Stephan: Here's something else Big Pharma doesn't want you to know.
The human body appears to have its own built-in safety mechanism for breaking down questionable pharmaceutical components and rendering them inactive. A recent study published in the journal Science reveals that gut flora, which naturally populate human intestines for digestive and immune system purposes, render useless the active drug compounds in some heart failure and cardiac arrhythmia medications, a mechanistic action that has baffled scientists for decades.
For the past several decades, the scientific community has been aware of the fact that gut bacteria are capable of inactivating certain pharmacological components. A team of scientists from Columbia University in New York, in fact, identified back in the 1980s one bacterial strain in particular, known as Eggerthella lenta, that deactivates digoxin, one of the oldest glycoside compounds used in cardiac medications.
But in the decades since this groundbreaking discovery was made, scientists have been unable to determine with any sort of precision how, exactly, E. lenta deactivates digoxin, or whether or not it utilizes the synergy of other bacterial strains in the gut to perform this function. A primary reason for this is the fact that, in isolation, bacterial samples taken from the human digestive tract react unpredictably when exposed to digoxin.
This latest […]
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Dina Fine Maron, - Scientific American/Salon
Stephan: I keep writing that water is destiny. It is finally beginning to dawn on the media how true this is. The Congress no longer works; its dysfunctionality has basically reduced it to a debating club for partisan polemics. The media spends its time rehashing Anthony Weiner, and other meaningless drivel, while virtually every major issue goes unreported, and undealt with. But that doesn't mean the issues go away, as this report makes clear.
As we have been hearing, global water shortages are poised to exacerbate regional conflict and hobble economic growth. Yet the problem is growing worse, and is threatening to deal devastating blows to health, according to top water officials from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who spoke before a House panel hearing today.
Ever-rising water demand, and climate change, are expected to boost water problems worldwide, especially in countries that are already experiencing shortages. Globally, the world is on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people unable to reach or afford safe drinking water by 2015, but it still must make strides to improve global sanitation, says Aaron Salzberg, the State Department’s Special Coordinator for Water Resources. In addition to supply problems, unclean water causes more than four billion cases of diarrhea a year which lead to roughly 2.2 million deaths, and most are in children under the age of five.
‘The magnitude of it is extraordinary.
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ALI WATKINS, DAVID LIGHTMAN and ADAM BARON , Washington Bureau - McClatchy Newspapers
Stephan: I think this story is quite extraordinary, but not for the reasons given in the report. This year we will spend approximately $682.5 billion on the military budget and by the best unclassified estimates about $80 billion on the intelligence apparat. Hundreds of thousands of men and women work for these vast entities. Yet 19 young jihadists and about $500,000 created 9/11, and after over a decade of expenditures, a few dozen jihadists still have the power to massively disrupt the U.S. There is something deeply wrong with this picture, and the current SR poll shows that over three-quarters of you feel less safe than you did 15 years ago. So what have we achieved, beyond making a small number of corporations obscenely rich, and killing and maiming a lot of people?
One can only wonder if the choices made by first the Bush and, then, the Obama Administrations were the right ones. What would have happened, for instance, if instead of drones and war we had put our money into schools, libraries and hospitals in Islamic countries?
WASHINGTON — The closing of U.S. embassies in 21 predominantly Muslim countries and a broad caution about travel during August that the State Department issued on Friday touched off debate Sunday over the National Security Agency’s sweeping data collection programs.
Congressional supporters of the program, appearing on Sunday morning talk shows, said the latest rounds of warnings of unspecified threats showed that the programs were necessary, while detractors said there was no evidence linking the programs, particularly the massive collection of cell phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans, to the vague warnings of a possible terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, there were no reports of violence or unusual activity in any of the countries where the United States had kept its embassies and consulates closed when they would have ordinarily been open on Sunday. Nevertheless, the State Department announced that embassies and consulates in 16 countries would remain closed throughout the week, including four African nations that had not been on the original list. Diplomatic posts in five other countries would reopen Monday, the State Department said, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq, where terrorist attacks have been frequent.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the extended closures were ‘not an indication of […]
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ALEX HENDERSON, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The Theocratic Right is the most dangerous social movement in America today, in my view. Far worse than any threat posed by Islamic radicals. Here's just a small sample of things that lead me to say this. These people are armed and have proven they are willing to kill. But corporate media addresses none of this, and both parties fear to offend them.
From Fox News to the Weekly Standard, neoconservatives have tried to paint terrorism as a largely or exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Their message of Islamophobia has been repeated many times since the George W. Bush era: Islam is inherently violent, Christianity is inherently peaceful, and there is no such thing as a Christian terrorist or a white male terrorist. But the facts don’t bear that out. Far-right white male radicals and extreme Christianists are every bit as capable of acts of terrorism as radical Islamists, and to pretend that such terrorists don’t exist does the public a huge disservice. Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev and the late Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev (the Chechen brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013) are both considered white and appear to have been motivated in part by radical Islam. And many terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who were neither Muslims nor dark-skinned.
When white males of the far right carry out violent attacks, neocons and Republicans typically describe them as lone-wolf extremists rather than people who are part of terrorist networks or well-organized terrorist movements. Yet many of the terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried […]
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IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: Almost every day I read stories about Republican actions to subvert the wellbeing of the middle class. It is amazing to me. They just roll in day after day, each one more extreme and hurtful than the one before it. Here is an example. Frankly, and I know this will offend the 14 per cent of my readers who are conservatives, as presently configured I do not think is is possible to be an ethical person and to vote Republican. I am sorry, but on the facts, in my view, that is the case.
More than three-quarters of the Senate Republican caucus signed onto legislation introduced Wednesday by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rand Paul (R-KY) that could render it virtually impossible for Congress to enact any legislation intended to improve working conditions or otherwise regulate the workplace. Had their bill been in effect during the Twentieth Century, for example, there would likely be no nationwide minimum wage, no national ban on workplace discrimination, no national labor law and no overtime in most industries.
Like many Tea Party proposals to neuter the federal government, Coburn and Paul’s bill is marketed as an effort to bring America back in line with a long-ago discarded vision of the Constitution. It’s named the ‘Enumerated Powers Act of 2013,
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