Stephan: Here is an excellent account of an almost unknown aspect of the growing police state apparat. This story reveals how skewed this entire Orwellian system has become.
By the end of this month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is expected to issue what could be the most important order in its 35-year hidden history, ruling on a motion filed by the ACLU that asks the court to publish all of its prior opinions evaluating the meaning, scope and constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
Codified as part of the omnibus Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, this is the law that empowers the FBI and the National Security Agency to obtain secret orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court compelling third parties such as phone companies to produce ‘tangible things
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Stephan: Here is some good news in the trend towards growing organs, instead of using organs from the dead or compatible donors. The effect of these developments will be to ultimately eliminate the grotesque roulette game of 'who gets the organ?', as well as ridding us of the world organ gray market, with its stories of prisoners having their kidneys forcibly taken from them. Note that this is not American research. The Theocratic Right, with their weird view of science, hobbled U.S. stem-cell research.
Prometheus, a Titan bound to a rock by Zeus, endured the daily torture of an eagle feasting on his liver, only to have the organ regrow each night. Compared with this spectacle, a video on the website of Nature this week seems decidedly dull. It shows a collection of pink dots consolidating into a darker central glob.
But something titanic is indeed happening. The pink dots are stem cells, and the video shows the development of a liver bud, something which can go on to look and act like a liver. Takanori Takebe and Hideki Taniguchi of Yokohama City University, in Japan, who made the video, have created working human-liver tissue.
Researchers have long dreamed that stem cells might be used to repair or replace damaged tissue, an aspiration known as regenerative medicine. Embryonic stem cells, in particular, are ‘pluripotent
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DOUGLAS BIRCH, - truthout
Stephan: Despite the fact that the nuclear power industry is a dying energy technology the U.S. continues to pour vast sums of money into it -- a measure of the corruption in the government, and its subservience to its corporate masters. Here is an excellent example of what I mean. As you read it think about what this money could have done to move us away from carbon energy.
A yawning gap opens between Washington’s claims about a nuclear plant and its messy construction.
Key Findings:
A multi-billion dollar nuclear fuel plant being built by the Energy Department in South Carolina has become an embarrassing symbol of government mismanagement, plagued by long delays, wasteful spending, and construction snafus.
Officials in Washington initially paid little attention to the plant’s construction, despite the project’s size, its importance to U.S. nonproliferation goals, and a total cost projected to exceed $18 billion.
Mismanagement and improper contracting practices cost the government more than $1.38 billion in avoidable expenses.
The prospects for selling the plant’s plutonium-laced fuel to domestic nuclear power plants appear dim, and at best the government might recoup just 10 percent of its investment.
Savannah River Site, South Carolina – Scattered among the pine forests of this 310-square mile federal reservation are five mothballed nuclear reactors where tens of thousands of workers were once engaged in a grim race to create as much plutonium as they could.
By the time production ended here in 1988, the site was a horrendous mess. Today, about 36 million gallons of radioactive liquid wastes sit in underground […]
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Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013
BRENDAN O'BRIEN and GEOFFREY DAVIDIAN, - Reuters
Stephan: This story just never seems to end. I have held off publishing reports on it for several months, because of the endless repetition of malfeasance, but this one could not be avoided. In a just society Cardinal Dolan would be in prison. If you had behaved as he did, you would be.
MILWAUKEE — Roman Catholic Church officials in Milwaukee vigorously shielded pedophile priests and protected church funds from lawsuits during a decades-long sex abuse scandal, according to hundreds of documents released on Monday.
The documents include letters and deposition testimony from Cardinal and Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan who, during his time as archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009, appealed to Vatican on numerous occasions to help address the ongoing fallout from the scandal.
The 6,000 pages of documents related to eight decades of abuse cases showed in great detail the Milwaukee archdiocese regularly reassigned priests who were accused of sexual molestation to new parishes and Dolan himself asking the Vatican permission to transfer $57 million to a trust fund to protect it against court action.
In 2011, the Milwaukee archdiocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing the financial drain of settling sexual-abuse claims and acknowledging missteps by the church in dealing with pedophile priests.
The judge overseeing the archdiocese’s bankruptcy ordered the documents to be released.
The Roman Catholic Church has been hit with a series of abuse accusations and scandals during the past two decades, in the United States and elsewhere. The scandals have cost the U.S. church about $3 […]
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Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013
KATIE MCDONOUGH, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Here is the latest on the very profitable but largely dysfunctional illness profit system that passes for healthcare in the U.S. What this story doesn't tell you, but should, is that not only is giving birth in the U.S. more expensive than anywhere else in the world, it is also dangerous. A young mother would do better to have her delivery in Bulgaria than America. Our maternal mortality rates are a disgrace.
Giving birth in the United States is far more expensive than in other countries, and the additional cost does not appear to come with additional benefits - Americans do not have more access to care or better access to care than citizens in other developed nations, according to an analysis [3] from the New York Times.
‘It’s not primarily that we get a different bundle of services when we have a baby,
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