JULIE STEENHUYSEN, - Reuters
Stephan: Here is a positive development, and some good news, about a trend that has looked very bleak for a long time.
U.S. cancer death rates are continuing to fall, but not all segments of the population are benefiting, the American Cancer Society said Friday.
Overall, the group predicts 1,596,670 new cancer cases in the United States and 571,950 deaths in 2011.
Death rates for all cancer types fell by 1.9 percent a year from 2001 to 2007 in men and by 1.5 percent a year in women from 2002 through 2007.
Steady overall declines in cancer death rates have meant about 898,000 who would have died prematurely from cancer in the past 17 years did not, the organization said.
Americans with the least education are more than twice as likely to die from cancer as those with the most education, according to the group’s annual cancer report.
Death rates for all cancer types have fallen in all racial and ethnic groups among both men and women since 1998 with the exception of American Indian/Alaska Native women, among whom rates were stable.
Black and Hispanic men have had the largest annual decreases in cancer death rates since 1998, falling by 2.6 percent among blacks and 2.5 percent among Hispanics.
New cases of lung cancer among women fell after rising steadily since the 1930s. The decline comes more than a […]
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CAROLYN LOCHHEAD, - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: Here is some wonderful news. The corn lobby has been overcome and this will go a long way towards relieving the corn for energy, corn for food juxtaposition that has caused so much stress on the world's food supply. It will also reduce the massive pollution arising from the use of fertilizers in the cultivation of corn for energy that has been washing into the nation's waterways. Most who have looked at this issue believe that it was this runoff that was the cause of the algae blooms in the Gulf that were so damaging to that already heavily degraded eco-system.
WASHINGTON — The Senate cracked Republican orthodoxy on taxes and undermined the once-impregnable political support for corn subsidies in an overwhelming vote Thursday to kill tax credits and tariffs for corn ethanol for the first time in more than three decades.
A combination of record corn prices, which are damaging poultry, dairy, cattle and hog farmers, and rising alarm over the chronic $1.5 trillion deficit forced lawmakers to take a second look at how the nation spends its money.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican, joined forces on an amendment to eliminate a 43-cent-a-gallon tax credit for corn ethanol that is paid to oil refiners and a 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that blocks more energy-efficient sugar ethanol, mainly from Brazil.
Gas mandate remains
An additional federal mandate that refiners add a 10 percent blend of ethanol to gasoline would remain. The amendment passed 73-27.
‘If we’re going to carry out the mandate of a prudent government, we’ve got to start making changes,’ Feinstein said, predicting more cuts ahead. The ethanol subsidy has cost $22.6 billion since 2005.
Ethanol tax credits are a classic ‘tax expenditure,’ a tax break that is equivalent to a cash payment because it awards a direct financial […]
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MARY CLARE JALONICK, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: I don't know how the people who voted for this look at themselves in the mirror.
WASHINGTON — The Republican-led House rejected bipartisan attempts to reduce farm subsidies Thursday and passed a food and farm spending bill that makes deep cuts in food aid at home and abroad.
The bill, which provides $17.3 billion for the day-to-day operations of the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration, won approval by a 217-203 vote.
It would cut the Women, Infants and Children program, which offers food aid and educational support for low-income mothers and their children, by $868 million, or 13 percent from the current level. An international food assistance program that provides emergency aid and agricultural development would drop by more than $450 million, one-third of the program’s budget.
The bill would trim the FDA’s $2.5 billion budget by almost 12 percent, straining the agency’s ability to implement a new food safety law signed by President Barack Obama this year.
Lawmakers rejected two proposals that would have lowered the maximum amount of money a farmer can receive in subsidies from the government. While fiscal conservatives and other critics of subsidies argued that they need to be cut as lawmakers look for ways to save, farm-state members said those cuts should be pushed back until Congress considers a new five-year […]
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Stephan: It is grotesque enough that the Japanese continue to hunt whales. That they are also poisoning them with radiation, with the inevitable cancers such exposure causes, is just further proof that we must end this violently toxic energy technology. And this form of pollution is going to get much worse and will spread through the Pacific and, possibly, the entire world ocean.
Thanks to Frank DeMarco.
According to Japanese news sources, Japanese whalers tested 6 of 17 whales captured 650 kilometers north-east of the Fukushima nuclear reactor. Of the 6 whales tested 2 were found to contain cesium radiation which must have come from the Fukushima nuclear reactor. The first whale contained 31 becquerels per kilogram of cesium radiation and the second whale and the 24.3 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram.
Japan Finds Nuclear Radiation In Whales Caught 650 KM From Fukushima
Tokyo – Radioactive caesium was detected from two minke whales caught off a city on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, 650 kilometres north-east of a damaged nuclear plant, a news report said on Tuesday.
Researchers examined six of the 17 whales during so-called research whaling in Kushiro city, which started this year’s season in late April, and they detected 31 becquerels and 24.3 becquerels of radioactive caesium per kilogram in the two whales out of the six, Kyodo News reported citing a whalers’ association.
While the level of the radioactive substances remained below the limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram, the association officials told a news conference in the city that the contamination must […]
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Thursday, June 16th, 2011
MIKE LUDWIG, - truthout.org
Stephan:
Keith Starvrum stands on the banks of Willapa Bay, where the low tide has revealed long lines of mudflats speckled with empty oyster shells. The sun is making a rare appearance in southwestern Washington State, but the perfect spring weather fails to cheer up the lumbering Starvrum, whose loud outbursts and biting sarcasm keep his employees’ eyes rolling. He served overseas as a special ops soldier in his youth and he has some interesting things to say about the recent uprisings in Arab countries and the CIA’s dirty habit of quietly ‘rearranging’ governments amid apparent political turmoil. But he has a lot more to say about oysters.
Starvrum points to a lone oysterman gathering the day’s catch from neighboring mudflats and shakes his head. Starvrum used to harvest oysters from the thick mud exposed by the low tide, but he has not brought in a catch in three years. He refuses to participate in the lucrative business, a traditional mainstay of the local economy, because the pesticides sprayed on adjacent mudflats drifted onto his oyster beds.
‘That’s why we don’t sell our oysters, ’cause we know what they’re in,’ Starvrum says. ‘But when we do, they will be 100 times better.’ Other […]
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