Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
Jennifer Welsh, Staff Writer - LiveScience
Stephan: Depression is clearly more than a psychological condition. The poisons and toxins also play their role. The bees and the butterflies are not the only victims of a system that puts profit above wellness.
Can a psychiatric disorder be diagnosed with a blood test? That may be the future if two recent studies pan out. Researchers are figuring out how to differentiate the blood of a depressed person from that of someone without depression.
In the latest study, published today (April 17) in the journal Translational Psychiatry, researchers identified 11 new markers, or chemicals in the blood, for early-onset depression. These markers were found in different levels in teens with depression compared with their levels in teens who didn’t have the condition.
Currently, depression is diagnosed by a subjective test, dependent upon a person’s own explanation of their symptoms, and a psychiatrist’s interpretation of them. These blood tests aren’t meant to replace a psychiatrist, but could make the diagnosis process easier.
If a worried parent could have a family physician run a blood test, it might ease the diagnosis process during the already tough time of adolescence, said Eva Redei, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who was involved in the study of the teen-depression blood test.
If they hold up to further testing, blood tests could help young adults, who often go untreated because they aren’t aware of their disease, get treated. The biological basis […]
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Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
JOHN P. MELLO JR., - Computerworld
Stephan: It is simply unacceptable to corporations and the government that private citizens should have any shred of privacy. For a variety of reasons it is important that every phone conversation, every email, every appliance you use be monitored. You live in the illusion of privacy; it is no more than that, an illusion, and the detailed level of surveillance will only become more invasive with time.
Anyone looking for assurance that the privacy of their home wireless networks would be protected from snoopers by government regulators won’t find it in the Federal Communication Commission’s recent action against Google.
The FCC fined Google $25,000 for impeding the agency’s investigation into reports that Google snooped on WiFi networks as its vehicles gathered information for its maps service.
Although the FCC didn’t peek at the info Google gathered from the private wireless nets, regulators in other nations conducting similar investigations have. They found Google had captured e-mail messages, instant messages, chat sessions, romantic exchanges between lovers, Web addresses that could be used to determine a person’s sexual orientation and data that could be linked to specific addresses.
Google ‘Good Faith’ Effort
When Google’s activity was uncovered in 2010, the company was profusely apologetic in public. But when the time came to find out ‘the rest of the story’ about the data slurping affair, Google entered bunker mode, blocking the FCC’s efforts to obtain the information it felt it needed to complete its investigation.`
‘We worked in good faith to answer the FCC’s questions throughout the inquiry, and we’re pleased that they have concluded that we complied with the law’ was Google’s official line on […]
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Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate - Op-Ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: Paul Krugman is one of the few op-ed writers I publish. I do so first because he is a Nobel Laureate in economics, so he speaks from an actual basis of data, not ideology or theology and, second, because he has been so correct over and over since the nightmare of the economy began in the Bush-Cheney administration. I take what he writes here as a warning we should heed. I would be very careful if I had investments in Europe.
On Saturday The Times reported on an apparently growing phenomenon in Europe: ‘suicide by economic crisis,
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Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
ALEXIS BADEN-MAYER, - Nation of Change
Stephan: As I have been doing the research for today's edition I have come across not one but two different stories on the trend of poisoning the planet, including ourselves. Do you note that little of this is ever discussed in the mainstream media? Take it as a measure of the level of corruption and control special interests exercise in our country.
2,4-D and the dioxin pollution it creates are too dangerous to allow, period, but in the hands of bad actors like Monsanto and Dow Chemical the dangers increase exponentially. What’s the Environmental Protection Agency doing? Helping cover-up the chemical companies’ crimes!
In February, Monsanto agreed to pay up to $93 million in a class-action lawsuit brought by the residents of Nitro, West Virginia, for dioxin exposure from accidents and pollution at an herbicide plant that operated in their town from 1929 to 2004.
That may seem like justice, but it is actually the result of Monsanto’s extraordinary efforts to hide the truth, evade criminal prosecution and avoid legal responsibility.
A brief criminal fraud investigation conducted (and quickly aborted) by the EPA revealed that Monsanto used a disaster at their Nitro, WV, plant to manufacture ‘evidence’ that dioxin exposure produced a skin condition called chloracne, but was not responsible for neurological health effects or cancers such as Non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
These conclusions were repeatedly utilized by EPA and the Veterans Administration to deny help to citizens exposed to dioxin, if these persons did not exhibit chloracne.
The EPA knew the truth about Monsanto’s dioxin crimes, but it decided to hide it. Why? It would […]
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Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Monsanto, a corporation strongly supported by Bill Gates, who has made a very large investment in the company, is on my top ten list of the most evil corporations on earth. There just doesn't seem to be any limit to its perfidy and the negative effects it has wrought across the planet. First the bees and, now, this about Monarch butterflies. I began covering this story, about the in 2005 (see SR archives) and, like the bee decline, it just keep getting worse.
It is long past time that we realized an enormous experiment is being perpetrated, so large that it is almost beyond our comprehension; and it is placing all of us at risk.
f any insect species can be described as charismatic minifauna, it’s the monarch butterfly. The gorgeous creatures flutter about in a migratory range that stretches from the northern part of South America up into Canada. The monarch is the only butterfly species that undertakes such a long-distance migration. And when they alight upon a place en masse, heads turn. No fewer than five states-Texas, Alabama, Idaho, illinois, and Minnesota-claim the monarch as their state insect.
Unfortunately, the monarch populations appear to be in a state of decline. Why? A new study (abstract; press release) from University of Minnesota and Iowa State University researchers points to an answer: the rapid rise of crops engineered to withstand herbicides.
Their argument is powerful. Monarchs lay their eggs on one particular kind of plant: the milkweed. And when the eggs hatch, the caterpillars feed exclusively on the weed. Milkweed is common throughout the Midwest, and has long thrived at the edges of corn fields. But when Monsanto rolled out its ‘Roundup Ready’ seeds in 1996, which grew into plants that could thrive amid lashings of its flagship Roundup herbicide, the Midwest’s ecology changed. As farmers regularly doused ever-expanding swaths of land with Roundup without having […]
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