Thanks to the work from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), investigative journalists like Beau Hodai and The Nation’s exposé, we now know that ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a front group for major corporations, the Koch brothers and right-wing lobbying groups, actively disseminated model bills promoting its agenda to state leaders.

Though many of ALEC’s activities are still only recently coming to light, we can already see the group has widespread influence in national politics.

Using its hilariously titled bills (one called ‘Economy Civil Rights Act’ openly wages war on regulation and public services), the right-wing group aims to distribute its propaganda in all 50 states.

In one of their models, the group outlines its opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) regulation of greenhouse gases. ALEC claims the rise in carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases is not linked to a decline in welfare or public health. ‘Indeed,’ ALEC’s bill remarks, ‘quite the opposite is true.’

The model bill continues in an attempt to refute other […]

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ROME — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Friday that global shortages of food and spiraling prices threaten widespread destabilization and is urging immediate action to forestall a repeat of the 2007 and 2008 crisis that led to riots in dozens of countries around the developing world.

Clinton told a meeting of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization that urgent steps are needed to hold down costs and boost agricultural production as food prices continue to rise.

Although the situation is not yet as dire as it was four years ago, she said the consequences of inaction would be ‘grave.’

‘We must act now, effectively and cooperatively, to blunt the negative impact of rising food prices and protect people and communities,’ she said at the FAO’s headquarters in Rome.

The U.N. estimates that 44 million people have been pushed into poverty since last June because of rising food prices, which could lead to desperate shortages and unrest. Clinton said the world could no longer ‘keep falling back on providing emergency aid to keep the Band-Aid on.’

Speaking to a room full of ambassadors to the Rome-based U.N. food agencies, Clinton warned that some countries had adopted ‘unwise’ policies such as export bans during […]

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Is there a little Fred Flintstone in you?

According to a new genetic analysis, some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals — but it’s found exclusively in people outside Africa.

The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago. They evolved over the millennia mostly in what are now France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and went extinct (or were simply absorbed into the modern human population) about 30,000 years ago.

The ancestors of early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, according to DiscoveryNews.com. Despite that wide spread in time, genetic material from Neanderthals still can be found in a piece of DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome — meaning the two clearly mated.

‘This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred,’ says Dr. Labuda. His team places the timing of such intimate contacts and family ties early on, probably at the crossroads of the Middle East.

Neanderthals possessed the gene for language and had sophisticated music, art and tool craftsmanship skills, so they must have not been all that unattractive to modern humans at the time, DiscoveryNews.com noted.

‘There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with […]

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Ever since the current economic crisis began, it has seemed that five words sum up the central principle of United States financial policy: go easy on the bankers.

This principle was on display during the final months of the Bush administration, when a huge lifeline for the banks was made available with few strings attached. It was equally on display in the early months of the Obama administration, when President Obama reneged on his campaign pledge to ‘change our bankruptcy laws to make it easier for families to stay in their homes.

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Climate change is speeding up the rate at which animals and plants are becoming extinct. By the end of the century, one in 10 species could be on the verge of extinction because of the effects of global warming, a study has found.

The findings support the view that the earth is currently experiencing a global mass extinction where the rate at which species are being lost is many times greater than the historical extinction rate. It is the sixth great mass extinction in the history of life on earth. Scientists said that previous predictions of how fast species are being lost because of climate change match the actual observed losses. They calculate that around 10 per cent of species alive today could be facing extinction by 2100.

Ilya Maclean and Robert Wilson, of the University of Exeter, examined nearly 200 previous predictions about how climate change may affect the extinction of species and compared them with about 130 reports of changes already observed.

The aim was to judge the accuracy of estimates made by scientists in the past about climate change predictions in relation to species extinction. They concluded that the observed threats matched well with the actual threats, based on real […]

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