Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
SCOTT THILL, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: I confess I had never heard about this problem until two people in the same day sent this to me.
If you’re looking to avoid further hormonal freakouts brought on by the hated Bisphenol A (BPA [3]) — a frightening endocrine disruptor [4] reportedly found in 96 percent of women but consumed more by their children, then you might want to clean out your wallet. Or perhaps forego shopping receipts altogether until you hear otherwise from conclusive scientific studies — which could take many years to straggle in.
Two years ago, Canada became the first country to outright declare BPA, a controversially toxic compound for polycarbonate polymers and epoxy resins found in everyday plastics and other products, a toxic substance unsuitable for the First World. More recently, laggards like the European Union, the United States and more have banned it from baby bottles, but not everything else. That includes the thousands of point-of-sale thermal receipts [5] ripped daily from cash registers, gas stations and other places too numerous to count, unless you’re a scientist studying the toxicity of BPA or its less-known substitute Bisphenol S (BPS [6]) in those receipts and resins.
It should be by now common knowledge that BPA secretes enough weak estrogen to influence serious developmental and neurological deformities and diseases, such as the congenital defect hypospadias […]
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Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
Stephan: This is where the privatization of what should be a public system ends up. When profit is the first priority saving money so profit is greater inevitably leads to hiring the cheapest, the damaged, the compromised. Maybe New Orleans is o.k. now, but for the rest of the state I feel sorry for the people of Louisiana. For many reasons it is a dangerous, unhealthy state in which to live.
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.
That’s how the New Orleans Times-Picayne introduced its gripping series on Louisiana’s prisons last May.
Now comes more bad news.
Of the 15 doctors working full-time at Louisiana state prisons, nearly two-thirds have been disciplined by Louisiana’s medical board for issues ranging from pedophilia to substance abuse.
Here’s more from the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
Louisiana state prisons appear to be dumping grounds for doctors who are unable to find employment elsewhere because of their checkered pasts, raising troubling moral questions as well as the specter of an accident waiting to happen. At stake is the health of nearly 19,000 prisoners who are among the most vulnerable of patients because they have no health care options.
About 60 percent of the state’s prison doctors have disciplinary records, compared with 2 percent of the state’s 16,000 or so licensed medical doctors, according to data from the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners. The medical board is aware of the prison pipeline - in fact, […]
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Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
DAN MURPHY, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Was the whole thing the neocons created in Iraq, and lied about, worth it? All the death, all the suffering, the damaged families, the rampant corruption in both the U.S. and Iraq. Was it worth it? Make up your own mind.
The New York Times, one of the few American newspapers left with full-time staff in Iraq, reported last week that 15 members of neighborhood governments in Baqouba, a city north of Baghdad, recently resigned because of fears they’d be murdered by Sunni jihadis.
The paper quoted the head of the Baqouba city council as saying the officials resigned ‘to save their family members’ lives because of living under threats from Al Qaeda and militants.
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Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
Stephan: Two hundred million dollars wasted. A billion dollars in actual currency misplaced without accounting. Just a couple of the growing litany of grotesquely bad government policy decisions. What could your state have done with $200 million? Of course if you believe in trickle down economics I guess the idea was that the few hundred people, and the handful of corporations they control, that profited from this would let some of their millions trickle down. Feel any drops yet?
The United States wasted more than $200 million on an Iraqi police-training program that has little backing on the ground, a new U.S. government audit released Monday found.
Training the Iraqi police was originally envisioned as the biggest single program run by the U.S. Department of State in the world, spanning five years and costing billions of dollars. But the program has been gutted as Iraqi officials show dimming interest. The U.S. slashed the number of advisors from 85 to 36 this month; it had once planned to have 350.
As Iraqi enthusiasm for the idea has flagged, the program has been downsized so much that the Baghdad Police College Annex — built at an $108 million cost to help house the program — will be closed. The U.S. also chipped in an additional $98 million to a Basra facility where training will be halted, making the money a ‘de facto waste,
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