Senior Staff Writer, - MedPage Today
Stephan: Men, if your waist is larger than 40 inches you are putting yourself at serious risk. Women, you too can correlate your waist size with your risk. Obesity is killing us.
BOSTON — Carrying too much weight in the belly — having an apple shape — may increase the risk of sudden cardiac death, researchers found.
In a cohort study, the risk of sudden cardiac death increased along with waist-to-hip ratio (P=0.009 for trend), according to Selcuk Adabag, MD, of the University of Minnesota and the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis.
After accounting for numerous obesity-related comorbidities, however, other measures of obesity — body mass index and waist circumference — were not related to the risk of sudden cardiac death, Adabag reported at the Heart Rhythm Society meeting here.
Obesity ‘is a root cause of problems,’ he said in an interview. ‘People, particularly physicians, need to be paying attention to weight gain and should actively work on reducing weight.’
The findings of the current study could be incorporated into the counseling that physicians give to patients, he said, although waist-to-hip ratio is not often measured in the clinic and the public is not as familiar with that index of obesity as it is with BMI.
Obesity has been associated with a higher risk of sudden cardiac death in both the Framingham Heart Study and the Nurses’ Health Study, but the analysis by Adabag and colleagues took […]
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SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Once again, we find the footprints of the old energy forces and their disinformation program. Having created climate change denierism, all funded by a tiny group of uber rich individuals, like the Koch Brothers, and the Virtual Energy States, they are tackling alternative energy itself. You and I are the suckers they are aiming at. The conservative movement in the U.S. is no longer rational, and you may rely on it that a large number of conservatives will buy into this toxic illusion. This is all part of the American decline and why I keep saying that we have passed the point of no return on climate change. The issue now is how to get through what is coming.
A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama’s energy agenda.
A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.
Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using ‘subversion’ to build a national movement of wind farm protesters.
The strategy proposal was prepared by a fellow of the American Tradition Institute (ATI) – although the thinktank has formally disavowed the project.
The proposal was discussed at a meeting of self-styled ‘wind warriors’ from across the country in Washington DC last February.
‘These documents show for the first time that local Nimby anti-wind groups are co-ordinating and working with national fossil-fuel funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry,’ said Gabe Elsner, a co-director of the Checks and Balances, the accountability group which unearthed the proposal and other documents.
Among its main recommendations, the proposal calls for a national PR campaign aimed at causing ‘subversion in […]
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ASHLEY PORTERO, - International Business Times
Stephan: This documents how the big industrial agriculture corporations game the system through disinformation and false flag operations. This is how GMO and its related poisons are being forced down our throats.
As the U.S. Department of Agriculture readies its decision on whether to approve for widespread use Dow Chemical Co.’s (NYSE: DOW) new genetically engineered corn, the chemical company is touting a broad coalition of support among farmers to increase the likelihood that the agency approves the product.
Dow is taking this step to counter claims that the new corn, called Enlist, could encourage the use of a powerful herbicide found in the Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange, because Enlist is designed to be resistant to this chemical. Enlist’s opponents say that if this herbicide is more widely employed, the environment and public health would be endangered. More than 140 agricultural, consumer, environmental and public-health groups sent USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack a letter, which was signed by 365,000 people last month urging him to reject the crop.
In response to an article we ran in late April about this campaign, Dow dismissed as ‘hyperbole’ criticism surrounding Enlist. The company said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined 2, 4-D (the Agent Orange herbicide) poses ‘a reasonable certainty of no harm,’ and that, in fact, a different chemical, 2,4,5-T, is the principal contaminant in Agent Orange.
‘The surest way to increase per acre herbicide volume is […]
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ELLIOTT FREEMAN, - Digital Journal
Stephan: We have endless billions to bail out hedge fund managers, and to fight wars. But to protect ourselves from the catastrophes our more toxic technologies produce -- whether it is oil spills in the Gulf, weather satellites to warn us of extreme weather events, or nuclear radiation detectors to alert us to nuclear events -- well there just isn't much money for that.
A recently released report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Inspector General’s Office has revealed perilous failures in the operation of RadNet, the nationwide radiation monitoring network, in the midst of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
The April 19 report, titled ‘Weaknesses in EPA’s Management of the Radiation Network System Demand Attention’, was created as nuclear watchdog groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Nuclear Information Resource Service, raised urgent concerns over the program’s reliability.
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) pointed out a litany of problems that have limited the RadNet system’s ability to detect harmful radiation levels, including the following:
— At the time of the Japan earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, 25 of the 124 radiation monitors across the United States were out of service. The average time out of service for these monitors was 130 days.
— The EPA’s inability to acquire replacement parts in a timely manner led to some repair delays that lasted over six months. In one case, a radiation monitor was out of service for 428 days before a contractor was able to fix it.
— Based on a sample study, 50% of radiation monitors had gone […]
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BRAD JACOBSON, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Fukushima has largely vanished from the outlets of corporate media. But coverage, or its lack, is not the same as reality. This situation, as the headline says, is a ticking time bomb, for which no good solution is known. It could affect the entire world, but particularly the American West Coast. In the U.S. we have something like 40 reactors of the same type as those at Fukushima, quietly aging and leaking, each with its own containment pools filled with spent fuel rods.
The next story in today's edition explains why it is probable you won't be hearing about the presence of dangerous radiation, until it is too late.
More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site’s current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.
But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel — 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.
Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat
The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core’s reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean — just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored — but it’s also open to the elements because […]
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