on a sea coast as I did in Virginia Beach, it would be prudent to acquaint yourself with what is going to happen in your area.
WASHINGTON — Rising seas spurred by climate change could threaten 180 U.S. coastal cities by 2100, a new study says, with Miami, New Orleans and Virginia Beach among those most severely affected.
Previous studies have looked at where rising waters might go by the end of this century, assuming various levels of sea level rise, but this latest research focused on municipalities in the contiguous 48 states with population of 50,000 or more.
Cities along the southern Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico will likely be hardest hit if global sea levels rise, as projected, by about 3 feet (1 meter) by 2100, researchers reported in the journal Climate Change Letters.
Sea level rise is expected to be one result of global warming as ice on land melts and flows toward the world’s oceans.
Using data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the scientists were able to calculate in detail how much land could be lost as seas rise, said study author Jeremy Weiss of the University of Arizona.
Rising coastal waters threaten an average of nine percent of the land in the 180 coastal cities in the study.
Miami, New Orleans, Tampa, Florida, and Virginia Beach, Virginia could lose more than 10 percent of their […]
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Friday, February 18th, 2011
Stephan: The madness of Iraq justs gets more and more surreal. History is going to record these wars as one of the most catastrophic geopolitical errors ever made.
Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The city’s government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad’s infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military.
‘The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste,’ the statement said.
‘Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford…we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad’s people and pay back these expenses.’
The statement made no mention of damage caused by bombing.
Baghdad’s neighborhoods have been sealed off by miles of concrete blast walls, transforming the city into a tangled maze that contributes to massive traffic jams. Despite a sharp reduction in overall violence in recent years only 5 percent of the walls have been removed, officials said.
The heavy blast walls have damaged sewer and water systems, pavement and parks, said Hakeem Abdul Zahra, the city spokesman.
U.S. military Humvees, driven on street medians and through gardens, have […]
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011
A. G. SULZBERGER, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is why the media matters. Shining a light on this hateful legislation stopped it.
A state bill to expand the definition of justifiable homicide in South Dakota to include killing someone in the defense of an unborn child was postponed indefinitely Wednesday after an uproar over whether the legislation would put abortion providers at greater risk.
The House speaker, Val Rausch, said that the legislation had been shelved, pending a decision on whether to allow a vote, amend the language or drop it entirely. A spokesman for Gov. Dennis Daugaard said, ‘Clearly the bill as it’s currently written is a very bad idea.
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011
Stephan: Now it is absolutely clear. The entire rationale for the insane Iraq war was a lie. Hundreds of thousands have died and hundreds of thousands more are maimed because the neo-cons wanted a war so they could capture the Iraqi oil -- which in fact is not going to happen. There is no upside and we have beggared ourselves to serve a conservative fantasy.
LONDON – An Iraqi man whose testimony the United States used as a key evidence to build a case for war in Iraq says he is proud that he lied about his country developing mobile biological warfare labs.
The Guardian newspaper published an interview Wednesday with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who has been identified as the informer called ‘Curveball,’ whose claims about weapon labs formed part of then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. Security Council in 2003, shortly before the war began.
The Guardian quoted al-Janabi as saying: ‘I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that.’
Although some intelligence agents were skeptical of Curveball’s story, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 2004 that the Central Intelligence Agency ‘withheld important information about Curveball’s reliability’ from analysts dealing with the case.
The Guardian interviewed al-Janabi in Karlsruhe, Germany in a mixture of Arabic and German. The U.S. Senate panel’s report said Curveball spoke in English and Arabic when he was interrogated by intelligence officers.
Asked about his feeling’s about the deaths and destruction during the war and in the years following, The Guardian said al-Janabi said there was no other way.
‘I […]
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011
MARY BROPHY MARCUS, - USA TODAY
Stephan: I am a Virginian and dislike seeing these stories about the South. However, the data is clear: Southern states have populations that are more ignorant, have higher incidence of STDs, more teen pregnancy, greater obesity, more spousal abuse, higher divorce rates, more type II diabetes, greater percentages of anti-evolutionists, and greater racism.
It makes me very sad, that we have learned so little.
Colorado has one of the most active populations in the country and Kentucky has one of the least active, according to a new government study that looked a people’s physical activity county by county.
This is the third in a series of county-focused reports by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first two looked at diabetes and obesity rates, says Ann Albright, director of the CDC’s Division of Diabetes Translation.
‘When you actually take all three maps together, it really does give you this clear picture that the Southern and Appalachian areas on all three – obesity, diabetes and inactivity – are very closely tied to each other. It lets you step back and gives the big picture,’ Albright says.
The study reflects data collected from all 3,141 U.S. counties from adults who reported their physical activity levels.
Among the states where at least 70% of counties fell into the group with the least physical activity were Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
States with at least 70% of counties in the group getting the most were California, Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
Four of the five least-active counties in the USA are in Kentucky, report the researchers, and four […]
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