, - The Times of India (India)
Stephan:
LONDON — Developing diabetes in middle age may cut your life short by about six years, a new study has suggested. The study, involving over 250 scientists from 25 countries, was the first such research that linked reduction of life expectancy to having type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes is known to double the risk of heart attacks and strokes, but the new findings showed that people with type 2 diabetes are also at greater risk of dying from cancer, infection and mental disorders, the Daily Mail said.
Scientists from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration - co-ordinated by the University of Cambridge - analysed data on 820,900 people.
After accounting for other risk factors like age, sex, obesity and smoking, the researchers found people with diabetes were at increased risk of death from cancers, infections, mental disorders, liver, digestive, kidney and lung diseases.
Researcher Naveed Sattar of University of Glasgow said: ‘The findings not only show the extensive range of complications linked to diabetes, but also the importance of raised sugar levels, as opposed to cholesterol and blood pressure to such complications.’
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Saturday, March 5th, 2011
DAVID BROWN, Staff Writer - The Washington Post
Stephan: A real data-based picture of who we are. Read this, and consider the dissonance it represents from our actual policies. You can't make good policy if you lie to yourself.
Among the findings of a sweeping federal government survey of American sexual behavior is one that may surprise those bewailing a permissive and eros-soaked popular culture: More than one-quarter of people interviewed in their late teens and early 20s had never had sex.
And the number was growing.
The latest round of the quaintly named National Survey of Family Growth found that among 15-to-24-year-olds, 29 percent of females and 27 percent of males reported no sexual contact with another person ever – up from the 22 percent of both sexes when the survey was last conducted in 2002.
‘The public’s general perception is that when it comes to young people and sex, the news is bad and likely to get worse,’ said Bill Albert, chief program officer of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, an advocacy organization in Washington.
The seventh and latest round of the survey, first done in 1973, provides a corrective to that view.
‘Many, many young people have been very receptive to the message of delaying sexual activity,’ Albert said. ‘There’s no doubt about it.’ He added that the nearly 40 percent reduction in teen pregnancy since the 1990s – which experts attribute to both increased condom use […]
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Saturday, March 5th, 2011
LEE FANG, - Think Progress
Stephan: Please recall that Climategate has been proven to be completely without substance, as attested by multiple assessments. (See the SR archive) I was doing some research today about how Climategate was created by a Koch brothers campaign, and came across this. It is the best single account I can find. Note how very specific it is. I can find no fact-based rebuttal contradicting this exegesis.
As you read this, think of it as a form of warfare against the foundations of the State, for the benefit of the few.
In mid-November, thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit webmail server – a top climate research center in the United Kingdom – were hacked and dumped on a Russian web server. Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth. The skeptics also propelled the story, dubbed ‘Climategate,
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Saturday, March 5th, 2011
Stephan: Here is a responsible assessment of what our insanity is costing us. This should stun you. With everything calculated we spend on security twice what all the rest of the world spends combined. Yet, I can tell you, and anyone who has travelled abroad knows I am right and will confirm this, America is the most fearful nation on the planet -- absent countries with active wars like Libya. It is so notable coming to the United States that it is like a change in the air. This is all being done so that a small group of corporations can prosper. It is only rational when seen through the prism of profit.
Christopher Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent 10 years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues.
What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.
Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range — close to $700 billion for 2012 — but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.
Take that in for a moment. It’s true; you won’t find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it’s no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it’s the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for ‘security
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Saturday, March 5th, 2011
IAN URBINA, - The New York Times
Stephan: Addicts will do anything to get their fix, in this case increasingly that means even if it destroys the very land we addicts live on. We spent over a trillion dollars this year on security, which went largely to the corporations which feed off of our fears. And that goes on year after year, indeed, President Obama wants to increase these expenditures. If even a fraction of that had gone into alternative nonpolluting energy none of this would be happening, and we could have universal healthcare, and a decent educational system -- and an end to the practises described in this report. Only sustained citizen action, such as we are seeing in Wisconsin, is going to change this equation.
The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush – for natural gas.
The Waste Problem
The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.
So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs. They also see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other countries for oil.
But the relatively new drilling method – known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking – carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up […]
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