New research published in the journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, has verified that the vast majority of the 10,000-or-so chemical additives currently allowed in food are backed only by industry-funded and supported safety assessments. And a large percentage of these have never even been submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for review, which means the general population is essentially being used as a collective guinea pig in a giant food additive safety experiment.

Between 1997 and 2012, the FDA reportedly received 451 voluntary notifications about new food additives, 100 percent of which came from individuals and groups connected in one way or another to the food industry. Rather than be accompanied by independent safety research, every single one of these new additives came with ‘safety data’ conjured by the companies that produce them, a serious conflict of interest that apparently has become the standard rather than the exception.

Researchers from The Pew Charitable Trusts (PCT), a non-profit organization serving the public interest, decided to review data on the new food additive notification process after the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal watchdog agency, issued a report back in 2010 raising concerns about it. And what they found is astounding, particularly […]

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This won’t be the first time we’ve heard whispers of impending doom for the natural gas fracking industry, but since this one is coming from Bloomberg it’s probably worth a listen, so here’s the deal. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the boom in gas field purchasing from 2009 to 2012 has turned into a whopper of a bust, leaving oil and gas companies with a belly load of depressed assets and ‘disappointing

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Reform criminal justice now. That was the core message US Attorney General Eric Holder delivered recently to the American Bar Association [3]and our nation. He declared that ‘too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason’ and at great public expense.

Seeking to cut imprisonment rates and spending while protecting the public, Holder has directed the Justice Department to charge non-violent drug offenders with less severe federal crimes. Beyond reducing the use of mandatory minimum sentences and shortening prison times for lower-level drug felons, while reserving more serious charges and longer sentences for violent and higher-ranking drug traffickers, the Justice Department supports sentencing more people to rehab than (re-)imprisonment for crimes rooted in drug abuse and addiction.

Those reforms, among others, according to Holder, will do more for ‘the lives being harmed, not helped, by a criminal justice system that doesn’t serve the American people as well as it should’. There is one group of Americans that couldn’t agree more – the children [4] of the imprisoned.

Most prisoners are parents of children under 18 years of age [5]. Two-thirds of incarcerated parents are nonviolent offenders, often locked up on minor drug-related […]

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Three and a half years after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig dumped 205 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean, leaving 11 workers dead and damaging hundreds of miles of shoreline, the Gulf Coast is still recovering. And BP, the oil company behind the spill, is no longer willing to foot the bill for the cleanup or to compensate those whose lives were affected.

The company has spent or earmarked $42.4 billion so far for cleanup, compensation payments and environmental fines. Its profits have suffered, and it has sold $38 billion in assets to help cover the cost. For a while, the company made a show of doing its part regardless of the price tag. But now, its chief executive has decided its time to change tack.

A tougher strategy

‘As we continue to fight what I think are absurd outcomes, we want everyone to know that we are digging in and are well-prepared for the long haul on legal matters,

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Conservative think tanks have spawned a cottage industry churning out dubious studies purporting to show that poor families are living high on the hog on public benefits, a claim that anybody who has actually experienced poverty in America would find laughable.

These papers are then amplified by the right-wing media, forming the basis for calls to further eviscerate a social safety net that’s already been tattered and torn by 30 years of ascendant neoliberalism.

The latest addition to the genre is a study published this week by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes at the CATO Institute. They calculated the maximum benefits of every federal anti-poverty program in which a single parent with two kids could participate, including things like tax credits for the working poor and supplemental nutrition and health benefits for pregnant women and young children, called it all ‘welfare

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